#WalletCard: Robert Goes to Dinner

Tonight, my wife and I joined our next door neighbors for dinner at one of our favorite restaurants near where we live. The restaurant is a burger joint, but that does not really do justice to it.

It's called Farm Burger, and their "thing" is that all the burgers are from locally raised, grass-fed beef that is dry-aged and ground fresh on site. Here, let me get you hungry (if you like burgers):

My wife was confused when I pulled a card out of my wallet and took a photo of it on the placemat next to the Farm Burger Dunwoody Logo. Y'all will understand, though.  Here's Robert Edwards, looking ready to have a burger himself:

It's been a hectic week here for me, but thankfully #walletcard makes this one an easy post.  And my burger -- which was a build-it-yourself with fresh jalapenos, swiss cheese, homemade mayonnaise, and red onions -- was fantastic.

Christmas Cards from Too Many Verlanders

Dennis at Too Many Verlanders is one of the most generous bloggers around. I've gotten several envelopes from him over the past several months, and each one has great cards in them.  What did the Christmas package hold, other than the incredibly nice handwritten Christmas wish?

First off, a 2010 Topps George Kottaras card. Kottaras is Canadian -- from Ontario -- and got the opportunity last September finally to play for his hometown Blue Jays.  Here's his tweet about that. And here's the card.

The next card? Another catcher who got to fulfill his dream, perhaps, of playing for his hometown team. But for Damian Miller, the team he wanted to play for was the Milwaukee Brewers. Interestingly, Miller was not a member of the players' union because he was a strike breaker back in 1994. As a result, Wikipedia claims (without attribution...but it could be true) that his name was left off 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks memorabilia celebrating their World Series win.

Those union guys...sometimes they hold a grudge.

Next up, two lefty starters who bounced around the leagues a bit. Randy Wolf, who pitched 25 innings for the Marlins last season, appears on a 2011 Topps base set card.  And Doug Davis is pictured here on a 2010 Topps Update Gold card in his second tour of duty in Milwaukee.

Next, we come across two current Brewers.

First off, there is fourth/fifth starter -- and late season ace -- Mike Fiers. Everyone who talks about Fiers mentions that his stuff just isn't that great and that they are always waiting for the other shoe to drop when it comes to his pitching. I look at his results, and, outside of a tater-induced disaster in 2013, he has put up some impressive numbers in 200 innings of big-league work. Especially look at his K/BB ratio -- 3.75 in 2012 and 4.47 in 2014. Maybe that's a fluke, but he's always had good control and struck out a ton of guys at every stop in the minors. Something's working.

The other current Brewer is a Wal-Mart parallel of Jean Segura from the 2013 Topps Update set. It's always nice to add a card to a player collection, and my adding to my current player collections other than Ryan Braun has been slow this first year collecting again.

The final card from TMV was definitely the highlight. I mentioned a few months ago that Gorman Thomas was a guy who really never hung around to sign autographs after games. As a result, I never was able to add his autograph to my collection on anything. Either Dennis remembered that, or he just figured I would love this card because Gorman's a Brewer and a player collection. In any case, it was absolutely a fantastic Christmas gift to get!

Thank you so very much, Dennis, for the excellent cards and the holiday wishes.

Mail from JayBarkerFan

Whenever an envelope arrives from Hazel Green, Alabama, you know you're in for a good day. Recently, I received my second envelope from The Tide Fan from North of Huntsville, Jaybarkerfan. JBF, as he is rather logically known throughout the blogosphere, has a knack for tracking bloggers' collecting interests and, then, an even greater knack for sending cards that hit those interests head on and then some.

This envelope from JBF to me was no different. Filled with hits, oddballs, and parallels that I needed for both team and player collections -- and then some special cards that made my day and then some -- JBF did it again.

