SognCenter: The Best Gift? Baseball Cards

When I was in middle school, I received possibly the most exciting gift ever for Christmas: 10,000 Minnesota Twins baseball cards. 

Now, many people will view this gift as a joke. 

After all, how could baseball cards really be the greatest gift ever?  What about that Nintendo 64? A Chicago Bulls winter jacket? Do baseball cards really even beat new underwear? 

In my opinion, yes.  Baseball cards are the greatest gift you could ever give a sports fan.

I used to waste hours each day looking at my cards.  I'd spend hours memorizing Pat Meares' stats from 1996, or looking at how many stolen bases Dan Gladden had in 1988 (28, in case you were wondering). 

These cards are the reason I am such a fanatic when it comes to sports.

Over Thanksgiving, I took the time to look at my cards, check out what sets I had, which ones I often dreamed of getting, how many Kirby Puckett cards I had and think of the hours I wasted as a child, dreaming of my baseball fantasy team, using the cards to act out the games. 

In my opinion, I should be credited with the invention of fantasy baseball; after all, I was forming those teams long before Yahoo thought of it.

When I was born, my dad started buying me sets from the year 1989 (with Ken Griffey Jr.'s rookie card) until around 1998, when the factory sets were stopped.

Overall, I would venture to say I have at least 60,000 cards. 

Is it an obsession? Some may think so. 

Me? I think it's healthy. I think every young child should have a pack of baseball cards. I think every child should be given the chance to dream, just as I did, of being on a baseball card and having someone read my major league statistics out loud.

So this Christmas, if you know someone who is a sports fan, pick up a pack of sports cards to throw in with that new video game. 

While Call of Duty: Black Opsmay get more immediate attention, those baseball cards will forever be remembered as the greatest gift ever given.