Nothing (sorta) Happened in July

On average nothing happened this month. I have the same number of cards in my collection as I did in June. For a while the mailman was wondering if I had moved. I wrote a handful of posts but did not publish anything for a 36 day stretch, actually letting 68 days elapse between profiles of specific cards in my set building projects.That was remedied at the start of this week with a look at Sherman Lollar's 1952 Topps card.

Same Numbers, Different Look

For several years each of the baseball card profiles posted to my site were accompanied by an infographic showing a player's performance relative to the other names in a set checklist. This worked pretty well for my own purposes, though the way I presented the data was not intuitive for those unfamiliar with the spreadsheets full of statistics that have long accompanied my collection. Just take a look at what I mean:

Shrug. It's difficult to immediately know which player is being reviewed. Things became particularly confusing for readers when trying to interpret the sliders at the bottom of the graphic, which were intended to show a player's stats on an annualized basis against the high, low, and median name with the checklist for each category. I got tired of thinking, "I should fix this" when drafting posts and shifted my efforts to actually doing something about it.

This month I rolled out a replacement set of graphics, replacing the existing items on my site and creating a spreadsheet that automatically generates all the images I need. I think this was definitely a step in the right visual direction. Newly added to the mix is a snapshot in time showing a player's stats as of Opening Day for the season in which the card in question was released. My player rankings were also tweaked so that they better reflect relative performance and eliminate the need to view pitchers and position players separately.

Was it worth the effort? Does the information presented make sense? Is it a step up in the looks department?

The Same Number of Cards...

Like most collectors I have a handful of duplicates that have accumulated either as extras in the purchase of card lots or leftovers from condition upgrades. This month saw the number of these surplus cards fall by two, with a pair of sales thinning out the extraneous parts of the collection and augmenting a collecting budget still feeling the effects of a purchase made at the outset of the year. 

Against this backdrop I purchased one card, a Tiffany parallel of a 1997 Fleer Jose Canseco. What sparked an interest in this one was a casual comment from another collector that he was having a difficult time finding the '97 Tiffany cards of his favorite players. Remembering that Fleer essentially packed out its parallels at one per pack, I was surprised to discover that 1997 edition was 20 times scarcer than its 1996 counterpart and and ~190x harder to come across than the base variety. It's one of those challenging cards to add to a collection when you're otherwise taking it easy.

Last month I added a similar hidden toughie to my Canseco pile courtesy of Penny Sleeve. He struck again this month, delivering an unexpected PWE with a 1953 Topps Charlie Bishop rookie. Bishop, as previously noted, was a distant relative of mine who played a few partial seasons with the Philadelphia and Kansas City Athletics.

 ...and Yet So Many More Cards

 I count cards as being part of my collection as soon as they are acquired, not when they actually get into my hands. Not all of these pieces of cardboard "live" at my house. Rather, some are in third party storage and others are held by services that aggregate small purchases into a single shipment to reduce delivery costs. While I wasn't very active in making acquisitions I did receive a nicely padded envelope filled with previously purchased cards.

 My annual COMC shipment arrived the same day as the surprise Charlie Bishop card. For those of you tracking that service's shipping challenges, this economy speed package arrived 24 days after requesting my cards.Inside were 34 cards comprised mostly of assorted lower grade '52 Topps commons. I try to pick out ones that will look good, at as much as I can with photos apparently taken by COMC with the backup camera from a junked Ford Escape. A few of the cards I received had some creases that are visible only in hand. COMC charges extra to protect cards in top loaders, an added protection that I decline in the checkout process as their bulk packaging is usually very good. Imagine my surprise when almost every card was received in top loaders of varying sizes and clarity. One even had a sticker from a well known hobby shop in Cincinnati and my assumption is the free top loaders are the result of the way the site's sellers delivered their inventory.

More to Come

I am soon going to resume a more consistent writing frequency at CardBoredom and there are several more site upgrades on the way. Better set collecting dashboards are coming, as is better photography for some items that I want to highlight. Another deep dive into one of my Charlie Bishop cards is in process and is pending a response from some witnesses to a key event that took place in 1953. Some improvements to the site's navigation are on the way as well as few select upgrades to this outpost on the Blogger platform. I don't expect to add many new cards to the collection between now and year end so my focus will largely be on upgrading CardBoredom and getting some planned posts published.

2024 Half-Time: GPS Coordinates, Looking at a Wallet Card, and a Gift from the Famous Penny Sleeve

 

 

What does this field have to do with baseball cards? It's where the players came from, at least on average. This month I had a little fun with maps, stadiums, and the backs of 1952 baseball cards.

