So the other day I was tooling around the house before work and my daughter caught  me looking at baseball cards.  Normally when she and my son catch wind of me fidgeting with my cards, they both come over and start wanting to hold everything too.  Not a bad problem … if the kids are careful with the cards.  But my kids are 4 and 2 years old.  Cards are merely scrap paper to them, items that can be folded, torn and even colored on.  The cards usually get put away when they start wanting to grab them.

But on this morning I was in a good mood.  I placed a single 1990 Topps Ken Griffey Jr into a magnetic snap case and handed it to my daughter.  The reason for this was two-fold:  First, I was testing the durability of the magnetic snap cases (topic for another post). Secondly, I wanted to know what she (and my son) saw. I wanted to know what young kids see in this 23-year-old baseball, one featuring one of the greatest players to ever play the game, a card that I have many memories of, but one that is completely new to them.

I expected my daughter to point out the yellow “Rookie Cup Trophy.”

I expected my son to point out the bat on Griffey’s shoulder.

But they apparently both saw something that I had never seen before.

“What do you see?” I asked my daughter first.

“A boo boo,” she said.

“What?!  A boo boo?” I replied.

“Yes, right here,” she said as she pointed to Griffey’s left forearm.

My son then chimed in with the same answer: “Yeah, a boo boo!”

And there it was.  A boo boo, a patch of skin that had been rubbed off Griffey’s left forearm.  Something I had overlooked for two decades was immediately pointed out by my children.  Maybe I should let my kids handle my cards more often.

On a side note, I checked CheckOutMyCards to look at other examples of this card and it appears that on some versions of the card the red pigmentation to the injured area of Griffey’s arm has been muted.  Interesting. (H/T to Beckett Baseball Editor Chris Olds for pointing that out.)

This entry was posted on February 5, 2013 at 8:51 am and is filed under Instagram Portraits with tags baseball, baseball cards, Ken Griffey Jr., sports, Topps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.