Jackson — When I met the owner of the new baseball card shop in town, I asked him if he had a significant other.

“Look around,” Sky Marshall told me, surrounded by towers of cardboard boxes full of sports cards. “If I had a girlfriend, could I be doing this?”

Clearly, this was a man who knew his business, and it’s a tough one.

As George Carlin once joked, “If you’re a kid, the cards are keepsakes of your idols. If you’re a grown man, they’re pictures of men.”

What Carlin didn’t understand is that card collectors never grow up.

These cards were how my generation learned sports. Not just baseball. All sports. I never heard of a journeyman basketball player named Willie Norwood, who played for the Detroit Pistons, until one day in 1975, when I opened a pack and there was his Topps card staring up at me. Norwood wasn’t even a starter, but he had the coolest card in that year’s Topps set, a rare action shot of him driving the lane. Most cards of that era were posed portraits. Norwood’s was a card to be remembered.

Back before the hobby was hijacked by opportunists focused on monetization of superstars, a Topps set of your favorite team included just about every player on the roster. The 1975 Topps set of the Detroit Lions includes four of the five offensive linemen. The only one missing, guard Chuck Walton, had a card in 1974. Back then, how else would a 10-year-old know the faces of the men who played on his hometown team’s offensive line, if not for the trading cards?

Certain cards are a tattoo on our memory. Take iconic Tigers pitcher Mark Fidrych. His rookie card is him standing for a simple mugshot, with his curly golden locks spilling out from under his Old English D cap, and a smile that appears as if the photographer caught it in mid conversation. Fidrych’s rookie card had the “A.L. ALL-STARS” banner stripped across the bottom, one of three Tigers to carry that honor that year.

Fidrych had a chip on his shoulder with the Topps baseball company back then. They kept mistaking his hometown for another nearby village, and apparently, there was a rivalry between these towns. So, to get revenge, Fidrych tried to portray himself as a left-handed pitcher. The Topps photographer caught the ruse, telling Fidrych he wasn’t the first to try to dupe the card company. Fidrych ended up posing as his right-handed pitching self.

I started working at age 8 at my father’s pharmacy, and he paid me in baseball cards. I remember the moment I pulled that Fidrych as clearly as people recall the day JFK was shot.

At age 59, there is nothing in this world that makes me feel 8 years old again like opening a pack of baseball cards. To tap into that feeling again, I went to my new favorite baseball card shop.

I call Jackson Sports Cards: “The last baseball card shop on Earth.” In reality, it’s not. It just seems like that. There are baseball card shops scattered around the state, though far fewer than 20 years ago.

Baseball card stores are being pushed to the brink of extinction by the internet. The brick-and-mortar costs that sunk bookstores are now optional.

Sky Marshall opened his baseball card business this past spring. It sits in a large downtown building, across from the Town Bar, one of my father’s hangouts back in the 1970s.

“Is that what your parents really called you? Sky?” I asked him.

“They were hippies,” he said.

Marshall was walking around his store in his socks. Clearly, the slogan, “no shoes, no shirts, no service,” is not embraced by the ownership. And why should it? He’s selling baseball cards, not engagement rings.

The previous card shop in Jackson closed in December. It sat in the back of a jewelry store. When the jewelry store closed, so did the card shop, which had tried to stay relevant by housing Magic, Pokemon, and other non-sports card events. It wasn’t successful.

The place I had been going to for decades was now gone. I had few options.

Many hobbyists make a pilgrimage to Taylor once a month. The Taylor Town Trade Center hosts a flea-market-type baseball card show the first weekend of the month. Sometimes, the organizers bring in former Detroit professional athletes. I’ve been there to see former Detroit Tigers Willie Horton, Mickey Stanley, and John Knox. Yes, John Knox. He played four seasons in Detroit from 1972 through 1975 and accumulated just 219 career at-bats, but he has three Topps baseball cards—quite an achievement for a man who never even hit a home run in the majors.

