Dust collectors

Obviously, a lot of card collectors don't limit their collections to baseball or cards. They collect cards of football or basketball or hockey players, or of movie stars, or scientists or whatever. They also collect magazines and yearbooks and baseballs and bats and caps and bobbleheads and figurines and posters and photographs and seat cushions, and items I can't even describe.

And they collect things like what's pictured above. I received this minature tractor-trailer from my sister-in-law, who seems to have no idea what I collect except that it's baseball-related and that I like the Dodgers. She also gave me a die-cast pick-up truck with similar Dodgers decorations.

When I was 9 years old, these would be the coolest items I owned. I'd vroom, vroom, vroom them all around the room. But now? When I received them as a gift? I'm trying not to sound ungrateful. But I call items like this dust collectors.

I have no idea what to do with this stuff. The Dodgers tractor-trailer sits in my upstairs office with a fair amount of my baseball cards and gets ignored while I thumb through cards. The pick-up is ignored, too. So are some of the other items that I have received as gifts - Dodgers pictures that hang on the wall, an autographed baseball, and some old tickets (I do have a couple of cool ones: one from the 1951 World Series and an unused ticket to the first game at SkyDome in Toronto in 1989). The ticket stubs of games I've been to are more keepsakes than collectibles.

Even the items that I do find interesting -- magazines and yearbooks -- don't get looked at all that much.

And there are memorabilia items that others collect that I have none of, nor any interest in acquiring. Gloves, jerseys, bats, etc.

I'm pretty much a baseball guy. Pure and simple. And I'm a card guy. Pure and simple.

I suppose it comes down to this for me: baseball cards are 2 1/2-by-3 1/2 snapshots of history. Preserved on that piece of rectangle is a ball player's career DNA. His photograph, his stats, his bio information, a glimpse at what was going on in his career at that exact moment. I can pick up that card 20 years from now and find something interesting. Perhaps something that I had never seen before.

Baseball magazines and yearbooks accomplish that feat as well, but aren't as compact, nor as wonderfully brief. Ticket stubs and pocket schedules are good for recalling the times you had at the ballpark, but they don't contain that knowledge rush that I get from a baseball card. Nor the great visual of a card front.

Artifacts like gloves and jerseys, etc., have their purpose, but I really have no interest in turning my home into a museum. Neither does my wife.

In a sentence, I think, a baseball card is the perfect collectible.

So that brings me back to the truck. What do I DO with that thing?