Randomness and Maybe Some Sorting

 

I started on a Herculean task of going through the boxes that make up the bulk of my trading card collection. Including almost a dozen 5 row monster boxes. Some of the monster boxes at least I had just one sport in, but not all of them. Two or three of them are sorted, or were. Many of the other boxes at first were just filled with random cards, unorgainized. A mishmash sometimes a box of all baseball, sometimes baseball and football, sometimes all 4 of the major sports plus Non-Sport and sometimes a full set of something would be in there. Lots of boxes filled with surprises. There were only a few boxes that I had remembered exactly what was what and maybe marked. Very few actually "organized" and "in order".

I have accumulated 1,000s upon 1,000s of trading cards in my life. I started so early as a kid I don't recall when I "first" started collecting. As a kid I was limited to what I could buy mostly due to allowance at the time and other interests. When I was in Jr. High a friend of mine introduced me to an LCS which is still in business, they are at their 4th location over the almost 40 years. Sometime around the late 1990s to early 2000s my collecting stopped a bit then with the internet and discovery of Ebay and online forums it picked up dramatically. 

Not finishing a major reorganization of my baseball collection (pre internet days) from being sorted by player name (with A to S maybe only Ms in binders and the rest of the alphabet neatly in boxes, to going back to the Year/Brand/Set way of things helped make the collection just a heap of a hoard of cardboard. Add to that Ebay auctions and eventually "Buy It Now"s listings, Card  Forums, Card Purchasing sites, group box breaks, and team trading groups, plus a lifelong tendency to procrastinate and you have the organizational mess I am in today. 

Things improved in  late 2023 when I had a mandatory apartment inspection, where I went from probably a level 3 hoard down to level 1.5 my collection went from being almost anywhere in my apartment mostly in boxes but also a few dozen binders on shelves (in the den and dining rooms) to having those now 35 binders in the living room and dining room on shelves and the boxes in the den filling and overflowing two 6 foot tall bookcases. Unfortunately most of the boxes are unmarked and as I mentioned earlier and are unorganized. Plus there were tons of cards that were condensed from boxes and piles of original packages to just the cards in large non-card boxes.

Enough about that messy stuff. I am getting past all that.

Over a recent weekend I made a bit of progress all but one of the monster boxes are just one sport or non-sport now and some other boxes the same. I have a few large boxes that still have mixes of card types to go through and many small card boxes to sort through.

The more I work with the boxes the more I know of what I actually have, or rather where it actually is or could be now. There are a few boxes that I am dreading organizing but I will have to get to them eventually.

Oh I didn't mention the unopened materials I have. There are some blaster boxes, a few of those random pack boxes in various forms by Fairfield and a bunch of packs all over the place. I also have about 1/2 a dozen unopened boxes from the  "Collectible Card Club" I used to get the monthly boxes of 15 packs of cards of both Baseball and Football from them.

I also shipped off 140 football cards to CheckOutMyCards (COMC). Now some people refer to that site as "Com-C". I don't like that name for it and I don't use it I usually say "Check out my cards" or "COMC" (saying each letter like an acronym). My blogging I usually just use COMC and readers will read it the way they like. 

I recently signed up on "BuySportsCards.com" (BSC) as a buyer primarily and then as a seller. I will try my hand at that. I started populating my "store" over there. My seller handle is my usual "captkirk42". So as I am sorting stuff I am putting doubles and very shiny cards aside to go to sale somewhere.

Now part of my Project Hercules effort will be to set up some boxes of the cards I want to sell. Most of these cards I will have to find ways of getting rid of in large batches because trying to sell everything card by card is more than insane and mostly impossible.

2024 Some Sales YAY!

 

This past year for my card sales over at Ebay I only sold one item an Adrien Peterson relic card. In attempts to get things to sell on Ebay a few times I have played with lowering shipping (which I shouldn't do and it bit me on this sale) and lowering the asking price of items. Yeah I did both of those for that card and ended up losing about $1.50. Dems is the breaks over at my Ebay with only 67 items now.

