Flipped, Traded, Loved: Happy 75th to Topps and the Cards That Raised Us

If you’re anything like me and my wife insists there is no one like me (I’m still not sure if she meant that as a compliment), you can remember exactly when and where you bought your very first pack of baseball cards. Just reading this probably has your sense of smell kicking into gear right now. (Is that… that smell?) That unmistakable aroma of cardboard, ink, and gum, or what passed for gum in the 1960s, especially when you peeled back that last card in the pack, hoping for magic and getting a stick of something that tasted like it had survived several presidential administrations.

And then there was the added bonus. They entertained us.

We didn’t just collect cards. We played them. We invented games that would make modern parents nervous and modern investors faint. There was Colors, a variation on war, where matching a team color meant you won the entire stack and felt like a Wall Street genius at age nine. There was Closest to the Wall, where cards were whipped against brick or concrete to see whose landed closest, or better yet, landed on top of another card, the holy grail known as a “leaner.”

Flipping was yet another classic game played with baseball cards. The objective was simple: win cards by matching your flip to your opponent's. Players took turns flipping a card from a stack onto a flat surface, usually the sidewalk. If both cards landed on the same side, heads/stats, or matched in team/color depending on local rules, the flipper won the stack. If they didn’t match, the cards stayed put, and the next player tried to match the previous card. This simple game taught strategy, timing, and patience, and sometimes, frustration.

And sometimes the cards weren’t about winning at all. They were about noise. Sliding a card into the spokes of your bike wheel turned every Schwinn into a Harley, every ride into a parade. It drove parents crazy, ruined perfectly good cards, and was absolutely worth it.

For kids, cards were currency and not in the fantasy league sense with dollar amounts affixed to players, but in the pride of your collection, the players you owned. We all learned the value of players through the cards themselves. If you were lucky enough to get a Tom Seaver back in the day, it meant something. Even if you had six Seavers and desperately needed one Clay Dalrymple, that trade wasn’t happening. It wasn’t about what the card might be worth in 25 years; it was about talent. A Seaver needed to bring back a Pete Rose, a Willie Stargell, or a Reggie Jackson in return. Talent for talent. Nine- and ten-year-olds acting as GMs of their shoeboxes, sliding cards across elementary school lunch room tables like Vegas dealers, arguing value with the seriousness of grown men discussing real estate.

Long before the advent of plastic sheets, our cards lived in shoeboxes sorted by teams, held together by rubber bands. We would study them endlessly; to this day, show me a 1969 Topps card, cover the name, and I will get 664 out of 664 correct. The cards meant everything they were how players became people. This was long before SportsCenter, and if we were lucky, we might catch a glimpse of a player on Kiner’s Korner, but the baseball card was how we really learned who they were.

Then the cards changed, because everything does.

The gum disappeared, which should have required a congressional hearing. Photography got sharper. Gloss replaced cardboard grit. Statistics multiplied like rabbits. Suddenly cards weren’t just cards they were collectibles. Limited editions. Foil stamps. Serial numbers. Jerseys embedded like archaeological finds. Somewhere along the line, kids stopped flipping cards against a wall and started sealing them in plastic or carrying them in locked boxes like rare documents from the Library of Congress.

And yet still somehow the magic held.

In my interviews with 40 Mets for Howie Karpin and my book You Never Forget Your First, I asked them to recall the first baseball card they ever owned and the first time they saw themselves on one. The answers were fascinating. Big leaguers, All-Stars, Hall of Famers — for a moment, they all became 10-year-olds again, wide-eyed and starstruck.

Benny Agbayani remembers pulling his first card like it was yesterday: “I think it was the Dale Murphy baseball card. In Hawaii, on TBS, they used to show all the Braves games. Just going to the store and trying to get all the bubblegum out of the wrappers. One day, I went to the store and boom, Dale Murphy was the first card and I didn’t even eat the gum yet. I just pulled it up and the card was right on the top.”

Seeing himself on a card for the first time left him stunned: “I had to pinch myself because it was always my dream to become a professional baseball player coming out of Hawaii. When I first saw it, I was like, ‘Wow, look — I got it. I got my own baseball card now.’”

Edgardo Alfonzo had a similar reaction: “Amazing. Amazing because you never thought about that. You’re always seeing somebody else on baseball cards and now it’s yourself there. You feel so proud. It never crossed your mind that you’re gonna be on a baseball card. You come from a little town in Venezuela, now look at you, on a baseball card. They show your city, your country, everything. Years, dates, everything, so it’s good.”

Kevin Baez still treasures his first card: “It was 1988 Little Falls Mets. I looked back at it — it’s not a nice-looking card, but hey, it was my first card and skinny as can be. I was at Little Falls, New York, and I still have the card to this day.”

Shawn Green recalls the thrill and the heartbreak of trading cards as a kid: “I was really into baseball cards. That was kind of a peak of the baseball card era, mid-’80s. I got a Mickey Mantle card for Hanukkah. I ended up trading the card and came home crying, but then I got a Nolan Ryan rookie and a Graig Nettles rookie. None of the cards were in mint condition, but it left a lasting impact — worrying about trading my Mantle card but ending up with something even better.”

