When he opens the door, he is wearing a Ken Griffey Jr. hat and sweatshirt. The official tour of one of the world's largest, life-changing collections of sports equipment begins when he points to the bottom of the stairs.
The tour could have started in the driveway of the home of Vass, with a Ford Fusion with a "GRIFFEY" sign on it.
He has a rolled-up banner of Griffey that used to hang in the Kingdome in his shed. He thought it was 7 feet long and 6 feet wide.
He has to figure out what he can do with something the size of a minivan in Lynchburg, Virginia. He believes the banner was the final straw for his old mailman, who had already been pretty grumpy about the endless stream of packages delivered to Vass.
Vass is 48 years old and he bounds inside his house and down the carpeted steps like a teenager. There is more to this than a collection at the bottom of the stairs. He has a fast laugh and is giggling as he slowly opens the door. He is walking into a room that brings him great joy and he thinks it could bring you joy as well.
Vass takes his time with the door like he is showing off the final shot of a home improvement project.
There is a giant carpet on the floor with a photo of a Reds player on it. Vass took a picture at a Reds game and his wife took it to a place that makes personalized carpets.
The room is roughly the size of a medium-sized bedroom and he works his way around it. He starts on the left with a case holding his favorite items. There are dozens of his most valuable cards, along with pins, baseballs, photos, a golf hat and a glove that he once used at a charity tournament. There is a bag of seeds that Griffey ate and signed. There are two signed footballs from the Cincinnati Junglekats, an arena football team that former NFL player Sam Adams owned at one point before it went bust.
Vass thinks the bat that Griffey used to hit home run No. 481 is his most valuable item, and he has two 6-foot cutouts of him staring across the room at the bat. He thinks he could get a good price for it.
Vass wanders the room for 10 minutes, describing how much he has accumulated. It is impossible to discuss 20% of the items in the room. They are stacked and organized from the floor to the ceiling, with bats all over the floor, signed pictures on the walls, and Starting Lineup figurines packed on a small shelf.
He arrives at what is believed to be the largest collection of sports cards ever assembled. Vass has 101,000 Griffey Jr. cards, ranging from 80 of the notorious 1989 Upper Deck rookies to 1,439 of the 1990 Donruss.
Most of the cards are meticulously organized into four library card catalogs, hundreds of duplicate Griffeys, all cloistered together in rows that still have tiny labels at the end.
He gets a lot of cards because he is a member of two different Facebook groups. Vass is a big part of the Griffey family. A buddy runs a league that only real die-hards are allowed in, and scam artists who try to make a quick buck get a stern talking-to via Messenger. The group has more than 1,000 members.
Only the best from the other group get called up to the big leagues, because Vass manages the other group. He is the unelected president of the group and he has the gravitas of a massive collection, the passion of a little kid and a case of Griffey-itis. These are his people, and he has a person named Griffey.
The projector is hanging down a foot into the middle of the room. He likes to come down here and show old games or highlight clips of Griffey on a white screen. I don't know what else to say.
He describes how his wife found a can of Ken Griffey Jr. Easy Cheese on eBay and he stood in the middle of the rug. The bigger question is why.
Why Ken Griffey Jr.?
Why are there so many cards?
Why?
It is easy to shake your head at a guy like Vass, or watch an episode of "Hoarders", and think, "Hey, just get rid of all that junk, dude!" Maybe it is baseball cards, a wine cellar, or vinyl records, or even your favorite sweatshirt. The thing that keeps us going sometimes is a pile of rubbish.
Vass talks about a traumatic childhood, an attempt to take his own life as an adult, a painful divorce and how Ken Griffey Jr. helped pull him through it all. His rapid-fire speaking pattern slows down for stretches, and he stops talking at others, his lips pursed about an old memory that still hurts.
This room is not a collection, or even a museum, when he finishes talking.
It is a monastery.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, a child of divorce and a card collector exploded to all-time highs in American society.
