In occasions of mourning, Ben Aguirre turned to baseball playing cards.
“Collecting has been [a] huge part of my journey — it’s been there through good and bad. It serves as a means of celebration, as well as a distraction during times of pain. We have to give ourselves permission in these times of grief and sorrow to enjoy the things that we like. Abandoning such activities would be a protest of our own personal joy.”
Ben’s household and buddies are searching for their very own distraction from ache after the 43-year-old father of two youngsters died abruptly of an unknown trigger on Oct. 28. Ben had constructed a large group within the baseball-card world as one of many pioneering bloggers in The Hobby, as he and different collectors discuss with the trading-card trade.
I labored with Ben earlier than he began writing about baseball playing cards, when he was a reporter for The Argus and I served as news editor for the then-daily newspaper in Fremont, Calif. We stayed linked after he left journalism to function a group service officer for the town of Fremont, which is when he delved additional into running a blog and writing about gathering playing cards to maintain scratching his writing itch.
We talked extra in recent times, as my son started gathering baseball playing cards throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, when a spike in curiosity amid the arrival of scorching rookies throughout all the foremost sports activities made it onerous to buy packs of latest playing cards. Ben was a tremendous information, instructing me to join Target’s
TGT,
Redcard program — buying some containers of playing cards on-line from the retailer required it — and pointing me to a number of social-media accounts that alerted followers when playing cards had been obtainable on the market, together with tons of different tips on gathering and storing baseball playing cards.
After he died, I noticed I used to be removed from alone in relying on Ben to assist me perceive the baseball-card-collecting panorama. Dozens of individuals posted remembrances of Ben final week on social media, recounting how he helped information them on their gathering journey and remembering him as one of many nicest individuals to realize prominence in The Hobby.
“He’s always been a very kind, very gentle type of soul who cared for other people even to his own detriment sometimes,” mentioned Mike Osegueda, a school classmate and longtime shut good friend of Ben’s who’s well-known in baseball-card circles as “Mike Oz.” “If you needed him for something, he would spring to action and help in the kindest way and give you every bit of himself that he could in that moment.”
I’m saddened to know that Ben won’t be round to proceed shaping the journeys of others via the baseball-card world, however he leaves behind 15 years of blogs and tweets that may function a information to these not lucky sufficient to have acquired his private counseling. With permission of his household and a few steerage from Osegueda, I’ve tried to boil down Ben’s ethos on gathering playing cards into three easy guidelines for these in The Hobby, and others in search of to enter it, based mostly on his blogs and his personal gathering expertise.
Collect for love or enjoyable, not (simply) cash
“The value of our cards — while often tied to money — is often a personal experience,” Ben as soon as wrote, and Osegueda mentioned that having fun with the expertise of discovering and shopping for playing cards was an important a part of Ben’s ethos.
“He enjoyed the thrill of the hunt,” Osegueda informed MarketWatch. “Yeah, if he found something he could sell it and make money, but that wasn’t all that it was about.”
For Ben, the true function of The Hobby was not in flipping playing cards for a revenue, however the enjoyable that may be had scouring card outlets and thrift shops — his “Thrift Treasures” weblog posts turned considered one of his most generally identified varieties of posts — for the items of cardboard or different memorabilia that might spark emotion.
“This hobby isn’t just about money,” he wrote in a “Thrift Treasures” publish in 2016. “It’s about the memories and feelings that come with tracking down a White Whale for your collection. It’s about the stories you have that are tied to specific cards. It’s about reliving our childhood in an instant with a glance of a player’s face on a piece of cardboard.”
As gathering playing cards turned well-liked once more in recent times, Ben’s running a blog appeared to morph from “Hey, check out this cool card” to specializing in this nostalgia and different classes he needed to cross alongside. Much of the change appeared to return from his son turning into excited by The Hobby and rising right into a collector of his personal, which made Ben replicate much more on why he collected.
When his son pulled an autographed card from a pack at age 9 in 2019, he wrote that “The joy on his face and in his voice when he announced it and showed it off to his sister is what The Hobby is all about.”
“We are all chasing that joy,” he wrote. “We are all trying to recreate those fabulous feelings we all had whenever we pulled something that made us smile.”
