Baseball cards: Did other aspies do this too?

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When I was in first thru third grade, I collected baseball cards (it's an NT interest, I know, but read on). Now, I had little or no interest in baseball cards, but sometime in first grade, I learned through the rudimentary social intuition I developed that collecting baseball cards was the cool thing to do. So I started buying them with the allowance money my parents gave me. My friends liked baseball cards too, so they recommended me places where I could get good value. My older sister gave me some cards she got from someone at her college, and so my baseball card habit got started. Over the course of a few months, I managed to build up a decent-sized collection. I was fiercely proud of it, and spent hours looking at the cards. But in a typical aspie fashion, I was more interested in the card design and patterns on the borders, rather than the players on them.

By listening to friends and classmates, I found out which cards were great, which ones were good, and which ones were only so-so. However, as luck would have it, social things crept in that I never expected. Apparently, I had a few really nice cards that were hard to come by (the ones my sister gave me), plus some other cards that were popular in general. Word got around fairly quickly, and soon enough, friends and classmates were bombarding me with offers to trade cards; namely, some of theirs for the really nice ones I had. While I'm sure there would have been kids who tried to rip me off, most of the offers actually seemed genuine. But there was one problem: I was never interested in the social aspect of trading baseball cards. What I enjoyed the most was accumulating them, expanding my collection, and looking at the card designs (and to a much lesser extent, the players). Still, the offers kept coming, and I wanted them to stop.

So I did something an only an aspie kid would be creative enough to come up with. I took a thin red marker, and drew a diagonal line on all my baseball cards (about 70), including the really great ones. I made the lines from one corner to another, clearly visible from a quick glance. (I got this idea from seeing classmates refuse to trade damaged cards.) This made my card collection nearly worthless to 98% of people who were offering me to trade, and the offers almost disappeared. Needless to say, most people (except one or two really sympathetic friends) were weirded out by what I did. I occasionally got duplicates which I was OK with trading, but during the 3 years I had the collection, I actually traded with someone at most 5 times, while other (read: NT) kids traded at least once a week.

After third grade, my family moved across the country, and we had to leave more than half the things behind. (We were poor, and couldn't afford a moving truck.) I ended up giving my cards to my best friend at the time; he agreed to take them, but I'm not sure he could do much with them, since they've been "marked". After I moved to my current city and got settled in, I never bothered to restart my collection, and honestly, didn't care. I changed as a person, and the stress of fighting off offers to trade just wasn't worth it. Also, collecting cards was far less popular at my new elementary school.

So, after reading all this, here's a question. Did/does anyone else here feel the same way about tradable collectors' items, like baseball cards, milk caps (pogs), beanie babies, etc. Did you collect something like that as a kid? If people offered you to trade and you didn't want to, how did you decline or prevent the offers? Share your stories.

I collected baseball and hockey cards when i was young but it wasn't popular at my school and I never liked baseball so I guess I just like collecting them. Other things tho like marbles , pogs and Pokemon cards I had a lot of fun with. I was actually the opposite of you, I wanted to trade and always managed to get some great deals. Since no one at school played Pokemon cards the recess was just people showing off their cards and trading. I was always spending my whole recesses trying to strike deals. (I have always been good at that kind of thing) I still remember the day I managed to trade for a Venusaur I would get to go home and play with my brother and dad with my new cards. Marbles I didn't really trade but I played a lot and I still remember the time I beat someone and won a tenis ball sized marble (I have to wager like 10 large , 20 medium and like 50 small ones lol). And finally pogs.. I was very good at that game and I had a huge collection. My best memory associated to pogs is the day I forgot my pogs home and someone gave me a single cardboard one and by the end of the day I had managed to win enough to go home with like 20 pogs, 4 slammers and a case for them.
I guess I went a little off topic but thank you for reminding of those things

Yup, i did the Baseball collecting before, didnt last long due to not being able to understand collecting them in the first. It wasnt until 1995/97 that i got into collectible card games (Magic: The Gathering) . . . collect and play, much more involved than Baseball cards. I still have my baseball card, but i have no idea what to do with them at this point. Need to get around to having them appraised.

If someone had put a red mark on any of my cards I've have strangled them. But you're right about no social interest in trading the cards, I traded the best trade on offer whether the person was someone that I played with me or not. No sympathy trades out of me.

