Pictured above: A collector on eBay is asking $2,499 for a Topps Pete Rose No. 580 baseball card.
The 1970 Topps Pete Rose No. 580 baseball card was a popular one when I was a kid in northern Minnesota.
It wasn’t because Rose was a favorite player of my gang or that he epitomized his nickname “Charlie Hustle” when he bowled over Cleveland Indians catcher Ray Fosse in the All-Star game that year.
Instead, it was because his card featured just his big crew cut head adorned with the Cincinnati Reds cap. Most of the other baseball cards of that year showed stars swinging their bats, preparing to throw a fastball off the pitcher’s mound or poised in a defensive position.
Rose’s No. 580 just showed his noggin, and because of that, the card was not the most favored one when we bought packs for 40 cents back then, but it did have an important purpose. Whenever we’d find one of his cards between the slab of chewing gum and the other more prized cards, it immediately went into service.
We’d clip the card onto the frame of our bicycle with a clothespin, making sure the card fit between the spokes of the bike’s wheel. Whenever we peddled the bike, the spokes would hit the card and make the “flap, flap” noise that, to a kid, sounded like the engine of a revving motorcycle. We could turn our Schwinns and Huffys into Suzukis and Harleys.
Now more than a half century later, I see that a Topps No. 580 card sells from $250 to even $1,000.
Such is the nature of sports cards. Yesterday’s spoke flappers are today’s collectibles.
A sports collectors’ website recently noted that card fans will spend more than $600 million this year buying those cardboard pictures. What was once a part of the joy of being a boy and discovering pictures of our heroes that we could hang on our walls is now a thriving business.
I, like so many others, probably had thousands of dollars worth of cards in shoeboxes that my mother threw away when we moved. I’m sure buried in some Minnesota landfill are the Henry Aaron and Willie Mays and Reggie Jackson cards I once owned, and there are probably scores of Pete Rose No. 580s, all creased in the middle and frayed on the edges from bicycle spokes.
I never was much for card collecting other than keeping cards of my beloved Minnesota Twins back in the day. The one time I thought of investing in cards, I bought scores of cards of Teemu Selanne, a Finnish hockey legend who played in the NHL, mostly with the Winnipeg Jets and the Anaheim Ducks. The year I got serious with his cards, Selanne cut his Achilles heel in a game and was never quite the same after.
I saw it was a sign for me to merely enjoy sports memorabilia and not delve into the business end.
Now, as we near opening day of baseball, I find I tend to look back to the baseball days of old, rather than ahead to the present season, and I’ve got the memorabilia to prove that. On a bookshelf at home is a framed autographed photo of Henry Aaron, my favorite player. There’s an autographed picture of Joe DiMaggio on the other side, my father’s favorite player.
My wife has a signed baseball by Ernie Banks, and displayed prominently atop the bookshelf is a picture signed by Ball Four author and former pitcher Jim Bouton.
Perhaps my best autograph really shows my impression on sports collectibles and puts the heart into what it is really about.
When I was 10, the same year we were putting the Rose cards on our bicycles, I wrote a letter to Green Bay Packers quarterback Bart Starr. I wrote that the Minnesota Vikings were my favorite team, but I liked Starr the best of all the NFL players. I asked him for an autograph and enclosed a 5-by-7 index card in a self-addressed envelope.
Months later, in the summer of 1971, a letter dropped through the mail slot, and I recognized my own handwriting. Starr wrote back! He signed the card and added a thank you note.
I placed the card in my 1971 NFL football guide book and eventually forgot about it.
When my mother passed away in 1998, I was going through boxes of things at her house and found one containing a lot of my old books. I saw that 1971 football guide and wondered.
Yes, 27 years later, still tucked in the book by the Packers’ team page, was the card. I could sell it, I guess, but the memories of how I got it and later found it are worth more than whatever I could claim from a collector.
I do know, however, that it’s worth more to me than the Pete Rose No. 580 — and I won’t clip the Starr autograph to my bicycle.
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