My baseball cards are starting to pay off.

Back in elementary school, I collected a lot of baseball cards with my brothers. One of the coolest (ie most expensive cards) I got was a 1989 Fleer Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card. It was worth about $10 as I recall. So I bought a nice case for it, and stored it away.

So I was being bored today and I ran across an article about Ken Griffey Jr and how he's approaching his 600th home run. That got me to thinking about that rookie card of his. I looked it up online and one site has the card listed for $49.95! Sweet!

As kids, we loved collecting baseball, basketball, and football cards. But mostly just baseball cards. I have no idea how much money we sank into those cards, either. It seemed like that's all I bought for a while. There was a sweet sports card store right in Alpine. "The card shop" as we called it, although I doubt that was the real name. We'd ride down there on our bikes or rollerblades and buy a few packs of cards and a soda.

The card shop owner was cool too. He'd shoot the breeze with us, give us deals on candy or cards. We'd trade for specific cards, or just plain sell them. We'd check out the latest Becketts (monthly price magazine for sports cards) and see if our cards had gone up in value. We knew most of our valuable cards numbers by heart, so looking them up in the Beckett was easy.

Ah... good times. Many hours were spent hanging out at the card shop.

Mom really didn't have anything against it either. She was just glad we were outside, instead of playing video games or watching TV.

We have boxes of cards somewhere, probably in a dark closet at my parents house. I wonder what they are all are worth.