It's the Big One, Elizabeth

I'm not someone who considers myself to have much of a want list.  When it comes to my team collections, it's more about finding a card I don't have at a price I like.  There just aren't many cards out there that I'm actively prowling for that very card specifically.

So the few true "wants" I have?  They're kind of a big deal to me.

In the days before half the products being high end releases, it was touch to find higher end Pirate cards even worth chasing.  Multi-player autos of multiple Pirates players were exceptionally rare.  So when I first spotted this quad auto in 2006, I just about lost it.

And then I realized that Perez and Casey were both listed playing for other teams.  Both players had been dumped mid-season (Casey on his own bobblehead day), but Upper Deck was notorious for being slow to update player movement.

Just not when it benefitted the Bucs collectors.  Somehow the team at UD managed to change the design and photos to accommodate the move to larger market clubs.  Meanwhile, they would still be releasing Adam LaRoche Braves cards two years into his Pirate tenure.  But I digress...

For years, this was a card I desperately wanted, but refused to add to my collection due to the team switcharoo.  But time and general disinterest in current products heals all wounds.  And this card shot back near the top of my want list over the last couple years.

At 25 copies, it's not the easiest to find.  But I was thrilled to find one on ebay from a Canadian seller (Bay is Canadian, and had a pretty strong collector base up north at the peak of his career), and won the auction for about $7.  Even though I'm sill a little salty over the non-Pirates, I'm thrilled to add this one to my collection.

And if snagging one card off my want list wasn't good enough, how's two?  While this looks like just an ordinary Jack Wilson card that doesn't scan particularly well, it's long eluded me.  This is supposedly the common, unnumbered version of this auto that also has a blue parallel /15 and a gold parallel /10.  But as was common with Donruss' autograph inserts, the number of cards for each player was often pretty irregular, depending on how many stickers they had available.

In the decade plus of looking for this card, I had only seen one copy.  And that one was in the collection of a fellow Jack collector.  It's "common" status was pretty misleading.

I already have the blue parallel, and still need the gold to complete the run.  But I was thrilled to land this one for just $5.  It's been slow goings adding to the Jack Wilson collection in recent years, but that just makes each new find that much more enjoyable.

I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends

I'm pretty proud of the Pirates collection I've amassed.  At times collecting can feel overwhelming.  At times I wonder if I might be sliding down a very weird compulsive slope when I realize I checked COMC for new cards twice in a day.  But at the end of the day, I just simply enjoy the cards I've accumulated...even if I am always on the hunt for more.

But that collection isn't simply thanks to some great dime bins and way too much time shopping on the internet.  I've been fortunate enough to come across some really great people while collecting.  Whether it's trades or folks simple sending me a card because they know it would have a good home in my collection, some of my favorite cards are ones that came to me from another collector.

But it comes down to more than just cardboard.  I've met some really great people through collecting.  And right at the top of the list are my group of Team Collector friends.  I know I've been mentioning the group a good bit lately.  I swear this isn't just a cheap plug for our upcoming Heritage/Donruss/Opening Day break, which we still have a few slots open for.  Ok, maybe that was.  It's a genuinely great group of people, who I genuinely consider among my group of friends.  We even try to get together once a year for a Team Collector Convention.  Not bad for a bunch of guys (and a girl) from across the country who started out just trading baseball cards.

So for me, any cards I get from the group hold a little asterisk in my mind, right up there with cards that came as a gift from my parents.  

So I was pretty excited when I had a box waiting for me the other day.  See, the way the group works is that there are Tier 1 and Tier 2 collectors.  The Tier 1 guys all trade with each other.  By the time I joined the group, the Pirates had already been claimed, so I got slotted in as a Tier 2.  I round up stuff for the other 29 teams, send it to the Tier 1 Pirates guy who dishes it out among the group, and then sends me his Pirates doubles.

 Doubles might not be the right word.  Barry, the Pirates Tier 1 collector, is a great guy.  He has a ton of cards, but I'd guess not alllll of these were doubles.  The package he sent me was absolutely loaded.  The Luis Heredia card is an X-Fractor /25.  It graded well, but I'm tempted to crack it free and slot it into my binder where it belongs.

 And while Kenny Lofton's stay in Pittsburgh was short, he was really exciting to watch.  While perhaps not the dynamic player that sparked the Cleveland offense a few years earlier, he was still near the top of his game.  And he brought an electricity to PNC Park that I hadn't seen again until the last couple years.  But he has tragic few Pirates cards.

 And what package would be complete without some mid 00's Bucco love?  The Pirates haven't fared too well in home run derbies.

And don't even get me started on Oliver Perez.  Even though his career in Pittsburgh fizzled quickly, he was still one of the more exciting pitchers I've watched between 2004 and 2005.

The cards are great, and welcomed additions to my collection.  But collecting is about more than just the cardboard.  My collection wouldn't be anywhere near where it is without the great folks I've met along the way.  And that's worth way more than the value of some ink, cardboard, and pieces of fabric.

