The Thrill Is Gone

Packing up your collection can be a sobering experience. 

Right now the spare bedroom I use for an office has about a dozen monster boxes piled up, along with another dozen or so smaller boxes, ranging from shoebox sized to the ones that hold a hundred or two hundred cards.

The conclusion?  I have way too many cards.  After all, these boxes are just (most of) my Pirates and some assorted trade bait.  I probably have twice as much still being stored at my parents'.

And seeing all those cards stacked up tells me a couple things:

1) I have an awesome collection.  And not in the self-aggrandizing, 'look at me, I'm awesome' kind of way.  After all, though I do have some "high dollar" cards, my favorites continue to be fun odds and ends.

Cardboard reminders of forgotten players.  An awesome 1995 Topps Cyberstars Kenny Lofton that reminds me of playing with my Starting Lineup figures in front of the tv with my dad while watching the '96 All-Star game. 

Those cards, in the grand scheme of things, are more important than any patch auto superfractor metallic prism doodad.

We're still about a week out from the move, and my days largely consist of stressing, packing, cleaning, and more stressing.  My typical outlet would be to do...something...with cards.  But at this stage that all seems counterproductive.  I want to scale back my buying for a while.  I can't sort because...that would just cause a big ole mess. 

But I guess that's the ebb and flow of collecting.  It might not be a bad thing to pack up the collection for a bit, and then appreciate them even more when it's all unpacked again.

Then again, these may just be the ramblings of a guy who absolutely hates moving.

The Nomad

Sometimes I feel like a very well educated drifter.  And no, not the doo-wop variety.  Since college, I've pretty much moved once a year.  Into the dorm, out of the dorm.  One house with awkward roommates to another house with my girlfriend and equally awkward roommates.  During grad school, I managed to stay in the same apartment for two years.  But here we are, and I find myself boxing up my life after almost exactly one year to the day.

What does that mean for my cardboard traveling companions?  It means that attempts at sorting and organizing are aborted midway, and boxed up.  I'll surely get back to them in a few weeks, once the moving craziness settles and my life again unpacks itself.  Of course...I'll likely have no idea where I was in the process, or vaguely recall what my plans for those cards were, brilliant schemes lost to the fog of stress.

No scans (for now at least), but I made my final trip down to Dayton.  The show as decent, but unspectacular, and I don't think I spent more than $20 total, a decent chunk of which went towards cards I will be moving in one form or another.  Still, I found around 50 new Pirate cards,and a handful of other Pittsburgh-centric collecting fodder. 

One nice thing about being a team collector is the never ending quest.  And even when I find myself boring of the current array of cards I'm chasing, there are always fun oddball cards to add.  These cards came from the Robert Morris show last month, and are very cool additions.  They are from a playing card series released around 05 or 06.  I know they released the for all 3 major Pittsburgh teams, and presumable other cities as well, featuring some of the team's most popular players on the cards.

I didn't come away with a complete set, but I ended up paying far less than the decks cost at retail, since I see them for between $10-15 when I am able to find them online.  I'd certainly love to complete the "set" without having to shell out for the whole deck.

And now...back to packing.

Going,Going, Gone

You know how I've been really bad about posting in recent weeks?  Well, it looks like that won't be getting better any time soon.

We're escaping the clutches of Browns/Bengals territory for an opportunity that came up in Pittsburgh.  As you can imagine the opportunity to move back home has lots of advantages when it comes to friends and family, and the job is pretty nice in and of itself.  But...the card shows.

Pittsburgh basically doesn't have shows anymore, aside from the one biggie (which I still haven't finished posting about) each year.  Mall shows have dwindled from one every month or two to a couple per year, and there's little in the area beyond that. 

Pretty sad for such a sports crazy town.

I will miss living out of market, since I've been able to add quite a few Pirate cards and literally triple my Pens and Steelers collections thanks to the great show in Dayton each month.

I may still try to make it to the Vets show in Columbus.  Quite a few of the Dayton dealers set up there, and I know a few bloggers have mentioned the show is nearby or them.  It would certainly be cool to meet some of the people whose collecting exploits I follow from cyber-land.

So what does this mean for you, my loyal reader?  I'll be spending most of the next two weeks packing, and then another week or so unpacking.  I'll try to get posts up as much as possible, but I literally just boxed up all of the cards in the apartment, so my backlog of trades, show pickups, and online buys will have to wait even longer.  But it also means I have some added incentive to get some packages out in the mail for some folks I've been building stacks for. 

So we'll call this a brief vacation from blogging.  If there are any outstanding trade packages coming my way, I should be getting mail here for the next week or two.  Or just drop me an email and I'll send you a new and improved address!

So until next time, here is a scan of my last scan before everything got boxed up.  Jose Tabata sure does get some nice photos in card sets for a guy whose play is less than spectacular.

"Wait, When Did He Play There?" (Not) Wedesday

Alright, I'm a day late on this one.  But it was just too good to wait on.

Walt Terrell enjoyed a pretty lengthy carer as a starter in the majors for a decade.  He was a solid, if unspectacular, pitcher who put up pretty consistent numbers across his career.

...and then he came to Pittsburgh.

Terrell had put up era's in the high 3's to low 4's for most of his career until he his a rough patch with the Yankees in 1989.  Presumably a bounceback candidate, the Bucs signed him for the 1990 season. 

There would be no bounce.

In 16 starts with the Bucs,  he wen 2-7 with a 5.88 ERA before being released in July.

But of course n typical Pirates fashion, this wouldn't be the last seen of Terrell.  He caught on with Detroit for the second half of the season, and would stick in their rotation with mixed success for the next two seasons.




