Sensory overload

So all of us pretty much learned when we were younger about the senses we have in our body. You know the five - smell, sight, sound, touch and taste. Aristotle came up with that list. We actually have more, closer to nine and maybe as many as 22. But when you dive into other senses above the first 5, it becomes harder to describe. Sure, I step outside right now without a shirt on and know pretty quick the thermometer is closer to zero than 100. That still seems like a bit of the touch sense.

When it comes to baseball cards, most of us only attribute them to two senses: sight and touch. Yet, over 100+ years of cards, we have touched on all of the senses.

SIGHT

I could post pretty much any card here and demonstrate "sight", but when you think about Championship Baseball, you have more than the cards. The playing board, the tokens, the box - all of the pieces really are something to add in viewing the cards. They take on much more than just holding them in our hands to view the front, then flip them over to read the back. 

TOUCH

Again, almost any card could be here, but think about all the changes that cards have gone through. The sizes and shapes, the gloss, the foil, the embossing, the addition of jersey swatches and patches - all allow us to get a different sense of the cards. Just like this '96 Fleer with the matte finish. Quite the change to cards than everything else coming out since the late 80's.

SOUND

Cards were flat, inanimate squares of paper. Then, Starting Lineup released Electronic Talking Baseball, and now we could hear the player on the card "playing" a ball game. A year later, Topps jumped into the sound with Baseball Talk cards. Then, Donruss and Upper Deck put a card on a CD, so you could watch and hear videos of the player on your computer.

TASTE

While officially no card exists you can eat (to my knowledge), there are still a plethora of cards released by food companies and restaurants. Slurpee, Jimmy Dean, Denny's, Hostess, and even Red Heart dog food to name but very, very few. Plenty of food products you can munch on as you hope to pull out a nice Griffey card and not a.... DAMMIT!

SCENT

Now, just a year ago, an official scratch and sniff card was released by minor league club the Myrtle Beach Pelicans. But here, in my mind, is the first card you could smell. Plant the card, water it and in a short period of the time the seeds within the card would sprout. I wonder how many people planted these?

Baseball cards - much more than something pretty to look at.