Demise of card collecting

Slate has a good piece up today that reminded me of childhood: Requiem for a rookie card.

"If I had to guess, I'd say that I spent a couple thousand bucks and a couple thousand hours compiling my baseball card collection," Dave Jamieson writes. "Now, it appears to have a street value of approximately zero dollars. What happened?"

Well, shit. There went the McPrince children college fund.

Still, all those cards in my parents' attic are mine. And the memories I associate with them are worth more to me than whatever a Robin Ventura rookie might have brought in.

Maybe it's one of the flaws of our out-of-control capitalistic society. When everything (even, say, cheap cardboard images of men playing a game that are mass-produced for children's enjoyment) has a price tag slapped on it, at some point, you have to ask what things are really worth. The value of baseball cards, at their core at least, was the thrill of opening the pack, hunting down your favorite players' cards and trading them with buddies.

Like so many things, it was fun while it lasted. And damn the corporate schmucks who overinflated the card-producing industry like batting averages balloon against expansion-year pitching.

I begrudingly take this, and the fact that I find myself writing a post on the subject, as further evidence of one undeniable fact: I'm getting old.

Sigh.