So Yeah I Destroyed a Card the Other Day

Ever since I was a young card collector I treated my cards with the up most care. Not to the point where I wore white gloves when I handled them, but I did the best I can to not damage them. After all, who knew when that 1991 Topps Keith Comstock would multiply in value?

Until a few years ago it bothered me when I heard about people that threw away cards, even junk era cards. I think it was being the child of an older generation who put their Mickey Mantles' in bike spokes and flipped their Willie Mays against the wall. I wouldn't make the same mistake of rubber banding my future college tuition together and shoving it into a shoe box to be dog-eared and bent to hell.

My Don Mattingly and Randy Johnson rookies would stay nice and sharp inside their protected sleeves and boxes until it was time to cash them in for untold riches. Alas, we all know what happened. The industry over produced and every single person my age had the same idea. So they sit in their boxes in my Florida compound waiting for the day I find someone that wants 20 copies of a 1990 Franklin Stubbs.

A few years ago I stumbled across a website where an artist created original works out of baseball cards.

For the first time I saw that cards could be turned into something other than tradeable pieces of cardboard. Sure it went against my basic belief that cards shouldn't be messed with, but damn it, the finished product looked awesome.

Then at a craft show I stumbled across some homemade 3D cards. I can't find a picture online, but he took three identical cards, cut and stacked them so that they appeared to pop off the table.

That was probably the final factor. I realized that ninety percent of the cards in the world would never be worth anything. So if people wanted to cut them up or glue them on tables then so be it. Let them have some fun.

All this is a long winded way of saying I was bored the other day. While pulling some cards out of the box I noticed one of the cards was creased beyond repair. I thought about it wondered what it would look like if I cut out the player and propped him up, kind of like the Stand Up cards you found in packs of late '90's Collector's Choice.

So basically this:




turn into this:




Yeah, it's rough. I was working with a box cutter, and might have been a little bit more than two and a half sheets to the wind. I like it though. With a little work, who knows how much smoother it will work. Heck maybe I'll create baseball dioramas with cut out cards and shoe boxes. Or I won't. Who knows?