Complete Set Sunday: Finish What You Start.

     After the pandemic struck and we all went through several rounds of the Kübler-Ross stages, there was a calm when most of us decided "OK, I have all this time on my hands, I am gonna do something important!" and we made plans to learn a craft or go back to school or remodel the house or invent a better mouse trap or focus on our hobbies or whatever.  It's always best to think big so that the actual plans can find the right size but also, reality eventually says that our plans will be big but our follow through small.  At least that seems to be the way things go for me most of the time. Well, I already went back to school a while back, and my house is just fine the way it is, and my inventing skills are nil, so that left me with my hobby.  I did throw myself into my collection in a lot of different ways the last couple years, pruning some parts and expanding others.  I bought some cards I always wanted and got rid of ones that did not spark joy.  In keeping with the Mary Kondo theme, one thing I really lament from my long term collecting history is that a long time ago, I sold off all my vintage Topps sets.  I had built a 1969 set, a 1972 set, and as you can probably tell from the thumbnail of this post, a 1975 set. Given all this time on my hands, I decided to rebuild one of those sets and since the 1975 set is my favorite (for many reasons we'll get to) that was the one I went for.

The pandemic has made it almost impossible to go out and buy cards in a store but the online offerings exploded.  I had my choice of a few nice starter sets and I picked one that had a few of the key rookie cards (Rice, Yount, Hernandez) and then added my back up Gary Carter to the mix.  I then made it a challenge for myself by making my set build a low budget affair.  Sure, I could have just went to ebay and nabbed a few other common lots or just paid for hall of famers but instead, I built most of this set through my own collection, reddit trades, Listia listings, and a great serendipitous find: I got my Brett rookie for nothing because a friend was updating his 1975 set to PSA quality.  He bought a PSA 9 and gave me his old, just fine, ungraded #228. That was nice.

The Mantle/Campy card was the last from the MVP subset and part of the final four.

 

 

So on and off for the last 18 months or so, I have been accumulating cards. A trade here, a find there, a listia seller had a bunch of commons one week.  Slowly but surely, I hammered it down to a final four: three random commons (all in the 500s, as though the 1975 set had high numbers or something) and one of the Mantle MVP cards that for some reason, everyone was hoarding.  Well, I did finally get that Mantle and then I treated myself to buying the final three from ebay to finish things off.  You are now looking at me triumphantly placing those cards into their spots in the binder.

 

 

Gary Thomasson slides in nicely next to Gaylord Perry, who has one of the nifty All Star logos from this set.  You can also see on the page one of the team cards, a lot of mine have pen marks on the checklist but this does not bother me in the least. I was not very picky when it came to condition. As long as it didn't look like Night Owl's original cards, I was okay with it.

 

 

Von Joshua finds his spot here as the penultimate card.  I always thought Von Joshua should be a classical pianist, not an outfielder, but hey, who am I to judge. He was a major leaguer and I wasn't. You can also see on this page that Billy Williams is sadly off center and I will have to perhaps replace some of those.  Maybe during the next pandemic...

 

 

And here it is, the final card, #557 Larry Gura.  There is a fun irony of him being shown as a Yankee since his reputation was that of Yankee Killer later on in his career.  Of all the iconic cards in this set, this one was the last one; not epic but it will do.  Al Oliver looks a little jealous over his shoulder.

 

 

So there it is, I set a goal and accomplished it.  It took a year and a half and some time and patience, but I rebuilt my 1975 Topps set.  I love this set because I was born that year, I love this set because it is garishly bonkers colorful. I love this set because it has the rookie card of my favorite player of all time, Gary Carter.  But now I love this set even more because it will always remind me of a very trying time in my life (and all our lives) but that we made it through.  It will remind me that I can set reasonable goals and follow through on them.  I will be keeping this one for the rest of my life and passing it on to one of my nibblings, with the story of its acquirement (lucky too that my nieces and nephews have already shown great interest in baseball).  It is not perfect by any means, but it is a perfect trophy of the last two years.  And now I have to decide if I want to redo those 1969 and/or 1972 sets.  If we don't all die in a nuclear war in the next few months, maybe I will choose one and get back to you. 

