Baseball cards hold value beyond money

From the time I was about 10 until I was 16, the most exciting time of the year was early March. That's when the new baseball cards hit the market.

My older sisters loved Bobby Sherman, Michael Jackson and David Cassidy.

I loved baseball cards.

Due to baseball cards (and my passion for sports in general), I knew the name of every major league baseball player – at least those who were among the 660 cards printed annually by the Topps Company.

Baseball cards were fun and interesting. My collecting started slowly and built up steam. By the time I was in seventh grade, my goal was to get a complete set: All 660 cards.

Obsession? Maybe. I prefer to think of myself as driven.

My friend Dana and I competed (and teamed up), pushing each other to do better, to get more cards. We sometimes traded, but also worked together.

By the time I was 14, I stopped relying on my mom to buy cards at the grocery store and ordered cards directly from a distributor, in boxes of 1,000 or 1,500. I spent much of my savings on those cards, then waited for the UPS truck to drive to my remote home in early March. It was like watching Santa Claus come . . . if Saint Nick delivered boxes of baseball cards 10 weeks after Christmas.

I collected passionately, telling everyone that these would make me rich one day.

But it wasn't really about money. I loved baseball and loved collecting cards. I traded them with strangers (Dana and I took out an ad in a sketchy baseball card magazine to land more old cards) and dreamed of getting the rare Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays rookie card. More than anything, I loved my era: the mid-1970s.

In 1975, Dana collected 659 of the 660-card set, missing only Steve Foucault of the Texas Rangers. We spent months pursuing Foucault, an otherwise forgettable relief pitcher. I'm pretty sure that Dana never completed that set. His 1975 Topps mini set (distributed in only a few areas of the U.S.) was forever at 659, one short. Mine remained 12 short.

I put together complete sets in 1976, 1977 and 1978. Then, like nearly everyone, I slowed. Then I stopped. By the time I was a senior in high school, I had no interest in baseball cards – but unlike most people my age, I kept them. Separated by year in boxes, in numerical order.

I know that because I recently decided to sell my baseball cards after storing them for years in my garage (in a plastic tote, secured and dry, still in boxes in numerical order).

When I reviewed them recently, they looked just like they did when I was a teenager. The complete sets (and all the extras from those years) are still in order. My 1975 mini set is still just 12 short (including Foucault!).

When I checked them out, I didn't think of their financial value (which has dropped off a cliff in the past two decades). I thought about how much they meant to me when I was a teen. They were distinctly mine. They were my first investment. They were the way I learned about baseball and friendship.

They tied me to a place and time.

I will sell my cards in the coming months, hopefully to someone who appreciates them as a snapshot of time as much as a fiscal investment. I won't miss them, since they've been largely out of view for decades. My memories aren't financial, but what those cardboard treasures meant to me.

They meant springtime, baseball, a good investment . . . and that Steve Foucault was elusive.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

How to make Winter Olympics even better

The Winter Olympics are at a crossroads. The question is whether the International Olympic Committee is ready to take the kind of steps necessary to move the Games to the next level.

Sure, they're Olympian now, by definition. But they could be much better. I'm optimistic that the IOC is willing to surge ahead to ensure the success (and by success, I mean good TV ratings) into the future.

The IOC has already made steps.

Consider the difference from even 38 years ago. Back in 1980, the U.S. Olympics hockey team won the gold medal, but the rest of the Olympics? Boring figure skating. No short-track skating. No snowboarding, half-pipe. Not even any curling. There were only six sports – with 10 events (since things like skiing have multiple variations) – contested. This year? There are 15 sports with 102 events.

Here's my point: The IOC doesn't need to keep expanding sports. It simply needs to make the existing ones more exciting.

I have recommendations.

You want me to keep watching NBC's coverage through commercials every five minutes and boring interviews? Try these three updates to the sports:

Multiple competitors at once. In events such as short-track speed skating, the excitement comes from several athletes racing simultaneously – and the inherent danger. Same thing is true on the snowboarding and skiing slopestyle events.

What if we added multiple performers to other sports?

I'm thinking of downhill ski races, sending them down side-by-side or side-by-side-by-side (elbowing each other at 60 mph). What about three or four luge teams shooting down a wide track simultaneously, racing to the finish?

Want something really out of the box? How about multiple figure skaters on the ice at the same time? The thrill of whether someone will land a triple-lutz, triple-toe loop combination will be multiplied when someone else is racing toward them. Backward.

Increase jingoism. When I was a kid, the Olympics were all about misplaced national pride. The Russians (who were the Soviets then) cheated. We didn't. Wins over the evil empire were celebrated as if they proved our culture was better.

We live in a flattened world, where we don't believe that anymore. But what if we tied medals at the Olympics to something of national importance – for instance, to the ability to have military bases in other countries. Each gold medal gets you three foreign bases, a silver medal gets you two and a bronze gets you one.

Do you think we'd care more about the giant slalom or the skeleton if a gold medal expanded American military influence?

And how significant would this year's banning of the Russian team be if that meant they had to close all of their military bases in other nations?

Let's bring back American pride: Make the Winter Olympics determine our nation's influence on the world.

A winter pentathlon. The Summer Games have the decathlon and the pentathlon in track and field and this is the winter version. Imagine watching the same person over the course of the week competing in downhill skiing, figure skating, the luge, the ski jump and curling. It would be ratings gold, especially if multiple people were competing at the same time!

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

Why your local newspaper is a treasure

I love newspapers.

That may sound self-serving, but it's not. I haven't worked for a newspaper for more than three years. I pay to subscribe to the Daily Republic, just like you.

I love newspapers and cheer for them to succeed.

