Organizing and Reorganizing

Watching card content on social media and YouTube these days, I feel like a total Old Guy. So many folks got back into collecting during COVID--at the same time as I was sitting it out and trying not to get sick--that my having gotten back into the hobby initially in 2014 makes me feel like a veteran. 

But I find myself now questioning how I organized things back in 2014. Perhaps that is because Topps started to issue so many sets, or more pointedly, so many parallels that trying to collect anything more than a few things is a fool's game. Or maybe I just want a new reason/excuse to go through my Brewers collection again. 

Either way, I am thinking about reorganzing my Topps binders in particular as follows:

1. The "Flagship" binder: for use with the base Topps set and the Traded/Update set and perhaps other similar use of the flagship design (like 1st Edition or the 1994 Bilingual set).

2012 Update Ryan Braun All-Star SP

2. The "Tobacco" Binder: This one is for Topps 206, A&G, Gypsy Queen (RIP), Turkey Red, and other similar sets.

3. The 1990s Originals: An excuse to put Finest and Stadium Club (and their spinoffs) into their own binder together.

4. Chrome: For Chrome and its many, many variants. 

Garrett Mitchell's 2023 Logofractor

5. Kid-Oriented: A place to put Topps Kids, Big League, Big, Fire, Holiday, Bunt, and Opening Day (RIP), among others

Some numbered to 99 Fire Variant from 2018

6. On Demand: Everything from Topps Now to Throwback Thursdays to the oversized moneygrabs to the Steve Aoki collaborations

7. Higher End: Things like Museum Collection, Tribute, Triple Threads, Sterling, Five Star, Inception, etc.

I couldn't leave this Aramis Ramirez Museum Collection Copper behind at a recent card show

8. Archives: The binder for recycled Designs and the mixed retired player/current player sets of that ilk, like Heritage, Archives, Archives Signature Series, All-Time Fan Favorites, Cracker Jack, and anything similar

9. Regularly Revisited: Stuff like Gallery, Pristine, maybe Rookie Cup, maybe Topps Total, maybe High Tek--the sets that get issued maybe three or four years in a row, then go away, then return again in five or six years. 

10. The One-Offs/Limited Runs: A parking lot to put the Yugos of Topps's history, like DIII, Embossed, Bazooka, Co-Signers, Ticket to Stardom, Unique, Attax, Legacy, American Pie, HD, Stars--things that were out for maybe 3-4 years at the most, perhaps consecutively, which are out there.

11. Oddballs/Food Sets/Promo Sets: Everything from Supers in the early 1970s to Scratchoffs in 1981 to the Drake's sets to the Post Cereal sets of the early 2000s to those bubble packed Team sets to the recent Baseball Card Day stadium giveaways. 

This set helped set socks in 2019. 

The obvious point is that I can organize my cards in any way that I feel like organizing them. But I feel like I want the parallels and inserts to be with the base set from each year instead of being in different binders--that it would be easier to organize my collection in that way. 

My question to you all--especially you team collectors--is this:

How do you have your cards organized? Binders? Boxes? By Player? By Manufacturer?

I'd love to hear how y'all do it.  

Molitor from COMC

I've been able to spend a bit more money lately on cards as my business/work life has improved tremendously over the past several years. More clients for me means more work billed at an hourly rate which means more money coming in. Add in having other people working on my cases and client matters, and you have a recipe for success in the legal industry. 

So, I've taken the opportunity to start loading up on my big collections from COMC. Sportlots is excellent for getting commons at a good price. Card Barrel can be good as well. eBay is better for those special, higher end purchases. COMC, though, is probably best when used for relatively commonplace cards of stars or some of the more numerous parallels. It's easier to find them on COMC, and the combined shipping for all the cards at like $6--even for the "slow boat to nowhere" shipping speed--is tough to beat.

I recently added about 125 Paul Molitor cards that I did not have to my collection off COMC.Here are a few favorites.

As best I recall, I don't think I ever saw the hanger-pack stickers with panels of five stickers all together as one where I lived, and I may not have ever seen them in the flesh before about 2 months ago. I only got those little paper packs to rip open. Never the fancy boxes. So, when I saw this one available, I had to grab it. Where else do you get reminded of such awesome mid-1980s players as Jerry Remy (RIP), Steve Rogers (alive and hopefully well), Johnnie LeMaster (also still with us), and Ron Oester (among the living) alongside Hall of Famer Paul Molitor?

This great disc came from 1988, obviously, and from some kid getting a haircut at franchise haircuttery Fantastic Sam's. I was sort of surprised to learn that Fantastic Sam's is still very much in business as a franchised entity, but that's probably because the franchised haircuttery of choice in my part of Atlanta is Great Clips. 

And finally, this is the Jiffy Pop Square Proof. Back in the 1980s, if you had Jiffy Pop, you were fancy. Agricultural megacompany ConAgra still packages and sells Jiffy Pop Popcorn for anyone interested in such things. Microwave popcorn defintely is far easier to make. 

Thanks for stopping by. I'll have some eBay purchases posting soon. Maybe I'll even update my player collections....though that might take a while since I haven't done it since 2018.  

 

Went to a Card Show Today

When I originally got back into collecting in 2014, there was one local card show in a hotel conference room. It would happen maybe once a month, and usually I'd end up at the same one or two tables digging through dime boxes of cards looking for stuff I needed to backfill my collection. 

