Welcome to the #TheHobby Life, my new weekly column on, well, #TheHobby, as baseball card collectors on Twitter call their passion. I hope you’ll join the conversation every Monday morning. From time to time, we’ll write about big leaguers and their collections. This week, a bit from a great conversation with Royals reliever Taylor Clarke.
Taylor Clarke has unlocked the secret. The Royals reliever has figured out the answer to the question that has, for decades, frustrated collectors standing in front of rows and rows of boxes of trading cards at retail stores or local card shops: Which box should I pick?
No, he doesn’t bring a scale to Walmart. He doesn’t examine each box at Target for minute signs of possible mishandling during the stocking process. He doesn’t ask the person behind the counter at the LCS for advice. He doesn’t even have some sort of lucky charm.
MORE: Ranking the Junk Wax years, from 1987 to 1993
His solution is much simpler. Logical, too.
“My kids have better luck than I do,” he says with a laugh, “so I always let them pick out my packs.”
Yeah, when twins Bryce and Brody are running the pack show — whether it’s picking packs or just opening packs — the possibilities are endless.
Take the retail blaster of Diamond Kings the twins opened on their seventh birthday last year. Not a hobby box or jumbo box, but one of those $25 blaster boxes available at retail stores.
“Bryce pulls this Downtown Wander Franco and he shows it to me,” Clarke said. “He said, ‘Hey, this one’s pretty cool.’ And I’m like, ‘Holy crap.’ We sleeved it up right away. We looked it up and it was selling for like $400.”
Not a bad return for a $25 Diamond Kings blaster.
“So that was a cool one,” Clarke said. “And he pulled a pretty cool Mike Trout that we graded, and it’s like a $300 card. I was like, ‘Jeez, man, I’m going to start giving you everything to rip.’”
No doubt, it’s a win-win situation.
And for Clarke and his boys, it’s not just about ripping packs. It’s a learning experience on how the hobby — and, yeah, life — works. Clarke sent the Franco in to PSA to get graded and it came back a 10. Because it was right after the Diamond King cards were released last year, it was the first one to get a grade of 10 by PSA. That’s known in the industry as “Pop 1” — as in, the population of 2022 Downtown Wander Franco cards with that exact PSA grade is only one — and, as you can imagine, that’s a very good thing.
“I asked him what he wanted to do. ‘Do you want to keep this? Do you want to sell it?’ He was like, ‘Let’s try to sell it,’” Clarke said. “So I have it up on eBay. It still hasn’t sold yet because (Franco) kinda had a down year and was hurt. And I was overpricing it because I know what he can be. I keep asking (Bryce) what he wants to do. We had an offer last week. I asked him if he wanted to sell it, and he was like, ‘Well, maybe.’ I was talking with another buddy who’s into the hobby, and he said he’d probably just wait, with spring training coming around, usually people will get into buying cards. He was fine with it, wanting to wait.”
It shouldn’t take long to move, once spring training kicks into full gear, and especially if Franco and his Dominican Republic teammates make a run in the World Baseball Classic.
Clarke was a fifth-round draft pick by the Diamondbacks out of the College of Charleston in 2015. He made his big league debut in 2019 for Arizona and signed with the Royals in December 2021. He found his big league stride in the K.C. bullpen last year, posting a career-high 8.8 K/9 and career-low 3.30 FIP in 47 relief appearances.
The most important stat, though? In his 49 innings, he walked only eight batters. Last year in the bigs, 206 pitchers who were primarily relief pitchers threw at least 40 innings. Clarke’s 6.00 strikeout-to-walk ratio ranked eighth in the majors. Not in the AL Central or the AL, but in the entire major leagues. The Royals are counting on more of the same thing year.
And Clarke’s kids are counting on more opportunities to open packs with SP cards for the hottest rookies of the year. They’re always on the lookout, which means that when Clarke takes them into, let’s say, Target with a list that includes actual necessities and not baseball cards, dad has to be sure that they just avoid the aisle entirely.
They do get their cards, though.
“They’re big into it. They love collecting everything, but they’re really into everyone that’s big names,” Clarke said. “Like, we went to the store on Saturday, and they would see the Justin Herbert or Josh Allen or (Patrick) Mahomes and all these big quarterbacks, and I’m just like, ‘That’s a little bit out of your price range.’ But it’s fun.”
MORE: Iconic 1987 Topps set still beloved by collectors
It also feels very familiar.
“I used to do the same thing with my dad,” Clarke said. “Every Saturday morning, if I was good in school or I did my chores or whatever, I could pick out a few cards or a few packs. We’d do that every Saturday, mostly going before the grocery store.”
He paused for a moment.
“So, full circle, being able to do that with the kids is pretty cool.”
No doubt. Clarke grew up in Ashburn, Va., and his earliest sports rooting interests — and, of course, collecting interests — were that of his parents, Noel and Pat, both of whom grew up in New York. So young Taylor was a Mets baseball fan and a Giants football fan, and that’s what he collected. Grown-up Taylor, well, it’s a similar story.
“I have a good amount of David Wright and Mike Piazza cards,” Clarke said. “Those two, and then Eli (Manning). Then big names, I just like holding onto them if I pull them from packs. Or if I find a good deal on them, I’ll buy it if it’s a cool card. That’s my biggest PC, those three guys: Piazza, Eli and David Wright.”
There’s one Mets card that holds a special place, though — a 1968 Topps Tom Seaver. It’s the one with the giant Topps All-Star Rookie trophy on it. Clarke had that one graded by PSA, too, but it wasn’t about hoping for a grade of 9 or 10. It was about slabbing a special card.
“My dad gave it to me,” he said. “He had it up in his memorabilia case in his room, for as long as I can remember. That was more a personal, nostalgic one for me to get graded.”
He’ll pass that one down to his kids, too, along memories of trips to the baseball card shop and a collection of cards with their dad’s picture on it. That’s pretty darn cool.