Opening Day is Coming...Let's Start

I've got something fun, and if you're not already doing this, I want to encourage you to start. 

About a decade ago, a yearlong project concluded across multiple sports card blogs. Gavin of Baseball Card Breakdown challenged readers to carry a "Wallet Card." Some collectors had fun participating, even more followed along to see text and pictures, and a portion continued onward with the tradition in future years.  

The idea of Wallet Cards is simple: You pick a card that you like, put it completely unprotected into your wallet, and carry it around with you for a full year. After 12 months you have a card that resembling the kind of condition usually seen on classic vintage cards with each crease and corner ding attached to a personal memory. Because you're hanging around sharing pictures of your collection online, we want to see what that card ends up looking like.

Early incarnations of this project generated a good amount of comments from readers, many of which lamented not being able to join for various reasons. Many said they discovered the idea, which started on New Year's Day, too late to join. Others cited inertia preventing them from trying something new, some didn't try because they didn't feel their cards would be interesting enough, and others gave up because they quickly exhausted their stock of creative ideas for what to do and how to document their wallet cards. 

All of these issues are easily solved.

Joining Too Late: Most wallet cards start their term on New Year's Day with the writeups that remind everyone else to play along coming in the ensuing days and weeks. By that point many throw up their hands and declare they are too late to the party. Nonsense. I chose my February birthday as the start date for my wallet cards because I completely missed the New Year's launch. The start of the MLB baseball season is less than two weeks away from today - a perfect opportunity to shove some cardboard into your wallet just when baseball is top of mind. If you miss that start date, there is always the All-Star game, the trade deadline, and the day the Rockies are mathematically eliminated from playoff contention to aim for. Any point in the year can be the start of your own wallet card ritual.

Frequency of Posts: A look through older blogs' wallet card archives generally reveals a pattern. First, an excited collector shows their new wallet card selection to the world. Next, a well thought out post shows up, followed by a number of increasingly disjointed updates just to keep the posting streak alive. Then, radio silence. The ideas have run out, and admitting it seems like a failure to the person behind the keyboard. YOU DON'T NEED TO POST ALL THE TIME. Some wallet card fans, like Bo at Baseball Cards come to Life, have found a frequent cadence that works well with their chosen niche. Others, like Gavin, have settled into a less frequent pace that allows for longer exposition about what is in their photos. I found a single, all encompassing annual post works best for me, augmented later by an in depth look at the card itself.

Creative Fatigue: From speaking with others, I find more than just a few have avoided posting wallet card pictures because they don't know what they want to photograph alongside their card. They're worried about being seen as boring or silly. Keep in mind that we're all browsing pictures of cards that most of us are already at least familiar with in a passing sense, yet we still stop and look. Don't worry about it being boring, the fact that your '90 Topps Griffey or 5th year Mike Trout has an odd crease in it makes it interesting.

You're not telling us about the card anyway, the card is just an excuse to tell us about something that otherwise wouldn't be on your blog. Eating an awesome sandwich? Take a picture. Find a weird bug? Picture. Get an awful haircut? I absolutely need to see that. You don't need to take a picture every day or week. Bo is one of the most consistent at the game and has found his lane chasing ghost signs and New York infrastructure. It's fascinating. 

How about writing about others' reactions upon seeing the cards? Most people just shrug when they see mine. Card shows, however, are the perfect opportunity to make a dealer lose their mind as you take out some cash from behind your creased wallet card. Get other collectors with wallet cards to sign yours, like a World War II Short Snorter. Use them as bookmarks and make them a way to share your reading interests with collectors. Are you trying to bulk up and find yourself eating extra calories? Let's see you try to eat a million calories in a year with your wallet card next to the most ridiculously portioned meals you encounter.

Take a bunch of pictures throughout the year and see if a story emerges. You don't need a plan to start, just an obliging card and pocket.

Spoiler: This Isn't About Cards 

You're telling us abut YOU. Your job. Your school. Your interests. Worried someone won't like it? We're collecting little pictures of sweaty dudes playing a game. Wallet cards keep the ridiculousness of all this front and center (OK technically behind you and in a pocket to the left or right). Whenever a card is present, Gavin is actually showing us his vacations and dog. Bo is showing us one of the most interesting cities in the world. And me? I'm showing that I have way too much free time.

Come Play

It's not too late to start a game of Wallet Card. Baseball season is about to begin, giving just enough time to pick out a card to carry around until the next labor stoppage season begins. Tell me what card you're carrying (and why).

