The smell of chewing gum and card stock always triggers my fond memories of collecting baseball cards as a kid. Like anyone else who accumulated boxes of cards in the 1980’s, I was told they’d be worth lots of money when I got older… only to discover they were pretty…

When I originally brainstormed my gum stick artwork, I was thrilled by the new concept. As a kid growing up in the 80’s, the last card inside a pack would often get stuck to, or stained by, the piece of gum inside. …

A couple years back, I randomly found myself driving through my old stomping grounds of Wicker Park. I lived there in my early 20's… in a tiny studio apartment above an out-of-place French restaurant with a methadone clinic across the street. As terrible as that sounds, it was quite the…

I’ve always enjoyed the backs of baseball cards as much as the front, especially on the old colored card stock. Over the years, Topps has filled their backs with stats, comics, personal facts, career highlights, trivia questions and more. I was eight years old in the summer of 1985, and…

When I was 14 or 15 years old, my friends and I used to challenge each other to epic home run derby battles… using wiffle ball bats and tennis balls. We’d set up home plate on the street, and on certain neighborhood blocks we spray painted bases. The home run…

The fact that Mario Mendoza somehow managed to stick in the major leagues for parts of eight seasons might just be the eighth wonder of the world. One glance at the back of an old Topps Mario Mendoza baseball card would tell you that he was a 5’11” infielder from…