2nd blog anniversary

2 years ago today I started this blog. For this year's anniversary post I think I'll go way back to the beginning of my baseball card collection. 

My first 2 cards, a 1987 Ralston Purina Eddie Murray and a 1990 Starline Darryl Strawberry, were given to me by the older brother of one of my friends. Though I guess I liked them enough that I still have them, I hadn't caught the collecting bug yet. What really made me start collecting was my 6th birthday. For that birthday my Grandma gave me a 2012 Topps Yankees team set. I still have them all, though they're in pretty rough shape. 

I don't have a very good memory for things that I don't make an effort to remember, so I don't know much about my early days of collecting, unfortunately. I believe, though, that what made me start collecting in earnest is that some people we knew moved into a house and there were several thousand cards from the '80s and early '90s in the attic. I guess they heard that I collected baseball cards, so they gave them to me. For an early collector, it was incredible.  I didn't know a lot about cards, and so these cards were pretty much my whole collecting world. 1933 Goudey? Never heard of it. 1956 Topps? What's it look like? What I like is 1986 Topps. I still remember looking through a ton of 1986 Topps cards, and liking them so much. 

Baseball cards taught me everything I knew about baseball back then. One thing I still remember is the beginning of my baseball statistics education. I loved baseball statistics from the start. I guess I asked my Dad about what were good statistics, because I remember picking out Mike Krukow (20 wins one year) and Pat Clements (once had an ERA under 3) as Good Players. 

I tell you, I LOVED (and still do) baseball statistics. I like numbers, and baseball statistics tell you stories about a player, almost as vividly as a book. One game I started early on (probably in 2015), which I still play, is where I make a fictional baseball player's career out of statistics from the backs of my baseball cards. It has various rules, and is very fun. It's called Mock. My memory is that I called it that by accident, because I just liked how it sounded, but I'm not sure if I can trust that memory. It sounds too improbable.

I've been collecting baseball cards for a little bit over 8 years now, so almost a quarter of my collecting life has been covered by this blog. It's been fun writing a blog. I like a lot how there is a baseball card blog community, so people actually read my blog. I guess I'll do the acknowledgements now, as I should start wrapping up this post. Thanks to all my readers, and everybody who takes the time to comment on my posts. A special thanks to Fuji, who comments on ALL of my posts. It's very nice to have someone who always comments, because then you never have to have a post with 0 comments, which is rather depressing. Thanks to my 4 followers, and thanks to my mom and dad for at the least tolerating my messy baseball card obsession, and even sometimes getting me more baseball cards. And thanks to my Grandma, for getting me my first pack of baseball cards.