Starting with an oddball of an oddball, apparently the McDonald's that JBF visited in the 1990s had a printer that didn't quite understand how the gold foil on the Baseball's Best sets was supposed to be applied. The result was a great addition to the Robin Yount collection:

Having completed and updated my team collection want lists through 1998 at this point felt like a major accomplishment. It's more fulfilling, though, when I have to go back and update the list because some new cards came in. Such was the case for this rack-pack insert from the 1984 Topps set of Harvey Kuenn. Kuenn managed the 1983 American League All-Star team, so he was featured in that Topps Glossy All-Star set. Somehow, I never got one of Harvey's cards back then -- though I got a couple of Ted Simmons's cards. So, getting one in this package was a nice addition.

From a more recent vintage, JBF shipped me a couple of hits. One was from 2008 Upper Deck, and the other was a 2009 Allen & Ginter framed relic.

Two parallels also made their way south on I-65 and east on I-20. Both of them are Wal-Mart parallels of Topps Series 1 cards, including the card that is one of the two best Brewers cards issued this year -- the Topps base Khris Davis showing him apparently making a spectacular play at the wall. By the way, the other one is Jonathan Lucroy's Topps base card of what I think is a walk-off winning run being scored by Luc, who was the best position player in the National League in 2014 by WAR.

Not to leave out serial numbered cards, JBF sent me two of those as well. The first is a Rollie Fingers card from the 2005 Donruss Team Heroes set -- and I am guessing this is the "showdown silver" parallel, but I don't know that for sure. It is serial numbered 49 of 50.  The second is a J.J. Hardy card saying it is an "Authentic Ticket Stub Plus 2 Relic card of J.J. Hardy from 2009 Topps Ticket to Stardom Baseball."  I'm glad that the card identified itself clearly.

The final baseball cards in the package were from the 2009 Upper Deck Season Documentary set, and both of them picture the hefty lefty, CC Sabathia.

As everyone knows, though, JBF usually does not stop with the obvious card needs like "hits" or "cards from a want list." He has accumulated a wide array of cards from other sports and for other teams that other collectors just do not have. For this package, that meant that I received some Georgia football cards.  

Artie Lynch graduated from Georgia after the 2013 season. Lynch grew up in Massachusetts and pretty much retained that Massachusetts accent despite four years in the fair city of Athens. He was named as the first team All-SEC tight end his senior year. He was drafted by the Miami Dolphins in the fifth round of the NFL draft last year. But then he suffered a back injury in off-season team activities and spent the 2014 season on injured reserve.

Garrison Hearst was at Georgia while I was attending college at Vanderbilt. Even Ray Goff couldn't screw Hearst up, and Goff is the guy who played any number of running backs (including Hearst, mind you) ahead of Terrell Davis.

Here's my wallet card, Robert Edwards.  That story is here.

Finally, the Georgia Bulldogs cards ended with an autograph of Fred Gibson. Gibson was a frustrating player, both at Georgia and in the pros with Pittsburgh. Basically, he and Reggie Brown were two of the top three wide receiver recruits. On signing day, supposedly Gibson flipped a coin between Georgia and Florida and chose the Dawgs as a result. It always seemed during his career that he had more to give. Despite finishing his career in the top three in yards and receptions, he is remembered nearly as much for a dropped pass against Florida in 2003 as for his positive plays.

And through it all, Gibson would have much rather been playing basketball. In fact, his final professional sports job was in the NBA D-League in the 2008-2009 season. At least Gibson was smart enough to go back to Georgia and finish out his degree.

The thing is, I don't really collect football cards. But guess what? I met an 8-year-old who does. So the Georgia football cards other than Robert Edwards left my possession on Friday.

The final cards JBF sent me were Milwaukee Bucks cards. One card was of Ray Allen. By the time that Allen made it to Milwaukee, though, I had long since ceased to care about NBA basketball generally and the Milwaukee Bucks in particular. 

Growing up, though, I spent a fair amount of the winter watching the Don Nelson-coached Bucks come so close so many times to getting to the NBA Finals -- only to be denied by either the Philadelphia 76ers or Boston Celtics. One of the stars of those Bucks teams was a guard from the University of Arkansas, Sidney Moncrief. What a fitting way to put the figurative cherry on top of this package.

Thank you very much, JBF -- these cards and the memories they brought were greatly appreciated.