The divorce rate went up in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was exactly when card collecting began to become a business. Donruss and Fleer jumped in the next year after the loss of the exclusive deal to print baseball cards by Topps. The boom was gradual until Upper Deck changed collecting forever in 1989 with the first high-quality, low-quantity premium card with a splashy first card from its very first set featuring a phenomenon: Ken Griffey Jr.
Vass describes a childhood that millions of Americans can identify with: divorce. There are constant moves. Parents are bad-mouthing. Remarriage with rocky relationships. Again, divorce. Being in high school can be brutal. He rocks from foot to foot every 60 seconds or so, careful to not stomp directly on the face of Griffey, but he is not sure he wants a lot of details in print about the physical and mental abuse he suffered as a kid. It was torturous and constant. Vass says that he has been told by two different doctors that he has post-traumatic stress disorder, when he mentions that he considers the chaos of his home life to be trauma.
Vass wanted to find his tribe. He talks about high school in a way that makes it seem like there were jocks, nerds, and cool kids.
It sounds like so many high schools at that time were full of kids who were adrift, so unmoored at home that they latched onto football or Drama Club in a way that provided a tether to something. Vass was trying to figure out who to be each morning as he pondered what he wanted to be when he grew up.
He says he was not very athletic and had a speech impediment when he had to speak in front of groups. He says he was never able to fit in and felt like an outsider. He spent most of his time with kids using drugs and alcohol to escape home lives.
One day when he was a teenager, he hung out with two kids, Brad and Aaron, who had formed their own startup high school group: the card collectors. There was talk that the Upper Deck card had been short-printed. A gold rush occurred at card shops, gas stations and grocery stores when it shot to $200 in mint condition. Think of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with wax packs and cards instead of chocolate bars and golden tickets.
The first valuable card was a 1989 Mark McGwire, and as he points out, he keeps the McGwire in the big glass case with all the Griffeys. Vass will never forget the world that the McGwire card opened up for him, even though he despises the steroid era guys. He was hooked immediately.
The card collecting was clean. The cards came in numbered sets with rules about how to grade them and price guides that gave a specific value. They could be neatly put into protective cases and organized in a way that was meditative for any collector, but especially for rudderless young people. For kids like Vass, who spent every day desperate to fit in, sitting with peers and taking their cherished pieces of cardboard and sliding them into hard cases that would keep them safe was a doubly therapeutic experience.
It was more than just collecting in general. There was something special about Vass and millions of other young people. He was an athlete with a story and persona that is hard to duplicate. He had the talent of a genius, with the name recognition of his baseball father, a smile of pure joy, and just enough rebellion to fit into one 19-year-old person. Sports cards were elevated to an entirely different level.
The basement of Vass is a shrine to the late 1980s capitalistic greed that led to the demise of the collectibles industry five years later. There was too much, too fast, and Griffey was the poster-child: Vass says he had over 8,000 different cards printed with his face on them over his 22-year career.
Even though the bubble in the card industry never burst, Vass and many other Griffey Collectors still have values that are close to nothing. Vass had found a life raft and found his people as well. Vass spent the rest of his high school collecting. He worked his way up at Alliance Industrial Corp., which made conveyor belt equipment and systems, after getting a job there. He moved a few times and took his stuff with him.
He got married after finding love. His wife asked for a divorce after a few years of marriage. Vass had always vowed to not end up like his parents. He was getting divorced.
Vass contemplated moving out when his wife went to the gym and left him alone. He left a good job at Alliance to move closer to Washington, D.C. He had a bottle of aspirin and a bottle of Xanax in his hand. He swallowed all the pills after staring at them.
He says it was more than just his marriage. There were so many things that went wrong that it came to a head.
Vass tells this part of his story and he sits in the corner of his basement. It is a stool with a seat back at a desk. The safest place in the world for him is in the back corner of his room. After a rough day, he comes down here and opens his laptop and starts logging every new item he has.
