May is just about over and I'm not planning any further additions to CardBoredom in the remaining hours of the month. I'm just relaxing and enjoying the weather, something I had hoped to do at the outset of May. Of course, things did not turn out exactly as planned.
My house is at the cusp of turning 25 years old and started the year with the same appliances that initially furnished it. After spending many hours replacing a long-neglected deck last fall, I again made repeated trips to Home Depot after those appliances began to fail in rapid succession. I had rebuilt the internals of my dishwasher several times since buying the house and finally sprung for a new one at the beginning of May. Last week the oven kicked the bucket, joining the range hood above it and the refrigerator ice maker at the other end of the kitchen. A rainy Memorial Day was spent under cabinets and rooting through tool boxes installing replacements. I don't think there's anything else left to break so I should be good on this front going forward, hopefully for another 25 years.
Work was again busy. The intern I wrote about at the beginning of April jumped ship for a better offer just prior to his start date. We spoke about it and it turns out he is being hired for the summer at an annualized compensation level in six-figure territory. I wished him well and gave him a high five as I would have done the same thing if placed in his situation. My group responded in kind, employing a similar playbook to steal a different intern. More importantly, we were able to leverage the incident into quick approval for adding a new full time role and immediately hired a woman who just oozes professional competence.
Baseball Cards
That's enough of the real world. We're here to talk about baseball cards.
Bobby Witt, Jr. and Corbin Carroll joined the wallet card game by carrying their own baseball cards into real MLB contests at the outset of the season. It's a project undertaken in connection with PSA that has the grading service encapsulating the resulting bent up cardboard.
I spent 22 minutes inside a local card show this month and found an amazing table run by a fellow '52 Topps collector. That table was worth an entire post on its own and I will write more about it in June. Suffice it to say that table made this sparsely populated show the best I have been to in the 5 years or so that have elapsed since my return to the hobby.
Lately I've been looking at my collection and thinking it is getting too big, or at least too far from its primary focus. The collection currently sits at around 600 cards with plans to ultimately take it up to somewhere around 1,000. Some of these cards are cast-offs of the junk wax era, some are common enough low-grade vintage cardboard, and some are expensive things in slabs. This isn't a function of outgrowing storage space or no longer being of interest to me. At this stage ALL have a reason for being in my collection, though upon reflection I see some of these collecting priorities taking away from my ability to pursue higher ranked goals. After chewing on this thought for a while, I finally decided to dump anything that is not part of my core interests. Soon to be gone are my 2018 Sandlot autographs, duplicate refractors, player autographs, and the like.
What is left behind is a much cleaner selection of closer to 500 cards. I am still working on the '52 Topps and '93 Finest sets, as well as player collections of Charlie Bishop and Jose Canseco. The player PCs have some leeway in this more focused approach, but they tend to be added to on a more sporadic basis anyway when set building cards are hard to find.
Random card thought: Card Savers are growing on me as a way to store cards. Should I make the switch away from top loaders?
New Additions
This month I was fortunate enough to add a few more cards to 1952 Topps collection. Two easy names were checked off the list via COMC in the forms of Ron Northey and Sol Rogovin. Two tougher fifth series cards joined that pair and were luckily priced in line with other commons in the set. The two semi-high numbers added were Ralph Branca (absolutely not a common player) and Frank Campos.
The Campos card has been harder to obtain in recent years for reasons that do not make a great deal of sense to me. An absolutely microscopic number of Campos cards feature a printing error that results in the stars on the back of his card appearing in different colors instead of an even shade of red. Like 99%+ of the other Campos cards out there, mine is the run of the mill corrected variety. That hasn't stopped many sellers from screaming "VARIATION!" and asking waaaaaayyyyyyy higher prices than would be expected. Yes, this is technically a variation but is the extremely common corrected version of the card. The card's popularity in recent years has been buoyed in much the same manner as other run of the mill corrected cards such as Billy Ripken's 1989 Fleer card. I was glad to finally find someone who wasn't interested in playing those games.
The card show I alluded to earlier produced four additional commons for the set building project, as well as a condition upgrade for my Hank Sauer card. Each of these cards were duplicates from the seller's own set building project and were notable for their clean VG-condition appearance.
There was a small addition made this month to the Canseco player collection. I picked up the silver parallel of his 1997 SPx card, one of those indeterminable late-'90s sets that can be frustratingly difficult to track down all the different varieties.
1952 Topps
My goal has been to write up baseball card profiles at the same pace that I add them to the collection. This month I fell behind by five. After adding the eight previously mentioned cards I was able to get three new profiles pushed out. ***Sarcastic voice: Oh no! Now I have too many baseball cards!***
The cards that were looked at more in depth in May were added to the collection one year earlier. Aside from featuring some very interesting ballplayers, they pushed my fully profiled portion of the set past the 50% completion mark. The cards reviewed include the Chicago ballplayer whose on field career overlapped both Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron, a journeyman with a seemingly cursed hat, and a lengthy ramble about one of the better pitchers of the era.
1993 Finest Refractors
Having let several weeks pass since my last profile of a card from the 1993 Finest checklist, this month I made a point of pulling several from my drafts folder. Joe Carter took the leadoff role in May with a look into his reputation as an "RBI Guy." Mark Grace did not appear as often in RBI leader tables, but he did manage to collect more hits in the 1990s than anyone else. There was a period where Cecil Fielder was a bigger name than either Carter or Grace. That's probably why a guy who lived on my street cornered him in a bar and wouldn't let him leave until he signed a baseball.
Never let your collection be boring!