Invigorated...and #walletcard sits down to type

Things are almost getting back to normal for me after my job change. I'm starting to work a fairly regular schedule again -- as opposed to over the holidays, when I would sit and sort cards all day since there was no point in my going into the office. I'm working a fair amount at trying to develop business, which at this point is being accomplished by contacting people I've worked with in the past.

I'm still not all the way back on blogging, though. My 1982 Topps blog has lagged severely in the past two months as I've been getting ready for my job change. I had a ton of pretty important things I had to do -- set up a limited liability company, set up two bank accounts, get my cell phone number transferred to me by my firm, get a new phone to replace the BlackBerry I had, get a new computer to be my work computer (and, since it's an Apple, that has been a heck of a learning experience), getting health insurance set up, and get all the technology talking to each other properly so that I can actually get my work e-mail on my smartphone.

Just remembering everything I needed to do was a chore. Getting all of it done...well, I'm getting there.  It's a tricky process to walk that line between being respectful to the job I had and making preparations for the job I was going to have.

All of that is just a further explanation as to why I'm still a little behind on blogging.

Last night, though, injected some life back in to my collecting and blogging. My wife organized a neighborhood party and made two crock pots of chili for it. We had a bunch of people over, including one family whom I know somewhat but not very well. They brought their 8-year-old son and their 9-year-old daughter along, and one task for the night was to entertain them. The boy dug right in when I turned on my Playstation for him and he started playing one of the EA Sports NCAA football games as the Georgia Bulldogs, which made me smile.  

About midway through the night, though, my wife was talking to the boy's mother. His mom told my wife that her son (and her husband) both love baseball and that her son collects baseball cards. That led to the boy, the mom, the dad, the mom's sister, and the daughter all coming into my baseball card room to see my collection. They didn't believe me when I estimated that I have about 70,000 cards or more...now they do.

The dad is a big Cincinnati Reds fan, and he was very proud of the fact that they had found that a former Reds player from the 1910s is a third- or fourth-cousin of theirs. I happened to have a Reds franchise history book on my shelf that I got about 12 years ago when I was buying a lot of baseball books. I pulled out my Reds cards, and the boy started looking through them. 

Suddenly, half the party came upstairs to my card room. People were telling stories about the Big Red Machine in the 1970s, how Davey Concepcion should be in the Hall of Fame, what players they remembered meeting, who was nice, who was not -- just as if they were the 8-year-old kids again. So, I pulled out a card that any Reds fan and nearly any baseball fan would have to appreciate -- a 1981 Donruss Johnny Bench autographed card that I got back in about 1982. I think the dad was more excited by that than the boy was.

As it turned out, the boy is also a big Freddie Freeman fan (living in Atlanta and all). I happened to have a 2014 Allen & Ginter Freeman relic that came out in Gint-A-Cuffs last summer, so I gave him that and some 2013 Topps Stickers and, yes, I gave him the Johnny Bench autograph. 

It really reminded me what collecting is really about. It's about keeping what you want and what you like, and what you give away will put smiles on other people's faces.

Kind of like how #walletcard Robert Edwards makes me smile. It's why Robert joined me at my computer tonight.

For what it's worth, my computer background changes every 30 seconds to show another card I've scanned. It just happened to be Blue Jay Molitor this time.

Thanks for reading tonight -- some cards will appear tomorrow on this blog. I promise.

#WalletCard: Robert Goes to Work

This morning, it's absolutely freezing cold in Atlanta. It's not Chicago/Buffalo cold, but 11 degrees with a windchill of -1 is not warm anywhere.

That cold did not deter Robert Edwards The Wallet Card from accompanying me to work this morning. He did insist, however, on basking in the rays of the rising sun on my window:

I hope wherever you are that you are staying warm.

A PWE from P-Town Tom ... and I'll Join in the #WalletCard Hashtagging

A couple of weeks ago, I received a single card in the mail from P-Town Tom from Waiting 'til Next Year. It was a Christmas Card with a Christmas gift in it -- and it was an excellent addition to my Robin Yount collection:

Tom expressed joy in finding a Robin Yount card that I don't have. I definitely like it when people send me cards like that -- I know it's tough for me to find cards to send other people in trades a lot of times because either I don't know what they want/need or they have such large collections that they have everything I can contribute.

