Baseball Cards and Bubble Gum

By Andy Spear
Love of Sports Correspondent

The other day, out of the blue, my wife bought a pack of baseball cards for my son.

Boy did it bring back memories. I was instantly transported in time.

I would exit Bob’s corner store holding at least 10 packs of baseball cards, costing me 10 cents a pack and rip open the wrappers. Doing so would be welcomed by that smell of bubble gum. And like the sweet smell of freshly cut outfield grass, or a well oiled glove, that too was all part of the sport, all part of growing up with baseball in your life.

After stuffing the sheets of brittle pink bubble gum into my mouth, I would flip through my cards, carefully inspecting which new players I now owned. Warmed by the spring sun, my friends and I would gather outside the store to exchange wads of cards and scheme trades for our favorite players and concoct ways to complete our favorite teams.

I remember shuffling through the cards while blowing and popping pink bubbles, uttering a string of, “Got it, got it, don’t got it, don’t got it.”

Yes, it was a simpler time where winter for me was similar to hibernation for the bears. I bided my time, waking each morning, rushing to pull back the curtains of my bedroom window to look out into the backyard waiting for the snows to melt. Or like another harbinger of spring, the appearance of a flurry of the annual baseball magazines to appear on the local newsstand.

This was a time well before the internet and ESPN and Sportscenter. A time when the general baseball going public relied of Street & Smith’s or Bill Mazeroski’s Baseball Magazine to help us relive the pleasures of the baseball year gone by. We read to get up to date with all the trades that had taken place over the winter and start heated debates by trying to forecast the future with who would win what and who would play in the World Series.

When I opened up one of those magazines, with their glossy color pictures in the centerfold, I could actually feel the wooden bat Greg Luzinski was holding or smell the leather of Joe Morgan’s glove. When the pictures and words in these mags could evoke such beautiful images and the diagrams and words in my text books were just that, is it any wonder I would choose the former to occupy my time?

Come on, who cared about the difference between like and as or what happened in 1765 or converting fractions to decimals? That wasn’t the real world.

Grammar had no smell. You couldn’t feel history. But baseball ... ah, baseball! Now there was something real. When I read about Reggie Jackson’s stats, that he’d hit 27 home runs for the Orioles in 1976, now that was something real, because I’d witnessed one of those home runs on an NBC Game of the Week.

Well, that was then, and this is now. I’m older and supposedly wiser, and when I look through a baseball magazine I no longer feel the wood of Ryan Howard’s bat or smell the leather of Derek Jeter’s glove. I can’t name the starting lineup of every major league team, nor do I really have a good idea of the stats of the best players.

You can’t buy a pack of baseball cards for a dime, and gum is no longer included, so that heavenly smell is gone and will never be a memory for the kids of today. Now the cards simply smell like ... well, cards.

I don’t say “Got it, got it, don’t got it, don’t got it” anymore because, there are no Leonard Carrs or Tim Bobys to trade them with. And maybe more importantly, as the years have passed me by, most of the faces on the cards I flip through and stare back at me are no longer men who’s lives I dreamt about someday living, but kids whose jobs I can now only envy.

But let me tell you, simply holding those coated cards in my hand, bubble gum smell or no bubble gum smell, I can still remember those warm spring days. So much innocence. So much happiness. So much promise.

“Hey Leonard, let me see your cards .Got it, got it, don’t got it, don’t got it.”

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(We love baseball as much as you do, and we love drinking some adult beverage when we do it! Check out our sister site, The Love of Beer, to see what we’re drinking today!)