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Retired major league baseball players from Canada know Kelly Sage as “the Canadian card guy.”
For many of them, the Saskatoon man has become the best person to get them their own baseball cards.
Of the roughly 50,000 total cards in his collection, Sage estimates he has between 30,000 and 35,000 individually different cards of Canadians.
He said he started collecting baseball cards in the early 1970s in the small village of Cardale, Man., when he was five or six years old.
“The very first card I saw when I opened my first pack was Bob Bailey of the Montreal Expos,” he said. “Still have that card.”
Sage backed away from collecting for years after it became much easier to acquire complete sets. But one day, Sage bought some baseball card packs at a gas station “for old time’s sake.” A handful of the cards were of Canadian players.
“And it got me to thinking, ‘How many Canadians have played at this level?’ And that’s where I started collecting Canadian-born players,” he said.
“Because that seemed to be a little more interesting to me, because there’s far fewer of them, they’re far less known. And it was intriguing to see your countrymen playing America’s pastime.”
Meet baseball superfan Kelly Sage, also known as ‘the Canadian card guy’
Sage said he started sending cards to retired major leaguers for them to sign for him.
Then he learned many of them didn’t have their own cards.
One time, he hunted down the autograph of retired major league pitcher and former Toronto Blue Jay and Montreal Expo Denis Boucher, who was staying at a Saskatoon hotel.
Sage brought a binder of Boucher’s baseball cards for him to flip through. Boucher also received several of Sage’s business cards.
Within weeks, word spread.
“I was getting emails from guys saying, ‘Hey, do you have any of my cards?'” Sage said.
“So I don’t know if it was old-timers games or team reunions or how it transpired, but that was kind of like my first exposure to players coming to me.”
Sage said he has standing orders from several players, including Hall of Famer Fergie Jenkins, to send them all the cards of them he can get so they can give them away at camps and clinics.
“It’s really fun to know that you can contact a player that you watched as a kid and just have a regular everyday conversation with them,” Sage said, “because I know I’m getting them something of themselves that means a lot to them, that they may not even know exists.”
Of the roughly 260 Canadians who have played in the big leagues, Sage said he has cards of about 190. He said between one-quarter and one-third of the Canadians who played in the majors never had cards made of them.
Sage said he’s built relationships with local card shops in each city with a Major League Baseball team, in order to acquire cards of Canadian players featured in unique local sets, such as ones handed out by police officers and firefighters to kids or issued by newspapers to subscribers.
Sage’s collection has grown from signed cards and baseballs from retired players to a library about the game, movie posters, and other baseball memorabilia.
His collectibles fill a downstairs den and line the walls of the living room. Sage said “99 per cent” of visitors to their home tell him he has a very understanding wife and ask him how he gets away with it.
Rhonda Sage said she gets her own room for sewing and quilting and the arrangement has always worked for them.
“So it’s all fair in collections and sewing,” she said.
“He’s filled up the basement. He’s starting to fill up some of the upstairs. I have given him a slight warning that if it takes up much more real estate, it’s going to be ‘the big D’ and that doesn’t stand for ‘defence.'”
Kelly Sage has a few rules of his own.
He doesn’t try to collect signatures from current major leaguers; he won’t charge former players for the cards he sends them; and he won’t sell any signed items he receives. However, some items are donated to fundraisers for kids’ baseball.
When he’s done collecting, he plans to donate his collection to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame.