I definitely appreciated the Christmas joy from Peoria.  Thanks Tom!

#WalletCard

The other part of this post is joining in the pack. In various iterations, the idea of carrying cards around with you everywhere you go is one that I think is kind of fun. Defgav from Baseball Card Breakdown posted his idea to put a card in your wallet -- one that makes you smile when you see it, of course -- and to take photos of it when you go various places and do things.  

The idea caught fire rapidly among all of us bloggers and on Twitter -- so much so that even Cardboard Connection wrote up a story about it two days ago. Admittedly, I tend not to be a follower of trends. If I were, I wouldn't be a Brewers fan. But, this is a trend that I can get on board with.

So, I decided to choose a card that will be featured in an upcoming post as one received from the ever prolific JayBarkerFan. The strange thing is that it is not a baseball card at all. It doesn't even carry the picture of a professional athlete. And, it comes from a card issuer that just announced it is going out of business.  

Still, this card makes me smile:

This is a card of former Georgia Bulldogs and New England Patriots running back Robert Edwards. Edwards was injury prone -- never playing a complete season in Athens -- and then had his career basically destroyed when he completely annihilated one of his legs and knees in a rookie sand flag football game as part of the Pro Bowl festivities. I mean, the guy almost lost his leg in the incident...the damage was that bad.

I remember Robert Edwards for something else though. In my first game as a University of Georgia student (in law school), Georgia played against South Carolina. Because I was a member of the Vanderbilt Marching Band, I never experienced a college football game as purely a spectator before that day. Ray Goff was still coaching Georgia that day.

Lining up at quarterback for the Dawgs was sophomore quarterback -- and now Colorado State University head coach -- Mike Bobo. The Dawgs third leading receiver -- and also the quarterback with the most yards passing that season -- was future Super Bowl MVP Hines Ward. In the defensive backfield and the leading kickoff returner for the Dawgs that year was a freshman from Bainbridge, Georgia -- current Alabama defensive coordinator Kirby Smart.

But the star of the show that game against South Carolina was Robert Edwards. He set a Georgia record by scoring 5 touchdowns in the game -- 4 rushing, 1 receiving -- and the Dawgs destroyed the Gamecocks 42-23. Edwards had been moved from defensive back to running back in spring practice, and his performance made Ray Goff look like a genius. If you remember those days of Georgia football, well, it was tough to make Goff look smart.

The next game Georgia played was at Tennessee, and the Dawgs lost 30-27. In that game, Edwards tore his ACL and missed the rest of the season. He just wasn't built to last through all that hitting.

This card, though, makes me recall my days as a 23-year-old law student. It was 20 years ago this year, so this card is the perfect card to bring a smile to my face.

And it's my wallet card.

Catching Up: A PWE from Mark Hoyle

In the past few weeks, my blogging has slacked off to next to nothing. There are a lot of reasons for that. The first reason is one that I mentioned just before the end of the year -- that I got busy with organization. The second reason was Christmas and New Year's and all that.  

The third reason is perhaps the most personal though. I have been in the process of transitioning from large law firm life -- with its corporate, wait-for-work atmosphere based around a few rainmakers bringing in large clients and cases for which the clients are willing to pay, say, $600 an hour for a lawyer who has practiced 15 years and upwards of $900 an hour for the senior people -- to small firm life. Small firm life for me is now reality -- I'm part of a five-attorney firm now, and I'm in the process of trying to build a practice of my own. It's a tough move to make in many ways, and it's taken a lot of my mental energy to deal with all the changes.

Now that I've started though, it's back to being more of a day-to-day job. It's moved from worrying about the unknown to focusing on making this move pay off for me emotionally, financially, and personally. So, it means that I'm now finally able to get back to writing on my blog at night sometimes. I may not write as frequently, but I will keep writing. Also, I'm going to kick start the 1982 Topps blog again as well.

