When I was nine, my family lived just a touch south of San Francisco. Deb, my oldest sister, got me interested in the 1970 baseball cards after having bought a few packs herself before losing interest. (She always called them "baseball trading cards." Still does.) My father had recently given me Cad-a-Co's "All-Star Baseball" game, the one with spinners and player discs, and this awakened my interest in the major leagues. The baseball cards -- especially because now I had faces to attach to names -- developed that interest even more.

At that time, though, all I did was store the cards, organized by team, in a shoebox, or retrieve them and reorganize them after Deb had taken the shoebox from my bedroom and heaved all the cards down the stairs. And, of course, I spent plenty of time looking at them and reading the information on the backs. I was the only kid I knew of in our neighborhood -- in my school, even -- who collected them.

About midway through that baseball season, my family moved, and not only did the kids in the new neighborhood collect the cards, they played a dice-based baseball game with them. They even went to the trouble of constructing elaborate baseball fields, mostly employing the following tools: crayons and flattened paper bags. I never joined their baseball-card baseball league, partly because I'd arrived too late in the season, but mostly because someone else had the Giants. But I remember many occasions when kids -- almost all boys ranging from six years old to, say, 16 -- would gather at the Drevers' house and play this game. They'd roll out the paper-bag diamonds, the manager of the defensive team would lay out nine cards in the players' respective positions, the manager of the batting team would put his batter in one of the card-sized batter's boxes, and play would begin.

Tragically, for all the elaborate preparation, the dice game itself was hopelessly lame -- or, more euphemistically, primitive and silly. Long story short, you rolled two dice, and snake-eyes was always a home run. The dice roll results were always the same, no matter who batted; Gaylord Perry had just as good a chance of hitting a home run -- or getting any kind of hit -- as Willie Mays. Nobody seemed to care, though, or even think about it. The home run leader was Bob Moose, a pitcher on my friend Matt's Pittsburgh Pirates. I mean, even All-Star Baseball was more realistic.

But the game, and the entire atmosphere, were still fun. In fact, I played hundreds of baseball-card baseball games before discovering more "realistic" simulations, such as Sports Illustrated Baseball. Of course, I still kept my cards in shoeboxes as I continued to collect them, which I did with a certain voracity. Also, other people's baseball cards were always infinitely more interesting than mine.

I stopped using my cards for baseball games once I decided that, inning after inning, laying out nine cards on a waxy paper bag after picking up nine other cards and arranging them into the proper batting order was a royal pain in the butt. But the cards themselves have always evoked a sense of fun to me.

Then once I hit high school, I lost interest in collecting baseball cards, though I was still heavily into simulations such as SI Baseball. I'd look at my cards occasionally, but I'd just put them back in their boxes afterward.

Occasionally I'd read about them, too. A couple of books talked about putting cards in the spokes of your bike, which I thought was nuts -- I mean, why damage the cards (irrespective of the fact that I always used to write my name or initials on the back of each card I owned)? They also mentioned such gambling games as Flip, which is more or less the same as penny-pitching. I figure I could never have gambled with my cards, except maybe the ones I had at least a dozen of, like the 1970 Cesar Gutierrez card.

Then in 1987 Deb gave me the complete set of that year's Topps baseball cards, and suddenly I was hooked again. And I mean hooked. I didn't buy any cards myself for a while -- in fact, I think Deb gave me the 1988 set a year later -- but come 1989, I was at drug stores all over the place, trying to acquire every 1989 Topps cards in a wax pack rather than having to go to a baseball card store and buy the ones I was missing. See, to me there was somehow more integrity in acquiring every card in a set through these "random" purchases than by buying an entire set from a dealer.

And this wouldn't have happened at all if it weren't for Wendy, the wife (at the time) of my best friend, Dave, who one day came home from shopping and tossed each of us a 1989 wax pack. Dave's, of course, contained Will Clark. I say "of course" because Clark had established himself as the Giants' best player by then, and "of course" it'd be Dave's pack that had Clark's card, not mine. And when did my Will Clark card show up? Oh, roughly when I bought my last 1989 wax pack months later.

