Randy Smith
Last night I watched with joy and amazement as my grandsons, Coleman and Boone discovered their father's old baseball card collection. I bought my son Davey a complete set of Topps cards every year for about ten years, beginning with the first baseball season he was on this earth. The first set I purchased was the 1983 Topps set. I don't even remember the big individual cards from that set, but I do remember discovering that the "reputable" person that sold them to me at a baseball card show had taken the best cards out and sold me the set as "complete."
Growing up I collected baseball cards at a very fast pace. Every time I went to the store I would buy a pack of bubble gum, and inside the pack would be five shiny new baseball cards. The gum was usually stale and most of the time I just threw it away. I always kept the cards however. I would trade them....(I'll give you a Mickey Mantle for a Roger Maris.) I would divide them into teams and put a rubber band around them to keep them together. Eventually my collection would have the starting lineup from practically every Major League team, so I would play a game of baseball. I invented my own game with a big piece of paper and a big-league diamond drawn on it. I would draw areas of the field for singles, doubles, triples, and of course home runs. A small paper-wad would be my baseball and a pencil would be the bat.
My lineups would be based upon the order that I stacked my cards in. This was my X-box or my own personal video game, and I literally spent hours each summer playing it. I would play at night and on rainy days, but when the sun was out during the day, I was outside playing baseball or whiffle ball with my friends.
By the time I was married my collection was quite extensive. I had calculated the worth of my collection at around $10,000 in 1978, but I never took care of it the way that I should. Rather than a fire-proof box to keep my cards in, I kept them in a big cardboard box under my bed. I very seldom took them out of the box back then, but on April 25th of 1978, our house burned and the only thing I have left from that wonderful card collection is a 1962 Hank Aaron card that is charred around the edges. It currently sits in a display case in my home.
You always hear the story of someone's mother throwing away a kids' baseball card collection during a spring cleaning frenzy, but I had taken my cards with me when I left home. Of all the personal possessions we lost in that fire, I miss my baseball cards the most. I had several Mickey Mantle cards, including a couple that were worth about $350 each at the time. One Mantle card, was worth about $300 and I had three copies.
I mourned the loss of my cards for weeks, and still wonder what they would be worth today if I still had the collection. I don't think baseball card collections are worth what they were in the 1980s when card values peaked, but when I collected them, I never thought about their value; I collected them because it was fun. I certainly hope that my grandsons have fun playing with their dad's baseball cards. I regret that I have only the charred Hank Aaron card to share with them, but maybe I can share some other collectibles with them. Now....where did I put those comic books?
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Randy Smith has been covering sports on radio, television and print for the past 45 years. After leaving WRCB-TV in 2009, he has written two books, and has continued to free-lance as a play-by-play announcer. He is currently teaching Broadcasting at Coahulla Creek High School near Dalton, Ga.
His career has included a 17-year stretch as host of the Kickoff Call In Show on the University of Tennessee’s prestigious Vol Network. He has been a member of the Vol Network staff for thirty years.
He has done play-by-play on ESPN, ESPN II, CSS, and Fox SportSouth, totaling more than 500 games, and served as a well-known sports anchor on Chattanooga Television for more than a quarter-century.
In 2003, he became the first television broadcaster to be inducted into the Greater Chattanooga Area Sports Hall of Fame. Randy and his wife Shelia reside in Hixson. They have two married children, (Christi and Chris Perry; Davey and Alison Smith.) They have four grandchildren, Coleman, Boone, DellaMae and CoraLee.