To get things going again here, I have to catch up on some envelopes and packages that I received last month. This first PWE came from vintage collector extraordinaire, Mark Hoyle. Mark sent me a mix of Milwaukee Brewers and Braves with the 1960s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s all represented.

These first two cards are our 2010s representatives and, in many respects, they represent the good and bad of modern collecting. The good: bringing back classic designs from yesteryear. The bad: incessant parallels. I do not know who is telling Topps that the hobby needs more parallels, but whoever it is probably ran Press Pass.

Sorry. Low blow to Press Pass.

Moving back to the beginning of the 2000s, we have this Fleer Impact from the year 2000. Having not collected through the late 1990s and early 2000s but, now, having created a checklist through 1998 and a wantlist through 1995 (and I've organized everything through 1998 as well), I sort of wish I had collected then. Yes, there were too many card issuers with a lot of sets. But, even so, the variety and diversity in collecting must have been a lot of fun at times -- even if it was in some respects just as frustrating as collecting today.

The older I get, the more I start missing the 1990s in many respects. I did not have the same responsibilities then -- I was in school for 7 years then with a year off living at home in between. It was a fun time for me -- being in my 20s and, by the end of the decade, having some money to have fun in a great city of Atlanta. These cards show off the focus of collecting then as well -- the cards either were psychadelic 1995 Fleer, or they were full bleed photos with foil. Yeah, they start to look alike at times, but at least the companies used different photos on their various products.

When I got back into collecting, I think it was because I was nostalgic for the early 1980s -- pre-1984 in particular. Things went wrong in the middle of the 1980s though. Topps started with parallels in 1984, issuing both the uncut-sheet set with Nestle logos on them and the first of the Topps Tiffany sets. The bubble in baseball cards and speculating on rookies began in earnest with the 1984 Donruss sets. All that led to increased buying of cards, increased production runs, and, soon, in 1986, the weird Sportsflics cards. I mean, I get that some folks like the multi-photo stuff on these (and the Slurpee discs that came out around that time as well), but I am not a fan. I needed this card, though.

The piece de résistance of the envelope was the 1960s representative, Milwaukee Braves outfielder Wes Covington, a North Carolina native who served as Hank Aaron's cohort through Aaron's trip through the Braves minor league system. But, Covington was considered to be a better prospect than Aaron -- at least that is what Aaron said (quoted here in Covington's SABR biography). He moved to Canada after some "tax issues" forced him to leave the US, and that is where he died -- in Edmonton in 2011.

Mark, please accept my apologies for taking so long to highlight these cards, and thank you very much for the trip through the decades that this card took me on.

Taking Stock, Part II: Looking Ahead

In my most recent post -- written a week ago -- I sort of recounted my learning curve over this past year of getting back into card collecting. That post turned itself into a post about why I collect what I collect and wondering whether I'm out of touch with other collectors. 

The gist of that post, when boiled down to its essential elements, is that I like to have definition in my hobbies and my life. It's not that I'm tied to having "rules" though. It's more that I like to have specific ideas and reasonable explanations in my head for what I collect or what I do. 

To that end and in one of the least original post ideas around, here is what I would like to accomplish in 2015 in collecting. 

1.  Finish creating my Brewers checklists. 

The cataloging process for me is a two-step process. It's both creating the checklist and filling in what I have on the checklist. I use my own spreadsheets for this because I am not comfortable enough with Access to go that route.  

I tried in the past to use online databases such as Zistle and Trading Card Database to catalogue my cards, but I got frustrated with these user-created sources for a few reasons. First, they are incomplete. This is especially true for the oddball sections of my collection.  Second, they are incomplete. People add sets and checklists to these databases without filling in team information for players. That makes the results on the back-end when I sort for just Brewers cards incomplete. Finally, many of these lists are incorrect, inaccurate, or confusing -- whether it is for leaving off the particular serial number to which a certain parallel is numbered, for leading users to believe that certain sets are numbered in a certain way when the cards give no such indication (usually caused by people assuming that alphabetical checklists for an unnumbered set provided elsewhere is a real numbering system), or for photos being incorrectly submitted for a particular parallel.