 

My wallet card for 2026

Wallet Cards!

For the past month my thoughts have been on perhaps my favorite area of the hobby: Wallet Cards. My birthday was in February, and as is tradition, I marked the occasion by swapping out the cards that I carry in my pocket. I paid homage to some prior selections, dedicating extended looks at the fundamentally good '87 Topps Bo Jackson Future Star and the nesting doll of Easter eggs that is the '95 Pinnacle Ken Griffey, Jr. Those were wallet cards of the past, hailing from the 2024 and 2023 era of my back pocket. The cards themselves are from the bookends of the Junk Wax Era. It is now time to tackle a more modern problem.

New Wallet Cards: A Good Writer Writing Badly

I think we are all in agreement that the handwritten signatures adorning many modern baseball cards are absolute garbage. It's fantastic getting a player autograph from a pack, but the actual work of using one's hand to apply ink to cardboard is not an area of concern for most players. As a result, I feel it is my duty in 2026 to subject a poorly executed on-card autograph to the Wallet Card Project. It's my way of fighting back.

And who made their mark on the Wallet Card volunteer sign up sheet? Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and a raft of other popular titles. Lewis is a fantastic storyteller, but his writing skill apparently lives solely in a digital world. His handwriting on this 2018 Topps Archives Fan Favorites card is the proof.  This one is for the collectors who demand good penmanship.

Of course, I always have at least one accomplice during the commission of any crime against cardboard. The rookie card of A's general manager Billy Beane is coming along for the ride.

I May Have Broken the Idea of Wallet Cards

The new wallet cards took their place on my birthday, which meant the retirement of the Ripken themed cards of 2025. I have just posted my annual year in pictures review of these cards. Let me warn you, this is nothing like the previous years.

I knew in advance some of the events that would be coming in 2025, and was completely surprised by others. An amazing story came out of this, one so engrossing that I had to set it down in a more in depth style than ever before. Read it. Enjoy it. It includes the culmination of a very special surprise that took more than a decade to put together, and every bit of the tale is true.

The Cardboard Death of Billy Ripken

January 2026 Post

There was lots of vintage goodness at CardBoredom in January. 

1949 LEAF

This set really sounded the starting gun for postwar baseball cards. I'm fleshing out the history of my Leaf cards through the lens of player nicknames. This month it was the turn of "Wig" Weigel, a part-time catcher who would have played his entire MLB career without a baseball card had Leaf left him off the checklist. It wouldn't have been an obscure fate for the White Sox backstop. Nobody was getting baseball cards made during WW2. Even when the cards came back, it would take a full generation to solve the mystery of exactly who was in the set. 

STILL WORKING ON ADDING 1952 TOPPS...

I profiled two more cards from my '52 set building project, taking the total number of explored cards up to 259 out of 407. One of the players didn't do much on the diamond, aside from giving up 4 home runs to Mickey Mantle and walking Eddie Yost 17 times. Lou Kretlow, however, managed to transition his wild baseball career into an even wilder world record on the golf course. Johnny Schmitz, on the other hand, was an excellent pitcher before seeing his career turn into that of a journeyman as soon as he appeared in the '52 Topps checklist.

Collecting Update: I picked up my third Monte Irvin card from the set this month after seeing one come up for sale at a price too good to pass up. This is becoming a habit. I supposedly have another '52 Hall of Famer on the way to my mailbox. It has been sliding back and forth on frozen highways between two far off cities and I am hoping it eventually makes it way to my collection.

...AND WRITING ABOUT REFRACTORS 

January also saw the second annual report on the state of the landscape facing collectors of the 1993 Finest Refractor set. It's a streak! Feel free to skip this one if you're not deep into the weeds of this set (You're either really into this or you're not). I am continuing to track the availability of each card in the checklist and am working on additional ways to analyze this data. Eventually the goal is to develop a scoring system that will automatically identify and rank which cards set collectors should prioritize, details that are so sorely out of date or lacking in their entirety from a set wrapped in myths and legends. While this functionality is not yet built into the public facing part of the report, it is being tested internally to see if the output holds up against actual experience. I want to build the resource I wish was available to me when I started chasing these cards. Let me know if you have tried to build or seen anything similar for a particular set.

NEXT MONTH: WALLET CARDS! 

