Blog Bat Around: Pick Only 5

Last week Daniel from It’s Like Having My Own Card Shop blogged about what would his collection be like if he whittled it down to collecting only five players, sets or collections. A couple of people have followed suit in posting similar collection ideas and it got me thinking.

For me it seems a bit easier because I have begun to limit my collection already to keep it more focused and more interesting to me. As a collector it can be too easy to become overwhelmed, I have been there myself, so now I feel limited is what I want and what I need. Here is my selection of the five “focuses” I would keep if given a limit.

1.      Ken Griffey Jr

2.      Jay Buhner
3.      Star Wars related
4.      Manfred von Richthofen (Red Baron) / WWI related
5.      Sketch cards

While it was easier because my collection is smaller that doesn’t mean it wasn’t difficult. Gone would be my Ryan Bader collection, Steve Largent, Gary Payton and Allen Iverson. So long Edgar Martinez, Sue Bird and all my Seattle team cards. Phoenix Suns, Steve Kerr and the other University of Arizona athletes, happy trails in to the Arizona sunset. Family Guy and The Simpsons would be cancelled, and Mars Attacks would return to Mars. It was a difficult choice, but I feel good about it.

Not All Boxes Are Created Equal

As part of my organization process I am trying to move my mini-PCs in to one box together instead of keeping them in larger storage boxes and separated. This way I can them all in a single 1500-ct box and everything is there. So I grabbed a empty box I had sitting in my closet and have been using that and hadn’t noticed I had writing on the side. Apparently I have had this box for 25 years, back in the early 90s I was a set builder this was my 1993-94 Skybox & UD basketball box. Surprisingly after 25 years and 9 moves this box is still in great shape.

The Gift Of Giving, And Receiving, Griffey Cards

October was a “No purchase” month for me but that didn’t mean I didn’t get new cards. I was the recipient of the Great Giving Griffey box, a traveling box of roughly 500 Griffey cards that pass from Griffey collector to Griffey collector. You receive the box, pull out what you want/need for your collection, replace the cards in the box and pass it on to another collector of The Kid. I am very appreciative that Daniel from It’s Like Having My Own Card Shop thought of me when he was ready to send the box on, thank you.

I pulled aside around 50 cards and set the stack on my desk for later while I focused on building a website for a friend. I added around 60 cards to the box, plus some customs, and sent the box on, but I didn’t get around to going through my Griffey Want List and The Beast Jr. and updating until a couple of days ago. 

Most of the cards I pulled were base cards or base inserts, gray whales, that have been sitting on my wants list for a while, so it was nice to be able to knock a bunch of those off the list. A couple cards of note are the 1991 Stadium Club membership card. I had totally forgotten about this oddity, so I couldn’t pass on adding it to my collection.

I was excited to see some of Gavin’s custom cards too, I am very glad that he made several of them to put in the box. I have one of his glow-in-the-dark custom Griffey cards that he sent me a couple of years ago but these two are new to me.

TJ, from The Junior Junkie, started the Great Giving Griffey box in 2015 using dups from his collection and it really shows how close the community can be when it comes to giving. I am sure that all those who have received the box and all those who will be receiving it are so grateful that this project was begun and still traveling.

The Future Of My Collection

With having quite a few medical bills (I am digging out of this hole slowly) I have cut my collecting purchases to a minimum and it has led me to re-evaluate my collection. Over the past few years I have made some changes, both large and small, and I have found that eliminating some of the things I collected made life easier. Since I began the blog in 2009 I have stopped working on set building, cut out a large portion of my non-discretionary purchases, stopped buying boxes/blasters/packs, donated a couple thousand cards and decided to set up primary and secondary collecting goals to keep my collection focused.

I think one thing that has helped greatly was that I set up a Want List in a Word document and if a card is not on that list I normally don’t purchase it. The list is fluid and does change, often, when I purchase a card or find a new card with the occasionally deduction. This list has helped me stay focused on my primary and secondary collections, which have also changed over the year.

The last few days I have been considering the future of my collection, it has been on my mind the last few months really. I had started “secret” PCs, these are personal collections I have not posted much about for whatever reason. For example, my Mariner Moose collection, I picked up a card or two here and there and before I realized it I had became a super collector purely by accident. Over the last year I had started PCing the 2013 Chrome Marshawn Lynch rainbow, Sheamus and Becky Lynch (Irish wrestlers), UFC Conor McGregor (Irish fighter), comic characters Rocket Raccoon, Ant-Man and Radioactive Man (The Simpsons guy).