2.  Correct Trading Card Database information when possible. 

If I'm going to use a source but complain about it, well, how about I do something about it and fix it where I can? 

3.  Finish creating my Brewers Want Lists.

The whole point of creating the checklists is to see what I have and what I don't have. I have been spending a lot of my time in December working on this particular aspect of my collecting, and it is what has diverted my attention away from blogging.  I've made it part way through 1995 as of this post's writing, and I feel like I need to keep plugging away on it to get it "done" while I have the momentum.

4.  Budget for collecting.

A major change this year for me is that I am going from having a defined, definite, steady income every two weeks to having a sporadic income once a month. Obviously, making payments on insurance policies, my mortgage, and my credit cards will take precedence over buying baseball cards. But, when things settle down on the work front, hopefully I will have the ability to create a defined budget for collecting.

5.  Send out Packages.

I have been bad about this over the past several months. I have promised people that I would send a package to them, and then I don't get around to doing it for a while. I'm making no excuses here, either -- I just need to get better at it.

6.  Catch up on my Milwaukee Braves collecting.

Collecting the Milwaukee Braves is my way of collecting vintage cards from the 1950s and 1960s. I have a decent number of Braves cards at this point, yet I have not done anything to catalogue them, to create any checklists for them, or to determine what collectibles even exist. 

7.  Relax and enjoy the hobby.

It's not that I've been chasing any of the high-end products. It's not that I would turn down getting some of the high-end products if they showed up in my mailbox, either. It's just that I have to stop myself from getting so worked up about "OMG TOO MANY PARALLELS" and just collect. 

The part I hate about this is that it makes me make decisions and draw lines about what I will collect or chase and what I won't collect or chase. At the same time, I'd go insane trying to collect everything -- even if that was my goal as a kid. 

In the end, all of this boils down to a couple of things. It's seeing what I have, what I don't have, and deciding what I will try to collect. 

This is a lifelong hobby. Think about it: At some point in 2025 on some auction site/at some flea market/in some storage unit sale, someone's 2014 Topps Target Red Parallel complete set will come up for sale. It may be more expensive at that point than it would be right now, but if I can't buy it now, hopefully I'll be able to buy it in the future. 

So I keep telling myself -- relax and enjoy it. No one is judging you for not collecting Topps Dynasty, and, at the same time, don't judge someone who does. If it makes them happy to spend $300 on a pack of cards that is literally just one card, well, great. If it doesn't make them happy to do that but they do it anyway, that's their problem. Not mine.

Here's to a great 2015, and to a great year of collecting.

The State of My Hobby, One Year In: Taking Stock

It's nearly 2015. About one year ago, I paid to ship all my baseball cards I had collected as a kid from my mom's house in Wisconsin to my house in Georgia. From the time that I left law school, I had intended on restarting my childhood obsession of card collecting. Now that I'm married and have a house (rather than being single and in a condo), I decided it was a good time to start again.

Once I got those cards, I started sorting through them. That process took a while because about midway through the sort, I decided to sort the cards by teams. That was to assist me in trading.

Immediately, though, I had a problem. I wanted to buy cards, but I didn't know what to buy. It figured out quickly that I had a lot to learn. Concepts like blasters, hobby boxes versus retail boxes, licensed products versus unlicensed products, hits, inserts, and parallels were all ones that confused me entirely.

I started reading. I read blogs. I did Google searches. I looked at Amazon, eBay, Cardboard Connection, Sports Collectors Daily, and Trading Card Database. Once I had enough knowledge to feel like I wouldn't embarrass myself completely, I started blogging. 

In the process, I learned a lot. More to the point, I learned that my initial "completist" thoughts -- that somehow I would work to complete all the major sets -- either were crazy, would put me into bankruptcy, or both. It was disconcerting to jump into this hobby without some sort of "definition" or, dare I say it, "rules," for what I would collect. 