People who purchase playing cards to flip them for a revenue, he mentioned, aren’t truly collectors.
“Is it wrong if someone wants to buy the hot prospect today with the idea of selling in the future? No, not really, as long as we’re calling it what it is. Because that’s not collecting. That’s a different form of participation in The Hobby, or industry,” he wrote.
Collecting was what Ben did, and what he cherished.
“I enjoy collecting — it’s fun,” he wrote in a 2018 publish. “I enjoy chasing cards that I never dreamed of owning. I enjoy obtaining a card that my grandfathers or great-grandfathers would have owned if they loved baseball. I enjoy sharing hobby experiences with my children. And so I shall do only the things in this hobby that make me happy and that are fun.”
Your assortment ought to be about you
While the primary rule offers with the act of gathering and the explanations behind it, this one is extra in regards to the assortment itself.
Baseball-card collectors appear to have one million unwritten guidelines about the way to accumulate, however Ben wasn’t actually excited by them. For occasion, many collectors eschew pitchers for hitters of their “personal collections,” or PCs. But Ben’s largest PC as a child was Roger Clemens, a pitcher, and for the previous decade he turned probably the most outstanding collectors of playing cards that includes Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw, rating No. 1 for such collectors on a Trading Card Database checklist with greater than 2,800 distinctive Kershaw playing cards.
To Ben, a baseball-card assortment ought to replicate the human who places it collectively, and develop into a dwelling, respiratory organism that adjustments together with its proprietor. Nothing else actually issues.
“Bottom line: If cards talk to you, find the ones (new or old) that make YOU happy and give them a new home,” he wrote.
Ben’s assortment exemplified this concept. He began off as a child gathering Clemens and different gamers of the Boston Red Sox, his favourite baseball workforce. In his 20s, he removed his basketball and soccer playing cards and targeting gathering rookie playing cards of baseball gamers, finally refocusing in his 30s and amassing a set of rookie playing cards of each baseball participant within the Hall of Fame. Recently, he was promoting off a few of these rookie playing cards and getting again to his private collections of particular gamers for him and his son.
“Someone asked me recently: WHY do you collect baseball cards? This is why. It’s not really about the money. It’s not really an investment because cards rarely appreciate with time under normal circumstances. It’s about the memories. It’s about how in an instant [a] single worthless card can transport you back a quarter of a century to the moment when you asked a parent for money and trekked clear across town to buy a card of your childhood sports hero,” he wrote. “I have other reasons for collecting what I do. And sometimes I can’t fully explain it. But THIS is probably the strongest reason why.”
And it wasn’t simply playing cards. Ben additionally collected game-used baseballs that hit batters in the middle of a sport. These balls had been put into a big show that he known as his “Wall of Pain” — a set that was unlikely to develop in worth, however gave Ben pleasure in proudly owning and mirrored the individual he was.
“People often call music the soundtrack to their lives,” he wrote. “For me, baseball cards are essentially my timeline.”
Be sort, particularly to youngsters and new collectors
Ben’s remaining weblog publish offered “10 tips for veteran collectors to stay positive with new hobbyists,” which he wrote as a result of he mentioned “it’s important to share good vibes for our hobby.”
Right there at No. 3 is that this: “Be kind — we were all new once.”
Ben embodied this rule, and never simply towards new collectors or youngsters. He was sort to everybody with whom he got here into contact on social media and within the wild, patiently explaining features of The Hobby that many different collectors would think about primary data. Other skilled collectors may frown on those that requested these comparatively primary questions, however not Ben.
For Osegueda and myself, that can be Ben’s true legacy in The Hobby.
“If you look at all the things that people said [after he passed], they always talk about how insightful he was, how nice he was, how much he tried to bring people in and lift them up, and that’s who he was from the beginning,” Osegueda mentioned.
Ben was that method till the top, as properly. And hopefully that legacy lives on in all of these whom he touched within the baseball-card gathering world.
The baseball-card group organized a GoFundMe marketing campaign to boost funds for Ben’s kids, and it has already surpassed its $10,000 aim.
Source web site: www.marketwatch.com