I just sat down and whittled down my Want List and removed many of those secret PC collections. I will keep what I already have in binders or whatever is currently sitting in my COMC account but I removed any cards from the list that I was on the fence about. It felt good to delete card after card, shortening my list.

My primary PC is now only three athletes; Ken Griffey Jr., Jay Buhner and Ryan Bader in addition to Manfred von Richthofen and sketch cards. Vintage cards (sports and non-sports), movie/comic autographs & relics, Mariner Moose and Rocket Raccoon are all secondary and everything else on my Want List is now “only if it is real cheap” type of cards. This means Steve Largent, Steve Kerr, Randy Couture, Seattle teams and University of Arizona team cards become a third level of collecting.

My Wants List is sitting at 2,049 cards but 1,517 are my Griffey wants, 172 Buhner wants and 93 Ryan Bader wants. So out of that 2,049 total cards 1,782 cards are for my PC guys so I think I have gotten the list under control. Plus with Bader moving to Bellator MMA Topps will not be including him in any future UFC releases which helps keep my list limited to just his past cards. 

In the future, I would also like to work out some trades to clear out some of the cards I have sitting in 5,000-ct boxes. I have roughly 20,000 cards in my collection and probably 15,000 are players, teams and sets that I do not collect. I am selling what I can on eBay and I also just sent my first submission to COMC so that clears out some cards but I have plenty more to go.

Since I can not close a post this long without showing something on cardboard here you go, a recent Griffey pickup:

The Beast Jr. Has Been Updated

When I ended up restoring my computer at the end of July I had made the mistake of not saving certain files on my external hard drive before starting the restore and I lost a number of files with most of them being connected to my blog as well as some art projects.

Over the past two weeks I have sat down and went through my PC collections to get everything back up to date. My Bader and Buhner collections were completed quickly being only 127 and 135 unique cards, respectively. I still need to update my Largent collection but I decided to turn to the Beast Jr first and focus on my Griffey cards because I am not hunting down any Largent cards right now so that list can wait.

It ended up taking me almost a week to go through my Griffey collection to update my Beast Jr. spreadsheet and my want list but I finally got it all completed. I have posted my Griffey want’s list, which has grown by 24 cards since I last updated my want’s list here on the blog last January.

A quick update on my health; I have met three of my five new doctors so I have been very busy over the last few months. I meet my pain specialist tomorrow, meeting new doctors always causes a bit of anxiety for me because I had a bad experience with a doctor when my health first began to decline and now I never know what to expect. Over the next couple of weeks, I have to get an MRI and EEG test along with another blood test. Not long ago I had an x-ray to see how my spinal degeneration is progressing and luckily it has only gotten slightly worse. As odd as it is, even though my spine is slowly breaking down I have grown almost a ¼ of an inch in the last year.

And for those here to see cards, here is my newest Griffey which I pulled from a pack of 2017 Stadium Club recently.

Time For A Griffey Update

I reached another milestone in my Ken Griffey Jr. collection, I hit 1,300 unique cards when I picked up this 2001 Upper Deck Vintage base card a couple of weeks ago. With each one of my eBay sale I have left a bit in my Paypal account which I have used to hunt down very cheap base cards for my Griffey collection so I have been adding a couple of cards here and there.

In January 2014 is when I began to focus on my Griffey collection after adding my collection to Zistle and realized I was calling myself a Griffey collection but I only had 92 unique cards in my collection. Here is how the growth of my Griffey collection has gone since January of 2014:

January 2014 I was at 92 unique cards

January 2015 I was at 291 unique cards

January 2016 I was at 552 unique cards

January 2017 I was at 1,255 unique cards

This year has been slow going and about half of the 45 cards that I have picked up this year have come from trades with many of the rest being under $1 purchases but that is ok. Not every pickup can be a major find, I am glad to have a .35 cent card as much as a $200 card, it is all part of collecting one of the best players of our generation.

Why Must You Hurt Him Like This?

While I hit 1,300 unique Griffey cards a card that came in just prior is one that I am focusing on today. The card, #1,298 in the collection, came from a seller in the Seattle area in less than stellar condition. The card came in badly damaged, which was not the seller’s fault but from the post office. When I received the mailer it had a large oily circle that was roughly the size of a soda can smashed on to the middle of the padded mailer. I am guessing it was caused by some sort of machinery and even though the card was secured inside a rigid top loader it took some nasty damage to the top loader, penny sleeve and card.

The card has a circle stamped in to it that runs from Griffey’s waist and down his right leg and to add insult the card is creased above the circular mark. Ouch ouch ouch.  I contacted the seller to let her know how I received that card and I told her it was obviously damage by the post office and not her and that I was going to leave positive feedback, she immediately offered a refund and told me to keep the card. She even told me to look through her auctions and choose any card in the same value range and she would send that to me which I politely refused because I felt bad that not only was she out the Griffey card but the money too and I didn't feel right taking another card from her.

