Prices Are Cause for a Card-iac

Mine is not a unique horror story, but that doesn’t make it any less traumatic.

Like millions of others, I collected baseball cards as a kid. Without revealing my age, let’s just say that Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and a pinch-hitter named Dusty Rhodes were big stuff when I was spending my hard-earned allowance for cards and that stale slab of bubble gum you got with them.

There were other cards as well--Davy Crockett cards, football cards, Zorro cards. But it was the baseball cards that were the most prestigious.

We would wedge them into the spokes of our bike tires and roar down the street. That was cool.

We would hold huge (by our standards) card conventions with every kid on the block. We would meet at one house, arriving with our life’s treasure jammed into a shoe box which we clutched under our little arms. We would trade half the day and flip the rest of the afternoon.

Flipping itself was an art. We would put a stack of cards into a common pot, perhaps as many as 25 at a time per kid. With a total of 100 cards in the stack, we would then throw our flip card--one which had remained separate and protected to keep its ends from getting frayed and its ability to soar at maximum level--at a carefully selected wall.

Closest to the wall got the whole pot. Plain and simple.

Except for the endless hours we spent arguing over which card really was closest on those memorable photo finishes that seemed to occur every other flip.

We may have invented the reverse angle shot long before television got around to it. Because when two cards landed side by side near the wall, we discovered that by looking at them from different angles, we could prove one or the other was closer. If we later excelled in geometry, it was because of this early training at dealing with innovative angles to prove our card was a winner.

Our parents laughed at it all. Just kid stuff, they thought.

As I grew older, I discovered my shoe-box treasure was indeed kid stuff. Not too many of the girls I met seemed to be impressed with Dusty Rhodes.

By then, I had approximately 7,000 cards. I threw them into one large box and stored them in the garage. Someday, I told myself, my treasure will again be the coin of the realm.

Then, one fateful day, I came home to discover I had been robbed. Tired of this obviously useless clutter her teen-age son had dumped in the garage, my mother had given my life’s work to the trash collector.

You were too old for them anyway, she told me. What were you going to do with them?

It took a long time, but I got my answer the other day at a place in Sherman Oaks known as America’s Favorite Card Store.

Baseball cards are big business these days. There are an estimated 700,000 collectors in this country. The Sherman Oaks store alone currently has about 3 million cards in stock, ranging in value from an eighth of a cent to $650 for a mint condition 1938 card of Notre Dame football Coach Knute Rockne.

Proprietor Harlan Werner has sold four 1952 Mickey Mantle cards this year for $3,500 each.

The most popular current card, Werner says, is Don Mattingly of the Yankees.

The most expensive baseball card is a 1909 Honus Wagner in mint condition. Werner doesn’t have one. There are only 30 in existence, going for $30,000 apiece .

It’s big time all right, and cards are just the beginning of the memorabilia business. Looking for the perfect holiday gift for the sports fan who has everything? How about an authentic No. 24 San Francisco Giants jersey worn by Willie Mays. Werner has one, going for $4,000. He also has two Milwaukee Bucks No. 33 jerseys worn by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in the early ‘70s for $2,000 each. Johnny Unitas’ No. 19 Baltimore Colts jersey also goes for two grand.

The most valuable jersey is a 1954 Boston Red Sox model, No. 9, worn by Ted Williams. Asking price: $4,800.

How do these things wind up in Werner’s shop? He’s not always sure. He gets them from people whose methods he doesn’t always question. He knows that some are obtained by bribing ball boys or by simply breaking into clubhouses and stealing them.

The list of memorabilia never seems to stop. More than two decades ago, little toy figures of baseball players like Don Drysdale and Henry Aaron were manufactured and sold for $2.98 each. Werner is now selling the Drysdale model for $200, the Aaron for $125. The most valuable in this category are rare copies of Rocky Colavito and Dick Groat. Each of those, if you can find one, goes for $400.

Werner not only sells from his shop but also stages card shows. He’s holding one this weekend at the Anaheim Convention Center with appearances by Drysdale and Johnny Bench. It’s called the Sparky Anderson Card Show For Charity with proceeds going to the Cal Lutheran University baseball team’s scholarship fund. Anderson, a Thousand Oaks resident who lives near the college and has helped raise thousands of dollars for it through his annual golf tournaments, has donated many of the items being sold at the show.

It’s certainly a worthwhile cause, but I don’t think I could take it. Just walking through Werner’s store left me with a large knot in my stomach. I looked in his glass case at the cards on display and experienced nightmarish flashbacks. I had that one, I told myself . . . and that one . . . and that.

I couldn’t bear to look at the price tags.

What really bothers me is that there’s probably some wealthy guy sitting around his Palm Springs pool right now, telling people how he used to be just a poor trash collector until the day he stumbled across this treasure. . . .