It feels like a blanket that just came out of the dryer for Vass. His voice was a bit off a minute ago, but once he was in the chair there was a steadiness that came over him. He looks at the world from this seat.
He woke up from a coma a week later, after his wife found him unconscious and called the paramedics. Vass pointed to the inside of his nostril, where he says his doctor told him he had been dead for 93 seconds. It did a number on my nose.
He was in the hospital for a week. As his divorce was finalized, he had to move out of his house. He was living in his dad's guest bedroom, surrounded by boxes. After trying to take his own life, he was 35 years old and divorced.
Vass told his friends and family that he was going camping on his own. I needed to go out there and try to find myself.
Vass started packing his bags after he persuaded his dad to do this. He took a tent, rope, pots and pans, a hammock, some food and water and a small hunting knife.
On the day he decided to leave, he loaded his stuff into the car and grabbed a 1989 Upper Deck Griffey Jr., something he thought would help him work through all of his stuff.
Vass was alone in the woods for two weeks. Vass speaks a little slower as he tells the story from his stool, but then he speeds up. He is happy to talk about the healing that happened there. He says he cried, he prayed, he cried a lot, and when he said he punched a few trees, he swung his fists like he was punching the trees. He would have been damned if he didn't restart himself out there in the woods, cooking over a fire, listening to birds, and staring at a baseball card.
He came back to his dad's house and felt like a new man. He got a job at Alliance as a designer and salesman for conveyor belts, which the company sells to some of the nation's largest food and drink manufacturers. Vass met someone after moving out, lugging the boxes with him. He asked her out to Buffalo Wild Wings and bowling and they have been together ever since.
He chuckled a bit when he was asked about the moment he first mentioned The Thing He Does In The Basement. Two months into dating, they were talking about where they would like to live if they ever decided to move in with each other. He was going to move in with her and her two kids.
If we are going to live together at your house, I want to tell you something about me. I like to do this thing.
She looked at her face and realized the number of deal breakers that could fill out the sentence. Vass said that the collection was his version of meditating, going to the gym, or fixing up old cars, and that it meant a lot to him during the rough patches of his life.
When he moved in, he had a lot of stuff inside. Vass was halfway through bringing everything inside when he saw the mound.
She asked if you think this is a problem.
He gently said that it makes him happy.
They made it official a few months later after she nodded her head.
For a long time, Vass told people that if he ever got to shake Ken Griffey Jr.'s hand, he would stop adding new stuff.
He looks sheepish as he pulls up his favorite photo. It is a shot of him, three feet away from Griffey Jr., on the day the Reds inducted him into their team Hall of Fame. Vass posed for a picture, then leaned in and said "Thank you for what you've done for my life and thank you for what you've done for baseball."
Vass admits that it got worse after they shook hands.
The Facebook pages were a big part of that. The online crew had become part of his inner circle in his 40s, the same way the two kids in high school had helped him fit in as a teenager. Everyone shares the joys of Griffey, but it has become a safe place for super collectors to meet and discuss life. This is therapy for them.
Vass couldn't live without it because they share their struggles and comebacks. On the day Russia invaded Ukraine, Vass exchanged supportive texts with his Facebook friend Denis, who makes and sells Griffey Jr. dolls.
Vass considers Matt Posman to be one of his best friends even though the two haven't met in person. Their ups and downs are now extending far beyond their collections and they call each other almost every week.
Posman has turned to collecting Griffeys as a way to find his footing during difficult times in his life. When he graduated from Penn State with a math degree in 1999, he was trying to figure out what adulthood would look like for him, while also trying to reconcile the fact that he had sold off most of his Griffeys. One of the great four-year runs in MLB history was ripped off by Ken Griffey when he was at college.
He went back in and focused on Griffey. He and Vass became good friends after he joined the Facebook group. Posman's wife is very supportive, but also enjoys needling him. She will come into the room while Posman and Vass are talking on the phone, and she will ask if they are talking about the collection.
