Card collecting has arguably not been more popular than it is right now since the dreaded junk wax era, when cards were printed into worthlessness. Collectors actively chase rookie cards and short-prints of their favorite players for collecting, profit, or both. Since becoming a perennial contender, the Atlanta Braves have become an important team in the collecting space, with Austin Riley just one of many examples. As it turns out, Riley's own family appears to be getting in on the fun as well.
Despite his current slump, which has some Braves fans calling for his head, Riley has generally been a pretty popular guy to collect. While his market hasn't reached the heights it set right when he was called up (go look up some Roman Anthony cards right now if you need to see the madness in real time), being a really good player on a good baseball team has kept his market pretty steady.
Well, it appears as though the Riley family has joined an ever-growing list of MLB players who collect at some level. Over on TikTok, a video of Riley's family ripping a box of 2015 Bowman Draft is making the rounds, and in it, Riley's wife opens a pack, and it contains Riley's Bowman 1st card.
Austin Riley's wife only needed one pack to hit her star husband's first licensed Braves card
This is hilarious, but also not unprecedented. Mike Trout was famously ripping packs with his son in search of his own first autograph for fun and managed to pull it off. We are just not going to ask how much money he spent to pull that off, as those boxes are...not cheap.
In Riley and his wife's case, the odds were a bit better. Bowman Draft is a product that comes out once a year and features most of the higher-profile draft picks from that year. Given that Riley was drafted back in 2015, hitting Riley's Bowman 1st base card (considered by many to be a player's true rookie card) in just one pack still faces long odds given the size of the set, but it isn't like she hit his 1st auto or something sort of grail.
Still, this is a real fun moment that everyone involved seemed to enjoy. That was his wife's first pack of cards ever, and it created a fun memory for the entire family, even if she never touches a card again. The real winners might be the kids, who seemed VERY interested in opening as many packs as they could get their hands on. Riley might need every cent of that lucrative extension of his to fund their habit if the card addiction takes hold of them.
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