BASEBALL IS HIS CALLING CARD

BY KURT DUSTERBERG PHOTOS COURTESY OF GREGG FORWERCK

If you grew up a baseball fan, there’s a good chance you collected some baseball cards as a kid. Whether you remember the era of swapping for your favorite major leaguers with your buddies on summer afternoons, or you meticulously filed rookie cards in sleeves and binders, the hobby holds a special place for countless fans.

For more than 30 years, Gregg Forwerck has been the man behind those cards. Since 1989, he has been snapping the pictures that have graced Topps cards and other brands, reimagining the hobby with some creative flair along the way.

And it’s not just baseball. Forwerck has documented the prospects, the stars and the journeymen from pro football and hockey too, enjoying a front-row seat for some unforgettable moments. In 1989, Forwerck tracked Deion Sanders when he returned a punt for a touchdown for the first time in his NFL career. When Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan walked off the field after his final win in 1993, he captured the end of an era. And when Americans were captivated by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa’s pursuit of the single-season home run record in 1998, he was along for the chase.

Forwerck, who lives near Charlotte, spends a lot of his time in the Triangle. He has served as the Carolina Hurricanes team photographer since their arrival in 1997 and also works for North Carolina State University as a football photographer. But it’s the three decades of sports cards that will be his legacy. With close to 100,000 images making their way onto sports cards, Forwerck’s portfolio is unrivaled. Not bad for a kid from Toledo, Ohio who started collecting baseball cards as an 8-year-old.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Greg Forwerck photographs players for the Cactus League in Arizona; Forwerck takes a photo with Barry Bonds; Forwerck works with Ken Griffey Jr.; Josh Hamilton takes time for a photo with Forwerck.

How did you first get the attention of the Topps company? I was managing a Rally’s [restaurant]. I didn’t really have any credentials. I had photographed as many things as I could possibly come up with, but I didn’t have any formal training. I wanted to photograph professional sports and I couldn’t figure out how to get into it. Topps did all the sports, and I thought that would keep me busy all the way around the year. So I called this guy and he said, “I get this call every day, but if you want to be persistent, keep calling.” Many of the photos for the cards are taken during spring training in Florida and Arizona. How do these photos all come together? On photo day, you’re trying to pose them in baseball poses. You’re always thinking about what the player would be proud of in a photo. You’re not thinking about the collector’s standpoint. I’ve always noticed that Latin guys, the infielders, those guys want to show off their gloves. You work through the poses that you know. Some guys’ shoulders are wider, so you might want them pointing the bat. How have things changed in three decades of photographing the players? There was a time where we were really focused on getting good, clean stuff on veteran players. Then collectors started saying, “We want to see these prospects, and we want to see multiple cards of them.” So we started producing more of that and spending more time tracking down those players for a good decade. Then we started focusing on the prospects who aren’t even going to get into a big league uniform this year. Over the years, those prospect cards have become a little more creative. They’re not just posed pictures and game action.

I probably was the guy who started it. I don’t know anybody else who does it. I did a very memorable one at Duke Chapel with [Cleveland Indians and Boston Red Sox star] Manny Ramirez. He was playing in Kinston and he was coming to Durham to play at the old stadium [Durham Athletic Park]. Their hotel was really close, and I was thinking of a place that wasn’t baseball, and I wanted to get him in street clothes. I thought Duke Chapel would be the place to do it. It got voted as one of the top 100 baseball cards of all time. And you’ve got a really interesting one of Ron Gant when he played for the Cincinnati Reds. I told him, “I’m going to have you in the sleeveless Reds jersey and I’m going to take the guts out of a baseball and squeeze the outside. It’s going to look like you’re crushing it, with your arms all pumped up.” I did it right outside the locker room. I took a wood pallet and put it up against the wall. That was our background. It’s a two-light shot, pretty simple. Took us about five minutes. I love any opportunity to make a picture I’ve conceived in my head and just always wanted to see on a card. When someone asks you for advice on how to take good pictures, what do you tell them? Before I get to any venue, it’s always about the lighting. You think about the lighting first, then the background. You always set yourself up for success. Set yourself up in what I call the 80% zone, where 80% of the pictures are going to be made. When you look back at your career, does it seem pretty remarkable that you’re the guy, more than anyone else, who has brought baseball cards to the public for all these years? Just how I planned it. (He laughs). As a kid, you think about, “I want to sit in the best seat, I want to get up close, I want to meet players.” I didn’t really care about autographs. All I wanted to do was get a chance to have two seconds with somebody and hear them tell a story. I get to make pictures of some of the greatest athletes in sports. I’ve had players come to me and say, “Hey, can I get a copy of that?” If somebody had told me that when I was 12 years old, I would have thought, that’s never going to happen. So, yeah, I think about it, and I feel pretty blessed.

TOP TO BOTTOM: Over the years, Forwerck has come up with creative angles for photographing some of Major League Baseball’s most famous players.

BY KURT DUSTERBERG

Seth Cannon knows exactly when things will get busy at CARDIACS Sports & Memorabilia, where he serves as general manager. “Release days— Wednesdays and Fridays—can get pretty hectic.”

Times are good at card shops across the country, thanks to a resurgence in sports card collecting. After more than a decade in Cary Towne Center, CARDIACS moved to Apex in 2021 and now occupies a new, larger building. The industry is on an upswing, thanks to a diversification in products and a wide variety of buyers. Some card buyers are investors, while others are looking to purchase and “flip” valuable cards for a profit. There is still a place for the casual collector from a generation ago, but that’s not where the money is today.

“Back then, you couldn’t pull a $1,000 card right out of the pack,” Cannon says. “That was not really a thing; it was a hobby more than anything. There was no differentiation between retail and hobby, so there was only one product,” Cannon says. “Now there’s two.”

The current wave of interest in sports cards and collectibles can be traced to the early days of the pandemic in 2020. With pro sports paused, many folks dusted off their childhood collections and found some gems that they have sold to card stores. But the industry has also reinvented itself by dividing potential buyers into the hobby and retail classes. Local card shops deal mostly in the hobby class, where boxes of cards can cost $100 or more. The card manufacturers produce limited runs of those cards, which also include autographs, foil stamps and other characteristics that establish their value as collectibles.

“The production of product is a fraction of what it used to be,” Cannon says. “Everything is built on an allocation basis. We only see three, five, eight cases of product come through. That’s all we get all year long, so you only get one shot per year to get that box.”

For the casual collector, big box stores still carry the retail cards. Typically, those products have fewer specialty inserts that have investor value. And there’s good news for folks who long for the old days, when cards came in wax packs with pink bubblegum sticks. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, card manufacturers flooded the market with specialty sets, a period now known as the “junk wax” era. Those packs and boxes are still available in card shops and on the internet, many for less than a dollar per pack. CARDIACS Sports & Memorabilia has a variety of unopened baseball and football cards from that era, but even those relics are becoming scarce.

“A lot of that stuff is starting to dry up,” Cannon says. “Maybe they want to keep a pack or a sealed box. The sealed stuff is getting harder and harder to find.”