What else happened at CardBoredom HQ in June? There was a recap of finding a fantastic table at a very unassuming card show, one that was manned by the owner of a very impressive set of cards. I took an in depth look at my first wallet card, a 1986 Donruss Jose Canseco that spent a year riding around in my pocket. I also summarized much of the comings and goings of the last three months in the second quarterly update of 2024. 

I also belatedly discovered Junk Wax Jay, one of the better written card blogs to arrive in the present decade. Readers with an appreciation of literary pursuits will find this one well worth following.

Out With the Old

Last month's update included a few words about my decision to jettison some of the cards that were at the periphery of my collecting interests. I sold all my 2018 Sandlot cards to someone building a set and sent a signed Frank Thomas card to someone in Hawaii. My ripped (and trimmed!) 1952 Topps Monte Irvin found a temporary new home with someone planning to flip it for double their purchase price 🤷 (Good luck with that?). A number of other '52 Topps duplicates, a handful of items that were waiting to eventually become wallet cards, and a bit of graded junk wax were also let go in the past few weeks. A small number of extraneous cards remain and will hopefully be on their way to new homes by the time of my next update. Combined with giving away a few extra cards to fellow bloggers I reduced my pile of cards by a few dozen. Progress!

In With the New

Three new cards and an upgrade were added to the collection this month, which combined with the previously mentioned outflow of duplicates makes this period one of quality over quantity. Two of the newcomers helped build out the Jose Canseco wing of my collection. Interestingly enough, both are die cut examples from some fairly limited hobby-exclusive sets of the late '90s. 

The first hails from the 1997 edition of Upper Deck's SPx product line. SPx was a further step up in the decade's Topps Finest/Upper Deck SP premium card rivalry with the latest iteration consisting entirely of die cut holoview cards. The set was all about parallels, as the tiny 50-card checklist ballooned to 300 with all the different color variations. These cards sported a retail price of $6 per 3-card pack 27 years ago so I never so much as glanced in their direction when they were on store shelves. The cards from this set no longer carry astronomical price tags, but finding specific variations of your chosen player without damaged die cut edges can prove maddening. I finally came across a silver parallel that checked all the boxes.

I didn't have to go looking for the other die cut Canseco. Rather, it came looking for me in the form of a gift from Jon, the author behind A Penny Sleeve for your Thoughts. The card in question is a 2000 Pacific Crown Royale Proof, and Pacific, much like Jon, made it a habit to always go an extra step for collectors. The card manufacturer threw everything at this card. It is die cut, see through, an insert and a parallel, and even exists in an ultra scarce serial numbered version.There's a lot more to unpack about this card and the manufacturer that produced it in Pacific's final year of making baseball cards. A more in-depth look at the card and Pacific will soon be forthcoming.

Thanks Jon!

One final new-to-me card arrived just a two weeks ago to complete a project I have been working on, the fruits of divesting some of my extraneous cards. I held it in my hands for just a few days before sending it to SGC's facility in Florida where it remains for the present. A casual mention in a blog post doesn't do the card justice, so I will not spoil the surprise by just blurting out which card it is. A proper appreciation of this piece of cardboard needs more than a few days of work to put together so you will see more about this one early next year. Trust me, it's worth the wait.

The upgrade mentioned a few paragraphs ago helps improve my 1952 Topps set building project. Some time ago I marked the name of Bobby Avila off the checklist after nabbing a super cheap copy from a card dealer that had actually been in the business of selling cards prior to the release of '52 Topps. That alone makes for a special card, but this one was even more interesting due to the fact that it featured a guy who flirted with hitting .400, played professional soccer, and had an entire professional baseball league named after him before becoming a multi-term member of the Mexican Congress. The card residing in my card collecting box had several bits of paper missing, some of it distractingly near the center of the image. A few days ago I came across a PSA slabbed example of the card that somehow only garnered a numerical grade of 2 out of 10. Enhanced hi-res images showed little more than slight corner damage, none of which looked remotely close to being worthy of knocking a card down to "good" condition. I picked it up, essentially paying the seller the cost of the Avila card having been graded in the first place.

A Bit More on the Theme of Cardboard Renewal

It has been a few weeks since I last posted at the main CardBoredom site. After writing nearly 500 posts and reading through past entries, I have come to the conclusion that some elements could use a bit more work. Upgrades to navigation, reference data, selected writings, and even visual appearance have been underway in the background and are nearing the point where they can be deployed at scale, though the need to fine tune a few of these has pushed back the timeline for some writing projects. The first of these changes will publicly appear in late July and I can't wait to share the results.

Never build a boring collection!