The baseball cards that make us happy: Childhood favorites and mementos of loved ones

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For many of us, it’s impossible to think about baseball without also thinking about baseball cards. Those little pieces of cardboard serve as tangible reminders of people, moments and emotions that get wrapped up in the game we love. With the new MLB season now in full swing, we asked The Athletic’s writers and editors a question:

What baseball card makes you happy? 

Here are their answers…

My favorite player, Steve Carlton, didn’t seem to smile very much. His Hall of Fame plaque starts with “Extremely focused competitor…”, and really, that’s all we should want. But we still root for the people, not just the players, and so my favorite card is Carlton’s from Topps in 1982. That was the year I fell in love with baseball, at age seven, and Carlton was the best pitcher in the sport. He’s pictured at the Vet, with its earth-tone, upper-deck seating as the backdrop. Curls spill out from under his cap, his No. 32 (my favorite number, naturally) clearly visible on the front of his zip-up pinstriped jersey, his signature stretched elegantly across the photo. He’s almost certainly standing near the warm-up mound on the first base side, a special spot. If I had a ticket for the day he pitched, I’d squeeze myself through the grown-ups and scramble down to the front row, gazing up at the great Lefty, preparing with extreme focus for the competition. I don’t remember him smiling; I was too awestruck to care. But I’m glad he’s smiling on his 1982 Topps card. —Tyler Kepner

In 1984 and ‘85, when I was covering the Triple-A Maine Guides for the Portland Press Herald, their manager was Doc Edwards. Doc was a big, burly former catcher who was immensely proud of the five seasons he gutted out in the big leagues, and he happily signed all the baseball cards that fans would present to him as the Guides traveled the International League circuit, with me tagging along. I learned so much from Doc, such as why he over-shifted the little, lefty-hitting La Schelle Tarver as though he were a right-handed pull hitter, and where to get a decent bite to eat in Toledo after midnight. After Doc died in 2018, I bought one of his baseball cards — 1965 Topps, Kansas City Athletics — and placed it on my desk. It’s a pleasant reminder that for two years I rode minor-league buses with one of the nicest people ever to wear a baseball uniform. —Steve Buckley

I was born in 1975 to a Kansas City Royals fan. That meant, of course, George Brett was my favorite player, just as he was for pretty much every other Royals fan, but especially those of us who grew up with him as the face of the franchise. I played third base (even though I am left-handed), wore No. 5 and imitated Brett’s famous batting stance.

I was also obsessed with baseball cards, ever since the summer of 1981, which we spent mostly with my grandmother in Missouri. I’d go every day to the grocery store Cal’s, just steps from my grandmother’s place, and buy a pack of cards. Since then, ripping open packs of cards is something that brings me great joy. By the late ’80s, baseball cards were a big business and there was only one baseball card to me — George Brett’s rookie card, from my the year I was born, 1975. I collected Brett cards, every piece of cardboard I could find with his face, but there was still only one that was most important.

Each time I’d got to my local shop, Trilogy, I’d peer at the beautiful purple and green border with a shaggy haired Brett standing up straight with a bat in his hands, posing on some spring training field and his familiar signature above his printed name. For my 12th birthday, my parents spent the exorbitant amount of $36 for the thing I wanted more than anything. I recently bought myself a custom baseball glove that’s green with purple laces, that same color combination that sends dopamine through my system every time I see them together. —C. Trent Rosecrans

I never owned the Billy Ripken “F— Face”card, though my older brother probably did. It reminds me of my youth and the mystery of how things went viral in a pre-internet age. How did we all know about this card, no matter where we lived? Who was the first person who picked up on it? I know a lot has been written about it in our nostalgic age, but it reminds of how fun it was when something like this happened. To kids like me, seeing this was the most important thing in the world. —Jon Greenberg

I saved up my allowance for a month, all to buy one pack. It was a terrible decision analytically. I was going to buy a 1982 Topps pack, just one pack, for too much money, and there was really only one card worth a dang in that set. The Cal Ripken rookie. But I wanted the card, and I couldn’t afford the box, so I bought one pack. And I pulled the Cal Ripken rookie. To this day, the card reminds me to take chances. —Eno Sarris

Cal Ripken in the center of the 1982 Topps Future Stars card. (Photo: Eno Sarris)

I’m a New Orleans guy, so why wouldn’t my favorite baseball team be the Chicago Cubs? Thanks to WGN and my great grandfather, I started watching games when I was four in 1984. Ryne Sandberg instantly became my favorite player. When I was old enough to start collecting, I thought it would be impossible to find Sandberg’s rookie card. So I couldn’t be more thrilled when my dad bought it for me at a card show in 1990. It’s one of the few cards I still have from when I was young and one I’ll never give up. —Larry Holder

1990 Topps Ken Griffey Jr. #336.

There was no cooler baseball player in the early ’90s in my world than Griffey Jr. The batting stance. The backwards hats during batting practice. And the greatest swing in the Milky Way. A left handed swing I spent years trying to mimic after accidentally becoming left handed while copying switch hitter Eddie Murray’s batting stance years earlier (good thing he wasn’t batting right handed at the time or I wouldn’t be able to attempt to copy Junior in the future.)

