Chasing Panini (and Micky van de Ven)

On being almost 60 and getting giddy over stickers like a middle school kid.

Looking back, I’m not sure whether I fell in love first with baseball or with baseball cards. It’s a close call. But it’s probably baseball cards.

I have lodged in my memory this card, a 1973 Topps Joe Rudi, which somehow ended up in my shoebox filled with 1975 cards when I was 8 years old. I don’t know how I got it; I didn’t have any other 1973 Topps cards in there.

We now know this is one of the most famous cards of the 1970s because … that’s not Joe Rudi. That player being congratulated is actually Gene Tenace. Bruce Markusen did the important work of researching this card, and he found that it was photographed during the second game of a doubleheader between Oakland and the California Angels in 1972. In the third inning, Tenace hit a three-run homer, scoring Sal Bando (not pictured) and backup outfielder Bill Voss (who is the tall guy on the left*). Joe Rudi didn’t even start that game.

*Bruce also found that the player on the right is utility infielder Marty Martinez. You should know that Martinez was traded twice in 1972 and Voss was traded three times. Baseball was wild back then.

Of course, I didn’t know any of that back then. I was just fascinated by the card. I’d look at it for hours. Maybe it was because it was a sideways card. Maybe it was because I absolutely loved those Oakland A’s uniforms. Maybe, probably, it was because my very first memory of baseball was watching what I now know to be Game 5 of the 1972 World Series on television. I remember only blips about the game, of course — I was 5 years old. I remember the bright sunshine — it was a day game — and I remember how the Oakland yellow beautifully clashed against the Cincinnati red, and I remember a player screaming at the umpire.

That player, it turned out, was Blue Moon Odom.

Blue Moon Odom was called out in Game 5! (Focus on Sport/Getty Images)

I couldn’t tell you, though, that I fell in love with baseball watching that game.

No, I fell in love with baseball just looking at that odd Joe Rudi/Gene Tenace card and letting my young mind go wherever it wanted to go.

I bring this up now because, for the first time since I was a little kid, I’m falling in love with a sport in a whole new way through sports cards. Stickers, actually. See, World Cup fever has taken over our home. This is not because of me. This is Margo. She has always been mildly intrigued by the World Cup — we watched a few matches during our honeymoon back in 1998, and she has followed along ever since — but it has never truly grabbed her.

This year, it has grabbed her in the biggest way imaginable.

I blame (or credit) our friend Felipe. He is a comedy writer — he wrote for Stephen Colbert before that show sadly ended — and he wrote the most excellent book America, Let Me In: A Choose Your Immigration Story, and he writes a very funny and excellent newsletter, and he’s just someone you instantly fall in love with. Margo met him for the first time when we were in New York a couple of weeks ago. By the end of one meal, they were the best of friends.

And Felipe told her about collecting those Panini stickers at every World Cup throughout his life, and how much joy it brought him, and you could see Margo’s eyes light up. As soon as we got home, we bought the album.

We bought many, many packs of stickers.

We also bought bottles of Coca-Cola, even though I don’t drink it anymore, because there are bonus stickers behind the label.

And now, every single night, we open sticker packs, and we separate them by group and team, and we paste them into the book while watching Egypt play New Zealand or Czechia play South Africa or whatever match happens to be on.

But we do more than just that. We also mark the Fox Sports Top 100 players in the book — so far, we have not gotten any of the big stars we knew coming in. No Messi, no Mbappé, no Kane, no Yamal, no Ronaldo.

But we did get Ousmane Dembélé, the No. 4-ranked player in the world!

And we got a Christian Pulisic. It’s hard to see the number above because of the American Flag Blue, but the newest Captain America is ranked 70th in the world. We were pretty excited about that one.

You can probably see that the book looks fairly sparse despite our opening hundreds of stickers. That’s because Panini will give you lots and lots and lots (and lots) of doubles. I mean absolutely no disrespect to American Tanner Tessman, but we've already gotten like three of him. We’ve gotten zero Messis and at least four Micky van de Vens from the Netherlands. He’s the Otto Velez of Panini stickers. It’s hard to believe this is not a conspiracy.

We are obviously not collecting these stickers for any purpose other than to fill up the book. We’re vaguely aware that the stickers with blue and, especially, red borders are worth more. I just looked up how much a red border Lionel Messi would be worth — and I see it listed for $4,000 on eBay.* So I imagine that if we somehow get a red-bordered Messi, we won’t just paste it into the book.

*I just saw someone else selling it for $165, so maybe the $4K guy is being, um, optimistic.

But the rest are going in because we’re not about selling these stickers. We’re all about pasting them in, filling up the book, getting every sticker if we can. We estimate that it will take roughly 4.3 bajillion stickers to collect ‘em all. But we’re all in now, especially now that I have learned the secret to pulling the sticker from its backing.*

*The key is to NOT use your fingernail. What you want to do is rub your index finger against the top right-hand corner until the sticker begins to peel away. Then I hand the sticker to Margo to paste it into the book because she’s better at that part.

All of this has brought us so much joy. Imagine being almost 60 years old (that’s me, Margo is younger) and getting giddy over stickers like we’re middle school kids. Just yesterday, we pulled a Rodri — he’s from Spain, he’s the 14th-ranked player in the world, and he apparently is the only player at this World Cup to have completed more than 100 final-third passes!

I don’t have any idea what that means! But it’s awesome, right? Everything is awesome. Well, OK, maybe everything isn’t awesome, but the World Cup is awesome, and opening stickers is awesome, and we got Scotland-Brazil this evening, and then it’s Czechia-Mexico, and two more boxes of stickers are supposed to arrive at the house, and that means at least a dozen more Mickey van de Vens! I just did a quick search, and it seems like Micky van de Ven is one of the hottest players out there during the summer transfer window — Barcelona is in on him, Liverpool is in, Tottenham would like him back, etc.

Guys, listen, when the World Cup is over, come on by. We have Micky van de Vens coming out of our ears.