Jamal had always been fascinated by baseball ever since he was a young boy. His father was a die hard Yankees fan and they would spend every summer evening watching games together on their old box TV in the living room. Something about the repetition of the game and the statistics involved really captured Jamal’s attention at a young age. His favorite part was looking through his dad’s collection of old baseball cards and learning about the histories of different players.

By the time Jamal was 10 years old, he had decided he wanted to start his own baseball card collection. For his birthday that year, his parents gave him $50 and took him to the local sports card shop to get started. He wandered up and down the aisles in awe, looking at all the different sets from different seasons. There were so many players and teams to choose from. After some deliberation, Jamal decided to start by buying a few packs from the recent season to get cards of current players, as well as a box of packs from a couple seasons ago to find some of the stars from a few years prior.

Jamal instantly got hooked on the rush of opening new packs and seeing which players he could add to his growing collection. Whenever he had some spare cash from doing chores or getting money for his birthday/holidays, he would head right back to the card shop. Within a year, Jamal had amassed a collection of over 1,000 individual cards sorted by team and player in thick wooden binders. He started to focus more on filling out entire sets from seasons past to have a more complete snapshot of baseball history captured in cardboard.

As Jamal got older, the skills and strategies involved in building a successful baseball card collection also evolved. Around age 12, he started paying more attention to the condition and grade of each card when sorting through his collection. Any cards with bends, markings or other issues were moved to separate pages marked “for trade.” Jamal began learning the ins and outs of properly caring for and protecting his prized cards to maintain their high condition and value. Plastic sleeves, toploaders and magnetic stands became essential storage tools.

Jamal’s middle school years were when his collecting passion truly accelerated. By then he understood the basics of supply and demand when it came to the scarcity and desirability of certain players, rookie cards and rare inserts. He joined online trading forums to start networking with other collectors around the country. Jamal would analyze the trade values of cards in his binders and strategically work out multi-card deals to steadily gain more coveted pieces for his sets. It became a fun challenge and game to maximize the value of his collection through savvy trading.

Card show season was also a major highlight every year during Jamal’s middle school days. He would save up his money and take a trip with his dad to the larger regional conventions held in big convention centers. Roaming the dealers’ tables was like being a kid in a candy store, with literally thousands of cards available for trade or purchase spanning the entire history of the hobby. Jamal always came home with new additions to his PC (personal collection) after a day of hardcore hunting at the shows.

By the time Jamal reached high school, his baseball card collection had grown to over 5,000 individual pieces carefully stored, categorized and protected in a dozen organizational binders filling an entire shelf in his room. He had become semi-professional in his research methods, using industry price guides, census registry databases and auction records to accurately value each part of his collection. Jamal started giving appraisal assistance to fellow collectors at card shows, helping others determine the true worth of their childhood collections.

In addition to his collecting and organizing passion, Jamal had also developed exceptional card-pulling skills over the years from his pack-opening experiences. He became known among the collecting community for his uncanny luck in finding rare memorabilia cards, autographs and one-of-one parallels that other collectors spent fortunes chasing in box breaks. Jamal’s card-pulling videos uploaded to YouTube gained a loyal following and sponsorships from card companies started rolling in.

By senior year of high school, Jamal was well-known as one of the top young collectors and traders in the entire country. Scouts from major card companies were reaching out, trying to sign him as an official representative and athlete for conventions, box breaks and collection appraisals filmed for their industry websites and publications. Jamal decided to take a gap year after high school graduation to fully focus on his burgeoning hobby career, travelling to shows as a guest dealer and influencer while also maintaining his historic collection valued at over $50,000.

Now at age 20, Jamal is one of the biggest names in sports collectibles. Through savvy business moves, a huge social media following of over 500,000 and fantastic luck in front of the camera, he has parlayed his baseball card passion into a full-time career. Jamal still gets immense joy from building and showing off his prized collection, while also mentoring the next generation of fans pursuing the hobby. His rise from a kid with a $50 starter stack to industryleading collector is an inspiration for any dreamer who turns a childhood enthusiasm into a successful career path. Jamal intends to enjoy collecting and sharing his love of the game for many years to come.