The quest for the Topps Griffey Jr. rookie card was just as exciting as watching him play. Any time I could convince an adult in my family to take me to a card shop, I asked for a pack of Topps hoping to land “The Kid.” This particular day I opened four packs to no avail. I threw away the bag with the wrappers. Later on I realized I had actually bought five packs. I ran back to the trash can, pulled out the forgotten pack and there it was. A Griffey Jr. Topps rookie card with that cool “Topps All-Star Rookie” trophy. I took this card with me everywhere. Even to the bathroom. That’s where I learned cardboard and water don’t mix when you’re washing your hands. The card got wet and I learned the hard way the importance of protective sleeves. I still think about that day. And I’ve often thought about eBay-ing away the pain with a graded 1990 Topps #336. In the meantime I have to settle for the image of the card being the wallpaper on my work laptop. —David Betancourt

Growing up, Andy Pettitte was my favorite player, and anytime I packed a Pettitte card from Topps or Upper Deck, my eyes lit up like a Christmas tree. One day, my dad came home with a 2003 Topps Chrome Gold Refractor Pettitte card addressed specifically for me. It turns out, a family friend who we had lost contact with was thinking of me and was willing to part with a piece of his collection. In the pre-social media era, he managed to track down my dad via a few coworkers to deliver the card. It remains one of the biggest pieces of my collection. Not because of its value, but because of the sentiment behind it. The friend, Mike, has since passed away, and anytime I take a peek at the card, I’m reminded of not only his generosity but the specialness that is baseball fandom. —Johnny Flores

When I was a kid, I had the standard mountains of 1980s Topps and Donruss cards that are essentially worthless today, all catalogued in their binders by team. But when I was about 10, my mom and grandmother let me in on a secret: my mom had actually kept her old cards, and they would give them to me if I took good care of them.

It was a legit collection of pretty decent condition Topps cards from 1960 to 1965, with a few real standouts – a Gaylord Perry rookie, a Hank Aaron card, a couple Willie Mays cards — but I was a Yankee fan, and so what made me light up was the 1961 Mickey Mantle All-Star card. It was cool as hell, set against a Sporting News newspaper background, and it was a Mickey Mantle card. He (and Joe Pepitone, inexplicably) had been my mom’s favorite player, and having that card made me feel so connected to that era, and to something bigger than myself. A year or two later, I brought the card to a big card show at the Westchester County Center outside NYC where Mantle was signing, and showed him that I had it, while he signed a picture for me. He gave me some kind of ‘Well would you look at that” pleasantry and was good about it, and I have both the signed picture and the card in the same book to this day. —Dan Barbarisi

There’s a Frank Thomas card I distinctly remember, and a specific Greg Maddux card I bought for my best friend’s birthday, and there are countless Willie McGee cards that at some point have counted as my favorite. I still use old St. Louis Cardinals cards as bookmarks, and right now it’s Joe Magrane. I love seeing it every time I start a new chapter. But my favorite card today I can’t even picture. No clue what the photo looks like. Couldn’t tell you if there’s some interesting fact or statistic on the back.

I only know that my son is eight years old, and he’s getting into baseball. Sometime last summer, we were watching a game at home, and he saw a catcher take a foul ball off the leg, stay in the game, and hit a home run the next half inning. He thought it was the greatest thing an athlete had ever done, and just like that, he had a favorite player that was all his own. My son has started collecting cards, learning players the way did when I was his age, and a few weeks ago he finally pulled a card of his favorite player. The stunned silence. The way he stared at it. For me, it felt like 1988 all over again. My favorite card? It’s a 2024 Topps of Connor Wong, and I’m not even sure what it looks like. —Chad Jennings

It’s not just one card that makes me happy, but one specific binder filled with cards. I had a few of them growing up — usually divided up by sport — but one was smaller than all the others (each page had room for only for cards instead of the typical nine) and it was reserved for what I considered my very best baseball cards. The best players, inserts, and some I got from my dad’s old collection. There was lots of Ken Griffey Jr., Barry Bonds, and Chipper Jones. I also seemed to have a strong belief in Shawn Green.

Over the years I would spend hours rearranging and reassessing the cards in that binder. A space in that binder was the highest honor I could bestow upon a baseball card and I agonized over each inclusion. The front of the binder read “Superheroes Card Collection” and every player inside it was a superhero to me. But at a certain point my special curation stopped and the binder became a time capsule. Looking back through it now brings me right back to sitting in my childhood bedroom and ceremoniously upgrading Mark McGwire or Derek Jeter to its pages. —Brooks Peck

The superhero binder. (Photo: Brooks Peck)

Greg Harris carved out a 15-year big league career as a middle reliever from the 1980s to the mid-’90s. He threw well enough with both arms to be a switch-pitcher, though he was only allowed to do so in the penultimate game of his career. He once decided to throw almost nothing but curveballs, and enjoyed a run of success with a tactic that proved to be ahead of its time. And, unbeknownst to him, he spent the 1990 season hijacking my baseball card collection.

That year, I led the league in Donruss baseball cards of Greg Harris. If he wasn’t in every pack, then he was in every other one for sure. Once, I got him twice in the same pack, and though I’m sure he’s a lovely man, at the time I found this doubly infuriating. Anyway, that baseball dork turned into a baseball writer, and by the time I was starting out on the Yankees beat, it had been years since I’d thought about Greg Harris. The Yankees were playing the Blue Jays in Toronto, where on the main concourse of the Rogers Centre there was a vending machine that sold packs of baseball cards. They were specifically from the late ’80s and early ’90s — my wheelhouse — and only cost a toonie. One day, someone on the beat suggested that we make a quick detour to the machine before going up to the press box to write. Great idea. Soon, we were ripping open our packs, and reveling in that wonderful feeling of getting to be a kid again. When my turn came, the very first card I pulled would remain taped to the back of my work laptop for years. It was a 1990 Donruss. Card #582. Red Sox middle reliever Greg Harris. —Marc Carig

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(Top photo: Chris McGrath/Getty Images; all individual card images: eBay unless otherwise noted)

This news was originally published on this post .

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