Chasing 8’s: One Collector’s Unique Approach to Gary Carter Cards
As a 9-year-old growing up in New York, Karl Kuhn found himself drawn to Gary Carter after he joined the Mets in 1985. Throughout the 1986 season, Karl spent summer evenings watching the team with his mom in their Syracuse home.
With each game, his love for Carter grew. There are two moments from that season which Karl says impact him even today. “That summer, we made a trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame, and I wanted to have a Mets jersey to wear. Well, we were poor, and we couldn’t afford a jersey. So, my mom helped me make a Gary Carter jersey out of an undershirt and some markers.
“Then fast forward to Game 6, and he played an instru- mental role in that comeback,” Kuhn adds. “My mom said let’s celebrate and told me to go to the refrigerator and get a can of soda or a piece of cake or something. Well, when I opened it up there was a Mets Gary Carter jersey inside.”
On that October evening, a permanent connection between Karl, Gary Carter, his mother, and the Mets was born.
I love that story, but I would have never heard it if it wasn’t for a Tweet I came across this spring. A collector shared he was putting his collection of Carter Topps base cards up for sale. The collection started with his rookie in 1975 and went through 1989. There were no All-Star, Team Leader, or Record Breaker subsets. Just the base cards. What I found interesting is every card was a graded a NM-MT 8. It was unique enough that I decided to make on offer. After a bit of back and forth, we eventually landed on a price, and a few days later the cards showed up in my mailbox.
As I looked through them over the next several days, I started wondering, ‘Why Gary Carter?’ Why only grades of 8? What would drive a collector to build this collection and then to sell it? There’s got to be more going on here. So, I reached out to Karl to see if he’d be willing to share.
One of the things I love about cards is they always tell a story.
On the surface a baseball card is just a piece of cardboard with a picture of an athlete printed on it. But if you look just a little deeper, each one tells a story. They carry memories of the innocence of youth. They signify quality time spent with a loved one. And sometimes they serve as a tool to help those who are struggling.
Karl shared, “I’ve struggled with depression since my early 20’s, and in 2017 I was speaking with my therapist, and he asked if I had any hobbies to serve as an outlet. I’m currently a pastor in a church and my hobby used to be to read works of theology, but then I became a pastor and my hobby became my job. I couldn’t think of another current hobby, so he asked if I ever had another hobby in my past and I told him I used to collect baseball cards. He told me I should think about starting to do that again. So I began to research what it meant to collect cards again since the hobby had changed so much since I was a kid.
“I learned it would be a good idea to focus my collection, and as a long-suffering Mets fan I knew I wanted to focus on the Mets,” he says. “And when I thought about which players impacted me, I came to Gary Carter.”
But Karl didn’t stop there. He wanted to do something a bit different. As he thought about it more, the number 8 kept coming up. It was Carter’s number. It was the number he wore on that homemade jersey as well as the one his mom surprised him with in the fridge. It was the number he wore when he played in high school. It seemed fitting that this new project would focus on cards with a grade of 8.
So he started piecing together the collection. The cards from the 1970s and early ‘80s were the easiest to acquire, but once you start getting to the late ‘80s they became harder and harder to find. If you want a card graded a 9 or 10 the search isn’t too difficult, but for example the population of a 1989 PSA 8 is only 10 cards! From 1990-1993 there are only a handful of 8s total. So, after a few years of scouring the internet, setting up eBay alerts, and a ton of bids and offers, Karl was able to build the run of 1975 through 1989.
That’s how the project came to be, but I asked Karl why he wanted to sell after putting in all that work?
“We live in east Texas, and as some people may remember last winter there was a major snowstorm which debilitated the state. We decided that we needed to get a generator. That was $10,000 I needed to come up with. So I started thinking about what was around the house that had some value and this came to mind.”
The story of this collection started during the summer of 1986 when Karl was nine, and it continued to grow with each Carter mail day he received. Baseball cards, childhood memories, faith, family, mental health, Gary Carter, and the love of the New York Mets all came together in these 16 cards.
Here we are in 2022, and now it’s my responsibility to keep the story going. My eyes are peeled, the eBay alerts are set, and now I’ve got a new answer when I’m asked, “Is there anything in particular you’re looking for?”
Yes actually. Got any PSA 8 Gary Carter cards?
