Fatherhood Friday
In the past few weeks my first grade son finally (finally!) took an interest in baseball cards. Even better, he took an interest in my old cards. And while I neither pushed him (that much) towards them or would have been disappointed had he not been interested, I'm pleased to have another platform for us to bond over.
When I was younger I was a big baseball fan and even bigger baseball card fan. Though I stopped collecting by the time I hit high school, until recently there were about 25,000 cards residing in my old bedroom. Last year when we bought a new house my parents carted those cards over here, where much to my wife's chagrin they are in my new bedroom closet. (Just joking, they're in an extra room. For now.)
Their arrival coincided with my son's growing interest in baseball. We've been to a couple of games and he's understanding the intricacies and tantalizations of the sport. His first-grade classmates have been trading Pokemon cards all year, but when one of them brought in a baseball card a few weeks ago, he was hooked. It didn't hurt that his friend gave him a card. Which is where we need to be careful.
The card that his friend gave him was of a really good player. One of the best. That also means the card is likely to be more valuable today and down the road. And while I wouldn't want my son and his friends to think of cards as a commodity rather than a hobby, there is something to be said about the lessons of understanding the value of players to their teams and the relative value of cards that are traded.
When he showed me the card he got he also asked to see my old cards. We took out a couple of shoeboxes of cards from the mid-80s and started going through them. We found a couple of cards of significance but most of them were "common" players - cards worth next to nothing.
My son asked for a whole bunch of these cards to show his friends. Now, I'm a displaced New Yorker and a Yankees fan who is living in the Midwest, and while we root for our hometown team the Yankees remain number one. As we went through the cards we found a lot of players from our new hometown team. Since the friend who gave him the baseball card at school was a fan of this team, I suggested that my son give him a couple of these older cards. Overall a good trade.
The next day, he told me that a bunch of his friends wanted some older cards too. That's when he told me he'd like to trade a bunch of these older, relatively worthless cards for Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera. For those not in the know, these are two of the most popular and best players on the Yankees. While his friends might not appreciate that, and while they would find a certain interest in getting old cards of their favorite team, overall even calling this a lousy trade would be charitable.
With visions of angry fathers calling me the next day to complain how my son hoodwinked their kid out of some good cards, I suggested that he either give one or two of the cards to each of his friends for nothing in exchange or wait until they come over the house so their activity can be supervised for fairness.
On the other hand, if one of those fathers had called me I probably would have suggested he come over with his cards from growing up so we could skip the middleman and trade with each other!
(Photo Credit: http://upperdeckblog.com)
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