Behind The Wax: Collecting Thoughts from Fort Bragg – Collecting is tricky business. While the hobby is full of people who delight in sharing, trading, and finding pleasure in a sticker of their favorite player, there is also an undeniable selfishness to collecting. We want the cards of the players we collect.
In some cases we want ALL THE CARDS. In other cases, we exploit our fellow collectors’ desire for our cards and profit from them. Whichever form of selfishness our collecting assumes, it is born out of a love – love for sport, love for a team, love for the completeness of building a set.
Never has this dichotomy of “selfish collecting” been more on display than in the actions of well-known ballhawk Zack Hample at Fort Bragg this Independence Day weekend.
If you aren’t familiar with the story, Hample obtained a non-transferable ticket to a special MLB game being held exclusively for Armed Forces personnel just to add to his unique collection of snagged balls. The story escalated when equally-eccentric uber-fan @Marlins_Man called out the notorious ballhawk for lying (even in his apology). Marlins Man later shared screenshots of a private conversation with Hample, proving the ball-snagger knowingly violated the rules just so he could brag about attending the game and getting a ball in person.
No retraction received. As promised, 6pm, bombs away… pic.twitter.com/yF3q3MVnNg
— Marlins_Man (@Marlins_Man) July 5, 2016
Hample’s egregious apology and assertion of no wrongdoing reminds me of another Collector-Gone-Bad: The Pack Searcher. Collectors universally mock the Pack Searcher, and we can pretty much agree that sitting in the middle of a Target with a scale to try and identify the one $15 hit hidden somewhere in five retail cases of Topps Series 2 Baseball is morally wrong. However, multiple sources report retail store managers claiming there is no technical wrongdoing and Pack Searcher is allowed to continue unabated.
And while I continued to judge,
People who have “I am a @packers Owner” license plate cover #ThingsBetterThanHample
— The Breaks (@WatchTheBreaks) July 4, 2016
I couldn’t help but stop to ask myself a question: what pack do I grab when the hobby shop owner lets me pick my own pack? The majority of the time, I won’t let the existence of 90pt dummy cards deter me. I grab the thick pack and hope for a case hit myself (I’ve always ended up with the dummy card #CollectFail).
Other questions that come to mind:
- Would I rather hit a $200 auto in a $60 box, or a base card of my favorite player?
- Would I pick a slender pack KNOWING that another pack in the box was 3x thicker?
- Would I elbow a child out of the way for a ball if it was thrown towards me by the Angel of Wrigley himself Kris Bryant?
So although we all agree on the most extreme cases (Pack Searcher is gross, Hample should be banned from MLB stadiums, that older kid who cheated us out of our Canseco rookie card ruined collecting forever), let us never lose sight of our own selfish tendencies. There is a fine line between value and greed, and I believe the hobby is at its best when we take a second to objectively note where that line stands for each of us.
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- Behind The Wax: 2017 Panini America NFLPA Rookie Premiere - May 23, 2017
- Behind The Wax: Kris Bryant’s 1st Bowman Isn’t (But Should Be) - October 24, 2016