Back to Basics

Since moving back to PA, the sudden lack of card shows is leaving me feeling way out of touch.  One of the few benefits to being in Ohio was the regular access to card shows.  With a large show every month in Dayton and even larger shows in Columbus every few months, most of the commons from a new release and with some luck a decent number of the parallels would find their way into my collection within weeks of the product hitting the streets.

There is a show in November.  Other than that, there is not a single show, mall show, awkward little hotel show, or anything else between here and 2014 in all of western PA. 

That's the long way of saying I know 2013 A&G came out.  But I don't know a damn thing about it, except that the design doesn't make me want to drive 5 hours to go buy them at a show (and yes, I am overlooking the far more rational and cost effective option of just buying the things online).

As I've started adding my Pirate collection to binder pages, it provides an awesome opportunity to view my collection from a new perspective.  Up until now, my dozen or so monster boxes and shoe boxes were organized as such: commons by year and set with dividers marking each year, inserts/numbered cards/rarer parallels in their own box(es), a shoebox of certified autos, and a couple monster boxes of ip/ttm autos organized alphabetically.  Of course there were the odd boxes of cards still in need of sorting as well.

Point is...I could never really see all the cards from one release in one place without either pulling a bunch of cards from different places or the magic of photoshop.

So when I gathered all the cards together and put them on the page...



Oh my. 

Maybe the skies didn't open, the clouds didn't part, and it wasn't one of those ah-ha moments the way it is seeing the Sistine Chapel or Roman Coliseum.  But it sure felt like it.

2006 Allen & Ginter was a thing of beauty.  Each card appeared to be a masterfully crafted piece of artwork, enhanced by the dirtied, heavy card stock.  Slap an autograph on there, and there are few things more aesthetically pleasing in this hobby.

I could complain about the decline in quality in more recent A&G sets.  The lack of care with each and every base card.  Cookie cutter design, creating "retro" sets that are no longer based off of an actual historical set.

But I really don't care.  Just look at those cards!  Ok, maybe I could do without the spring training jerseys in each photo.  But what is art if not for our enjoyment and criticism.

Card Show Pickups...A Month Late

Well, it's official.  I'm a full month behind on my collecting. 

This past Saturday, I drove down to Dayton for the monthly show.  I came home with a nice stack of beautiful cards, including a huge dent in my remaining 60's vintage needs.  And then I realized I had nowhere to put this cardboard goodness (save for the living room table, which would not go over well with the little lady).  So I finally decided to get around to scanning and cropping all my pickups from last month to clear some space in what has quickly become s a cardboard disaster zone. 

Life has been pretty hectic recently, and coupled with some lots of minor league team sets that I recently purchased, the stack of cards in need of entering and scanning has become a major backlog.  With a show last weekend and the biggest show of the year (for me) coming up this weekend, I better make at least some dent in things this week before it gets any worse.

Card shows have become very hit or miss for me.  I used to be able to go into any show, dig through dime boxes, and come away with around 100 new Pirate cards each and every time.  But my commons needs have dwindled down quite a bit.  That isn't to say I don't need a truckload of commons.  It's just that the stuff I need never seems to make it into the dime box: either those all too common mid-late 80's overproduction era sets that people presume every collector in the world already has (I have more needs in the '86 Topps set than I do in the 2012 Topps Black team set), or the more obscure sets from the mid 90's through mid 00's that set builders and dealers never took an interest in.  Somewhere out there are boxes and boxes of Stadium Club and Ultra, Fleer Authentix and Donruss Team Heroes.  Cause I can assure they are not in any of the hundreds of dime boxes I've been through!

So with the dime boxes yielding limited potential, my show hopes have been bumped up to the $.25 and $.50 boxes.  This is quite a hit or miss prospect.  When there are dealers with such boxes (and I mean ones populated with serial numbered cards, inserts, etc rather than a host of Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds base cards) it's paydirt.  If those dealers don't show up that weekend, I'm usually spending an hour plus driving home while muttering to myself how I just wasted a bunch of gas and should have just ordered some cards off COMC.

While I wouldn't say I hit paydirt last month (this month was a different story), I think I found enough to make it worth the trip.

A quarter box yielded a nice mixture of 90's shiny goodness and some more recent numbered cards.  Nothing that made my jaw drop, but I gladly gobbled up all the Bucs I could find.

There's a bit of paranoia any time I hit one of these boxes.  I'm always convinced some Pirate collector has come before me, wiping out all the Pirate goodies in the box.  I've spent enough time digging through 4000 count boxes that only yield 3 or 4 Pirate cards to have faith in that theory.  Maybe it's because there just aren't a lot of Pirate players in most sets.  Maybe the Bucs are more heavily collected than the blogosphere and online collecting communities have caused me to believe.  Or maybe I just have plain bad luck. 

Either way, I can't help imagining that most shows play out as a comedy of errors, with some Steeler jersey wearing middle aged man with a mischievous grin and pencil mustache clearing out all the Pirate cards just moments before I enter the show.