It’s The Most Wonderful Time
February 14, 2011.
The celebration of my favorite annual holiday: The beginning of Spring Training for all of major league baseball! Every year my friends and I celebrate with friendly facebook updates and going on a binge of everything baseball related.
Throughout my celebrating this year, many thoughts went through my head. “Fantasy baseball starts soon”, “I wish I was in Peoria”, “I hate the Yankees”, “What’s on the MLB Network?” (okay, that one happens all the time), “Remember all your baseball cards you used to collect?”.
Baseball cards. Man, my dad and I collected baseball cards like nobody’s business. We had bins, full of binders, full of cards. We had countless ziplock baggies crammed with cards that had no other place to go and even had stray cards just laying around in bunches waiting to get the proper placement.
I used to spend hours going through as many cards as I could. I would sort them by team, and then by position, and then alphabetically if there were more than one card per position. I would literally sit with tons of cards in front of me and I would grab them one by one and occasionally read the stats on the back, but then I would start to sort. I have a few full yearly series of cards from Upper Deck and Topps that have some 600+ cards that are still sorted in this manner.
Every card has stats and bios about the player on the reverse side of the picture. Little-known fact about me, the very first thing I ever read wasn’t a book, (my first book was Hop On Pop if you were wondering) it was the back of an Ivan Rodriguez baseball card. I walked up to my mom and started telling her stuff about “Pudge”. She asked me how I knew all these things and I told her, “I read it on his baseball card!”
No offensive Santa, but I think the spring time is the most wonderful time of the year. Sitting around in the afternoon listening to the spring training games is an unmatched thing.
Well besides Opening Day!
