Klein’s Korner: Counting Our Blessings During Crisis – My user name for almost everything is Sabrgeek. SABR stands for Society of American Baseball Research and joining nearly 35 years ago was a natural extension of my fascination with all things baseball. One of the favorite people I’ve met while a member of SABR is Father Gerald Beirne who is a nice of a person as you’d ever want to meet.
Recently, we re-connected via email and he sent me a wonderful piece of writing from fellow clergyman, Father. Richard Hendriks, this is just one part of the message:
They say that in Wuhan after so many years of noise
You can hear the birds again.
They say that after just a few weeks of quiet
The sky is no longer thick with fumes
But blue and grey and clear.
And you know, while I was reading my email this morning, I could hear the birds singing and the rain about to 
commence and there was a certain joy in knowing the world will exist today as it did yesterday and as it will tomorrow. And for those card stores out there: One can follow the way Baseball Card Clubhouse in Tampa continued to operate as long it could under the structure. Our old friend Dr. Paul Lieber sent us an wonderful email about how they were helping the community continue to thrive during these tough times and helping to keep the community together. While we can argue that there is nothing essential about sports cards, within our ecosystem, sports cards are the glue to keep us together. We all have mutual interests, be it making money, building our collections or bringing information to our fellow collectors.
When I see programs such as Hobby Hotline, which bring not only podcasters but collectors together from the rest of the country together is always a joy to watch on a Saturday morning. The togetherness of our hobby community is never stronger than when we see the people with varied interests getting together to have spirited but friendly discussions about our hobby. Yes that is hobby icon Dr. James Beckett joining the Hobby Hotline as a special guest.
I also see the twitter collecting community coming up with ways to keep interest strong. Today, we found out neither Panini nor Topps will be able to print anything new for a while, so in a way we get something truly unique, a chance to coalesce and consolidate what we own and what we want to own or trade.
I’m so grateful that I get to play in this world and every day I work on donations for the Adat Chaverim synagogue show. We have been blessed with so many card donations this year that when I put them into the 3,200 count boxes I use for that purpose I get to see cards I have either never seen or forgotten about.
Seeing the great designs and photograph of all those cards is a real thrill. I once wrote about what a great New Year’s day I had looking at the scans on COMC and going back to my youth by looking at both the fronts and the backs of the cards I had as a child. We all have that chance now to look at cards we might never had before or never owned and realize that these cards just like the birds in Wuhan are singing again and we can here what they are saying to us.
We have reconfigured the office since that photo was taken but yes we still have almost that many cards in this office. And I appreciate very much every day I’m part of the hobby and let us all use April as a month to appreciate just how much we love this hobby and enjoy what we do. If you never realized how blessed you were to be part of the hobby community, this is a great time to start.
For more from Rich Klein, follow him on Twitter @sabrgeek.
Rich’s vast experience and knowledge of the hobby has been well documented through the years. GTS is happy to feature his thoughts on collecting in Klein’s Korner. The opinions expressed are his and do not necessarily reflect those of GTS Distribution.
Klein’s Korner: Counting Our Blessings During Crisis
- Klein’s Korner: The World is Not Ending - December 8, 2021
- Klein’s Korner: The Hobby is Truly the People - July 12, 2021
- Klein’s Korner: Record hobby history - April 6, 2021