It's easy to knock your local newspaper. Almost everyone does so – giving it a sarcastic nickname that suggests some fatal flaw. During my career, I worked for the Times-Standard (called the "Sub-Standard" by locals) and the Daily Republic (called the "Daily Repulsive" by locals). I tolerated those slights because I knew that happened everywhere. And I knew people were wrong. Both newspapers were good.

Local newspapers play an important, irreplaceable role in our lives. Local newspapers cover high school and community sports. They keep track of events at schools and weekend gatherings that are what make communities great. They tell you what's coming in entertainment.

They cover what's happening and serve as watchdogs of local agencies. Do you want to go to every city council or school board meeting and keep track of the happenings? If not, do you want someone to do it for you? Local newspapers do that. When a local newspaper goes away (as it did in Bell, in Southern California, a few years ago), local agencies can go crazy, because no one is watching. A local newspaper is much more authoritative than the local blogger.

There's been plenty of talk about the struggling economic model of newspapers and how they're not relevant in a world of social media and web-based outlets.

But when people ask me about newspapers and say things like, "They can't compete with the internet," I disagree. Because if you look at the real reporting of news on the internet, the coverage of government and well-written articles about events that matter most to you, they almost all come from newspapers.

Local newspapers are where we turn during events like last fall's wine country fires, when we need to have a broader focus. They're where we turn when there is crime or a fire in our neighborhood. They're where we turn when our child graduates from high school and we want to see photos.

Newspapers cover all those things. And you know what else? Newspapers pay reporters and photographers and editors. Newspapers pay receptionists and payroll clerks and the folks who design advertisements (so you don't have to pay 100 percent of the cost). Newspapers pay the people who work the printing press and those who make sure the newspaper gets delivered to your house.

And trust me, while newspapers pay all those people, none of the employees are getting rich.

The Daily Republic requires you to pay to see its online content, which has undoubtedly brought complaints from people who would never think to give away their work for free. I don't mind paying for the Daily Republic (just as I don't mind paying for internet access and food and heat and water). It's payment for service.

A recent article pointed out that the millennial generation, stereotyped as whiners who want everything for free, are leading the way back to traditional media. Millennials realize that it makes sense to pay for news in the same way they pay for food and clothing.

I love newspapers. My biggest hope is that they survive and thrive in the new world.

Because if we let local newspapers go away, the first losers will be those who make a living there. But the biggest losers will be our communities, which will lose something impossible to replace.

Keep supporting your local newspaper.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

Super Bowl 'facts' to make you a hit

Today is Super Sunday – the day of the ultimate football game (although, as I point out nearly every year, Dallas Cowboys running back Duane Thomas was correct nearly five decades ago when he said, "If it's the ultimate game, why are they playing it again next year?").

It's Super Bowl Sunday! Or, as we call it, "The Tom Brady Variety Show."

In case you thought today was about sports, consider the fact that the NFL threatens to sue any business that uses the words "Super Bowl" to promote something that isn't tied to the league. By "tied," I mean "paying" the league.

Super Bowl. Super Bowl. Super Bowl.

A sport? Far from it. The Super Bowl is big business, although it's big business that you will watch.

If you're a sports fan, you'll watch because it's the biggest sports event of the year. If you're not a sports fan, you'll watch it because everyone else is watching it and you can only see the Puppy Bowl so many times before you get cuteness fatigue.

There's a problem, though. The game will take nearly four hours to play and you will probably run out of things to say, whether or not you know anything about sports.

What to do? Here's one suggestion: Memorize the following "facts" and recite them during the game. Yes, "facts" is in quotes because I made some up. But the people you talk to won't know that (although you will, because the made-up "facts" have an asterisk after them).

Want to be part of the discussion? Drop these tidbits during today's game:

• The National Chicken Council says 1.25 billion chicken wings will be eaten during the game, bad news for 612,500,000 chickens.

• Minneapolis, Minnesota, where the Super Bowl is being played, is the most popular five-syllable city in America (Interesting, since Philadelphia – hometown of one of the teams in the Super Bowl – also has five syllables. It ranks fourth, also behind Colorado Springs). *

• Despite the frequent misspelling by your co-workers and mother-in-law, the game is called the Super Bowl. Two words. Both capitalized. (That's an emotional reaction from spending 20 years as a sports writer, which is also two words).

• Pink will sing the national anthem. She is the second color-named person to sing the anthem during a Super Bowl. (Redd Foxx performed an obscene version in 1968.) *

• Despite the similarity of their names, Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski and kicker Steven Gostkowski are not related. Weird.

• Justin Timberlake will perform at halftime this year, but most observers consider the show-stopping performance by Up With People in 1976 ("200 Years and Just a Baby: A Tribute to America's Bicentennial") as the greatest entertainment spectacle not only in Super Bowl history, but in world history. *

• My sister, Jana, traveled with Up With People for a spell. I denied it to my friends.

• Billy and Benny McCrary, who gained fame in the Guinness Book of World Records as "fattest twins," with that awesome photo of them on the minibikes, never played in the Super Bowl.

• Tom Brady's father, Oliver, was the goofy cousin introduced during the final season of "The Brady Bunch" in an effort to bolster the show. Which means Tom Brady is second cousins with Greg, Peter, Bobby, Marcia, Jan and Cindy. *

• You can bet on nearly anything in the Super Bowl, including whether the national anthem will take more than 2 minutes (historic average: 1:58) and whether the coin toss will land "heads" or "tails" (tails has a four-Super Bowl winning streak and leads the overall series 27-24).

• The winner of the Super Bowl goes to Disney World for one day, but the losing team is forced to go there for a week, as punishment. *

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.