Marlins Legend Mike Piazza.

     They say the first step is admitting you have a problem. While I have spent a long time the last decade or so making my collection smaller and more indicative of the things I love, some of the player collections continue to spiral out of control.  Mike Piazza has always been the largest of my hoards and it seems it might never ever cease (not as long as they keep printing old time players that is).

 

     Spring training and a very nice mailing from Night Owl inspired me to tend to a long ignored pile of around 30 Piazza cards that had accumulated but not integrated into the vastness. N.O. had included a few nice Mets inserts and it put me over the edge of having to organize. In that unsorted pile was the die-cut shiny Diamond Immortals card you see in the middle there, which made it nine original Piazza Marlins cards in my collection - that is 4 more than games he played in Florida teal - right in the wheelhouse of this blog. This also gives me an opportunity to fact dump one of my favorite things about Piazza's career: he hit only 8 triples over 16 years but that does include at least one for each team he played for, yup he hit one in the 18 at bats he took in Miami. So dumb, so delicious.

     So now I have almost two full super top loader boxes of worthy Piazza cards. Not the regular two row shoe boxes mind you, the giant long three row ones. You can see the size of the two row boxes on the right of this photo, and compare it to the two behemoths next to it.

The first box is chock full of the Mets (and Marlins!) insert cards plus all the ones post-2008 and his playing career.  There is about 600 cards in here:

The second box has all the relic and encapsulated cards in the left row and all his Dodgers inserts in the middle and right rows.  There is a bit of room left in here, illustrated by the double plastic box spacer in the back, but all it will take is one eBay or Comc binge and that bit will be gone. There is at least 300 cards in this box and maybe closer to four (I did not count as I organized).  That means there's about 1000 inserts SPs and parallels in top loaders here. And you wonder why I've never shown ALL the individual Piazza cards I have.

Oh yeah, and these are just the fancy insert cards.  I have a 3" binder full of his base cards and lesser inserts and parallels.  There's probably 90-100 pages in there as well.

So while Gary Carter will probably always maintain most favorite player status, he only has a single regular shoebox of fancy cards and one 2" binder.  Mike Piazza arrived on the scene as cards started to get silly and my abundance reflects that.  I will never have all of them but someday my heirs will have to figure out what to do with ~2000 Mike Piazza cards. And by then it could be closer to 3000.  I really do have a problem.