Collecting Baseball Cards

When I was a child, most of us were into collecting baseball cards. We would spend much of our allowance trying to get all of the cards and since each pack that you bought had different cards, you would wind up with numerous duplicates before getting the 'star' players. Sadly for most of us, our baseball card collection went by the wayside when we became teenagers and discovered other things... like girls. However, I do have a friend who's mother was wise enough to put his cards in a green garbage bag and there they sat in the closet for many years until my friend rediscovered them years later as an adult. Several of those cards are now worth a good bit of money, like the two Pete Rose cards that he possesses.

While there will always be a market for Sports Memorabalia, mass production will most likely keep a lid on the appreciation value of most of the cards printed today. The one's that will become valuable will be the 'limited editions'(if there is such a thing)and the cards that are put out in small circulation due to errors or some other variable like the one with Billy Ripken and his baseball bat with the writing on the end referring to 'Richard Head'. The Orioles once had a player named Dick Hall but he was from the sixties so I don't believe he had that Dick in mind.

Just What Constitutes An Athlete?

I heard two friends talking the other day at the local watering
hole and one was passionately arguing that Nascar drivers aren't 'real' athletes. Now I'm not a Nascar person but I've got to say that anyone that can endure the grueling schedule of nine months of racing every weekend at speeds of 200 miles an hour for several hours at a time, has my respect and admiration and to me certainly qualifies as an athlete.

It seems that many of us have the sterotypical idea of an athlete; someone who plays a game involving a lot of physical contact and/or requires individuals to have an 'athlete's' physique. I tend to take a different approach toward what constitutes an athlete. How about jockeys, who may only weigh about 100 pounds and who race animals several times their size as fast as possible. Are NBA or NFL players really any more of an athlete than these guys and girls?

Is it simply a matter of some sports being more 'athletic' than others?

I believe that some of us need to take a broader perspective when considering what makes a sport a sport, and just who is and isn't an athlete.

The Real National Pastime?

I talked to a friend at work yesterday, and he excitedly told me that he had purchased a couple of 'PSL's' at the 'M and T Bank' Stadium, the home of the Baltimore Ravens for the tidy sum of $5,000 dollars. Then he told me that is also has to shell out another thousand or so for the privilege of being able to sit in the seats that he just purchased for 5 Grand to be able to watch the eight regular season games plus a couple of exhibition games that the team has scheduled this year.

What's amazing to me is that Jim is not some high flying businesssman, attorney or some professional who makes boatloads of money, but just a regular working class guy that probably makes about $15 bucks an hour at most. With his wife having just recently given birth to their first child, I was contemplating as to how he justify spending that kind of money on something that wasn't a necessity, and from all appearances something that he probably couldn't afford.

The thing is, there is such a demand for NFL football tickets at this time that teams like the Ravens can get away with charging these huge fees and people are standing in line waiting for someone else to sell their PSL's so that they can then see their favorite team do their thing on Sundays.

While baseball may lay claim to being the 'national pastime', with fans willing to shell out hundreds and thousands of dollars to be a part of these 'sporting' events, it's apparant that NFL football along with possibly Nascar have become the real chosen pastimes of the majority of sports fans in America today, and I don't expect that to change anytime soon.