But while we were going back and forth I told her I used to live in the area and it turns out her and her husband used to run a card shop that I frequented in my town. It was totally random and had the card not been damaged I wouldn’t have contacted her and reconnected with an old dealer. Sadly, she closed the shop a year after I moved because her husband passed away but she is still selling cards through eBay.

Another Cavalcade of Griffey Cards I

Closing out 2016 I made two posts about my favorite card pickups and my favorite Griffey card pickups. It was difficult to cut down to just a Top 10 Griffey cards, especially when you consider that I added 703 unique cards so I decided to cover the best of the rest of 2016. None of these were expensive, I think I only paid over $20 for one of these cards ($22 plus shipping) so they are not “S1CK!…M0JO HITS!!!!” by any means but they are notable, at least to me.

Like many collectors I love the odd card, the odder it is the better it is and if it glows or is acetate you have my full and undivided attention.

1991 Topps and 1991 Bowman glow backs

These are cards that Topps used a UV type of ink on the back that glows under a black light. They are difficult to tell apart, without a black light, from the regular back with the only difference I have noticed being that the Topps 40 Years of Baseball logo being a bit bolder.

1998 Pinnacle Epix Emerald Play and Game parallels
This set was kind of wonky and would have fit perfectly in today’s releases. The set was released in many different Pinnacle products. They were inserts in 1998 Score, 1998 Score/Traded, 1998 Pinnacle, 1998 Pinnacle Plus and 1998 Zenith and they were announced to be included in the 1998 Pinnacle Certified but were not.

Each of those sets had certain sets of the Epix cards and they were broken down in to Play, Game, Season and Moment with All-Star Epix as a sort of insert. They were further broken down in to 70% Orange, 20 % Purple and 10% Emerald parallels. The most common card being the Orange Play card and the rarest being the Emerald Moment card, which Pinnacle announced that they are not numbered but there are only 30 copies of each Emerald Moments cards.

I picked up these two Emerald cards within a week of each other. I am still on the hunt for the Emerald Season and Emerald Moments Griffey cards but those are a now a very low priority.

1998 Premier 300^th Homerun 3D 5x7 card

2000 Upper Deck SP Top Prospects Minor League used game bat

2005 Topps Hot Button Baseball

I have never played the game but it is an acetate card with Ken Griffey Jr

2005 Topps Pack War

Another TCG that I don’t play but with my blog named Pack War what kind of collector would I be if I didn’t have a Griffey card from a set named Pack Wars?

2009 Disabled American Veterans SGA

2009 Topps Attax

Back to the TCG type cards but any time I can find a White Sox card of Griffey I am happy to pick it up.

On To The Next Thousand

I have officially topped the 1,000 mark for unique Griffey cards and have moved my collection from a 1,000-ct box to a 5,000-ct box. Big aspirations but considering that I went from 92 Griffey cards to 1,033 Griffey cards in 22 months I now know that I can build a nice Griffey collection for a reasonable price.

 

What card is #1,000? Well, I am not absolutely certain because as I got closer to the big 1K I went on a bit of a splurge and they all came in within a 7-10 days of each other so I am going to use one of the cooler cards from the purchases as my target card.

 

The card is from the 2000 Pacific Aurora release and is from the Dugout View Net-Fusions insert which replicates the foul pole netting. There are a couple of netting cards that were released around this time by Pacific and it is pretty cool that in this version they used net-like material.

 

In other Ken Griffey Jr. PC news, I have begun the great migration of keeping an Excel spreadsheet of my complete Griffey collection with the uncertainty of Zistle leaves me concerned that all my information could be gone in a moment.

The Ichiro Count

I have been a fan of Ichiro since he stepped on to the grass at Safeco Field but prices for his cards started out high and have remained there throughout his career in the U.S. and now that he hit the magical 3,000 hits (In MLB) prices for his cards are climbing. I have been uncertain about collecting his cards, I already have my Griffey collection and I would rather spend my time and money on his cards instead of working on a whole new collection. So I have decided to instead so with a mini-PC, probably around 100 cards. Getting a trifecta is going to be quite difficult because his autographs are still exceptionally high so I am just aiming for a relic for now, I already have his 2001 Topps rookie card.

 

In the meantime, here are some recent pickups. I want to stick to unusual cards when possible along with some Japanese cards. I am currently at 31 unique Ichiro cards.

