El Cardquistador

I used to be the guy shaking my head at the card shop. You’ve seen him too—the teenager, maybe with his dad, ripping through a fresh hobby box like a whirlwind. He’d pull out the five or six “hits,” sleeve them up, and then… nothing.

The rest of the box—the bulk of the set—was either dumped into a free bin or left abandoned on the table like Sunday’s trash.

To me, it felt wasteful. Worse, it felt disrespectful—to the players, to the set designers, and, if I’m allowed a pinch of sentimentality, to the game itself.

Coming back to the hobby after a long time away, this “no base” mindset felt like the final erosion of reverence. In the era I grew up in, there was no such thing as a base card. There was just the card. Even when inserts arrived, they weren’t hyper-limited or excessively dressed up. They were simply a fun addition to a set where every card mattered.

The modern approach felt born from the idea that cards are purely a business, the game is a business, and anything resembling history had been sanded off.

Then I looked around my office.

The Cost of “Reverence”

I am currently sitting in a room where “useful capacity” has been surrendered to the common card. In my effort to bring old-school values into a modern hobby, I hit a wall. I can’t do this anymore.

Here’s the cold reality I finally had to accept:

Space is money.
My square footage has a price tag. Devoting it to thousands of cards worth five cents on a good day is bad math.

Supplies are money.
Every penny spent on a penny sleeve or top loader for a common veteran is a penny not going toward a card I actually care about.

The cognitive load is real.
There’s a mental tax to “knowing what you have.” Managing a sprawling, disorganized mountain of cardboard creates constant background noise—and it quietly kills the joy of collecting.

What I finally realized is that my attempt at “reverence” wasn’t noble. It was just a slow-motion way of letting the hobby bury me alive.

The Great Relocation

So here I am, unloading cards and tucking them into 800-count boxes.

I still can’t bring myself to throw them away. I can’t treat a player’s career like junk mail. But I also can’t let these cards live here rent-free anymore.

I’ve moved much closer to the kids’ way of interacting with the hobby. My rule going forward is simple:

No more base. At least not on purpose.

I won’t throw away what I’ve already saved, but I will not bring more of it in. I’m adopting a leaner footprint—one that lets me actually see what I own instead of drowning in it.

Staying in My Lane

Do other things about how the current generation approaches baseball and collecting bother me? Absolutely. I’m old, and I think I’ve seen a better way.

But it doesn’t matter. Things have moved, and I don’t get a vote.

I’m not even going to get into those disagreements here. I’ve decided to stay in my lane. I’ll keep quietly shaking my head at some of what they do—but I’m also willing to adopt what they’ve gotten right.

And what they’ve gotten right is this: refusing to let the bulk of the hobby become a burden that crushes the best parts of it.

The kids are right.
They are mostly alright.
And I’m finally clearing the noise so I can actually see the cards that matter.