Collector Q&A: A Collector’s Dream

If you’re part of the YouTube vintage sports card community, you probably know about Orlando of A Collector’s Dream, a channel that focuses on his collection and the history of sports cards. He’s also a member of the 2025 YouTube Sports Card HOF class, has uploaded videos since the end of 2021, with nearly 750 videos on his channel, and I had the chance to talk to him on the phone, so here’s the Drawn to Cards Q&A, edited for length and clarity.

What’s your card collecting story (when and why did you start, which sport(s)/card era(s), and do you consider yourself a collecting generalist or specialist)?

I was born in Cuba. Our family had to leave and we got here in the United States around 1960. We made it to Miami and my grandfather was here and he was a huge baseball fan. I got involved in sports, due to my grandfather and spending a lot of time with him, and he took me to spring training games. Growing up here in South Florida, we would have the Orioles and the Yankees. The early 1970s was when I really got into cards. My grandfather took me to a spring training game and he knew one of the players, a Cuban pitcher, Orlando Peña, and he had my name, so my grandfather said he would go down and say hello because “he played for my team in Cuba.” My grandfather actually caught a foul ball, and after the game finished up, Orlando Peña signed the ball and he allowed me to come into the dugout, and I sat at the edge of the bench, and Peña passed the ball around and just told the players to sign the ball. My grandfather and Peña were talking when I saw Brooks Robinson come up, and he was one of my idols at the time, and he just started talking to me. And I see Boog Powell, Al Bumbry, Jim Palmer, and just seeing them, that’s what got me started, being able to see these guys that I never saw in person. I became a Yankees fan and an Orioles fan.

About three or four blocks from where I lived, there was a drugstore called Budget Drugs and they sold cards. My mom would give us like 25 or 50 cents to get lunch and I always had some money left over, and packs were 5, 10 cents at the time, so I would buy packs with whatever change I had left and on the way home I would open the packs of cards. And I played little league, and that’s where I really got into baseball. In the late ‘60s, the Dolphins came in, and I lived about three miles from the Orange Bowl, and I became a big fan of the Dolphins, because that was the only pro team we had in South Florida. So it was a great time for me and I did collect football because of the Dolphins. At games, I would wait outside of the locker room and get autographs, and that got me into autograph collecting.

Years later, I went to college, got married, had kids, and then I had moved to Tampa and one day my parents found my cards in the closet, six shoeboxes of cards, and some magazines, and they got them to me and all the memories came back. The majority of cards was from 1968 on, and I pretty much had all the sets from 1970 on built when I put them together, and I realized I wasn’t missing many, so I said “I’m gonna go ahead and finish these off.” I started to go to some card shows, talked to some dealers, and ended up getting a little table at a show to sell all the doubles and things that I had, and I had a couple of Nolan Ryan rookie cards and a couple of Reggie Jackson’s rookie cards. I eventually became a part-time dealer, and that’s when I established the name A Collector’s Dream in the early ‘80s. So I was a dealer for years, and little by little, I just built up a collection.

Who/what do you personally collect?

About 15-20 years ago, I had started to focus on pre-war cards and fell in love with the history of the cards, and the history of the cards themselves, and I worked in the printing industry, so the printing was very interesting to me, so I researched the printing, all the way back to the 1800s. Through that, I fell in love with a set, the 1888 Goodwin Champions, so I focused my collecting on that set and my favorite player, Mickey Mantle. It’s not that he was the best player ever, of course, but was one of the most loved players, similar to a Ken Griffey Jr. I ended up completing the 1888 Goodwin Champions set, and had the number one set on the PSA Registry.  One of the other sets I wanted to focus on was the 1949 Leaf set, and I eventually had the number one set on the PSA Registry for the 1949 Leaf Premiums. I also had the whole Mantle run except for the ‘52, and never expected to get it, but I started selling off some of my sets (but would always keep the Mantle), to get some money together, and I finally found the right Mantle at an auction and that completed the three main parts of my collection.

What’s your favorite card you own and/or what’s your grail card? Tell us why.

My favorite card has to be the 1888 King Kelly from the Goodwin Champions set. Not only is it probably the most beautiful card ever made, especially if you look at one in person, you’ll see the way they produced those cards. The ink is laid one on top of the other, almost like a 3-D effect, because that was produced with limestone blocks that were sanded down, they were carved, and each color was carved separately. And that’s the card that got me most involved with that set.

My grail card has to be my ‘52 Mantle. It took me literally a lifetime to get it, and to find the right one. I had opportunities to buy previously, but never found the right one, and eventually I did.

Who/what motivated you to start a YouTube channel?

