BEIER COLUMN: Get me out to a ballgame

There was a point in my life where baseball was the only sport I cared about.

In fact, I think it was one of a few hobbies I cared about from some point in time that spanned the age range of 8-13 or so.

I can remember what it felt like as each professional baseball season neared. I can recall certain feelings or impressions that came with each little Milwaukee Brewers offseason news nugget in the La Crosse Tribune.

Excitement? Ha. If only it were excitement.

Eventually, all that love for baseball fell by the wayside. I fell in love with the art and storytelling of comic books and superheroes. I moved on to different hobby habits and that once bright spot that was reserved for baseball, dimmed.

As a real adult, though — mostly because of this job — baseball has made a resurgence of sorts in terms of popularity in my life. It’s quite difficult to avoid certain emotions and excitement for those first few days around the diamond.

For me, baseball means the return to being outside after months of being stuck inside a gym for basketball or wrestling. For me, baseball means a slowly unfolding event that allows us all the time to just sit back and relax as the day simply passes away. For me, baseball has become a place of simple stresses — balls and strikes, mosquitoes and dust blowing into your face.

The other part of the onset of the baseball season that I can’t avoid are baseball cards. There’s just nothing like a pack of Topps cards.

Most of my formative years were in the early 1990s and the speculator market for baseball cards helped the industry grow into this wild, weird place full of so many cards, subsets, chase or variants, rare finds and the like, it was hard to keep everything straight.

At that time, you had to pick if you were a Topps card fan — you know, the classic staple of the hobby — of if you were going to go with one of the newer, flashier brands like Upper Deck.

Maybe you found your place with Donruss, Fleer or Score. Maybe the fun was collecting the oddball offshoots of the main brands. I really do enjoy looking back at my Topps Kids cards or the Nolan Ryan solo series someone put out.

The money that was pumped into the growing hobby also meant that improvements to that basic bit of cardboard would come. I loved watching the evolution of printing processes. It was a treat to see how glossy they could get those cards. The foil embossing, the holograms — here was hardly a thing they didn’t try to get us, the consumers, to part with those dollars.

My card-buying tastes changed with my other hobbies. The pop culture parts of my life all produced cards of high quality. I loved the X-Men Fleer Ultra lines. I always loved buying cards that were based on the hottest movies of that time — and every movie had cards, from the Flintstones live action movie to the Rocketeer to every Batman film and so on. There was no shortage of options.

The point is, baseball cards, cards in general have been a big part of my life for a while. That’s why, even now, it’s hard not to pick up a couple packs of Topps.

Cracking open those packs, that’s one of the biggest things that gets me in the mood for the upcoming baseball season. It’s nostalgic, and that’s what baseball is for most of us in some way shape or form.