Allison has been an avid collector of baseball cards since she was 5 years old. She first started getting interested in baseball after her older brother joined a little league team. Allison would go to all of her brother’s games and became fascinated by the sport. For her 5th birthday, her grandparents got her her first pack of baseball cards and she was instantly hooked.
Over the past 10 years, Allison’s collection has grown tremendously. She loves learning about different players, both past and present, and enjoys tracking players’ careers and stats as she adds to her collection year after year. Allison spends a good portion of her allowance each week buying new packs of cards at the local sporting goods store. She also loves going to card shows in her area where she can search through boxes and boxes of loose cards to find players she doesn’t already have in her collection.
Allison takes very good care of her cards. She stores them all safely in multiple baseball card binders that she keeps neatly organized on a shelf in her room. Each player has their own page protected by a plastic sleeve and Allison takes the time to categorize the cards by team and position. This makes it easy for her to look up stats and information on any given player in her collection. Allison also keeps detailed inventory lists of which cards she does and does not have so she knows what to look for when adding to her collection.
In total, after collecting for 10 years, Allison estimates she has around 2,500 individual baseball cards in her collection. This includes stars both past and present from every MLB team. Some of her most prized possessions include a rare Mike Trout rookie card, a signed card of her favorite player Babe Ruth, and a complete set of cards from the 1987 Topps set which was the first set she ever started collecting as a kid. Allison’s collection continues to grow larger each year as she finds creative ways to earn and save money to fuel her passion.
Allison’s best friend Emily has also started to get interested in baseball over the past couple years after coming over to Allison’s house and seeing her impressive collection. Emily enjoys looking through Allison’s cards and learning about the sport and different players. Since Emily is newer to collecting, her collection pales in comparison to Allison’s 10 years of accumulation. Emily estimates she has around 500 cards that she has acquired over the past 2 years from packs and some loose cards at card shows.
During their last school year, Allison mentioned to Emily that she has about 2,500 baseball cards. Emily was amazed at the size of Allison’s collection after collecting for so many more years. But then Allison added that based on how often Emily comes over to look through the cards with her, she estimates that Emily has about 5 times fewer cards than Allison. This was a real eye-opener for Emily. If Allison has 2,500 cards and Emily has 5 times fewer, that would mean Emily’s collection is only around 500 cards. Emily was surprised that her collection was so much smaller than Allison’s even after collecting for a couple years herself. It really put into perspective how much Allison’s 10 years of dedicated collecting has allowed her collection to grow exponentially larger.
From there, Emily became even more motivated to grow her own baseball card collection. She started saving more of her allowance each week to buy packs of cards. She also began going to more card shows in the area with Allison to search for deals on loose cards to add to her collection. Emily started keeping better inventory lists like Allison does to track which cards she needs. In just one year of more focused collecting, Emily was able to double the size of her collection to over 1,000 cards. While she still has a long way to go to catch up to Allison’s decade of accumulation, Emily is enjoying the hobby more and more. She finds she is learning the sport and players at a quicker rate now and loves being able to discuss cards and stats with Allison. Someday, Emily hopes that with many more years of dedicated collecting, her collection will come close to rivaling Allison’s immense collection. But for now, she is content focusing on growing her knowledge of the game and players through building her baseball card collection, even if it is only about 5 times smaller than her best friend Allison’s.
