The Phillies lose

The Phillies, my Phillies (I adopted every team from the City of Brotherly Love in 1983) had just made the final out of the World Series. As I looked down at the baseball cards from both the Phillies and those bastards, the Baltimore Orioles, they were arranged from top to bottom by batting order. I reached down for the card of Rick Dempsey, the Philly killer himself, and I ripped up his baseball card into tiny pieces. It didn’t matter that I had almost a complete set of 1983 Topps cards – my devotion to my favorite team outweighed the possible collective value. There are some things you just can’t put a price on.