My birthday comes next month and I've spotted a card-shaped present tucked away in the closet. The changing of the calendar also means it will be time for my favorite part of collecting: New wallet cards. February will be a period of nothing but Wallet Card posts. There will be extended studies of multiple past selections (1987 Topps Bo Jackson, 1995 Pinnacle Griffey, plus another card). There will also be the unveiling of the 2026 Wallet Cards, and an insane sendoff for the cards subjected to this treatment in 2025. Bring hearing protection. It gets loud.

December 2025 Summary

This month I profiled three vintage cards at CardBoredom. I took a look at the crossover between Japanese baseball and the 1952 Topps checklist. I explored parallels between J.R. Richard and a New York Giants pitcher appearing among the high numbers in '52 Topps. There was even a glimpse into how Johnny "Hippity" Hopp got his nickname more than a decade prior to appearing in the '49 Leaf checklist.

The fun part for me this week was writing the annual retrospective of how my collection changed over the course of the year. You'll find the full details here, including the recent development of reducing the size of my collection to the point where it could all fit in an 800-count box if I were to remove the many layers of plastic encasing the cards. I speared my white whale, threw a slabbed side quest overboard, and picked up some fantastic cards that had yet to make an appearance anywhere else. 

2025 CardBoredom State of the Collection Report

November 2025 Summary

I change out my wallet cards on my birthday which, so I am told, comes around in February. That makes November a bit early to discuss The Wallet Card Project, but here I am. I started out this month with the purchase of a card that will be used as a future wallet card. I am not disclosing the identity of this card, but will tease the fact that unlike any of the others it was manufactured by O-Pee-Chee. I don't know exactly what year I will sacrifice carry this card in my pocket but will make sure there is some sort of Canadian travel involved when I do so.

Picking up a new wallet card turned out to be a prescient move. I typically carry multiple wallet cards at any given moment and after a particularly chaotic concert my back pocket is down to carrying a single piece of cardboard. Both of the "cards that end in -ipken" are still in my possession but the '89 Fleer Billy Ripken is now on the injured reserve list until these cards are officially retired in a couple months. That's what had to happen after one of my favorite bands got a hold of my card. I promise full details and all the glorious pictures in February.

Injured wallet cards and Canadian cards aside, I did manage to add two additional cards to the collection this month. One of them arrived just moments ago. Inside this afternoon's package was a 1952 Topps Toby Atwell rookie, a guy primarily known as a borderline second-string catcher for the Cubs and Pirates. This card, however, is a high number and was therefore a bit of a challenge to obtain.

I've continued working on profiling the names already in my stack of '52 Topps cards. This month I explored:

• Harry Brecheen - My card of one of the best pitchers in the set was pulled from a common bin.
• Richie Ashburn - He seemingly only hit singles but by some measures somehow ended up with the offensive effectiveness of Johnny Bench.
• Wally Westlake - His rookie card is shared with Shoeless Joe Jackson?

The other card joining my collection this month was a 1949 Leaf Kent Peterson. You'll be seeing it and a lot of other cards like it because this month I am making my interest in building the set publicly known. Unlike past card profiles, all my looks at the names in the '49 Leaf checklist will be studies of how the players depicted got their nicknames.

My interest in Leaf isn't limited solely to the 1949 edition. This month also saw a deep dive into the history of the Sammy Sosa rookie from the 1990 Leaf set and how the manufacturer specifically sought to tie it in with the famed 1949 issue. 

 

Coming Next Month 

Much more will be written about 1949 Leaf, including the first exploration of a specific card from the set. The '52 Topps profiles will continue with a look at a pitcher who played professional baseball in Japan and another with some scary medical issues just ahead of him. December will also see the release of my State of the Collection Annual Report. Beyond the '49 Leaf project, which was mentioned in the 2024 edition, there is another major shift underway that needs to be detailed. In the interim, I want to see your year end summaries as well and am looking forward to reading all about how your collections are developing.

October is Completed

 

Football season is upon us, and as any quarterback can tell you completions are top of mind.  This month saw several bloggers complete long running projects. Night Owl wrapped up his 1969 Topps set with the addition of Mickey Mantle (the last of the three cards to picture Mantle in that set). The comments section show he was not alone in working on this issue. Fuji knocked out a ton of 1980s Traded sets (including '82 Topps and '84 Fleer) in perhaps his best flea market find. Nine Pockets just bindered his 1991-92 Upper Deck Hockey set. Finally, though it was completed a while ago, the well done 1956 Topps Blog wrapped up the final look at one best looking sets of all time.

So yeah, October was a good month for completions. 

