March 18th, 2025 by jake

It’s funny the things that different people can find relaxing. Two years ago, I was scrolling around on social media and saw a video of this guy opening packs of baseball cards. These weren’t modern packs, with all their flashy, shiny parallels, in-card relics and on-card autographs…they were cards from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, affectionately called “The Junk Wax” era. I loved every second of those videos, and down the rabbit hole I went, scrolling through video after video. I watched as someone’s disembodied fingers opened packs of mostly baseball cards with the occasional pack of basketball, football, movie cards and even Garbage Pail Kids, thrown in. Sometimes the crazier folks would even eat the 30 plus year old gum that is found in most old packs of Topps. I’ve tried it, it’s horrible!

There was something so soothing about watching a pack of instantly recognizable 1987 Topps being opened for the first time in 38 years. With its wood grain borders, team logos at the top and player names in the color filled box at the bottom, the memories came flooding in. Watching as players like Terry Pendleton, Doug Drabek, Ken Oberkfell, Candy Maldonado, and Storm Davis flashed by the screen. Then suddenly, a Future Stars card! “Could it be? Will Bo know 2025? Nope!” …It’s Tim Pyznarski, next card Atlee Hammaker. Then I catch a glimpse of the Red Sox logo peeking out and it’s… Wade Boggs! Sweet! I was hooked. Next thing I knew I was scouring EBAY for old packs of cards from the Junk Wax era to open myself.

The Junk Wax Era of baseball cards spans roughly from 1986 to 1994. It was a time of overproduction, inflated expectations, and eventual market collapse. The industry was booming, fueled by speculative investors hoping to cash in on future rarities and rookies. Though the average collector was unaware of this at that time, card manufacturers like Topps, Fleer, Donruss, Score, and Upper Deck flooded the market with millions (sometimes billion)of cards. The sheer volume meant that even rookie cards of legendary players like Ken Griffey Jr., Frank Thomas, and Chipper Jones were so overproduced that they never became the scarce, high-value collectibles investors had hoped for.

In the mid-’90s the bubble burst. As the supply outstripped the demand, card values plummeted, card stores closed, and investors lost small fortunes. Warehouses and garages filled with unopened packs and collectors found themselves sitting on mountains of once-hyped cards that were now worth little more than sentimental value. But, to me, sentimental value is where it’s at!

None of this mattered to an elementary and middle school kid who would readily take out the trash every night for a chance at making a buck, then excitedly ride his bike to the local convenience store with some friends to buy a couple of packs of the newest Topps. Yes, most packs were 50 cents back then, and yes you could find them in almost any convenience store.

My friends and I would open these packs up with gusto while listening to DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince singing about Elm Street from the cassette player. After guzzling a Mountain Dew and finishing off some Doritos, it was time for talking trades. Mark McGwire for Cal Ripken Jr., Tony Gwynn for Darryl Strawberry. We were wheeling and dealing like Sandy Alderson and Dallas Green (GMs for the Oakland Athletics and Chicago Cubs respectively), at the 1987 Winter Meetings. We were not thinking about investments or rarity, about future returns. We were just kids having fun while we searched for our favorite players and teams. Though I was a Red Sox fan, I loved Cal Ripken, and collected around 500 of his cards. I still have them, my wife calls it stalkery.

As I got older, somewhere in High School, my attention shifted from cards to…other things. I still loved baseball, but things changed, and I stopped collecting. Most of my cards ended up being sold for gas money or traded for a joint, while my favorites, the ones I just couldn’t part with(like those Cal’s I mentioned earlier), sat in boxes and binders collecting dust in my mom’s basement as they faded into my subconscious. They found a home in that place where GI Joe is pitching curveballs to Ken Griffey Jr. while Harry meets The Hendersons and The Bangles Walk like Egyptians through my cerebral cortex.

It’s that place, the cerebral cortex, the long-term memory center, where the streetlights came on as I sat scrolling through those videos. Each pack elicited a new memory of days gone by. The sound of the wrappers being torn open, that sweet scent of paper and ink, the images of those silly, wood-grained borders, of those worthless pieces of cardboard with the pictures of childhood heroes looking up from the front as their yearly achievements lined the back. It was the nostalgia that made those videos so relaxing for me and led me to create my own videos and social media pages, and ultimately this blog.

A lot of people watch and comment, mostly having fun, some to remind me of how worthless each pack I open is. Those latter people don’t understand that value is in the cerebral cortex of the beholder. I know these cards are worthless, but there is no value I can place on that time I opened a pack of 1989 Fleer, and there it was, the infamous Bill Ripken F%$# Face card in all its glory. It was awesome! As a kid I remembered drooling as I looked at that card in the display cases of long closed card shops, with no chance of buying it. I remember hoping that I would someday be so lucky as to open a pack and find it. I never did, but I also never imagined that Thirty-Five years later I would pull one! Here’s a link to the original post. Billy Ripken FF Pull.

After that I was hooked and rediscovered the fun of opening packs of cards from my youth. I know it’s not going to make me a millionaire, but that’s not the point. It’s the memories, the nostalgia. It’s finding that child-like joy once again, and that to me is why “Junk Wax” is priceless.

*If you’d like to take a walk down memory lane with me, I post videos to Facebook, Instagram, Tik-Tok and YouTube. All links are on the Home page menu of the blog. Thanks for reading!!!*