I'm Australian and in the mid 90's Baseball wasn't very popular. My brother collected Basketball cards and I did too. I remember someone wouldn't give them back so I gave them $1 to get it back. I wasn't really a fan of basketball but it was just something to collect.
I also collected Lion King cards and Tazo's. What I would do is I wouldn't trade my doubles I would stack them on top of each other. I liked having the same of each. I think my sister told me to trade them to get more cards/tazo's that I hadn't got yet. I once had a rare popup card and my sister told me to not pop it otherwise it wouldn't be wroth anything, but I wanted to display it on my desk so I popped the card and Zazu from the Lion Kind was displayed on my desk.

Back in the late 1950s I collected Hockey cards (i'm Canadian), plus Wings (aircraft) plus Rails and Sails (trains and boats) - I was obsessed with them, spent hours examining them, and I wouldn't trade anything that wasn't a duplicate.

But they disappeared somewhere along the way, and it hurts whenever I think of it.

AC

Oh wow, the more I post on this site, the more I realize that I'm not alone. Back in the day, I was the only person I knew who flat-out refused to trade baseball cards. Apparently I had some really good ones, but I didn't want to trade them because I liked how their design (as opposed to their value). So I resorted to desperate measures. I compromised the design of the cards a little, but at the same time, made them worthless to other people, thus thwarting any possible trades. This worked extremely well, giving me the ability to enjoy my collection in peace. Interestingly, environmentalists protect baby harp seals in a similar way, by spraying their fur with a red dye. It makes their fur undesirable to poachers, and the mothers don't notice or don't care. (Adult harp seals don't have fur, so a sustainable fur hunt can't be done.)

I am the opposite actually.


When I was I younger, I collected cards for the sake of it. I didn't trade as I didn't have anyone to trade with. Didn't really take that good care of them either. I just liked them. Over the past year or so, I have gotten back into the hobby.


Just recently I discovered that there where blogs and boards dedicated to people that collected cards. Baseball, foo ball hockey, you name it. That led me to make my own blog about collecting baseball cards. I then discovered a whole new kind of trading, done via the internet. It is just like the old school way, only the cards came via the mail.

Since then I have done nearly a dozen, if not more trades and recieved twice as many packages. I find I am learning even more about the hobby via trading and meeting new people from across the country is fun. I am learning to be more social as odd as that sounds, when I haggle with people about cards and make deals. I even organized a secret Santa with baseball bloggers.

Who's on first?

lol, pokemon cards. i'm 18 and i still collect & play. i go to a trading card league to play and trade, and it bugs me SO much when someone sees i have a full set of such-and-such really rare cards in a series and wants to trade me for one of them. i'm a competitive player so there are constantly new cards coming out that i need to play, but i'll refuse to trade some of the cards i'll never use because i simply like looking at them, especially under really nice lighting. people don't get why i won't trade my holographic version of such-and-such when i have 2 more of that card in a non-holographic format. trading cards makes me feel uneasy sometimes, especially if it's a card that i really enjoy gazing at for no particular reason.

Actually I do have a tiny collection of Satchel Paige cards.

I've watched the movie 'Are we there yet' many times with my children.

My younger daughter was very taken with 'Satch' (she's a bit like me) and so I got her a set of cards on Ebay, there were some duplicates for me

I collected baseball cards for a few years in the late 80's. I still have them in binders! One of the things I remember doing is putting them in order. First I would put them in numeric order, from 1 to 792. And I would do this inside those plastic display pages, which was really difficult because I would do front and back; i.e. I would do the front side from left to right, and then continue on the back from right to left so it would go in order when you turned the page. It took a long time to do.

Then after I got tired of that, I took all the cards out and put them in team order, starting with Angels and ending with Yankees, and all the players on each team in alphabetical order. I must've spent hours rearranging. I guess that was my idea of fun.

Like some others mentioned, I was more into the designs and the colors, and completing my set, than looking at the stats. I was especially fascinated by the Traded sets. Whenever a player would get a new card with a new team, that blew my mind. It was like they had a whole new identity. I would compare their old card to the new card just to make sure they were the same person.

I have a collection of baseball cards from the 60's and 70's. It includes the Reggie Jackson rookie card, but the condition is not very good. I also have Willie Mays, Roberto Clemente, and Catfish Hunter. I was never very careful about keeping them in perfect condition, because they weren't worth that much money when I was originally collecting them.

I have almost always collected something or other, including coins, shells, geological specimens (rocks, etc.) and flying discs ("Frisbees.")