As part of my celebration of the opening of the 2008 baseball season, I've featured several posts recently about baseball ephemera, including a recent interview with a collector of White Sox baseball cards. Today's post contains an interview with Josh Wilker, a baseball card collector and editor of the Carboard Gods blog. In it, Josh talks about card collecting from a generalists perspective.
ephemera: When did you become interested in baseball cards?
Wilker: I started collecting cards when my older brother started collecting cards, in 1975, when I was in first grade. It was something for us to grab onto just after our family moved away from our dad and all our friends and to a new state. I'm sure for me it was also a way to try to stay as close as possible to my brother, who I worshiped and imitated whenever possible.
ephemera: Did you begin consciously, knowing what you would collect, or did you just one day discover what you were doing?
Wilker: The collecting of baseball cards in some ways began--or at least paralleled the beginning of--my conscious life. It was something I woke up doing. Once I was doing it I had some conception of goals, such as completing a year's set or at least one team's set (I never accomplished either goal), but mostly I was just carried along by the feeling of opening a new pack of cards and chewing the gum and thumbing through the colorful new cards. The greatest feeling, of course, was when you discovered an All-Time Great in your pack. I was an addict of the sugar-high feeling, and of the slightly milder corollary highs--memorizing stats on the back of the cards, sorting the cards into teams, checking off acquired cards on checklists, etc.
ephemera: What challenges or obstacles do you encounter in compiling this collection? How do you overcome these challenges?
Wilker: I stopped collecting cards around the time I hit puberty. But after years--decades--of dormancy my childhood collection started to become a part of my present life again when I wrote about a few cards during a year spent in a Unabomber-type cabin with no electricity and no running water. I gradually began to realize that I wanted to try to bring the cards back to life. In that sense, the challenge became not one of compiling but of connecting. I've been writing at great length about the cards for a year and a half, and in that span there hasn't been a week that's gone by where I haven't wondered if there was absolutely nothing left to say about my childhood baseball card collection. But eventually a newly rediscovered card will show some glimmer of life, if I sit and look at it for long enough.
ephemera: What are your favorite items in the collection? Do you have a 'show stopper' in your collection? If so, what is it?
Wilker: The first card that comes to mind is a 1980 Mark Fidrych card. When I started the Cardboard Gods blog, I decided that the first card profile I would write would be chosen at random. I was stunned that out of all my cards the one to start the whole project would be Mark Fidrych. No one player from my childhood epitomized the brief, joyous flowering of childhood itself than Mark Fidrych, who burst into the league in 1976 and had one incredibly effective and entertaining season before fizzling out due to injuries. The 1980 card is especially poignant to me because by that point his fate as a one-season wonder had pretty much been sealed, yet here he was, still hanging on, still trying.
Beyond that, I don't have a hierarchical sense of my cards. Monetarily, they're all equally dinged-up and worthless. And in my own mind the cards of the least known players are often more fascinating than the cards of the stars. But that said, if I were showing someone a small sample of my collection, I'd show my 1975 Rudy Meoli, which because of its enigmatic action photo was a favorite of mine as a kid, and my 1977 J.R. Richard, dazzling in its rainbow colors and ferocious coiled energy, and my 1977 Pete Broberg for the strange, otherworldly effect created by the crude airbrushing job, and my 1980 Carl Yastrzemski, because he was my favorite player as a kid and because throughout my twenties I kept the card on my writing desk as a guide, i.e., "here's how to stand in there and wait for your pitch."
ephemera: What resources do you recommend for people interested in collecting baseball cards?
Wilker: The greatest baseball card writing ever done, and some of the best sports writing, period, was produced by Brendan C. Boyd and Fred C. Harris in Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book. I've also gotten inspiration in my attempts to connect to my cards from other of my favorite writers, most importantly Frederick Exley, who in A Fan's Notes showed that it was possible to present a life in full through the lens of being on the sidelines, as a fan. As for tools, I store all my cards the way I did as a kid, in a shoebox, no plastic, each individual team wrapped in a rubber band.
ephemera: Thanks for helping me celebrate the opening of another great baseball season, Josh. I appreciate your time and thoughtful care in answering my questions.
Search Abebooks for the books listed in this interview.
Recent Comments