 

I'm not a football card collector (or even a watcher of the sport), so what do these Steelers cards have to do with my thoughts on completing sets this month? Easy. They kicked off a chain of events that concluded with my last profile of a card from the '93 Finest baseball checklist.

1993 Finest Profiles

Several years ago I set out to complete a full set of the '93 Finest Refractors. I finished it quicker than I thought possible and have been profiling several cards every month. October brings these profiles to a close with the final three acquisitions that closed out this project.

• I'm not the first guy to build the refractor set. My Greg Maddux card, however, came via the collector who just might have that distinction.
• I needed some serious luck to find an Ivan Rodriguez card.
• A gradeschool letter writing campaign yielded some football cards and a return envelope from Don Mattingly.

1952 Topps Profiles 

I still have other projects that are going to take quite a bit of time to complete. Three more cards from my incomplete '52 Topps project were looked at this month.

• Did you know the A's spent more than a decade underperforming in the standings, trailing their crosstown National League rival in attendance, had fans calling for an ownership change, and playing with uncertainty surrounding their ability to even secure a place to play? No, not today's Athletics. I'm talking about the Philadelphia Athletics of the early 1950s and the time a new pitcher gave them hope.
• A Detroit Tigers' pitcher found he performed better when not wearing shoes. That probably looked odd, but not as strange as a card that looks like it says "Dentist" across the front.
• Don Mueller looks like a slugger on many of his cards, and without a specific hot streak in 1951 the New York Giants may never have caught the Brooklyn Dodgers to set up Bobby Thomson's "Shot Heard 'Round The World."

Next month I plan to continue writing about '52 Topps and will introduce a new set building project. I'm not done with writing about '93 Finest and will have much, much more to say about the cards soon. Posts for 2026 have already been mapped out and it is once again a full calendar. I'm looking forward to it.

September Summary

September also saw the arrival of my daughter's birthday party, one that we were expecting five friends to attend. What we didn't know was that she had taken it upon herself to also invite everyone she knew at school. Two dozen sixth graders were soon chaotically running through the house while I crouched behind a chair, frantically yelling into a phone for extra pizza deliveries like I was calling for close air support.

This month I added three cards to the collection; new 1952 Topps examples of Willie Jones and Hank Arft as well as a condition upgrade of the set's Mickey Vernon card. Arft is from the moderately tougher fifth series.

1952 Topps Profiles

A very good minor leaguer, Bob Mahoney found himself in no-man's land: He wasn't so much a starter or reliever, but rather, a mop-up guy. This was steady business when playing for the St. Louis Browns.

Remember the film Rookie of the Year? The one where a 12-year old hurts his arm and becomes the closer for the Chicago Cubs? The Brooklyn Dodgers had someone who pitched a little bit like him.

It's common to rifle through a newly opened pack of cards and hear the lament "I didn't get anything good. All these guys are terrible." In reality this sort of commentary reflects a pack that is either full of low level minor league prospects (Bowman) or, in the case of Topps, a handful of average players and serviceable utility guys. Jim Delsing was just such one of these latter players.

1993 Finest Profiles

Two more refractor profiles were posted this month, leaving just three names to go on the checklist.

Brady Anderson draws similar comments from almost anyone viewing his cards. He's frequently seen as a PED user and his cards are considered easy to find. I lean towards the opposite direction on both counts.

The '93 Finest Willie Greene has been considered one of the tougher commons to obtain in its shiny refractor form. I understand why a massive premium developed years ago for this card, but think this should have dissipated long ago. 

Making Use of the Transitive Property

Trading baseball cards is fun, but finding an exact match in interested parties' want lists is rare. Fortunately it doesn't have to work that way. This month I sold a pair of cards from my collection and used the proceeds to "trade" for something new. It's more or less a swap between three parties, just with the introduction of cash and an intermediary step to the process. 

The transitive property: If A is equal to B, and B is equal to C, A is therefore equal to C. That's how I turned a pair of junk wax Jose Canseco cards into this:

Of course, this weren't your normal Canseco cards. Both were PSA slabbed Gem Mint examples needed by a player collector. He ticked off high grade examples of the 1988 Fleer Glossy and 1986 Donruss Rookies from his set registry checklist and I ended up with exactly the right amount of funds to acquire this raw, slightly rounded 1958 Topps Mickey Mantle All-Star card. Win-Win. 

Amazingly the Mantle card was likely printed in larger quantities than either of these junk wax cards.