His Bowman release is the only mainstream card to feature Terrell as a Pirate, though his 1990 O-Pee-Chee does note "now with Pirates" in small text near his front knee.

As I've mentioned, the Pirates track record with free agent signings is far from stellar.  But their track record with released players finding success elsewhere is off the charts.

The Last Reason To Use Beckett

Growing up, there were few things as exciting as a new Beckett issue.  I read and reread every issue I had in my pre-teen years, pouring over the articles and memorizing the price guide for cards I had absolutely no chance of ever buying or selling.

Back then the magazine seemed cool, it seemed important.  As I grew a bit older and started to take collecting more seriously, I found Beckett's online forum.  It was the first time I really interacted with fellow collectors beyond the few people I would run into at the local shop, and was a wonderfully knowledgeable group of collectors.

And then, like many media companies unable or unwilling to adjust to the digital marketplace, they screwed up everything.  A website redesign in 2007 or 2008 rendered the website virtually useless.  The print magazine was lightyears beyond its usefulness in media terms.  The redesign included an overhaul of the My Collections feature, and subsequent redesigns that rendered it less than user friendly.  And of course the forum's dynamics changes, as moderators began suspending and banning knowledgeable members while a gaggle of obnoxious pre-teens ran wild over the place, presumable forsaking their Halo controllers for scamming people on the internet.

Needless to say, I don't visit Beckett much.  But I figured their checklists were still useful, right?

As I move my collection to pages, I wanted to cross reference my haves with a masterchecklist so I can leave appropriate space for new additions.

I knew the checklist was far from complete, leaving out countless regional, minor league, and oddball releases, while including those obnoxious renumbered "convention" cards that I couldn't care less about.  But...the checklist...it's all they have left.  It has to be accurate.

And of course it wasn't.  I didn't notice any glaring issues, like the absence of major Roberto Clemente cards.  But I did notice the absence of other players.  When searching by team, some of those lesser guys just don't exist as Pirates in sets where they are clearly pictured in black and gold.

Bruce Aven managed to avoid the Pirates checklist, as well as the memories of most Bucs fans.

So does John Vander Wal,, who had some success with the Pirates.

Both guys spent limited time with the team, and were traded mid year, so perhaps their cards were all miscategorized as their latter season team for that year.  Still, it was a bit frustrating to have to not just cross reference the Beckett checklist, but then double check that against my own excel sheet to make sure I wasn't leaving any cards out.

I may just stick to teamsets4u for team checklists from now on, though they aren't exactly excel-friendly.

You know, with all the advances in technology, you'd think someone would have come up with a navigable, comprehensive checklist by now.  It's just not surprising that it wasn't Beckett.

Movin' On Up

It seems like life is intent upon making it tough for me to keep up a semi-regular posting schedule.

We ended up spending a long weekend out of town due to two job interviews coming up, both of which would move us closer to Pittsburgh.  So I guess I shouldn't complain too much.

And better yet, when I arrived home I had a pile of bubble mailers waiting for me, and a case of 9 pocked pages.

Yes, a case.  Ten boxes of 100 pages.  As I start transferring my Pittsburgh collections, I'm quickly realizing that 1000 pages is not going to cut it.  But at least it's a start.

Now the biggest problem becomes how to organize said pages.  Steelers and Pens are easy - I'm keeping my meager player collections separate, and then everything else gets divided into insert/parallel pages, or base card pages.

But the Pirate collection is (and should be) more meticulously organized.  So far I paged most of the 70's and early 80's, but those years were easy.  In most cases one, and at worst three, manufacturers.  No inserts, subsets, and an incalculable number of parallels. 

But for more recent sets, I'm still debating whether I should leave holes for the cards I need, or simply reshuffle the pages every so often to account for new additions.  Leaving holes for base would be pretty easy, but doing so for parallels/inserts would be a far more involved task, and the odds of picking some of those cards up are small.

And then what to do with the oddball cards?

They neatly organize themselves into alphabetical order in my excel spreadsheet.  But how do you work in one solitary card in the grand scheme of binder pages?  Perhaps oddball issues and minor league cards will get their own pages at the end of each year.

With the number of times I've organized and reorganized, I really hope this will be the last big move.  Get the cards in pages, leave them in order, and just enjoy the darn things.

But doing that means I need to figure out a filing system that is both flexible and practical.  And if my thinking out loud is any indication, I clearly haven't reached that point yet. 

I'd love to hear about the organizing system other team collectors use, whether it involves binders or not.  I had always been a box guy, but I've found that I spend far less time actually enjoying my cards, and I manage to get the things out of order seemingly ever time I open the box.

And That's What the Checklist is For

I've been having a pretty bad streak of accidentally buying doubles lately.  Nothing high end, but it's still frustrating to bring home a card that...was already here. 

But occasionally having 10,000+cards cataloged pays off.  I was recently watching an auction for a team set of 04 Topps Traded Gold cards.  My Gold holes are many, so I figured it was a safe bet that I needed all or most of the cards.

With a few hours before the auction ended, I was preparing to bid, but decided to check my spreadsheet to see just how many of the cards I needed.

Much to my surprise...I had the entire team set.
Thinking about it, I believe I found the cards all at once in a quarter or $.50 box.

The set has some nice rookies - Nyjer Morgan, Paul Maholm, Brad Eldred, and Matt Capps.  Obviously these guys didn't exactly light the world on fire, but were memorable players in black and gold. 

Hopefully as I transition my collection from boxes to pages I'll be able to put together a master checklist.  It would definitely save me some disgruntled grumbling after shows.