Collector keeps things in perspective after losing card collection in WV flood
It’s quite possibly every collector’s worst nightmare: losing part, if not all, of their coveted collection due to a catastrophic event.
For David DiClemente, he recently lived this great fear. The Wheeling, W.V. resident had a significant chunk of his baseball card collection ruined as Mother Nature guided a flash flood through town on June 15. He had to throw away over 30,000 waterlogged cards.
Now, DiClemente is sharing his story and hoping a similar, devastating situation doesn’t happen to any of his fellow collectors.
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FLASH FLOOD WARNING
DiClemente, who takes care of his 93-year-old mother, was home on a Saturday night when he started receiving flash flood warning alerts on his phone.
“I looked outside and it wasn’t even raining,” he said. “It rained like five inches in a half hour about five miles to the northeast, it just came down the hillsides. I was downstairs watching TV and I started to hear these weird water noises, and I got up and looked out the side door and there’s a stream of water going down the driveway.”
DiClemente saw water flowing down the steps leading to an entrance in the backroom of his basement. It started to seep underneath the door, so he put down some towels. A few minutes later, DiClemente heard more noises coming from the backroom—he discovered water about two inches deep.
Three bookshelves filled with binders of cards, about 60 complete sets, were in harm’s way. Included in those sets was a complete Topps run from 1970-79 that DiClemente had finished in the last four years.
First, DiClemente grabbed the sets from 1970-73 and brought them upstairs; then he picked up sets from 1974-79. The 53-year-old was able to throw a few more sets underneath his arms before the water did its most damage.
When it was all said and done, DiClemente’s basement was flooded with about 18-24 inches of water. One of his neighbor’s houses was submerged with five feet of water in the basement.
“When things settled down, I was able to go through the binders,” said DiClemente, who owned 200,000 cards prior to the flood. “I ended up saving my sets from 1970-1985. If I had to save any of them, those were the ones that would be harder to replace.”
Those sets hold sentimental value for DiClemente.
“I bought a starter set for 1971 and a starter set for ’75. The other sets I put together from scratch from going to card shops and card shows,” DiClemente said.
DAMAGED GOODS
Unfortunately, DiClemente suffered a devastating loss to his collection. He figures half of his 60 sets were damaged. Over 30,000 cards were left on the street curb when the city came around to pick up debris.
A couple of sets that didn’t make it were his 2024 Topps Baseball Series 1 and 2 complete parallel sets. Before he threw those cards in the trash, DiClemente took a video of himself thumbing through the five-inch binder that held those modern-day sets. The cards were waterlogged and filled with mud.
Those 2024 Topps Baseball Series 1 and 2 complete parallel sets were one of the first things DiClemente collected when he got back into the hobby after a 30-year hiatus. DiClemente had been big into collecting from 1980-94.
He has become an avid fan of Topps Chrome Platinum Anniversary; he built the 2022 and ’23 sets, which survived the flood. The ’21 set was positioned on a bottom shelf, so it suffered water damage.
“Because those are Chrome cards, I grabbed those two books—they were in separate binders—and they were waterlogged,” DiClemente said. “I took them outside and took all the pages out. I took some of the cards out of the pages and I’m going to try and save that set.”
DiClemente’s 2024 and ’25 Bowman sets were both destroyed. DiClemente had put together this year’s Topps Heritage set and had the 2024 regular and High Series sets complete. He conducted a lot of trades for high-numbered, short-printed cards.
“Having those two sets get waterlogged was really kind of a bummer, because I spent so much time meeting people on Facebook and trading one card for one card,” he said.
DiClemente has some duplicate Heritage cards, so set rebuilding is in the works.
“Now it just feels like I need to go out and buy more boxes of cards,” DiClemente joked.
Most of DiClemente’s cards that got ruined were being stored on lower shelves of his units. But even some of the sets he didn’t have a chance to grab on the top shelves were damaged.
Along with his 100,000 cards in his basement, DiClemente had an additional 100,000 in a detached garage. There was flood inside the garage, but DiClemente didn’t know to what extent a week and a half following the catastrophic event.
Having a significant portion of his collection ruined by a natural disaster was hard for DiClemente. However, he’s thought about the alternatives that could have happened that night.
“A mile down the road—because I live just off National Road, U.S. Route 40 —and as you get further down the road east, peoples’ whole houses were washed away,” DiClemente said. “At that time, like seven people had died. So it puts it into perspective that I lost just baseball cards.”