And seeing himself on a card years later was unforgettable: “It was a huge thrill. The first couple, where I was just draft picks, I didn’t have any uniform on, just headshots. They even blurred out the Blue Jays logo on my hat for whatever reason. Once I started having action shots, I got really excited to see what the cards would look like each year. Thirty different cards, special cards — it was always cool to see the new cards I hadn’t seen before.”

Turk Wendell remembers the surreal moment of finding his own card in a pack: “I never thought about it as a little kid, having my own baseball card. When I got my first big league card, I just wanted to open a package of cards and find my own. My parents owned a little general store in Massachusetts, so I bought an entire box off the shelf and didn’t get my card. The next kid pulled my card and was so excited. ‘Will you sign it for me?’ ‘Sure!’”

David Wright’s first card came with a father’s obsessive pride: “My first baseball card was my first year in pro ball, 2001, an Upper Deck card. My dad went on eBay and bought every single one he could. To this day, I don’t know if it was because he had little faith in me or he was just proud. Either way, it was really special.”

Butch Huskey sums up the feeling of disbelief and joy: “I couldn’t believe I had made it that far. Just to see yourself on a baseball card and have friends call you saying they found one — it’s a pretty indescribable feeling.”

Jeff Innis, who has since passed, once joked about his own baseball cards: ‘When I was a player, I realized I was the guy kids hated pulling from packs. You hope for a Boog Powell or Jim Palmer and you get seven of me. I thought that was funny — ‘Oh my God, I’m the guy that I hated opening up,’ when I was a little kid.’”

Mike Baxter reflects on the cards as keepsakes: “For a career like mine, those are nice to have — a little memento. To get in a couple of sets of cards and have that tangible memory. When you get out, you realize how special that time was and how lucky you were. The further you get away from it, the more fulfilling it is.”

I loved that question so much, I asked a few Mets in spring training as well, and their memories were just as revealing. Luke Voit laughed about his first card from 2013, back when he was at State College: “It was my baseball card, and I was like super fat. I was like, this is embarrassing.” But seeing his first official Topps card? “Pretty cool, man. I collected baseball cards growing up, so getting a Cardinals picture with me on it was really special.”

DJ Stewart admitted he wasn’t a huge collector as a kid, but the moment still hit differently: “The first time was when I first signed. You see the cards as kids, but it’s cooler when a kid or a fan hands it to you to sign — that really hits home.”

Daniel Murphy reflected on how surreal it felt at the time: “I had one with me wearing number 87. There’s one of me hitting in spring training without my name on the back, and another going for a backhand. You just don’t think you’re going to see your face on a baseball card, so that really rocked my world.”

Drew Smith’s first card came even before he fully wrapped his head around being a professional. Panini reached out right after he was drafted and used a photo of him in his college uniform, complete with draft info on the back. “I still have that card,” Smith said, adding that his dad proudly keeps one on the refrigerator — which might be the highest honor any baseball card can receive. The Mets card came later, and what gets him every time is when a kid hands him his own card to sign. “Not many people have my card,” he admitted. “So when they do, I’m humbled. I sign it immediately.”

Pete Alonso’s journey started with Little League cards — goofy pose and all — which felt monumental at the time. The first official Topps card, though, was a different experience. Alonso laughed about seeing his early Bowman card, complete with a Photoshopped Mets jersey covering up a college uniform and even a metal bat sneaking into the image. “I wish I could have picked a different picture,” he said. “But I didn’t really have a choice.” That, too, is part of the rite of passage.

For Mark Vientos, the card represents something bigger than cardboard. “I get to be that guy,” he said, meaning the player he once chased for autographs as a kid. Now he’s on the other side of the table, signing cards that kids will stash in shoeboxes of their own. “It’s a full-circle moment,” he said. “It’s a blessing.”

Brandon Nimmo described the moment as surreal in the purest sense. As a kid, he collected cards and wondered what it must feel like to be one of those guys. Seeing his own card for the first time felt like confirmation that he had arrived. “This is part of making it,” he said. “Part of fulfilling a dream.”

Harrison Bader, true to form, viewed it through a different lens. Deeply locked into the craft of winning, he admitted he probably doesn’t pause enough to appreciate things like baseball cards. But even he acknowledged the power of the moment when a kid tells him he’s their favorite player or wears his jersey. Those moments, he said, snap him right back to being a kid himself — idolizing players the same way. Baseball, he noted, has a way of reminding you how full-circle it all is.

Francisco Lindor traced his first card back to Team USA, calling it “super cool,” even if signing thousands of cards in one sitting later on felt like work. Still, seeing himself on a baseball card for the first time was special — a reminder of just how far the dream had carried him.

That’s the quiet power of baseball cards. They freeze time. A rookie smile before the grind sets in. A veteran stance before the knees start barking. Careers reduced to a snapshot and a paragraph, neat and manageable, even when the real thing never is.

This week, as Topps celebrates 75 years of baseball cards, it’s worth remembering that these weren’t just products. They were portals. They taught generations how to love baseball, how to argue about baseball, and how to wait patiently for something wonderful to fall out of a small waxy envelope.

You can stream every game now. You can track every pitch. You can argue WAR with strangers at midnight.

But you still remember your first card.

And somewhere, in a drawer or a box or a shoebox that has survived four moves and one very patient spouse, it’s still waiting corners a little soft, colors a little faded, magic fully intact.