I don’t know how many I had. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. They were arranged by teams with each group wrapped by a rubber band. But the best cards were kept in plastic sheets in a binder. Most were Topps, but there were Donruss cards too.
I built my collection the old-fashioned way: I bought individual packs
instead of purchasing the entire year’s collection. (My parents were
too cheap for that anyway.) Each pack contained a stick of bubble gum. If you search hard enough, you can probably find old sticks of that bubble gum for sale. They might be worth as much as some of the cards.
I conservatively estimate the value of my collection at $46,000,000. What happened to it? I don’t know, but here is my guess. While I was at college, my parents snuck into my room, stole my baseball cards, and along with the parents of all my friends, built a huge bonfire in which they sacrificed our years of accumulated wealth in some type of sad quasi-religious ceremony repeated in small towns across America every year. That’s what happens to all our old baseball cards, which is why my friends and I are not filthy rich today. The moral of this tale is this: put your baseball cards in a safe deposit box.
Reggie says to guard your cards:
