The Rookie Card

Baseball card hunting with my dad

When I was 9 or 10, I began an obsession with baseball cards. All the boys in my class traded them at lunch, and they kindly let me sit with them and watch. I was obviously the only girl there, but I learned through them, via their dads, what made a card valuable, how to trade, when to hold. I wasn’t afraid of being swindled because I kept the newspaper and tracked all the players whose cards I had.

Not that they were my cards. They technically belonged to my 4-year-old brother, but he was too busy reenacting Power Rangers to care about stacks of cardboard stats.

One night, my dad came home from work and saw me at the kitchen table with a stolen USA Today from latchkey and my favorite encyclopedias I’d dragged out to verify old stats. I had a later Yogi Berra card that I considered my prized possession. He looked over my setup: my rows and columns, my scribbled notes, and complimented me on my obsessive system. Then he asked, because it was 1995, if I was the only girl at school with baseball cards.

I said yes. He asked if that bothered me. I said no.

That settled that.

He asked if I wanted to go to the card store that Saturday after basketball practice. He said he would give me $40 to buy a top-notch card (again, 1995!), but not to tell Mom about the $40 part. I was so stoked, especially when he said we didn’t have to bring my little brother, whose grubby ketchup hands would probably ruin a rookie Paul O’Neill card. I was, and still am, a diehard Yankee fan, and that was my dream card. At least until Derek Jeter’s rookie year, when I scored his card for cheap.

I was so excited to spend time with just my dad—no siblings allowed.

On Saturday, we finished up basketball and my mom took my brother and sister to McDonald’s while my dad and I went to the mall. I clutched the $40 the entire way there, my fingers tingling.

We got to the card shop, a little place tucked next to a nail salon in the Monmouth Mall, and I walked in like I owned the place. The guy behind the counter looked surprised to see a little girl and her dad come in arguing about batting averages. My dad held the door for me and said, “we’re looking for something special, but she knows what she wants.”

I spent an hour flipping through the glass cases and thick binders with cracked vinyl covers. The guy at the register tried to help, but I politely declined. I had a plan. I’d done my research. I knew what I wanted.

In the end, I chose a 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card. I didn’t even like the Mariners, but I knew what that card meant. It was flashy and cool and a little risky, like buying Apple stock in 1995. It cost $35, and I used the last $5 to buy a plastic case for it. My dad said I had excellent instincts and then bought me a soft pretzel because, he said, every good investment deserved an Auntie Ann’s reward.

On the way home, I turned the case over in my hands and asked if we could do it again sometime. He said, “Any Saturday you want. Just don’t tell your brother what you got.”

I’d totally forgotten about this phase of my life until my friend Brooke posted a photo of her boys at the card store. It all came rushing back. My dad letting me sit in the front seat. The Mariners hat my brother would wear years later after becoming a Griffey stan, partly because of that gem of a card. How, as I got older, I started to notice the consequences of sitting with the boys: I missed all the gossip from the girls table. I realized that’s where I was “supposed” to be, so eventually, winter ended, the boys went outside during recess, and I closed my card book and tried so hard just to be a girly girl.

But I’ll never forget how my dad accepted me. How he never made me feel like being boyish was wrong. How he took me to the card shop a few more times after that, and when my brother finally got into it, I tagged along, remembering. He made it a point to get obsessed with whatever we loved. And even though he found baseball kind of boring, he watched Yankee games with me until he died.

The last game we watched together was about a year ago this week. The last week of his life, though neither of us had any idea.

I miss him every day. But stories like this remind me how lucky I was. How few people get to say this about their fathers. That until the end, he set aside his interests and engaged with mine.

I love him and miss him madly.