Meanwhile over at COMC (previously "Check Out My Cards") I had a record year in sales. My biggest year in sales over there. My first year 2009 I had 9 sales for $25 ($24.90).  Sold 40 cards in 2024 for a total of $65 ($64.59). My previous biggest year was 10 cards in 2015 for $4.45. Thinking back this surge in sales is mostly in part to adding 364 cards there earlier in the year with them being added to the site in May, which was a month into my medical leave from last year. 

UPDATE: On 31 Dec 2024 two more cards sold for a dollar thirty so my grand total for 2024 is actually $65.89 thirty.

Project Purge: COMC and Other Fun

PROJECT PURGE:

COMC Submission

The Four Major Sports Groups

Updated: 29 FEB 2024

A little background: I've been on COMC (Check Out My Cards) since 2009. Over the years I've sold 67 cards there averaging 4 to 5 cards/year. That first year I sold 9 cards for a total of $24.90, the most I've sold in a year was 10 cards in 2015 for $4.45. Last year I sold 6 cards for a total of $6.55, this year so far I've sold my yearly average of 4 cards for only $1.45 total. One was a flipper card I bought from the site to test flipping (along with another card that I still have listed there). It took a little less than 3 years and I only made about 12 cents or less off of it. 

 I have bought a bunch of cards there as well. Interestingly enough I noticed that when I paid with a credit card vs paying with the site credit, the details of my order including the cards I bought are not included in my purchase/shipping history on the site. 

Now onto the regularly scheduled post content:

I recently shipped 364 cards to COMC to add to the 150 cards I have there for sale already. It is only the second time I've sent stuff there to sell. The estimated processing finish date is in May. This batch of cards covered the four major US sports Baseball, Basketball, Football and Hockey. It included some chrome/refractor type cards a few Hockey relics, maybe an auto card or two. Half of the cards were basketball or at least a third. I used two small card boxes and put them in a larger box that was about the size of a medium USPS flat rate box of old. There were also some Topps Baseball dupes that I had from  the years 1978 to 1980 (50 cards maybe?). Some of the cards I sent were still on my collection page over at TCDB. I tried to delete them from there as I was preparing the lot of cards to send. Soon I will be adding more cards to my trade list over at TCDB. I also plan on semi-regularly submitting cards to COMC, not lots as large as this last one. I don't want to spend a fortune everytime I submit cards. I Just have to keep track of my credit balance over there to cover submission costs.

I checked the population of some CCG cards over at COMC. Specifically from 1995 Cardz Hyborian Gates. Years ago I had bought a large starter deck/box and some packs because I liked the art work. Never played the game, but planned on collecting the card set. I don't play any of those card games. For ages I thought I would save a handful of them that I really liked the art work on and try to sell the rest as a lot via Ebay, in looking at what is already at COMC I noticed there were only 16 of the cards (from 4 sellers). I think that will be the next batch of cards to send to COMC. "Com Cee" as some Youtube vloggers call it. I just call it "checkoutmycards". Com-Cee sounds strange to me, like a communications network company. 

Over at TCDB my trade list there is my collection titled "Traders and/or For Sale".

Check Out My Cards (COMC)        Trading Card DataBase (TCDB)

Project Purge

Why Don't You Show Some Cards Already?

First off Hmm it looks like Trading Card Central (TCC) is down for the count. I first noticed, oh geez I think maybe the weekend of April 8th? That card site has had it's ups and downs many times over the years. In part due to the original owner skipping out years ago. He would occasionally pop up on the site and had some kind of arrangement for website renewals to avoid having the site go down every year, five years, or however long website registrations last. I forget what the time periods are as it has been over 10 or 12 years since I last attempted to maintain my own website. I'm pretty sure that TCC was the first trading card forum that I got involved with. I have always liked the way people there were friendly and most were in the hobby for the hobby not to just flip cards and make money as most people seem to want to do now. Some of my Facebook friends I met through TCC and I still keep loose contact with them even though many of them no longer use TCC and in some cases no longer collect trading cards. TCC has never been super high-tech but it used to be an old stand by. For several years I had used the "blog" area of the website for my trading card transactions and mail days before I started up my blogging and continued to blog there even though I eventually was the only one updating their blog there. I stopped detailing my mail days and trades and trading card stuff some years back about 10+ At one time I had started to copy my blog entries there onto a simple word document but stopped doing that after only having copied the first couple of years worth of stuff. I am not sure how many years worth of posts were left to copy over. I also used to make posts about purchases and favorite cards and whatever in the regular forums. I even had a "my collection" thread at one time. That reminds me I often had to repost images that had been on photobucket but I transferred to some other online photo gallery when photobucket started going corporate and having it's own problems and got greedy requiring paid subscriptions for access to actually do anything with the site. 

