The old ones, not the new ones. The new ones are about money, the old ones are still about memories.

A Willie Mays card might make me shake my head in awe at the memory of a remarkable catch. A card of a silly-looking Bob Uecker holding an oversized mitt might make me laugh out loud.

The cards of a pitcher from Hertford, N.C., named Jim Hunter always made me smile.

Especially the early ones, the ones before he and the rest of his Oakland teammates grew those handlebar mustaches and Old West sideburns, and before A’s owner Charles Finley took to calling Jim Augustus Hunter — “Catfish.”

Hunter had a boyish face, but then again, he was a boy in those cards from the ‘60s. He debuted in the majors in 1965 at age 19 without ever having pitched a game in the minors.

His 1969 card (pictured on 5B) is my favorite. The front shows a capless Hunter and proves emphatically that he didn’t spend any of his signing bonus on a good barber.

The back’s even better. It tells us that Jim — the Topps Gum people always called him Jim — pitched a perfect game against Minnesota in 1968, for which he received an “immediate raise of $5,000 from the A’s.”

Jim probably appreciated it. Today’s players wouldn’t bother to pick up $5,000 if they saw it lying on the street. That’s chump-change, now.

Also featured on the back of that classic card is a cartoon of Jim, handkerchief in hand, crying his eyes out because he was the losing pitcher in the 1967 All-Star Game. It has to be seen to be believed.

Finally, the stats on that card show us that for the first four years of his career he won 43 games, while losing 49. He would do better — a lot better over the next decade.

By the early ‘70s, Hunter was winning 20 games every season, He did it five years in a row, in fact. His cards tell us that he did heroic things like blowing away Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine in relief in the climactic seventh game of the 1972 World Series.

By 1975, Topps no longer had room for cartoons or biographies on the backs of his cards. Just goofy little offerings like “Jim likes to build things in his spare time” and a listing of his impressive numbers.

It ended for Hunter in 1979 as a member of the New York Yankees. His arm was gone by then — at age 33— but he’d accomplished enough that he was still a no-doubt-about-it Hall of Famer when his time came.

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Hunter passed away last Thursday at age 53, and you’ve probably already read and seen a dozen eulogies more eloquent than anything I can offer.

All of them have said that Jim Hunter was an humble man, who never forgot his roots, never got too big for his britches, and was the kind of guy you’d like to be your next-door neighbor.

I met him just once, but I can vouch that all those things are true.

Hunter came to Charlotte to sign autographs at a card show in the 1980s during the height of the baseball card craze.

He was immediately and obviously different than most of the autograph celebrities who had preceded him.

When he appeared, Hank Aaron watched a football game on TV and never looked up to acknowledge a single soul as he scribbled signatures for $25 a pop.

Pete Rose, for all his greatness as a player, was almost sadly comical in his pursuit of the last dollar in the room when he showed up.

Sure, he’d sign that bat for that 8-year-old , but it would cost an extra 10 bucks, because it takes longer to sign a bat than a ball.

Sure, he’d personalize that autograph “to Aunt Minnie from the all-time hit king.” But hey, how about a five-spot.

Hunter, thankfully, was, as his reputation suggested he would be, just another guy. He was like some friendly stranger who just happened to plop down next to you on a bar stool or barber’s chair.

He signed for $3 or $4 bucks — I can’t recall exactly — and actually seemed to enjoy meeting the fans who were responsible for the million-dollar contracts he enjoyed late in his career.

He patted the little kids on the head, hugged the grandmas, and posed for pictures with anyone who asked — for no extra fee.

He had a smile and a handshake and even a “thank you for coming” for everyone. He signed T-shirts, bats, magazines — even stuffed catfishes — without complaint until the line was gone.

What he was, was exactly the kind of guy all of us hope we would have been if we had been lucky enough and good enough to have been a sports superstar.

Six months from now when I go through those cards again, it’s going to be a little harder to smile when I come across a card of Jim Hunter.

But I’ll give it my best shot. The memories are there forever. And they are really, really good ones.

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