I’ve also turned to the internet to buy my cards. As an adult, nothing good ever comes in the mail. So, I started buying single cards for $1 and having them shipped to me. It brightens my day every time.

To Marshall, however, a baseball card purchase is more than a simple transaction. It’s a trip down memory lane.

That’s why he opened his card shop. He wanted the others to experience the raw excitement as he did in 1986, when he opened a pack of cards and found a Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire card. The Bash Brothers!

“The internet is trying to kill the industry,” said Marshall, who had sold office furniture before taking the leap to baseball cards. He refuses to sell cards online.

Mark Fenwick, who has operated Stadium Cards & Comics in Ypsilanti for 32 years, can’t see a way to sustain his business without the internet.

“If you didn’t do that, I don’t know how you can make enough revenue to keep things moving,” Fenwick said. “It’s just the way things are today. If you want to stay in business, you just have to.”

Fenwick has a baseball card project of his own. We all have at least one. Fenwick’s is to collect the complete 1962 Topps baseball card set. He needs just four more cards.

One of those cards is Warren Spahn card #100. He could buy it online on eBay for $14.

“I could go online and finish it off in two minutes if I wanted to,” Fenwick said. “But I’ve always enjoyed the collecting aspect. The chase. That’s what makes it fun.”

I walked into the Jackson Sports Cards store, looking for my white whale. There are people who buy cards likes houses, looking to flip them by buying cheap and selling high. These are investors.

I am a collector. Always a collector.

In a store full of high-end Michael Jordan and Shohei Ohtani cards, I am on the hunt for something completely different.

I’m searching for cards that are rare but not valuable. They call these cards “commons,” because they depict players that nobody wants. Nobody, except a niche collector like me.

When a hobby consumes a collector, you need to limit your addiction or start googling how much it costs to rent heated storage.

I now focus on Detroit sports cards.

At Jackson Sports Cards, I always head straight to the back of the store to a room where thousands of cards are kept in cardboard boxes. This is the bargain bin room, $1 a dozen. On this day, a man was sitting in my customary chair, a personal invasion of the highest degree. 

We were both searching for white whales. I could tell instantly he was a serious collector. He kept looking at worthless common cards and glancing at his phone, checking to see if the card was in his spreadsheet. The phone’s screen was cracked, another sign of his devotion. No need to worry about a cracked iPhone screen when you still need five Fleer 1985 updates to complete your Tigers set. Priorities.

The cardboard boxes I dig through are all on folding tables in a back room that is only lit by the sunlight coming through the windows. During the summer, the owner puts up a cheap fan to keep the air circulating and prevent it from turning into a Turkish prison.

There are distractions. I saw a cardboard box of cards but noticed a Campbell Chunky soup can with something scribbled in blue ink on it next to it. The can was old, with slight rust around the rim. I asked the owner. He told me it was a signature from a hockey player—either Wayne Gretzky or Steve Yzerman. It’s from 1999, he told me. I went back and checked. It was Gretzky. He wanted $50. A $50 can of 25-year-old Campbell’s soup.

But enough of the distractions, I was on the hunt.

Then I saw it. A cardboard black box with these magical words scribbled on them in barely legible blue: “$450 mystery box.”

I estimate I have about 200,000 Detroit sports cards, and 59 of them are the 1980 Topps card #572 of Jerry Morales. We call these “doubles,” meaning we have more than one. It’s an inevitable part of the hobby.

But on this day, in the mystery box, I found Topps Series 2 #490 from 2016, the rookie card of Guido Knudson. I’m a Tigers fan. I have never heard of him. He pitched in just four games in 2015, and that was his career. He finished with an 18.00 ERA.

His career was horrendous. But his card is priceless to me, because the moment I saw it, I knew I didn’t have it. I didn’t need a spreadsheet to tell me I had found my white whale.

Tom Gantert is a contributing writer for Michigan Enjoyer.