Over time, that show moved to another location. That was for two reasons. The original promoter passed away, removing the tie to the original place. Also, the banquet room next door to the show started being booked by some sort of very upbeat, very loud, very contemporary church service, which meant that the card show room was nearly uninhabitable because it was so loud. 

When I got back into collecting in the past year or so, the show had become one held in two locations depending on the weekend. The banquet halls grew in size, as did the number of tables. 

Now, the show has moved full-time to a location less than 3 miles from my house. It's great. The downside is that the person who used to have the dime boxes is no longer around--no idea what happened to her. I also have no idea what happened to the dime boxes, as every box now is at least a quarter and most "value" boxes are 50 cents or one dollar. 

Today, I stopped over at the show and was gone literally for an hour. There are two vendors that I tend to hang out by the most that have started pulling Brewers for me so I don't even have to dig through the boxes to try to find the cards I want--which is both great and bad. It's great to have that kind of service, but it's bad because the chase is sometimes more fun than the purchase!

In any event, one of those guys kept aside just a fantastic card for me.

This is a 2023 Topps Cosmic Chrome Autograph Variation Card (the back even says so). It's serial numbered 32 out of 50. I really like how all the yellow is something of a nice color match to the yellow front panel on Yelich's batting helmet and to his arm guard. 

I got a few other cards as well. One of them is the 2024 Topps Lids 1963 Chrome card that first came out at Fanatics Fest in New York in August of last year:

I also got two Juan Baez 2024 Bowman Draft Chrome cards numbered to 75 each. While I'm not actively seeking out cards that are numbered for my team collection or under 99 for any collection other than Yount, Molitor, and Yelich, I also hate to leave these great cards behind to fend for themselves in the cold wilderness. 

Hope y'all have had a good weekend. I spent a lot of my weekend in furniture stores, as my wife and I are taking the opportunity to try to make our house look like adults live here. 

Recent Purchases

I was going to go to a card show today, but I'm fighting a cold and don't want to subject everyone at the show to that. Instead, here I am organizing and writing a blog post. 

Over the past few months, I've started buying a LOT of Brewers cards. Part of that has just been backfilling the many holes in my collection through Sportlots, eBay, and COMC. 

For example, one hole in my collection came with buying Nelson Cruz cards. In 2006, Doug Melvin decided that he wanted a "Proven Closer" and traded away 30-year-old Carlos Lee and 24-year-old Nelson Cruz for Francisco Cordero, Kevin Mench, Laynce Nix, and a minor leader (Julian Cordero). The Brewers got two years of good relief pitching from F-Cordero, 30 total games from Laynce Nix, and 141 games of a 0.1 WAR from Kevin Mench. Lee still had 8.4 WAR and 137 HRs left in his bat, and Cruz--who'd been marooned in the minors by the Brewers for reasons that escape me--had 18 seasons and 42.1 WAR yet to come. 

I guess that career is why this card was nearly $20. 

I've also loaded up on a lot of Christian Yelich cards. I think I have added at least 350 Yelich cards since the end of the season--and probably more. His back surgery this past season probably helped lead to the sell off by others, and it probably also did not help the Brewers not having him at the top of the order in the playoffs. Here are just a few:

I hope your Sunday is going well. 

Back, sort of?

It's been almost six years since I posted here. I have far less time to post now than I ever did, yet my collecting life has been (dare I say it) better in the past year than it has ever been. So, what's been going on?

Well, let's see. My wife had a liver transplant in April of 2021. For many years, she drank to excess. In the process, she permanently scarred her liver to the point where she had cirrhosis at the age of 47. She had to have a liver transplant or she would die. That's how we spent our year in the pandemic--going to the hospital regularly for her to have fluid drained from her abdomen (ascites, it's called), for her to get treatment for the liver cancer she developed, and, eventually, for her to get her transplant. She is now a mentor for others in that same situation as she works to figure out how best to help. You can read her story here. 

Once we got through those issues, things cleared up greatly. I got more help at work and now have two (and soon to be three) other attorneys working for me on cases that I bring in. That helps pay the bills, of course, and that also allows me the freedom to buy cards.

For example, this Gorman Thomas from 2019 Archives. It was a recent purchase on eBay for me. You see, I pretty much stopped collecting in 2019 as I stopped posting. Not until last year did I get back to going to card shows around here. 

Last year was also a bit trying for me. I had to have my aortic valve and my aortic root replaced thanks to a birth defect in the valve that was causing an aneurysm to form in my aorta. Thankfully we caught it before anything catastrophic happened, but I now have a great big scar in the middle of my chest. That procedure cannot be done any other way than through open-heart surgery.

Yeah, that was one hell of an August. 

I also got to appear as a legal commentator on a local news station a few times thanks to making friends with one of the anchors.

You'd almost think that I know what I'm talking about there. 

I'm mostly finding myself hanging out on Instagram a fair amount. My social media fix comes from BlueSky rather than the Xesspool that is the artist formerly known as Twitter. If you stop by either place, please leave a message or a comment--it would be great to hear from you.

To close, I actually allowed myself to spend $65 on a single card recently. It's a beauty, though.

I hope to hear from you soon somewhere--whether here or BSKY or Insta or even on Trading Card Database.