Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Drink It In, Man

Leave it up to me to manage to get sick right when the weather turns nice.  I know the "put your coat on or you'll catch a cold" stuff isn't supposed to be true.  But here we are, every single year.  Nice day, leave coat at home, boom.  Sick, laid up in bed the last couple days.

So forgive the delay in posting.  Nothing beats feeling like garbage while rays of sunshine and chirping birds frolic just outside your window.

I've been reflecting a lot less on what I collect but how I collect.  This isn't going to be one of those "completely changing my collecting focus" posts, so don't worry.

But one thing that I've found over the last few years is that I find it harder to appreciate cards.  And when I say appreciate, I think I mean obsessively dissect.  I can describe, in vivid detail, every line, curve, and blade of grass on Ken Griffey, Jr.'s 2000 Topps card, his first as a Red.  Those little red league leader italics in the stat line are burned into my brain.  And I can quote the back of cards like it's a holy text.

And I'm sure I'm not alone.  I poured over my cards, taking in the fronts and backs time and time again.  Now, I add cards to my collection that are probably twenty times cooler, look them over, enter them in a spreadsheet, add them to the appropriate binder, and flip by them ever so often.
 And sure, there are a lot of reasons for that.  Not being 12 is one of them, for sure.  I think the wife would have me chopped up in a wood chipper if I spent my evenings re-reading baseball cards instead of cutting the grass or washing some dishes. 
 But there's more.  There are just SO MANY CARDS.  Seriously, take a look at some checklists.  According to Beckett, Randy Johnson had 365 cards in 1999.  In 2017, he had 344. 

There were 1,324 Pirate cards in 2000.  Last year there were 7,304 released, and 1,148 under the Bowman banner alone.
 And as much as I slow my collecting down, paring myself down to just the cards that I really, truly appreciate, the chase still feels never-ending.  And in a lot of ways, it should.  We're simultaneously in the golden age and dark ages of cardboard.  Look how freaking cool baseball cards can look right now!

But the center of the hobby universe continues to reside in taking the same autograph or patch, numbering it 600 different ways with 600 different tints of blue foil, and telling everyone their card is one of a kind.
 But seriously.  Look around.  Look what is out there, and tell me that if you had seen that exact same card in 1985, or 1995, or hell, even 2005, it wouldn't have had you foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog.

And that is where the catch comes in.  Or maybe just some fever induced madness.  I'm not staking a claim one way or the other right now.

I don't know what the answer is, or if there's a good one.  Because instead of opening a pack or two with 11 cards per pack, I pull packages from my mailbox a hundred cards deep.  Times have changed, and a lot of that change is fantastic.

But to borrow a line from Ferris Bueller, this hobby moves pretty fast.  If we don't stop and look around once in a while, we could miss it.

9 comments:

  1. I think about 3000 of those Pirate cards are Marte and Polanco autos/relics. As a team collector I crave variety and unless one of the young Pirates turns into a good everyday players it will be more of the same guys this year. When things go stale I usually just turn to my WVU collection for several months.

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    1. To me the best thing about being a team collector is there's always *something* to chase. When I lose interest in the current stuff, I work backwards and start filling in my vintage team sets or trying to complete a mid 00's Topps Gold set. When Topps or UD would saturate every product with the same rookie auto, I could live with it. At least it was one and done. But getting three, four years of Polanco and Marte autos without any variety kills me. I'd rather overpay and go pick up a Don Kelly auto I don't have than buy my 16th Polanco.

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  2. Great post. I support the belief that "less is more". I wish card companies would cut back on their production and spend more time in designing and producing quality cards for us to collect. The reason I've scaled down my collecting big time over the past few years is because there's just no way I'll ever be able to own every Gwynn or Altuve card. As a child growing up in the 80's, that was still a possibility. As for taking the time to sift through cards and soak them in. I only did that my first few years. By 1987, I was ripping through packs as fast as I could and sorting them into team lots. It's only been recently that I've gone back and looked at some of those cards and thought... dang, these are really nice.

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    1. To me the pace is just insane, especially when you consider there are basically two card companies producing baseball cards. To have more cards coming out when there are 1/4 as many companies is just insanity to me.

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  3. Collecting is a weird thing today. I like ripping packs just because of the thrill of seeing the new cards in hand and the potential of pulling an insert, but I find myself being able to get amazing looking cards on COMC or eBay to add to my favorite player/Rays-Devil Rays/Tigers/Highlights/Rookie Card/Refractor binders for good prices, and I think I could have some really cool binders and less crap that I don’t want like hundreds of Yankees if I would just order a few times a year on COMC instead of wasting money on packs. I don’t think I could ever get myself to stop ripping them, though.
    I also feel what was said about the sheer volume and hundreds of parallels. I am trying to collect all of Brody Koerner’s cards from 2016 Elite Extra Edition, minus the autographs. I’ve got close to finishing. Just missing one of the Gold 1/1’s, but it is crazy how many cards he has when he has only been in 1 release. I think if I’m correct, he has 8 cards including all the parallels, and then autographed versions of each. I would probably waste between 500-1,000 bucks if I were to go after the autographed ones, and I’m not made of money. If he gets into a Bowman set, I’m screwed. There must’ve been 10 different colors in last years set, and then all of them have an autographed version. Too many cards.
    I miss how back in the ‘90’s, you KNEW what a players best rookie card was, and actually had a chance of pulling it. You had a shot in hell at pulling Jeter’s SP rookie or Andruw Jones’ Bowman’s Best card. Now even if you can decipher which parallel card is a players best rookie card, you don’t have a chance in hell at pulling it because of the scarcity of it. It just ruins it for the guy who can’t spend a mortgage payment on a box of cards every week. Nothing new I guess. I’m afraid that collecting will be a rich mans hobby and that flagship Topps will be no more. People will be forced to make custom sets and sell them online until Topps cracks down and files a lawsuit and then we will only have a Panini-like custom set to choose from.

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    1. A few years ago I quit wax cold turkey. I open maybe a dozen or two dozen packs a year - a pack of two of S1, 2 and Update, and usually a blaster of Opening Day. The rest I spent at shows and COMC. I usually go on a little spending spree when COMC does their big sitewide sales. For $50 or $100, I end up having a box of refractors, autos, and other awesome cards shipped to my door. The same money in blasters would usually yield me a couple dozen base cards and maybe a could inserts I wanted to keep.

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  4. I still discover cards/designs from the last few years that I had no idea ever existed. This post added a couple to that fold with the TEKnicians and Golden Leather inserts. To me, it keeps things fresh. I don't feel pressure to research every single set that's being released these days, because doing so would be extremely time consuming and/or impossible. As a result, I'm always discovering new things whenever I go to card shows, and that's one of the main reasons I still love the card show experience so much.

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  5. It's definitely getting to the point that new stuff is going to run into the ground. I decide whether I want Topps flagship, and then see if I like A&G, GQ, Heritage, or Bunt. After that, I pretty much cross everything else off. Don't do high end or Bowman, so there isn't much left. If none of those are exciting, then I'm done.
    It seems this year that they've watered down the creativity behind flagship in favor of star power. I can see a year coming that I only buy older singles and lots and skip the entire new product year.

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    1. Yeah, that's pretty much where I am. I'll complete a team set of the newer stuff and grab parallels if they're cheap and easily found. But gone are the days when I try to complete team sets of the parallels or actively chase specific cards. There's just too much out there to keep track of. I've been slowly filling in older holes and it's a lot more enjoyable for me.

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