Economic Lessons From An Early Age

Choo Choo Coleman is back in town.

I wasn’t a NY Mets fan growing up, nor at present, but I saw Choo Choo play for the Mets in the old Polo Grounds, the team’s first home before Shea Stadium and now Citi Field rose in Flushing Meadows. It was at the Polo Grounds I witnessed first-hand the mastery of Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers. At the Polo Grounds, pitchers would warm up before the game near their respective dugouts. As Koufax warmed up, my brother and I made our way to the front row. I still can visualize the 12-to-6 curveballs Koufax spun during his warm-ups, hear the thumps of his fastballs as they hit the catcher’s mitt.

Choo Choo (nobody called him Coleman) came back to New York for the first time since 1966 to be a featured guest at baseball memorabilia shows and a baseball writers’ dinner (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/sports/baseball/mets-choo-choo-coleman-50-years-later.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=sports).

One of the foundations of any sports show is the showcasing and trading of baseball cards. Like most youngsters I had a massive baseball card collection, cleaned out one day by my mother. I didn’t have a hard to secure Rogers Hornsby card, but I had my fair share of Mickey Mantles, Yogi Berras, Roberte Clementes and Stan Musials.

Baseball cards were not just for collecting. They were also for playing with, often in ways that were sort of like gambling. Just like pitching pennies, where the winner is the one who flicked a penny closest to the wall, kids would cast cards toward a wall. A variation on this game was tossing a card towards a wall already targeted by your opponent; if your card landed on top of your opponent’s, you claimed his card. If it didn’t, he took yours.

Another game entailed holding a card to a wall and letting it tumble down. Your opponent won your card if his fell on top of yours. He lost his if it didn’t.

A fourth game was dropping cards from your hand to match the front or back of your opponent’s cards. One trick we used—if you wanted the card to land on its picture side, you’d hold the card with the back facing out. Fifth game variation: dropping cards from a wall, your opponent trying to match the fronts and backs.

Baseball cards were not just gambling devices. Using clothes pins, kids affixed cards to bicycle wheel spokes to make clicking noises while speeding through neighborhoods. Of course, I didn't do this because I never learned to ride a two-wheeler as a child.

Cards were also used to set up a defensive field in a game of marble baseball. If a batted marble rolled to a pre-determined spot on the field without first touching a card, you reached base safely. But if a marble skimmed over a card, you were out.

Perhaps the greatest contribution baseball cards made to the youth of America was their part in our education into the ways of capitalism.

Baseball cards were our currency of exchange We learned about supply and demand. We learned not all cards had equal value. We learned how to trade for the cards we wanted. We learned how to be good losers. We learned how to size up the competition, how to stay away from sharpies, how to exploit suckers. We learned fortunes could be won or lost in an hour. We learned sometimes it's the smart thing to walk away during a hot streak, that success can be fleeting if based on the flip of a card.

We learned, ultimately, that not everyone shared our values, that what we thought was gold our mothers thought was trash.

We learned to forgive, at least on the outside, but never to forget the simple joys of baseball cards.

And lest anyone think I'd forgotten, mom also threw out my comic book collection.