UPDATE: 20 April. Hey TCC is Back UP! I looked at the blog section over there. My last TCC blog was in early 2019 and the last blog by anyone was near the end of 2019. When I clicked on the link to add an entry I got a "this page isn't working" error. I probably should try to finish that "transfer" of my blogging from there to my word documents. I probably should have started backing up my archives here at blogspot back when I first signed up to blog here. OH Well.

ADDITIONAL UPDATE: 26 April 2023. BIG SIGH! Site is down again. not sure why... Still down as of time of this post's publishing on 30 April 2023.

In other card news over at COMC I have sold 4 cards this year, 2 in Mar and 2 in Apr. Granted 2 were under a buck one just a little over a buck and one a little over 2.5 bucks. The last few years I have sold 1 maybe 2 cards a year over there if that. Been years upon years since I submitted any cards to sell over there. I currently have 156 cards in my inventory over there.

OK so what cards to show?

This duo of cards I have had in a mixed box that has some cards that have been in my "to be blogged about" pile for years. Anyway, they are two copies of the same card. The difference is one of them missed the foil printing phase.

The Card 1993 Topps Stadium Club Baseball 515 Thomas Howard Cleveland Indians.

First the card as it should be:

Next the card that missed the foil lettering printing. 

It can't be seen in the scan but there is the slight indent of what was to be foil printing on the card.

Here they are side-by-side.

Blog Bat-Around: The Cards I Used To Own

 Blog Bat Around image comes from Night Owl Cards

This post is in response to the Blog Bat-Around question that was posed over at The Garvey Cey Russell Lopes Blog better known as GCRL some weeks ago. Regular readers of This Blog will know I tend to NOT follow the blogging trends and tend to ignore or avoid them. As a result my blog is not on the top lists of must reads and not even on some collectors RADAR. However, every once in a while a trend comes along that I can't resist.

The Question in Question:
What cards have you owned that you regret are no longer in your collection?

First some generalities: Over the years there have been many cards I've gotten rid of through trading, selling or in my childhood just plain getting rid of or having the dreaded "Cards My Mom Threw Out" happen. That happened to my oldest brother. For me many cards fell into the void that was our messy/hoard-like laundry/utility/storage room in the basement of the house I grew up in. Some of those I recovered over the years, others were probably lost in floods caused by backed up clothes washer, stolen by inter dimensional space aliens to fuel their time machines or left in the bottom of a box that got filled up with giveaway/donation stuff.

I recall a really stupid time in my childhood in the early 1970s when I did a huge purge of my collection that involved a large trash bag. I had gotten rid of many terribly hand-cut Hostess cards and similar type cards you had to cut from boxes and a bunch of dupes or cards from teams I hated at the time. I just tossed them out with many 1970 and maybe '71 Topps Baseball in the mix. This was years before recycling hit my area or neighborhood. I don't think there would have been anything really valuable. I have a vivid image memory of that dark green or maybe even black plastic trash bag and a bunch of poor 1970 baseball cards, maybe even some football mixed in. It is like seeing one of those gut wrenching pictures from The Holocaust of a huge pile of naked corpses. Needless to say I haven't done any other huge purges like that since. I didn't keep inventory totals back then so the exact total will forever be unknown. I just know it couldn't have been a huge number as I didn't have all that many cards back then to begin with. During this purge time I think I had gotten rid of many of my cards I had initialed with either red ball point pen or black magic marker with my initial "K" very large usually on the back sometimes on the front. I need to pull out some of the survivors and scan them and post about them sometime. I have been meaning to do a post like that for sometime.  I also recall a much earlier and equally stupid time of cutting up cards for team logos and helmets or caps to put into scrapbooks. Yeah those scrapbooks have been long gone.