Reading blogs, though, made me realize that rules in collecting are nonexistent. Now, as a lawyer, I have to follow rules very closely to make sure that I am doing everything for my clients in a way that comports with what the law requires me to do. That kind of thinking was instilled in me early in my life, but law school and practicing law reinforced it. 

As a result, I created my own rules. I decided to collect my favorite team -- the Milwaukee Brewers -- and, in addition, to create player collections of the players I cheered for as a kid, or the players I heard stories about as a kid, or, moving forward, the players I think of when I think of the Brewers (that's guys like Sheets, Burnitz, Cirillo, Vaughn, Fielder, etc.). 

To do that, I needed to figure out what I have and what I don't have. Perhaps the most difficult part of that is figuring out what I don't have. I needed to put together checklists of what cards I don't have.

The problem with that is that being complete is a long, torturous process for me. I have to establish my own internal rules of what I will track, what I will collect, and for what I will create a checklist. Because I like consistency, it's easier for me to create a complete checklist by including everything. It's easier in terms of what I include on the checklist, but it's damn near impossible to feel like my work on putting the checklist together is "done."

Once the checklist is reasonably complete for a particular year, then I use the checklist like a checklist -- seeing what I have and what I need and creating my want lists (like this one that I'm done with through 1992).  

It's great to go through that process for me since I am a completist, but it is an incredibly time consuming process to complete all those checklists. For example, the past two days I've spent going through the 2014 sets at Cardboard Connection (which I have found to be organized in a way that I understand more easily than other websites for very recent sets) to put together as complete a list as I can for 2014. 

Going through all the Topps sets alone (including Bowman in that), I identified 2912 different Brewers cards from 2014. That includes all the printing plates, 1 of 1s, high-end sets like Dynasty and Triple Threads, and low-end sets like Topps Opening Day. That is a LOT of cards.

It makes being a completist impossible, too. No matter if I were willing to pony up hundreds and thousands of dollars to buy as many of the 1 of 1 cards as come onto the market (I'm not), the problem is that most of those 1 of 1s never actually come onto the market. I mean, how sure can we be that all of the 1 of 1s are even inserted into the products? And so, I start drawing lines: what are the cards I'm willing to buy? What cards will I chase? What cards should even be listed as ones I want to add to my collection?

It's not that I meant for this to become any sort of rant. I've ranted before here, after all, about some sets having skewed checklists toward the "big market" teams. It does not do any good to get all upset about it, though. 

All that said, it's all good in many respects. I don't have to collect Topps Supreme if I don't want to. Those cards on the checklist just remain as "N" under the column "In team collection?" on my Brewers card spreadsheets. 

The concern, though, is that Topps and its continually rumored financial issues will cause Topps to go away, be bought by Panini, or otherwise cease to exist in its present form. If/when that happens, then what? 

Are "cardboard" collectors dinosaurs, soon to be extinct or forced into extinction? Will we be like those people who collect 78 RPM records, longing for a "good old days" that never really existed and of which we probably never were a part? 

Further, is Topps tone-deaf to what collectors want? So many of us bloggers seem to say that we do not want the high-end hits, that we don't chase that stuff unless we're chasing a player collection rainbow of some sort, or that we just don't like new cards. 

So why are the high-end cards and all the parallels proliferating like nuclear weapons in the 1960s?

Or, am I the one out of step with where the hobby is going by not chasing the proverbial "SICK HITZZZ" that seem to populate Twitter like so many locusts?

What do you think? 

Where you been, boy?

So, I didn't mean for 10 days to pass between blog posts here and over two weeks to pass on my 1982 Topps Blog. My last ten days have been pretty filled up with activities, travel, and general organizational stuff, along with the Christmas holidays.

Then, today is my birthday (happy birthday to me!).

What all that means is this: I'll be back blogging early next week, probably. 

I am still months behind on getting packages sent out to people that should have received them long ago. I wish I could say for sure that I know that I will get stuff out in the mail in the next week. I hope to do that. But I can't guarantee it. I'm sorry to all of you to whom I owe cards.

