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.