 1952 Topps Profiles

Three more 1952 Topps cards were looked at during August, period in which I profiled the cards of a few guys who were **briefly** Boston Red Sox. Bill Wight could have really used voicemail while Don Lenhardt was part of a headline grabbing trade dubbed "The Million Dollar Swap." Ray Boone ended his excellent career with a 34 game stint in Boston. Before that, the patriarch of the Boone baseball dynasty was an outfielder tasked with filling the shoes of a Hall of Fame shortstop.

1993 Finest Profiles 

Tom Glavine was on the mound at the first MLB game I ever attended. It was a low scoring affair while he was on the mound, showing why his plaque is in the Hall of Fame. In addition to Cooperstown accolades, he racked up a bunch of Silver Slugger Awards, prompting a look at his batting stats compared to other owners of silver baseball bats.

My introduction to premium baseball cards didn't come through the '93 Finest Howard Johnson card I picked up next, but rather his 1991 Stadium Club. I have very sharp memories of that season's Howard Johnson card, but not really because of anything on the card itself.

I was going to put the finishing touches on a write up of my Brady Anderson refractor today but, honestly, the weather is just too good for that right now. Look for that to show up next week.

 Wallet Cards

Yep, the 2025 wallet cards are still going strong. They have now reached the halfway mark of their 12-month sojourn in my back pocket and have already eclipsed the full year adventures of previous cards. I'm planning to post pictures in February. So far these Ripken cards have climbed a volcano, narrowly avoided an aviation disaster, been eyed by wildlife with really big teeth, survived dinner with a metal band, and were creased by a nun losing her balance at a rock concert. It's been insane. I can't wait to share the full year results and know several of you keep a full inventory of wallet card images on your own camera rolls. Keep those wallet card posts coming and share pictures when you're ready to recap your year.

A Quick Question For Those of You Attending the National

Hi guys. I have a quick question for anyone who attended the National this week. Did you see any 1993 Finest cards (refractor or base) at the show? How was availability? Did you see any sales or trades successfully completed that involved these cards? Were asking prices decent or were these just museum pieces without realistic prices attached to them?

A Pre-National CardBoredom Summary

 

Happy National Card Collectors Convention Week (to all who celebrate). I'm not going but am hoping to experience the event vicariously through some of your own accounts.  I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys find!

At some future point I hope to make it out there, but just can't bring myself to stomach the travel expenses. While I'll go overboard on a vacation or trip to attend some unrelated event, when it comes to baseball cards I keep mentally equating the associated costs with the cards I could acquire for the same price. Attend an awesome show? Yes! Do it instead of picking up a low grade 1935 Goudey Babe Ruth or a '52 Topps Eddie Mathews rookie? Absolutely not! I've never been to the National and do not have any Ruth cards, so I guess this is all just theoretical anyway.

It's been a busy month, and I must confess I did zero baseball related writing until penning this post tonight. Sure, there were five new card profiles posted to CardBoredom, but these were actually typed up and scheduled for publication much earlier. I've got a Tom Glavine post kicking around but just haven't found the energy to fully lock down my thoughts. That will be taken care of soon enough, so I'll leave you with that preview. 

July saw another 1% of the 1952 Topps checklist profiled. I finally finished the second series (cards #81-130). While no major rookie cards appear in the second series, the underappreciated debut of a defensive wizard shows up in the third series. Another cardboard resident of the third series, purportedly a Cincinnati Reds pitcher, showed up in my mailbox with a rather unique odor to it. Johnny Groth is in the 1,000 Hits Club, for whatever that's worth.

They say it is theoretically possible to bend time if you travel fast enough. The Refractor countdown continues with a player who was so fast that he erased home runs, possibly killing off more homers than he hit himself. Alex Cole just might have a claim to have generated a net negative number of dingers.

 

June 2025 at CardBoredom

New month. New cards. In June I picked up two more Charlie Bishop cards from 1953-55. Both are duplicates, but significant condition upgrades. 

I've also largely finished writing the card profiles that will appear on CardBoredom from now until early December. Time to enjoy the summer.

 PROFILES FROM THE 1993 FINEST REFRACTORS SET

1. The David Justice refractor is a particularly tough one to find.
2. Eric Karros hit more home runs in a Los Angeles Dodgers uniform than anyone else. 

PROFILES FROM THE 1952 TOPPS SET 

1.  Floyd Baker's semi-high numbered card looks pretty nice. It's certainly better than some cards sporting some touch-up work.
2. Ted Williams was out of the lineup and shipping off to Korea. Bring in the photo stand-in.
3. College football stars trying to get into pro baseball is a nearly 100-year tradition.