His love for baseball cards started with Royals. Now he has a world-record collection

Ian Badeer’s love for baseball didn’t start on a baseball field, nor did it stem from watching the Kansas City Royals on TV.

Instead, it started in his house with a box full of 3.5-by-2.5 inch pieces of cardboard.

As an 8-year old growing up in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1996, Badeer executed his first baseball card trade with his brother, Armen. Ian received a box of 1991 Score baseball cards and, in exchange, Armen received $2.

The deal consummated, Badeer became enamored with the players’ statistics and started to organize the cards as he collected them.

“I started sorting those things to my heart’s content,” Badeer said. “I just loved going through the numbers and I found a lot of joy in just kind of absorbing the numbers of the game.”

Since that day, Badeer has collected and traded cards. And as his love for the Royals has grown, so has his card collection. The Lincoln native now has over 50,000 cards in his home; according to Trading Card Databases, Badeer holds the largest unique Royals baseball collection in the world, with 17,554 and counting.

In the past year alone, he has collected around 14,000 Royals cards. Chris Dietrich, who owns Capital City Sports Cards in Lincoln, has formed a bond with Badeer — they’ve connected over their love of sports cards.

Dietrich said Badeer’s collection of Royals cards is a testament to how driven and passionate he is about everything he does, and it makes him feel special to be a part of it.

“It’s cool to see a guy get happy about a 2 cent card from ‘91 that nobody cares about,” Dietrich said. “But it’s fun for him because it’s one for his checklist. It becomes a thrill on my end to find stuff that he might not have, or oddball stuff.”

Badeer’s Royals collection started in the original box with KC legends George Brett and Bo Jackson. After learning about those two stars, Badeer began listening to Royals games on the radio whenever he could — even if he wasn’t supposed to.

“We had a strict bedtime of 8 o’clock,” Badeer said. “So I would sneak my little AM radio under my pillow, turn it down to the lowest volume possible and listen to it through my pillow.”

Much to Badeer’s dismay, he soon learned that Brett and Jackson had retired. He wound up falling in love with the play of Royals outfielder Jermaine Dye, and that’s when his card collecting took off.

In the early 2000s, Beckett, an online sports card-collecting website, created a marketplace for cards and Badeer, by then 13, made his own webpage and began logging his cards. He started trading with people across the country through eBay and other websites for Dye cards, even after Dye was traded in 2001 to the Oakland Athletics.

Badeer took a break from card collecting during high school and college while he pursued other interests (he noted that he “was also broke”). But toward the end of his time in college, he decided to get back into collecting with a narrowed focus: Jermaine Dye cards and autographed cards from every Nebraska Cornhusker who played in the NFL, NBA or Major League Baseball.

Using a website checklist with a list of every Jermaine Dye card made, Badeer pulled out all of his old binders, assuming he had at least 70 percent of them.

But he wasn’t even close. He realized there were different styles of cards he didn’t even know existed, like such as parallels, relics and serial number cards.

“I loaded them all in, spent days on it, and it was like, ‘You have 11 percent match,” Badeer said. “The thing that hooked me again was the numbers. … They’d say, ‘Here’s how many of his cards you had. Here’s how many of your autographs you have.’ I wanted to drive that number up.”

For the past 10 years, Badeer has dedicated his time to collecting Royals cards, Dye cards and, more recently, Alex Gordon cards, combining his interest in the Cornhuskers (Gordon played at Nebraska) and Royals. In three years, Badeer went from owning five Gordon cards to around 1,000 unique cards.

He said the typical cost for a high-end card ranges anywhere from $300-$600. Using Trading Card Database as well as Facebook groups, Badeer has completed hundreds of trades. The database allows him to match with other card collectors who are selling cards he wants. He also uses Dietrich’s Capital City Sports Cards to expand his collection.

“He walks in the back and he knows where I keep all my new cards,” Dietrich said. “We’ve done enough business together, he knows how I price stuff. … He walks in, grabs stuff, walks about and sends me Paypal.”

Badeer has now collected 80% of both collections, but he knows that reaching 100% is unrealistic because those cards could be destroyed, unopened or be in other people’s possession.

So what’s next for Badeer?

He wants to give back to the collecting community that has given him so much joy over the years. At Dietrich’s shop, he teaches young card collectors about how to trade. He has also learned how to make his own cards.

While he is proud of his current collection, he hopes to bring that number down.

Nowadays, he derives the most joy from collecting his favorites.

“I don’t need to have a million card collection,” Badeer said. “It’s more fun just to have the cards of the team that I enjoy, the players that I enjoy, and just enjoy the interaction with other collectors. The hobby is just having that nice side pursuit to help bring you joy in your life.”

This story was originally published June 23, 2020 at 12:00 PM.