During spring break, I received an interesting piece of mail. Among my usual junk mail (credit card offers, love letters from the Olsen twins) was a letter from former New York Yankee and future hall of famer Don Mattingly.

Inside the envelope was an autographed photograph of Mattingly with an apology for the delay in correspondence. You see, about seven years ago, I sent Mattingly a few baseball cards to autograph. Then I forgot all about it. And receiving the letter nearly a decade later came as a surprise.

Sadly enough, this was the highlight of my dismal spring break. While many of you were lying drunk and tan on the beaches of America, I was lying sober and white on my bedroom floor in Cuyahoga Falls.

To curtail the boredom that stemmed from being trapped in the Falls for the week, I opened my closet door with the hope of finding something to keep my mind off of thinking.

There on the floor sat my forgotten baseball card collection. Ahh ... baseball cards. Remember collecting baseball cards? What then seemed like a fun and possibly profitable hobby now looks like a complete and utter waste of time and money now.

But it was fun. It was a good way to keep up with your favorite sport, which was baseball, and collect the cards of your favorite players.

I remember going to baseball card shows, all wide eyed and full of the giddy adrenaline rush only a morning bowl of Cocoa Puffs can give you. All those tables! All those cards! And every time you went to a show you had an agenda. You knew exactly what cards you wanted and exactly how much of your lawn mowing money you were willing to shell out to purchase those cards.

Back then, baseball cards were still relatively inexpensive. Nowadays, kids pay three dollars a pack in hopes of scoring a gold-plated, metal-embossed, limited-edition-of-two, one-in-every-40-million-packs piece of cardboard.

Of course, nowadays baseball players make $10 million a year. Back then, player salaries weren't that absurd, and they deserved the money anyway. After all, players had dedication- to a team, a town and a loyal fan base.

These days, players have dedication to their bank accounts, check books and endorsement contracts. I guess this all clicked in my head after I looked at the bubble gum-stained back of a Mike Schmidt baseball card. Players like Schmidt, a former Ohio Bobcat and career-long member of the Philadelphia Phillies, are a rare commodity in the context of modern baseball.

In Schmidt's time, the backs of baseball cards were easy to read. Only one team usually accompanied a player's lifetime statistics; now the back of a player's card reads like a geography lesson.

Maybe cards should start listing how much money a player makes every year. This would help to make sense of the world of baseball for young fans who wonder why their favorite player is always moving from team to team. Because in a baseball world saturated with Florida Marlinesque success formulas, money takes top priority over accomplishment and devotion.

I hope I am not totally correct. I hope somewhere there exists a baseball player who still cares about the game and just laughs at the big joke his inflated salary is, knowing full well that he (or anyone else) is not worth the kind of money his contract entails. Cal Ripken Jr. and Tony Gwynn are rare exceptions, and Ken Griffey, Jr. seems to be content in Seattle, but overall, the days of the devoted big leaguer are numbered.

That was why Mattingly's letter seemed so out of the ordinary to me. Over time, I had forgotten baseball players once cared. Donny Baseball cared. He cared so much that he is devoting his retirement days to sorting through his old fan mail and returning letters. I'm doubtful many modern superstars would do the same for today's young fans. Unless, of course, they were getting something out of it, too.

Dryden, a sophomore news writing and editing major, sold his near-mint Gary Templeton rookie card to pay his way through college. He can reached via e-mail at cd341696.