#TheHobby Life: Royals reliever Taylor Clarke’s ‘full circle’ collection with twin boys

Welcome to #TheHobby Life, my new weekly column on #TheHobby, as baseball card collectors call their passion on Twitter. I hope you join the conversation every Monday morning. From time to time we write about great players and their collections. A bit of a great chat with Royals aide Taylor Clarke this week.

Taylor Clarke has revealed the secret. The royals’ reliever has found the answer to the question that has frustrated collectors for decades when they face rows of trading card boxes in retail stores or local card shops: which box should I choose?

No, he doesn’t bring a scale to Walmart. He doesn’t examine every box at Target for the tiniest sign of possible mishandling during the warehousing process. He doesn’t ask the person behind the counter in the LCS for advice. He doesn’t even have any kind of lucky charm.

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His solution is much simpler. Also logical.

“My kids are luckier than me,” he says, laughing, “so I always let them choose my backpacks.”

Yes, with twins Bryce and Brody running the pack show – whether it’s pack picking or just pack opening – the possibilities are endless.

Take the Diamond Kings retail blaster, which the twins opened on their seventh birthdays last year. Not a hobby or jumbo box, but one of those $25 blaster boxes that you get at retail.

“Bryce puts on this Downtown Wander Franco and shows it to me,” Clarke said. “He said, ‘Hey, this is pretty cool.’ And I say, ‘Holy shit.’ We made up for it right away. We looked it up and it was sold for about $400.”

Not a bad return for a $25 blaster from Diamond Kings.

“Well that was cool,” Clarke said. “And he pulled a pretty cool Mike Trout that we rated and it’s like a $300 card. I was like, ‘Geez, man, I’m going to start giving you everything you can tear up.'”

No question, it’s a win-win situation.

And for Clarke and his boys, it’s not just about ripping backpacks. It’s a learning experience about how the hobby – and, yes, life – works. Clarke sent the Franco to PSA to have him graded and he came back at 10. Being shortly after the release of the Diamond King cards last year, he was the first to receive a grade 10 from PSA. That’s known in the industry as “Pop 1” – as in, the population of 2022 Downtown Wander Franco cards with that exact PSA grade is just one – and as you can imagine, that’s a very good thing.

“I asked him what he wanted to do. “Would you like to keep this? Do you want to sell it?’ He said, ‘Let’s try to sell it,'” Clarke said. “So I put it on eBay. It hasn’t sold yet because (Franco) had a bad year and was injured. And I overpriced it because I know what he can do. I keep asking (Bryce) what he wants to do. We had an offer last week. I asked him if he wanted to sell it and he was like, ‘Well, maybe.’ I spoke to another buddy who is interested in the hobby and he said he’d probably just wait when spring training gets around, usually people will start buying tickets. He agreed, he wanted to wait.”

It shouldn’t take long to move once spring training is in full swing, and especially when Franco and his Dominican Republic teammates compete in the World Baseball Classic.

Clarke was a 2015 fifth-round draft pick for the College of Charleston. He made his big league debut for Arizona in 2019 and signed with the Royals in December 2021. He found his big move into the league most recently in KC Jahr’s bullpen with a career-high 8.8 K/9 and a career-low 3.30 FIP in 47 relief appearances.

The most important stat, though? In his 49 innings, he only walked eight batsmen. Last year in the Bigs, 206 pitchers, mostly relief pitchers, pitched at least 40 innings. Clarke’s 6.00 strikeout-to-walk ratio ranked eighth in the majors. Not in the AL Central or the AL, but in the entire major leagues. The Royals expect more from the same year.

And Clarke’s kids are counting on more opportunities to open packs of SP cards for the hottest newcomers of the year. They’re always on the alert, which means Dad has to make sure they avoid the aisle entirely when Clarke takes them to Target, say, with a list that includes essentials and no baseball cards.

Nevertheless, they get their cards.

“They are great at it. They love to collect everything, but they’re really into anyone with big names,” Clarke said. “We went into the store on Saturday, for example, and they saw Justin Herbert or Josh Allen or (Patrick) Mahomes and all these big quarterbacks, and I was just like, ‘That’s a little bit out of your price range. ‘ But it’s fun.”

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It also feels very familiar.

“I did the same thing to my dad,” Clarke said. “Every Saturday morning when I was doing well in school or doing my homework or whatever, I could pick out a few cards or a few packs. We did that every Saturday, usually in front of the grocery store.”

He paused for a moment.

“So it comes full circle, being able to do that with the kids is pretty cool.”

No doubt. Clarke grew up in Ashburn, Virginia, and his earliest sporting interests — and, of course, collecting interests — were those of his parents, Noel and Pat, who both grew up in New York. Young Taylor was a Mets baseball fan and a Giants football fan, and he cherished that. Adult Taylor, well it’s a similar story.

“I have a lot of David Wright and Mike Piazza tickets,” Clarke said. “These two and then Eli (Manning). Then big names, I just like to hold onto them as I pull them out of packs. Or if I find a good deal, if it’s a cool card, I’ll buy it. This is my biggest PC, these three guys: Piazza, Eli and David Wright.”

However, there is one Mets card that holds a special place – a 1968 Topps Tom Seaver. It’s the one with the huge Topps All-Star Rookie trophy on it. Clarke had PSA grade these as well, but it wasn’t about hoping for a 9 or 10 grade. It was about plating a special card.

“My father gave it to me,” he says. “He’s had it in his memory case in his room for as long as I can remember. It was more of a personal, nostalgic touch for me.”

He will pass this on to his children, too, along with memories of trips to the baseball card store and a collection of cards with their father’s picture on them. That’s damn cool.