Sorting things out.

       A few leftover notions from my 2018 Topps post from Sunday.

I spoke of the look of the new flagship set and while I don't hate it as much as I have 2017 or 2016 since Topps has gone to a borderless design, they have started to take on the vibe of late era Donruss base cards and this is not necessarily a good thing.  I think one thing that always made Topps special is that they had a specific feel and natural progression and the border is one of those things that now seems is lost. I feel this year's design, unlike the last 2 years, would look great with a border.  My awesome, utterly professional and in no way amateurish photoshop skills came up with this:

You can add a border and they look much more like classic Topps cards (think 1996 perhaps) and if you need to have things extend out a bit, you can see I took the ribbon to the edge of the card and continued the disintegrating name plate into the border as well as the team logo (where applicable).  I am sure somehow Topps thinks borderless cards are all "futuristic" but they have been around since 1990-91 and used on regular base cards since 1994 Donruss and Upper Deck.  I am not sure those are touchstones to be aspiring to. Flagship Topps always had a classic look and they seem to love to celebrate their history, so why have they turned their back on it the last few years in the name of "the future?"

***

We all recognize what this is:

I have collated cards for as long as I can remember yet I have never given it much thought.  I don't know if it is like scoring a baseball game but I suspect a lot of people have quirks to the way they do it, as I have seen folks in card shops and at shows do it their own way.  If I have a few dozen cards, I just do it in my hand like shuffling a poker deck.  If I have a few hundred, I sort them as you see above, into blocks of numbers of 50, e.g. 1-49, 50-99, 100-149 etc.  Then I sort them further.  If there is a few thousand to do, I so the same thing, then break them down into the 10s as I do it and then hand sort.  It is a monotonous activity but I have always found something relaxing and a little zen about it.  When I was a kid, my mom referred to it as me "playing solitaire" (which I supposed when you are 10 has a whole different meaning than when you are 15, but I digress).  And this is just numerically.  Anyway, does anyone have any different way they do things?  Let me know since I am momentarily obsessed with whether there's a whole different system I have never been privy to.  Not to mention there is also the classic 8x4 grid of sorting things by team, another issue all together.  I always do the teams alphabetically but maybe you do them by league and/or division?  I must know!  

***

And finally, a wonderful bit of card serendipity that I am sure we've all had or hoped to have at one time or another.  As I was searching for the new Topps on Friday, I was also meeting a friend for coffee at a Dunkin Donuts I don't normally go to.  I was a little early and there was a comic book shop next door, so I ducked inside there to kill the 10 minutes I had to wait.  Now, I am not comics guy but I can always enjoy a comic book shop just for the nerdy vibe, the toys, and there's always a chance they have some sports stuff stuck in among their wares.  They had a few long 5000 count boxes full of MTG and Pokemon cards and the like but then my eye caught the unmistakable dull gray cardboard color that can only be vintage Topps cards.  There was only a couple hundred of them, but what a vein of joy it was.  They weren't in sleeves or priced but going through them, there were some I just had to have...

How often does a coffee date turn into 1975 Topps?  More than that, was some of these...

I love the 1973-74 hockey design and there are a couple of wonderfully miscut ones as well.  So I only had a few minutes with these cards and I had no time to go through them all.  These are the few I nabbed while I was there initially.  When I went to check out, the n̶e̶r̶d̶ dude behind the counter said, "oh, anything in there without a sleeve is 10 cents"  I had lucked into a 10 cent vintage box in the middle of Wayne NJ on a Friday afternoon!  I had my coffee and caught up with my friend, and then you better believe I marched back into that shop and bought just about every one of those cards that even remotely interested me.

All because of my efficiency in finding the new Topps and over-promptness in meeting my friend, I now have a few hours of bliss ahead of me this week.  Oh, and I also have this:

If you need an explanation, I don't think we can be friends.