2007 Topps Chrome #158

2008 Topps Trading Card History #TCHC 19

2011 Bowman Chrome #351

My Collection In One Image

Next month I am moving after living here for nearly 8 years and even though I had organized my collection last year it was still spread out pretty well and to get everything as minimal as possible I ended up putting most of my collection in to 5,000-ct boxes. After a couple of hours of semi-collating and packing I have roughly 95% of my collection in 4 ½ 5,000-ct-boxes, this includes most of my supplies too.

I realize that I really was not as organized as I initially thought I was. I had cards on display in three different locations, I had cards in 500-ct, 1,000-ct, 3,000-ct and 5,000-ct boxes, I had supplies in a drawer as well as a large storage bin and that isn’t counting bobble heads, SLU/McFarlane figures and various memorabilia. Ugh…

Now most of my collection is in a nice little stack with some empty boxes left over with memorabilia going in to their own packing box and my Griffey collection in a separate 1,000-ct box and I am another step closer to moving. Next will be unpacking everything after I move but that is more fun that packing my collection away.

 

A Collection In An Instant

I came across this really interesting story the other day about a sports memorabilia collection that had been appraised on the television show Antique Roadshow while they were filming in New York on August 9^th.

 

The collection had been passed down through 5 generations to the current owner. Her great-great-grandmother had run a boarding home in Boston, the same boarding house where the newly formed Boston Red Stockings were living in 1871 and 1872. Included were early baseball postcards, autographs, photographs and letters.

 

According the Leila Dunbar, the Antique Roadshow appraiser, the “Crown Jewel” of the collection was a letter sent to the boarding house owner (the great-great-grandmother) saying that the players were missing her cooking. The letter was signed by Hall of Famers Albert Spalding, Harry Wright and George Wright. In all it is estimated that the entire collection could be worth as much as $1 million if sold as a complete set.

 

The episode will not be shown until next Spring but I was able to find an image showing the collection from the show.

D-Rod To The Rescue

  Dennis Rodman has always marched to a different drummer, he has always been considered an a-hole but he was an a-hole who could play shut down defense and grab the rebounds so he always had a job. He is in the Hall of Fame and deservedly so but is his current direction of friending North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un going to destroy his credibility in the hobby?  I don’t want to turn this in to a political debate, I would like to focus on Rodman’s decisions.

Rodman played a majority of his career during the junk wax period so most of his cards can be found for a couple of dollars with base relics and autographs running around $10-20 each. But during this era there were also some very limited inserts which can run hundreds. Also winning 5 NBA Championships helps any ones collectability.

Do his trips to North Korea (and recent CNN interview) hurt his card prices? Do his choices put him on the despicability scale with suspected murderers OJ Simpson or Aaron Hernandez? How about on level with gambler Pete Rose? Or does this not change his collectability at all?

I would love to hear from a Rodman collector and get their input.

What To Do?

Last month I bought a blaster of 2011 Topps Opening Day and I am finally going through the packs. But as I go through the packs I realize that last year was an end of an era for me when Griffey finally retired leaving me in a position where I do not have any one specific player to collect.

I am a life-long Mariners fan but I just never jumped on the band wagon with collecting Ichiro or King Felix. Dustin Ackley is a young player I like but because he is struggling in the minors he does not have many cards showing up on any checklist. I am a Diamondbacks fan too and there are a number of young talented players coming through the desert that I like including Justin Upton and Stephen Drew so I may just turn my collection to the home team but remain a Seattle fan at heart.

Sadly I find myself in similar situations in the NBA (Suns fan) and NFL (Seahawks fan). It seems like the teams I collect are getting old and they do not really have any rising stars. The Suns do have Channing Frye (Yeah U of A) and the Seahawks have Golden Tate plus Mike Williams proved he has some serious playing left in him so I guess there are a couple of options. It is difficult to let go of my old players and move on to the young guns.

Evaluation

Have you ever sat down and attempted to evaluate the value of your collection? There are a number of options to assist with determining values such as price guides and auctions. I know that some people will sit down, grab a Beckett and begin to count off all of their base cards then start to calculate the price of the semistars times the total number of base cards. This is how you get collectors claiming that they have a $15,000 or $20,000 collection when all they have are cards from the 90's onward. I have been collecting for almost 30 years now and I seriously doubt my collection even tops $10,000 but then I set reasonable guidelines for myself when considering the values.

Unfortunately not all sellers are willing to take any advice when evaluating what they have but they are the ones that are left in the end still holding the bag because they over inflated the prices.

Base cards, semi-stars and even some low-end short prints, relics and autographs are valueless. Just because it contains a jersey or is a 1/1 does not mean that the value skyrockets.