Finding Joe Shlabotnik is a blog devoted to card collecting super nerds. Here, you can feel free to let your nerd flag unfurl. I began collecting baseball and football cards in 1975 at the age of seven. One of my fondest memories is of my mother taking me to T-ball games, and afterward, stopping at Dennison’s Market in Marion, Indiana, to buy five packs of Topps baseball cards and a Faygo cherry soda (or “red pop” as it was known to this Midwestern boy).

When I was about 10-11 years old, I’d go to flea markets with my cousin and uncle, where we would take a handful of dollars, our dupes (duplicates that we were willing to sell or trade) and spend the day wheeling and dealing. One massive flea market in Shipshewana, Indiana, was a frequent stomping ground. Back in that day, it was possible to find someone selling cards they’d found in an attic for a nickel each, as well as card dealers who were in it for the money. I would bum $20 from my dad, go to one of the nickel-per-box people, spend the entire $20, and then go to a dealer’s booth and offer to sell the cards at half the book value, which was well more than a nickel each. I’d then take that money, go find another person who was just offloading a pile of baseball cards, purchase a larger pile, then sell those to a dealer at half the book price. I’d spend all day repeating this cycle.

On one particular trip, this “11-year-old tycoon,” as my dad called me, returned home with $400 and a stack of new baseball cards. I offered to repay the $20 he bummed from my dad, but he was so impressed with my business skills, he let me keep the Jackson.

I collected baseball cards until I was 18 and moved away to go to college. Like my college students, my money and time were limited, and what money I did have went for other, ahem, pursuits. My baseball cards sat untouched—and largely forgotten—at my mother’s home for about 10 years until I finally owned my own home and enough room to move them into my own closets. I flirted with getting back into the hobby, but by this time, it was the mid-1990s and the hobby was booming. Sports cards – particularly, baseball cards – had become an investment. People were buying baseball cards by the case – straight from the manufacturers. Whereas the hobby had previously been dominated by just a handful of makers, now the market was FLOODED with baseball card makers (Topps, Fleer, Donruss, Upper Deck, Pacific, Pinnacle, Skybox, Bowman, Flair, and Leaf, to name a few). Cards were being produced by hundreds of different makers and produced with print runs for each card in the millions. Every time I thought about getting back into the hobby, the investment nature of the hobby left me with a bad taste in my mouth, so I pursued my other hobbies (fishing, fly tying, music, computers, and reading). Matters weren’t helped by the baseball strike in 1994, or by the rampant use of steroids in baseball. Juicing completely ruined my enjoyment of baseball altogether, and for years, I hardly paid any attention to professional baseball or my long-beloved Cincinnati Reds.

Slowly, however, the number of companies making cards declined and the investors, realizing that they’d been fleeced went away. Unfortunately for the investors, they were left with storage units—and even in some cases, warehouses—full of nearly worthless baseball cards that had been purchased with visions of one day making those investors rich. The good news for me was that my meager collection (30,000 or so cards) was almost entirely pre-boom era and actually held some value. In 2009, I bought a Beckett baseball card price guide and started looking up values of my cards. Of course, this resulted in me learning that the face of collecting had changed and was more like it was when I was a kid. Even though new baseball card prices are much higher than they were when he was a child, the investors had gotten out of the hobby and the manufacturers had stopped stuffing the market to the gills with millions upon millions of junk cards. Before long, I was back into collecting, full-steam ahead. I focus my new collection on vintage (1985 and older) sets – primarily Topps – and new sets from the Topps Heritage, Allen & Ginter’s, and Archives lines. I’m currently working on Topps sets from 1971 back through 1958. To this day, I still occasionally buy boxes of unopened baseball cards, some red pop, and I open them while thinking about good days gone by.

I started Finding Joe Shlabotnik in 2012 and originally hosted it on Blogger. In 2016, I dove headfirst into WordPress and created WordPress versions of both Finding Joe Shlabotnik and Dances with Bass blogs.

I would love to hear your card collecting stories, so feel free to comment on my posts, and share your own stories.