But between Dave's Will Clark card and mine, I spent I don't even want to know how much money on packs of cards. Dave and I would sit in his living room, opening up packs, and I'd be saying, "Got 'im, got 'im, got 'im, got 'im... got this entire pack." Dave would just laugh.

And around that time, too, I spent a certain amount of bread -- let's just say significantly more than the cost of several loaves of bread -- on cards in an effort to complete my 1970 set, which lacked about 200 cards, including a few that were stolen by some kid who I hope is making minimum wage these days. I am happy to report that I completed this set, but not before paying $45 for Reggie Jackson and $35 for Nolan Ryan -- and with the latter, I got off easy; if I were interested in buying that card today, I think I could count on paying at least 20 times more. Not only that, but I spent a fair amount of money buying complete Fleer, Donruss, and Score sets, too.

(Lest we forget the famous 1988 Billy Ripken Fleer card in which some oaf, once the photo had been taken, had inscribed something pretty obscene -- I know this because I looked at the card through a jeweler's loup -- on the knob of Ripken's bat. That one cost me $30. The card went way up in value very quickly -- before dropping back to $30.)

After 1989, I stopped buying cards in the store -- that is to say, I continued buying cards in the store, but with less zeal. I'd still pick up the various factory sets, though.

And now it's tapered off completely. It must be at least three years since the last time I bought baseball cards. I haven't missed it, and here's why: In 1990, as I was headed into a local card shop, I saw a kid come out, open a wax pack, and start putting the cards into clear plastic sleeves. Really. I thought, "They used to be toys; now they're portfolios. How fun is that?"

Maybe this kid, who I have no doubt is an accurate reflection of his peers, is way smarter than we were when we were kids. Maybe this kid will one day use his plastic-sleeved cards as a down payment on a house, or maybe they'll put his kids through college. In signing my name to my own cards when I was a kid, I rendered them immediately worthless.

Okay, not worthless per se -- not worthless to me. These things are supposed to be fun, damn it. And they still are. Granted, if the Big One hit and I had 15 minutes to enter my house and remove possessions of value, the 1970 cards would be a high priority -- along with my computer, disks, music, etc. -- as well as all the other cards I collected before high school, but if I couldn't retrieve the ones from the '80s and '90s (including the two-thousand-plus 1989 duplicates, or "doubles," as we called them), I'd think, "That's a damn shame." Then I'd sigh. Then I'd move on -- even though I do actually enjoy those cards.

But I must say that I don't care for the way baseball cards have changed over the last 25 years or so. In 1970 they were simple: you'd see a guy pretending to swing a bat or wind up to deliver a mock pitch; sometimes he'd be smiling. Often you'd see a closeup of a player, usually sans hat, just in case he'd changed teams before the cards were distributed (and if he did have a hat, Topps would simply airbrush out the team logo). The picture was surrounded by a gray border; the team name appeared in block capitals somewhere near the top; the players' name appeared at the bottom, in black script, next to his position (in kind of brick-red block caps). Simple. The backs of the cards were done in a yellow-and-blue motif, featuring the player's given name, vital statistics, a little biographical blurb, a stupid little cartoon image, and some baseball stats. Very simple.

I haven't seen any new cards lately, but now they're miniature issues of Sports Illustrated, featuring wonderful, full-color action shots (which I think is a fine idea in and of itself) on the front -- and full-color shots on the back. Maybe some stats. Frankly, it's too colorful, two gaudy, two "visual," too complex. I swear to you, if I ran a baseball card company, my cards would look pretty much like the 1970 Topps cards. Kids wouldn't buy them, of course, but maybe their parents would.

I'd probably encourage consumers to buy factory sets for themselves or their kids -- but have their kids buy the packs at the store in order to experience the fun of collecting. And I'd encourage the kids to touch the cards -- hell, put 'em in your spokes. I'd come up with some sort of dice-baseball game that somehow related to the stats on the cards themselves, and I'd encourage them to play it, to come up with leagues, to make stadiums out of flattened paper bags or something.

Because baseball cards are supposed to be fun.

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