When I started grousing about baseball cards, I knew I had become an old man. It was just last week. My wife and I were waiting in line at our local big box store, and one of the displays at the checkout was a four-foot tall case full of boxes of baseball cards.

“You can’t even buy a damn pack of baseball cards these days,” I grumbled. “Look, they put the packs in the boxes, and you have to buy them 10 at a time. In my day you bought a pack for fifty cents, and it came with gum. And it was a wax pack, and the cards were made out cardboard. Cardboard! I used to trade them with my friend Jeff, he lived on the other side of Jamaica Avenue,” etc.etc. I was not far from claiming I used to fix them to my bicycle wheels with clothespins. I picked up one of the boxes, as if to sneer at it, while my wife scowled at me.

It’s important to be intimately familiar with that of which you strongly disapprove, so yesterday, with somewhat the same sense about me with which a public moralist will buy a large stack of dirty magazines, I bought a Topps 2006 Series 2 Bonus Box, which promised “20 Packs Plus One Extra Pack of 6 Topps Vintage Cards,” and bore artwork featuring Mickey Mantle and Alex Rodriguez, laid out in such a way that it seemed a great player hated in his day for striking out too much and choking in the clutch was about to kiss a third baseman. Barry Bonds and George Washington also were featured prominently on the packaging.

As things go, 126 baseball cards for $19.99 plus tax probably isn’t really that bad a deal. In my day, despite what I may tell my wife while pining for ye olden times, the baseball card brand of choice was Upper Deck, which gave you 10 cards to the pack for $2, which works out to $2.97 when adjusted for the ravages of inflation. (Along with millions of others, I justified this price to my mother and grandmother by pointing out that it represented a solid investment in my college education.)

These cards were printed on heavy, glossy stock, came in foil packs to prevent tampering, eschewed gum as it damaged the cards, and rather than the beloved photos of grimacing ballplayers with Jheri curls and bad moustaches that I’d like to recall as a main feature of the cards of my youth, were touted for their slick photography featuring cool ballplayers with fades and dangly earrings.

When I opened the Topps 2006 Series 2 Box and got at the cards within, I discovered, somewhat to my disappointment, that they were actually much better than the cards I’d grown up with. Those Upper Deck cards, and the Topps cards that quickly followed as the industry tried to compete with the new giant, were all flash and no substance. They didn’t even fit complete lines of statistics onto the back, let alone useless trivia — the cards were too busy, with action shots of players and the like.

All of this was the consequence of the collectibles market that sprang up around baseball cards in the 1980s due to three things: boomer nostalgists eager to recover their lost youth; the breaking of the Topps monopoly on cards, leading to companies like Fleer and Donruss innovating with new designs and packages; and the rise of shops specializing in the former, which provided a market for the latter.

The bubble burst in the early 1990s, predictably enough, and taught everyone around my age a quite valuable lesson about economics, which is that something can be a collectible only if demand exceeds supply. Those 1989 Ken Griffey Jr. rookie cards may have been listed at $150, but everyone who wanted one had 10. These days, in the efficient market eBay allows, the things go for $20 or so, and are probably overpriced at that. A sad tale, made sadder by the card companies’ increasingly odd responses to the collapse of the market: deliberate short-printings of cards, cutting up antique memorabilia, and putting pieces of it in packs of cards, and the like. No longer can you go into a bodega and buy a pack for 50 cents — the remnant of the collectors’ market has distribution locked down, and what bit it doesn’t have goes to retailers like Target, Wal-Mart.

All of this is a bit sad because the cards are really quite good — and, I can report, beloved by 2-year-old children. Our present-day cards, it turns out, feature the complete career line for all players, and, in the case of those with short tenures, even extends back into their minor league careers. They also feature goofy cartoons drawn in a retro style. David Ortiz’s card, which points out that “David drove in an MLB-high 148 runs in 2005,” is adorned by a picture of four ballplayers in what appears to be a Yugo, driving toward home plate while grinning like idiots. This is tremendous. You also have to like that on-base plus slugging is neatly slotted in between slugging percentage and batting average, a small and worthy contribution to the increased appreciation of the game. The photos on the cards are crisp, the layout clean and understated, and if they come on glossy cardstock, there are probably worse things in the world for baseball cards to be printed on.

Still better, though, were the ridiculous bonuses that came in this box. The promised “Extra Pack of 6 Topps Vintage Cards” turned out to be a plastic sleeve containing six cards from the 1984 through 1986 series that no one ever needed to see again—Don Schulze, Nick Esasky, Richie Zisk (sporting an impressive moustache), Andy McGaffigan, and Dave Stewart, at this time young, a Phillie, and scowling as harshly as he does to this day. Along with these came several Mickey Mantle cards and, for reasons unfathomable, a card celebrating the signing of the Declaration of Independence, featuring John Dickinson’s signature and a headshot of the famed and esteemed statesman. Richie Zisk and John Dickinson — what more can one ask for for $20?

I suppose there’s a lesson somewhere in here about the evolution of baseball, the tricks of memory, and the relation of the past to the present, but I would prefer not to learn it, whatever the actual merits of today’s baseball collectibles are when set besides those from the past. Topps may not have utterly botched the simple production of pictures of ballplayers with rows of numbers on the back, and they may offer John Dickinson cards these days, but they will not be forgiven until they bring back the wax pack and the stale slab of tasteless gum. When they do, they will be cheered and treated as even greater men than John Dickinson.