Thousands of Griffey Cards and More
Having served in the Army for the past decade, Christian Stiene is used to moving. Every few years, he has to box up all his belongings and head to an unfamiliar area. One thing that eases the stress of constantly moving is Stiene having his card collection with him. Being a military member who collects is a labor of love.
“A lot of people think I’m crazy,” says Stiene, who recently moved to Monterey, California. “It’s pretty much standard that you’re moving every three years — sometimes every two, sometimes every four.” Wherever Stiene moves, he has a constant reminder of where he grew up. The Kentucky native became a Reds fan living just outside of Cincinnati. His collection is chock-full of Reds cards, ranging from 1909-11 T206s like Clark Griffith to ultra-modern parallels of Elly De La Cruz.
In all, Stiene has over 15,000 different Reds cards.
“As I flip through them, I would say 80% of those cards I can roughly recall where I got them or how I got them,” the 33-year-old says. “It’s a lot of memories. Even as a kid, I always liked history, just history in general. So, once I fell in love with baseball, I kind of married that love for history and baseball.”
When Stiene was deployed to Iraq for eight months in 2016 into ’17, not being able to collect was difficult. When he returned back to the United States, he couldn’t wait to add to his collection.
“It’s always been not just a hobby but a decompression method, something to kind of get away from life and be a kid again,” Stiene says. “It’s not really just the history of the game; I have personal memories with cards. It was tough in that regard to not have that decompression way to kind of just step back from life.”
Collecting The Kid
Stiene fell in love with baseball in 2002. At that same time, he started following the career of Ken Griffey Jr., who joined the Reds in 2000 after 11 memorable seasons with the Seattle Mariners.
“Truthfully, until about third or fourth grade, which is 2001, I didn’t have a huge interest in baseball,” Stiene says. “I got into Pokémon for a year and then my best friend moved from Ohio to my school and he had tons of baseball cards. Just being around, I started wanting to get into it.” After almost a quarter century, Stiene is still going strong in The Hobby, and his Griffey collection is diverse with nearly 4,000 cards.
“I’ve got every year card from rookie year through 1992 for Griffey,” Stiene says. “Then I’ve got 90% of 1993.”
Along with collecting Griffey cards, Stiene went to as many Reds games as he could growing up. With the team having some lean years in the early 2000s, he was able to get tickets, and he made sure to keep all his stubs. In 2008, when Griffey was approaching 600 career home runs, Stiene made his way to Great American Ball Park. Sitting in the right field bleachers, No. 599 was caught by a guy in the row in front of Stiene.
One of Stiene’s rarest Griffey pieces in his collection is from Topps’ Heads Up product. In 1989, Topps put out test copies of the oversized cutout heads with suction cups of players. Those test copies are super rare; Stiene says there’s a rumor amongst Griffey collectors that only 25 were ever made, and only 12 have ever surfaced.
His favorite Griffey he owns is a 2001 Topps Stadium Club Play at the Plate relic card with dirt from the batter’s box. Another card right up there for Stiene is the 1989 Bowman card Griffey shares with his father, Ken Sr.
“I’m super close to my dad,” Stiene says. “Griffey and his dad’s relationship has always been another draw to him.”
Collecting All the Reds
Barry Larkin and Joey Votto are also favorite Reds for Stiene to collect. He has almost 1,000 Vottos and over 500 Larkins. Among those Vottos is one particular noteworthy piece: a 12-relic autograph booklet from Topps.
“It’s particularly cool because a couple of the relics are the military appreciation jerseys, so it’s got some camo game-used in there,” Stiene says.
Recently, he’s latched onto collecting the Reds’ most exciting present-day player, Elly De La Cruz. On a mail day in early May, Stiene got nine De La Cruz cards. He has some colored, numbered parallels, but he’s in search of his first De La Cruz auto.
When he was a kid, Stiene started collecting Reds team sets every year. His sets go back to 1951 for Topps, 1948 for Bowman, and 1996 Topps Chrome® to present for all three products.
“I would go to the card shop, and you could get the 1990s boxes for $5, and I would sit and just rip and rip and build team sets,” Stiene says. “As a kid you can’t really get the high-end stuff. It really started with just building team sets and then collecting Griffey cards on the side at the same time.”
Collecting a franchise that started in 1869 can be fun. There are so many Reds cards on the market, Stiene will never run out of options to collect. However, having a storied history that dates back over 150 years can present a challenge to collectors as well.
“To me, it’s kind of a double-edged sword,” Stiene says. “There’s times that I’m like, I envy D-backs people because it’s easier to collect as a franchise than one that’s been around for 100-plus years. I have such a variety of cards. But to me, the vintage cards are awesome.”
