My baseball card belongs in more cleavage

The first baseball card I ever owned was a 1987 Topps Jose Canseco rookie card.

I was 12 years old and had only recently started taking an interest in baseball.

I remember opening that first Topps card pack, eating the stale pink stick of gum, and wondering who the hell this Jose Canseco was.

I was with my friends Blue, Big I, and Scotty, who as Dodgers fans had already spent years playing Little League and collecting cards.

Scotty saw the card and told me it was worthless. He tried to convince me to trade it to him for something called a Blue Jay or an Expo.

“If it’s so worthless,” I remember asking him, “then why does it have an All-Star Rookie trophy on it?”

I eluded his strategy to fuck me over and kept the card. It was only the first of what would become thousands of baseball cards I would eventually add to my collection, a hobby that quickly became a teenage obsession.

Topps, Donruss, Upper Deck, Score. I loved them all, memorizing the stats on the back and staring at ballplayers who stood as tall as my greatest heroes.

Every week, I saved my allowance money ($6/week if I remember correctly) and biked to my local baseball card shop, The Hot Corner. There, I would spend hours looking through the glass displays, lustily eyeing the priciest cards, buying packs and entire sets, and racing home to carefully yet methodically organize them into plastic sleeves.

I loved the entire process of card collecting. Playing GM and trading them with friends. Protecting my best cards in those hard plastic shells. Hiding my albums so my little brother would stop stealing them. (That didn’t work.)

Eventually, though, I grew up. And the faint whisper of a tradition long gone by became part of my past. My mom packed them up in shoeboxes and put them away. They eventually were lost or thrown out and my adult life reshifted into different priorities.

But every so often, I think about those cards and wish I still had them.

Which is why when I attended Dodgers fantasy baseball camp earlier this year, the prospect of appearing on my very own baseball card was one of the most thrilling moments of my life.

Who wouldn’t want to appear on his very own baseball card? Aside from becoming a Major League baseball player, it would be the most glorious moment in your life.

And though I obviously never made it to the show, having the Dodgers fantasy camp issue me my own card (with my stats on the back) was about as good as it got.

So good, in fact, that I made my baseball card the prize to my 100,000th visitor contest back in March.

Bridal Bird was one of the winners and wrote that “No newlywed household is complete without a framed Arjewtino card bestowing blessings on all who enter.”

The Maiden Metallurgist also won and tried instantly to find the perfect spot to store it. The perfect spot, as it turned out, was not a bicycle spoke or her purse but rather her cleavage. Pretty smart.

Maybe this will prompt me to restart my baseball card collection. My friend Beth last year found a whole bunch of old baseball cards while cleaning out some stuff, gathered all the Los Angeles Dodgers cards, and gave them to me.

Seeing Mike Scioscia, Kirk Gibson, and Fernando Valenzuela again reminded me of why I started to fall in love with baseball, this sport that would change my life.

My softball teammate Nick the Stick last week asked me for a card when I told him I still had many left.

I told him I’d give him one, to which he replied, “Will you autograph it?”