Vass is hoping they can get together in person someday soon, and it is possible that he holds a Second Annual Ken Griffey Jr. Facebook get-together in real life. The Baseball Hall of Fame in New York hosted the first one in 2016.
About 20 of the world's foremost Griffey heads were at that moment. Everything they owned saw a surge in value and interest, and the two Facebook groups were electric for the months leading up to his Hall election.
Vass decided to make his own set of Ken Griffey Jr. cards. He was a gifted metal worker and he made 20 heavy silver Griffey cards, numbering each one and handing them out to all the Facebook friends who showed up in Cooperstown.
Vass is sitting at his logging table near his spreadsheet. He points to a chest on the ground behind him, full of things that need to be recorded or have been recorded, but aren't quite ready to be seen. He casually mentions that he has two Ken Griffey suits in his house.
Is that a show?
He says they were custom-made suits from a couple of events in the 90s. I think it would be really weird if I could display them.
He looked at his laptop and spreadsheet where he recently recorded the two suits, which cost $200 apiece. Every item he owns is recorded with a field for value. Five years ago, Vass took out an insurance policy for $55 per month on his collection so he could keep an eye on how much it was worth.
Is everything worth anything? Vass doesn't answer immediately, but then points to the grand total on the page and says, "Here's what I estimate its value at."
$421,000 is the number.
The dollar figure goes up every day. After some initial reluctance on move-in day, Michelle has grown to be all-in on his collection. The carpet on the floor is her greatest contribution. The bigger thing she has done is her acceptance of the importance of this room for Vass.
He needed it when he was a little boy, he needed it as a teenager, and he needs it now as a 35-year-old.
He loves his job, but it is tiring. He designs and sells conveyor systems that can fill and cap 1,500 Coke cans in a minute. He sits at his laptop and plays videos of the canning process like an NFL ref under the replay hood, slowing them down, playing again, and trying to show how one little mistake can cause a devastating loss in a very short time. A few thousand soda cans backed up and exploded when the operator sped up the belt too much. It took the company 48 hours to tear everything apart, clean it and replace destroyed equipment, because the whole thing was over in two minutes.
He will often come home, collect packages from the front step, wave to his wife, and say, "I gotta go log some." He will take a deep breath and slide into his chair.
He says his collection saved his life.
He paused for a second and looked at his face.
You know what? He reached down into the chest and lifted out two priority mailboxes.
He says that he feels odd.
There is a single slice of bubble wrap after he sliced open the lid. He put the coat, undershirt, and pants together. It is as wrinkled as you would expect for a suit that has been in a box for 20 years. He flips over the tag from the inside of the shirt, and it says "custom apparel", Ken Griffey Jr.
It looks like a magician made Ken Griffey Jr. disappear, and the only thing left was his deflated suit.
Vass says that this actually is a little weird.
Nothing about Vass and his collection feels weird. Is it obsessive? Yes. Is it excessive? For sure. But weird? Nah. I don't know if I could handle what that guy just described, the kind of pain that would make anyone think. Have at it, Mr. Vass.
Vass laid out the contents of the second box, which was a black suit jacket, white undershirt, black pants and an initialed tag.
The suits are still laying there, deflated, when Vass walks toward the basement door with his picture of Ken Griffey Jr. on it. He is still thinking about those suits.
He looked back over his shoulder and wondered what he was going to do with them.
It is not a question that is asked often. The items on the walls of this room help Vass transform a physical space into a place that helps him transform his mood.
He starts to talk about the layout of the room and where the suits fit in, and it is like hearing a museum director talk.
The last thing I want people to think is that I am weird, because I am not. It might be too strange.
He gets into a kind of thinking man pose, with his thumb and index finger gripping his chin as he looks at the suits.
He stops talking. The thing he does in the basement is 10% more odd and beautiful.
You know what? Vass says they are pretty rad. They are going to fit in nicely here.
If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide or struggling with mental health issues, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline.
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