There were a few times in the later 1970s (circa 1977/8) when I played a "flipping" game with a friend of mine (who introduced me to what would become my LCS shortly after it opened). He was much better at the game. I suspect that he sometimes cheated and I wasn't catching him (or too shy to call him out on it, the few times I tried arguing about a score or flip of his I lost). I recall many 1975 Baseball cards exiting my collection that way along with 1970s-72s and a checklist or two, even some non-sport when the baseball and football ran out.

Then when I was discovering the world of online trading in 2007 and got involved in some of those team trading groups, where you send a batch of a specific team to that team's collector and they send you your team (many bloggers trade this way). Those groups are fun but I did trade away some cards from a few sets I am now trying to complete. I used to just put cards into those packages willy nilly. I recall a lot of 1981-83 Donruss, Topps and Fleer going into those packages. I might have unintentionally sent some valuable early to pre junk years Rookies then.

I was also going to tell of a card that at one time answered this question, but over the years I have since replaced the original copy of the card. Since it doesn't really qualify as a card I used to own, it will appear in a later post sometime soon and will reference this post. The card returned and the regret is gone.

Now onto the cards that really answer the question:

Shortly after discovering COMC (Check Out My Cards now Check Out My Cards, Comics & Collectibles) in early 2009 I sent 215 cards to them to sell. I've only sold 40some there. Yeah most of them are THAT common. This one was my second card that sold there and at $8 is tied for being the highest priced card I've sold there. I had gotten it from a group box break. It wasn't my first GU card (that was a football GU of a whozit Ram) but maybe one of my first multicolored GUs. It is a very beautiful card.

2007 Upper Deck SPx Baseball Winning Materials Limited Silver Patches

WM-RZ Ryan Zimmerman Nationals #58/99

(front and back images from COMC.com my sales archives)

Yes it is a 4 FOUR COLOR swatch card. The piece is an excellent high quality swatch from the jersey trim or maybe the pants side stripe trim. It is game used, a concept I am very against and try to avoid. Admittedly I have other jersey and relic cards I am currently keeping that are just as nice looking or better looking that I have no plans on selling or getting rid of anytime soon.

Thanks to Joe at The Shlabotnik Report with his Wacky Packages Blog Bat-Around post I was reminded of one of my first trading card regrets that I haven't recovered from. It was an original 1970s Wacky Packages Series 5 set (circa 1974). I left a semi-brief comment about this on Joe's blog, but I will expand upon it here. As did Joe and many other kids at the time I affixed a lot of Wacky Packages to my loose leaf school binders and spiral notebooks and even the paper bag book covers, clipboards, whatever else I thought of. I regret each and every one of those, even though it started with just duplicates. I have some non-sport binders that were regular photo albums I have taped duplicate non-sport cards and stuck stickers to for holding some of my collection of non-sport stuff. Hmm that might be another post sometime if I think about it.

Elementary school back in the 1970s during I think 3rd grade a school friend/chum of mine circa spring 1974 had bought a full box of Wacky Packages Series 5 from a local News Stand general store. All my school "chums" back then were "friends" even if they were just acquaintances. He had a duplicate set for sale. Back then a box of those things cranked out 2 or 3 full sets. NO inserts or dang parallels to worry about. I think my friend got the box for only about $20 but kids rarely bought cards or stickers by the box, this was the first time I heard of doing that I never thought the stores sold them by the box. This was a few years before I would discover a brand new LCS (that is another story). I forget how much he had sold the set to me $5 or $10 maybe? Well the rest of the class, especially the boys soon found out I had all these Wacky Packages and I was persuaded to sell some of them to the others for like a quarter or two. I really didn't want to sell them, but I caved in and did. I may have even sold some of the puzzle piece checklists as well, but that is beside the point. I think I managed to bring home maybe 5 of the remaining stickers of the 32 sticker set. I'm fairly certain it was Series 5 (or maybe 7) as I recognize that I had all or most of that set (those sets) and the puzzle. I have got to complete all the Original Wacky Packages Sets w/ their checklist puzzles. I have a couple complete puzzles but I don't think any full sets right now.

