I have about 10,000 baseball cards sitting in my room. In binders, bins, and boxes they are scattered across my room. I have so many unsorted cards that are in the boxes and it is my brother and my goal to get all the cards sorted into binders, or organized by team into boxes. This will surely take an excessive amount of time but it is fun to do, and it is worth it especially when you find a card worth some money. We have found rookie cards when we are sorting into bins and boxes or what have you and it is very exciting. A rookie card is a card that is printed in the players first year of playing and these are the cards typically worth the most money. When we first got these cards it was very exciting, it was from our grandparents. We were overwhelmed and we didn’t really know what to do with this crazy amount of cards.


Our grandparents are from Alabama and they visited once, maybe twice a year. This time they came up with something in the trunk of their white, beaten down ford pick-up truck. I saw boxes, and when I went to help unpack their car I saw our names on it, Dylan and Ethan. Oh great it’s probably some ugly shirt that I have to pretend to like, I thought to myself. When they gave my brother and I the boxes we didn’t know what it was, and they were too heavy to be any article of clothing. We open the boxes in unison and see rows and rows of baseball cards. Sweet, I thought to myself this is so cool, we said thank you, gave hugs and kisses and them went back to the boxes. We had no idea what to do with all of them but, I finally thought of an idea that was to sort the baseball cards into teams. We both liked this idea and so it began, we would sort two huge boxes into teams and put them into one binder and fill the other box back up but they would be in alphabetical order by team. We both knew that I would take forever and ever but in the end it would be very worth it. So we started sorting. I began sorting and I made piles on the ground organized by team, every team had a pile. In the beginning it was very hard because I had not yet memorized the place of every team’s pile. However as we kept going and going our piles got bigger and bigger, it also became easier and easier.


It was easier because it was like a habit, you would pick up the card, check the team, check the back, and then put it in the pile, unless the card was a rookie card. We could tell it was a rookie card by checking the back of it. You knew exactly where the pile was because you had been doing for at least an hour, hour and a half. It was a fluent motion. At this point the piles were huge and especially the Los Angeles Dodgers and the St. Louis Cardinals piles. This is probably because they are two of the more famous and storied franchises in all of baseball other than the Red Sox. However being a Red Sox fan and continuously wanting a Boston card, of course they never came. At this point the piles were pretty large probably consisting of around 100 cards for every single team, it was pretty cool, and I had never seen so many cards in my life.


At this point as I said the piles are huge and it was a fluent motion to sort, however we were pretty young and 9:00 was pretty late in the night for kids our age. So we went up to bed and we left the cards downstairs. However there was a big concern because we had a cat at that time and he was pretty reckless, and there was a concern that he would wreck the piles. If that happened I would have been so mad and it would have been a big waste of a lot of hard work and time. Being smart we put a box over the piles of cards and they were protected from whatever the cat could do.



That next morning we came downstairs to see the box in the same place and the cards in the same place as well, and breathing a big sigh of relief my brother and I went to sorting again, we couldn’t finish this day either and the piles of cards were even larger ever. That night we again executed what we did the previous night and again the plan worked to perfection. Then we came down two nights after we started with the piles about 200 cards per pile.


This was day we were sure to finish sorting them because we down to 100 or so cards left and it was still a fluent motion to sort a card. Finish we were sure to do. However up to this point we had still not found a card of value, there was a few one or two dollar cards but none near 10 or 15 dollars. We kept on going checking the back, the team and then placing into the correct pile. We were getting pretty tired of doing the same thing over and over again; we hadn’t gotten a valuable card yet. I was getting exhausted, and nearing my ending point, when out of the blue my brother yelled, “hey hey, it’s a rookie card”


“What? Who is it?” I questioned

“I don’t know, I’ve never seen him before” He responded. I snatched it out of his hands and looked at the face. Randy Johnson, I knew right away, I could tell because of his distinct nose. He had a great career and his rookie card would be worth a lot of money. The continuous persevering led to me and my brother finding a 20-dollar card that we still have to this day. Our plans are to keep it, in order for it to gain value. If we had short attention spans or if we had given up, nobody knows what would have happened.