Play Ball!

Whenever I would open packs or sort my cards as a kid, my Grandma would always observe that I was "playing with my cards." That used to piss me off. I was not playing with my cards. Baseball cards were serious business to me. Not in the sense of investment type business. But in the sense that they were more important to me than toys or running around and making noise. Baseball cards really meant something to me.

They still do. And my Grandma still insists on saying that I'm playing with my cards. But, you know what? She's right. Play is all about fun. And few things are more fun to me than collecting, looking at, trading and sorting baseball cards. Just as I would look forward to coming home from school as a kid and engaging with my collection, I look forward today, as a 43 year old, to coming home from work and playing with my cards. I'm no longer ashamed to say it.

And that's what this blog is going to be all about. I started Top of the Topps a couple of months ago as an excuse to, well, play with my cards some more. That blog has given me a reason to look more closely at the sets I grew up collecting and loving. The result has been to make me love them even more. In the course of working on that project, I've come to know and enjoy a number of different card blogs out there, and have even had the chance to get to know a few bloggers a little bit and exchange some cards. That experience made me really want to join the community, so to speak.

Here at Playing With My Cards, I intend to do just that. I'll talk about and show cards that I find interesting, maybe do a little trading, have a few contests... well, if you're here, you know what a card blog is all about. This will be my little playground. Hopefully some of you will join me for the fun.

I wanted to start things off by showing you all my favorite card, which also happens to ideally embody what this blog, as well as my feelings about cards, is all about. My cousin Craig (Grandpa's sister's son) gave me a handful of cards from his childhood about 25 years ago, when I was in high school. Like me, he was a Dodger fan. In fact, he was at game four of the 1959 World Series at the LA Coliseum. And, like me, he enjoyed playing with his cards. He loved this 1953 Topps Roy Campanella (#27) so much that he carried it around with him. When he gave it to me, I stuck it in with all of my other (smaller) cards, managing to mangle the top of the card even more. Now, I sometimes leave it sitting on my nightstand, just so I can see it often. It's a card that's been played with for sixty years, depicting a man who once said, "To be good you've gotta have a lot of little boy in you." That's what it's all about.