Alright, so this Patrick Mahomes baseball card thing. It kinda snuck up on me, you know? Wasn’t like I woke up one day and said, ‘I absolutely need this piece of cardboard!’ Nah, it was more like I kept hearing whispers, seeing things pop up. ‘Mahomes cards, big deal,’ ‘investment,’ all that jazz.
So, I figured, let’s take a peek. What’s the harm, right? I started poking around online. Just a little look-see. And man, oh man. It’s a whole different world now than when I was a kid trading cards. Back then, you got a pack, you chewed the awful gum, and you hoped for your favorite player. Simple. We’d flip ’em, trade ’em at school, stick ’em in our bike spokes. No one was thinking about ‘grading’ or ‘population reports’.
Now? It’s like, ‘Is it PSA 10?’ ‘What’s the pop count?’ ‘Rookie card parallel refractor serial numbered to five?’ My head started spinning. I just wanted to see a cool picture of the guy throwing a football, maybe. But no, it’s all about the potential cash-out, or so it seems. I spent a good few evenings just trying to understand the lingo. That was the first part of my ‘practice,’ I guess – just deciphering the darn thing. I even watched a couple of those unboxing videos. Guys screaming like they’d struck gold over a shiny card. Wild stuff.
Then I looked at the prices. Whoa. Some of these cards are going for more than my first car. And not even a good car, mind you. I’m talking about a beat-up clunker that barely made it up hills. So, I thought, okay, maybe there’s a cheaper entry point. Started looking for just, like, a basic card. Even those, if they were the ‘right’ ones, had a bit of a sting to ’em. It felt like walking into a fancy wine shop when all you want is a decent table red, and everything has three digits before the decimal.
This whole process reminded me of that time back in the late 90s, everyone was going nuts for those little bean-filled toys. Remember those? My cousin, bless his heart, sunk a small fortune into them. Had shelves full. Cases, even. ‘They’re gonna be worth millions!’ he’d say. He had price guides, special tags, the whole nine yards. Last I heard, his kids were using the less ‘valuable’ ones as dog toys. Not quite the retirement plan he envisioned. He still has a box in his attic, probably collecting dust next to his Pogs.
So, with the Mahomes card, my ‘practice’ became more about managing expectations and, frankly, a bit of amusement. I did end up getting one, by the way. Not online, though. I was at a local flea market, and a guy had a binder of newer cards. Found a perfectly normal, non-shiny, non-autographed, non-graded Patrick Mahomes card for a couple of bucks. It was probably from a base set or something. I bought it mostly out of a sense of irony, I think.
I looked at it. It’s a picture of Patrick Mahomes. He’s good at football. The card is… well, it’s a card. I put it in an old shoebox I have, with some other random stuff. Maybe I’ll look at it again someday, or maybe my grandkids will find it and wonder why old grandpa kept a picture of some guy in a red helmet.
The whole exercise was more about observing the hype machine, really. It’s fascinating, in a way. How something so simple can get so complicated and expensive. It’s not just cards, it’s a lot of hobbies these days. Everything’s gotta be an investment, a side hustle. Sometimes, I just wanna enjoy the thing, you know? But then you get sucked into the ‘value’ vortex. So yeah, that was my journey with the Patrick Mahomes baseball card. More of a mental workout and a trip down memory lane than anything else. Didn’t make me rich, that’s for sure. But it gave me something to chuckle about.