Wacky Packages Images from great reference site: http://www.lostwackys.com

Next a semi-regret I am kind of mixed on. It was around 2008/9 I sold an unopened box of 1991 Upper Deck Comic Ball 2 Baseball (36 packs/ 12 cards per pack) on Ebay for $20. I think it was for $20 it might have been for as low as $10. That was all I had from that particular series.This series had Nolan Ryan and Reggie Jackson with the Looney Tunes Characters I didn't think it looked as good as the Series one which had just the Cartoon Characters. Still I might try getting just the base set sometime.

I have a lot of Series 1 of Comic Ball dupes from 1990 as I super actively tried to complete that set. I got pretty far but there were some cards the eluded me for sometime. Then I found the album sets (3 albums with the full set of series 1 cards) for pretty cheap and got those. I also have the hologram cards chase set of 9 cards I forget if I built that or bought it as a set. I think the latter. A few times I had thought about selling the albums and the hologram set as a full set but haven't. Sort of glad I'm holding on to those. The dupes I need to eventually get rid of.

More recently another sort of semi-regret. It was a relic card I'm not too keen on relic cards but this one was one of those bizarre rare ones plus it was of an Expos player. I just gave it yes gave it to another blogger who is a super collector of the player.

2001 Topps Stadium Club Baseball: Play At The Plate PP3 Vladimir Guerrero Expos GU Batter's Box Dirt

(Front and Back)

Yep game used BATTER'S BOX DIRT. Um OK I guess but which stadium? The back of the card doesn't even mention that the card is a special relic card so no knowing which stadium it came from unless you do a soil analysis of the dirt inside. My semi regret is that I am more of an Expos collector now than I was when I gave the card away. It was around the time I got rid of this card that I decided to continue to collect Expos cards since they are the Washington Nationals Franchise History. Before then I was internal debating on whether to consider Expos cards part of my PC collecting and not just part of my base set collecting.

To have fun with a Tom Lehrer Song: These are the only ones of which the regrets have got me bothered, And there may be many others but they have been uncovered.

A small listing of Blog Bat-Around The Cards I Used To Own Posts from around the Blogiverse: You can find these in the comment section of the original GCRL post plus some comment stories and newer postings that appear there after I have published this post.

GCRL Original
Night Owl Cards
The Shlabotnik Report
Cardboard History
This Card Is Cool
bdj610's
Trader Crack's
Jayson's Custom Trading Cards
The Chronicles of Fuji

I must have slept late.

Don't worry folks I haven't slipped into the Twilight Zone... or maybe I have. I realize it's been ages upon ages since I've done an update to this card blog. My main focus and concentration has been on things other than those small 2.5" x 3.5" pieces of cardboard with pretty pictures on them. For 2012 I will try to improve my updates here. I can't guarantee a specific number of posts per month this year but I will try to be more regular than I have been.

Anyway Super Bowl Sunday is fast approaching us (February 05) and Super Bowl XLVI (46) is a rematch of four years ago with the New York Giants and New England Patriots. Yes I know in my logo filled heading I used the old "retro" helmets of the Patriots. I prefer that helmet over their gaudy Silver ones they have now. It took me two or three years to realize that the streaks on the top were the tricorn hat the Patriot was wearing and not a patriotic streamer.

OK to keep this on the topic of cards let me see what random card I can pull from my hard drive archives...

2003 Bowman #222 Roderick Babers RC - Giants

I think this card is still in my possession. I'm not a big fan of The Giants or the modern Bowman Rookie heavy cards so this 2003 card I think I will have to schlep onto Ebay or send to checkoutmycards.com sometime (if I still have it, I might have slipped it into a trade with a Giants or Rookie Card collector).

Actually here is a better card from my PC to show:

1974 Fleer Hall of Fame - Y.A. Tittle

From the 1974 Fleer Hall of Fame (AKA: The Immortal Roll) set. Y.A. Tittle best known for playing with the Giants but he also played on the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Colts. These HOF cards were unnumbered. The following year Fleer came out with a similar set of cards that look very much alike except they had numbers on the back and the card fronts have a brown border instead of a plain white border. EEK I need to check to see if that card is really that far off center or if it was just my hack-crop job when I scanned it. It could be a combination of both.