During Covid, I found out one of my wife’s friends had breast cancer, her second time around, and passed away, and then a friend of mine who was 20 years younger than me also had breast cancer, and my dad was in home health care, so it got me in this state of thinking that it could happen to anyone. So my friend asked me, “What are you planning on, for your future?” It got me thinking, and it inspired me to think, I have to do something. At the very least, I’m going to document my collection, if anything happens to me, and that’s why I started my YouTube channel. So I talked to my daughter, who’s an IT person, and she thought it was a great idea. I brought back the A Collector’s Dream name, and she got me the logo, got me set up on YouTube and even did my first video for me. My content that I want to produce is content that will be viewed 20-30 years from now. That’s the whole purpose of my channel.

What’s been the best part of your YouTube experience so far?

The best part has been just connecting with other collectors, and making friends. It went from collecting by myself to collecting with, almost, like they’re brothers, they’re friends. The funniest thing about this YouTube experience is that it doesn’t matter your age, gender, ethnicity, anything; we’re all card collectors, we’re all really alike.

If you could talk to/interview any person on your channel (creator, person in sports, person in the hobby, etc.), who would it be and why?

If I could go back in time, it’s probably Babe Ruth; that’s, to me, the best player ever to play baseball. I own a few Babe Ruth cards and am honored to even have them.

Which three YouTube sports card channels do you think more people should watch?

• I gotta say Baseball Collector. He was one of the first ones I watched and one of the nicest guys.

• I think Chris Sewall, you gotta put him in there. Baseball Card Collector Investor Dealer, in That Order. He’s gotta be one of the most honest and up-front people in this business. He will tell you exactly how it is, is super honest and a great business guy.

• I think the third one is Graig, MidLife Sports Cards. I think Graig is one that, he’s relatively new. He’s only been doing it for like two years now, but what I think he’s done is put together a community of people in YouTube and out of YouTube that have all got together somehow. He’s more of a voice of the vintage community.

• I have to add John Mangini, because John Mangini has really kind of been chosen as the president of the vintage community, and he’s someone who has the most diverse collection on YouTube, and really the most diverse collection I’ve ever seen. He genuinely loves the community and cards, and he’s always giving shout-outs, helping other guys out.

What do you think the future holds for your channel and for the hobby in general?

I think the hobby is definitely getting better and better. I think the problem with the hobby right now is the gambling aspect. If we focus people more on the collecting aspect of it, I think that’s what’s going to really continue the hobby boom. Parents always ask me, “What should I do?” and my advice is always, you’re gonna give your kid $20, tell them that they can’t buy any packs, they’ve gotta look through the dollar boxes. If you wanna buy packs, you gotta work for those, make them earn that. The only way you’re gonna know what you’re really gonna like in the hobby is to look at everything in the hobby. If I never saw pre-war cards, I never would’ve fallen in love with them. That way, you start the kid off curious. The goal of a lot of vintage guys is to teach the guys coming in that there’s more to it than just opening packs and looking at new cards. There’s all this history.

For my channel, it’s about giving shout-outs. I just saw a new channel that had 17 subscribers and I just posted it on my channel. Hopefully he’ll pick up some subscribers. You gotta give these people some boost sometimes and help ‘em, because it’s not easy producing content. It takes somebody a lot of guts to actually do it, but it’s very easy for them to give up if they don’t see anything happening. That’s kind of my goal: the more people we can get doing content, the more the hobby will grow and the faster the hobby will grow.

GemRate Update

I subscribe to the GemRate email newsletter, which generally means two updates per month - a monthly grading recap and monthly iconic tracker update (tracking 105 iconic cards in the hobby). For those not familiar with the site, it focuses on grading trends in the hobby, covering PSA, SGC, CGC and Beckett. It has some great features, including a universal card search and universal population report.

The reason I bring all of this up is because the February numbers newsletter arrived today and, in the shortest month of the year, 1.93 million cards were graded, the highest total the site has ever recorded. This was in 19 business days, meaning a bit more than 100,000 per day. Wow. And, as usual, PSA did most of them, grading about 75% of the cards.

What was especially interesting is that TCG (trading card games) cards accounted for more than 50% of the graded total, having its own record month, and was up 27% from the previous month. The big three in sports cards, meanwhile, combined to be relatively flat, with baseball down 2%, basketball down 8%, and football up 10% from the last month - and a total of 583.6K graded, or 142.5K fewer than TCG. Based on the card shows I’ve been to recently, I’m not surprised. I’ll be curious to see if that trend continues.

Valuable Video of the Week

When I got back into the hobby in 2022, I felt lost when it came to cards after the 1980s. “Serial numbers? Parallels? RPAs? Inserts? What does any of that mean?!?”

That’s why I enjoyed the above Cajun Cardboard video. It’s as if he was talking to 2022 me and saying, “Yes, Marc, this can be confusing, but I’ll do my best to clear things up." If you’re relatively new to the hobby and interested in modern cards, I think you’ll benefit from it.

And now that I better understand the difference between inserts and parallels, maybe I’ll eventually be able to identify the names of the various color parallels. Probably by 2028 or so.