Farewell to another collector

 

 

It's been a long time since I've written a post like this and thank goodness. These are the most crushing kind but also the most necessary.

I woke up this morning to the news that Ben had passed away over the weekend. He was 43. Longtime blog readers probably remember him, he was the one who wrote Cardboard Icons, one of the OG blogs, it began two months before mine.

I remember being excited to see his blog because he was a newspaper writer, his blog handle at the time was "Newspaperman". I found someone who understood my line of work. He got out of the business maybe a year or two later and, like me, wrote for Beckett magazine for a time. He moved on to work as a community service officer in California where he lived.

Ben was very active in the hobby and on Twitter/X. He was up on the latest hobby trends and card sets. His collections were BIG to my eyes. He had a crazy collection of baseballs that had one thing in common -- they each had hit a major league batter. He collected graded rookie cards of Hall of Famers, you should have seen that collection. He started selling those off several months ago, I think. But he kept collecting his favorite players, Clayton Kershaw and Roger Clemens.

I was envious of his Kershaw collection. He's right at the very top of the list on TCDB.

I don't know what happens to his collection now. His family, I'm sure, is overwhelmed and it will take months, if not a couple years, to handle the collection. Ben had two kids (💔) and a lot of his Twitter content was tracking down cards with his kids. You could see the joy come out when they discovered cards and they ripped a ton of packs.

Ben interacted with a lot of my Twitter favorites, writers like Ryan Fagan and Mike Oz. Ben was fun. He didn't quite collect like me but he had the same critical eye for what the hobby has become for a lot of people since 2020. He wasn't afraid to poke fun, but never in an angry way.

Before all that, Ben and I traded periodically. I remember the first time he sent me cards, it was three or four months after I started my blog. He sent a bunch of Dodgers cards (he was a Red Sox fan, which was kind of painful in 2018 during that World Series).

In that first send was 33 cards of Hideo Nomo, one of my favorite players. There were some Nomo cards in there that are still among my favorites, like this 2002 Topps insert. At the time, it was among the most cards of a single player that anyone had sent.

A year or two later, I pulled this SPx relic card (back when I was opening stuff like this). I was happy because I felt like I never had anything that fit Ben's collection. This was perfect. He sent some Dodgers cards back.

 

I remember this signed Brett Butler card being my favorite from the bunch.

As the years went on and more bloggers left for Twitter and other social media sites, there was less interaction with Ben as far as card trades, but one in particular stands out and you may remember me writing about it.

It was 2015 and I was busy collecting three 2015 sets -- I'll never do that again. The hardest of the bunch was 2015 Stadium Club, which I loved.

The last card I needed was the Kobe Bryant rookie card, you may recall he was a big deal at the time. I was annoyed that this card ended up being last because it was obvious Topps had made it less available than other cards in the set.

Ben found the card for me and completed the set.

But that wasn't all. It wasn't even the best card that he sent in that package. We had been discussing notable Hall of Fame rookie cards and he had one that I really wanted, it was key to my Dodgers collection.

He was thinking of selling it, if I remember right, he had an extra. But he sent it to me instead.

It was the Don Drysdale rookie.

Naturally, I've released Don and it proudly sits with the rest of my 1957 Topps Dodgers.

The last time Ben sent me a card was five years ago. That's too long a time for trading interaction, but it wasn't like we weren't talking to each other. It was fun to have someone so enthusiastic about the hobby on Twitter. He was always up for card talk, you'd see him on podcasts, on instagram, just everywhere.

This was the card he sent. It's the only Topps Living Set card that I own, I think it's one of the better ones.

So, yeah, Ben enhanced my collection pretty well. But he also helped grow my enthusiasm for the hobby. I sometimes wondered why he would run out to open all of the latest cards all the time, but I know it was something to do with his kids and also it helped me not become an old crank about current cards. There's a lot not to like about modern stuff, but it helps to have others around to help you appreciate some of it.

I won't have Ben around for that anymore. None of us will.

I don't think I told him directly what he meant to the hobby when I had the chance. I feel lousy about that, because he did that for me -- a couple of times. Here's a note that he sent with one of the card packages:

That's nice. That was Ben.

I wish we could have talked about cards longer.