In the meantime, I've been getting caught up organizing my early 1990s cards. There are so many different cards available from that timeframe that it is daunting even to create a checklist. But, I'm plowing through right now.

Also, what has been grabbing the main part of my attention is work stuff. I'm hopeful that I will be able to put all of that behind me in the next few months.

All that said, really, I should have posted before this. 

But, I'm still here and I'm still going to be posting here and collecting and all that. It's just a busy time.

Thanks again to all of you for reading, for sending me cards, and for making my first year back collecting baseball cards an enjoyable one!

A Very Ranger Christmas

Over the past two months, I have been the fortunate recipient of cards from Rob/Spiff at Texas Rangers Cards. Being that I'm really bad at reading comprehension and, occasionally, at clicking through links, it took me literally until TODAY to discover Rob's very comprehensive want list site at Spiff's World.

So, despite admonishing me "No Return Needed", I'm going to try to put something together.

The second package from Rob was yet another large stack of Brewers cards. These have been great to get because it means less typing on my Want List Pages (now complete from 1970 through 1990!). Here are the highlights from the Ranger Christmas speetacular:

A 1990 Bowman Jim Gantner. I am using this card to remind ya'll that were loading up on cards in the early 1990s that a few of us sat that time in the hobby out. Instead of collecting baseball cards, I was learning marching band drill at Vanderbilt.

Ted Williams set card of Cecil Cooper from 1993. I'm not sure if I like this card yet. Coop rightfully does not get as much recognition as either of his Hall of Fame teammates Robin Yount and Paul Molitor. Yet, I think I'd prefer this card if it had just one photo on the front.

Big Rob Deer. He was always a very intense man as a player.

The Ignitor.

These four Sheets cards were cool to get. I like the Bazooka cards, but I have yet to understand why card companies think selling to kids means an apparent dumbing down of cards. Most kids are dying to grow up fast, and emphasizing their being kids will make them ignore you. It might work to get a 5-year-old into cards to have cartoony graphics and fonts, but the 10-year-olds will stay away from the Kids stuff.

Yes, there were a lot of 1990 Bowman in this package. That's a good thing, because I think that Robin Yount might have been my only card from that set before this Spiffying up.

I have read a fair number of people complaining about the Upper Deck Baseball Heroes parallels and sets generally. I guess I haven't gotten into those enough to hate them. I'm sure I will.

Greg Vaughn was everything he was advertised to be. It's too bad that the Brewers traded him away just as he started hitting fifty home runs. It couldn't have been that he was using PEDs, right? I mean, read the Mitchell Report (written by the law firm at which I have worked for the past 9 years, DLA Piper) -- it has plenty of former Brewers in it (aside from the obvious current perpetrator of course). But DLA Piper...that's a story for another time.

I'm certain that Spiff would like to see big Prince back on the All-Star team this coming year. From my perspective, I'd like Fielder to rebound from the injuries. I hate seeing guys miss parts of their prime for any reason.

The only player for whom I have any minor league cards in my collection is Cal Eldred. Now I have two Cal Eldred minor league cards.

I have had a Chrome version of this card for several months, so it threw me off to find out that I needed the Heritage base card. My memory works in such a way that I tend to remember photos and sites pretty well, so often times I purchase cards based off what I recall having or not having. It works about 85% of the time at avoiding duplicates.

Apparently, it fails 15% of the time with endless parallels.

A Rickie Weeks Ultra Gold Brought to you by Old Spice or Fleer or something like that. At some point, I'm going to start remembering all these parallels.

Black borders are good. 1971 -- good. 1985 Donruss -- good.

Finally, despite being on a Bazooka card, I cannot tell you whether he is Forever Blowing Bubbles like fans of West Ham United.

Rob/Spiff, thank you very much for the two great packages. I'm glad that I finally came across where your want lists are too, so that hopefully I'll be able to send you some packages after the new year. May you and your family have a Very Ranger Christmas!

Then again, after all the injuries the Rangers had last year, let me amend that: May you and your family have a very SAFE and Happy Holiday season and a joyous New Year!