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.

Cleaning.

       It's been raining the last couple of days.  While I am not exactly Rain Man when it comes to the rain, I tend to mope around the house hoping my sinuses will stop throbbing when the spring showers come.  The rain plus insomnia led me to do a little spring cleaning.  I tackled some of the boxes I have previously shown awful pictures of; I delved specifically into some of the oddball memorabilia boxes, the stuff that is not strictly baseball cards, but more baseball card related. I will just randomly grab a few things and write about them, since I am sick of trying to figure out why I bought most of them in the first place or what the hell I am going to do with them.


OOOOoooo.... off to a good start, a couple of old school Mets pictures.  These are photographs, not cards or post cards.  I have no earthly clue where or when I got them.

The names of the players are written on the back (Al Jackson and Wayne Garrett) in different inks and handwriting.  I recognized the players, I do not recognize the handwriting (it is not mine, anyway).  These are still kind of neat and I will find a spot for them in my Mets books.  I need to catalog my stuff better, I'd like to know where these came from.

These are pretty cool too.  Some of you may have seen these before - they are from the late 70's - they are patches that are 2½" x 3½", so they are baseball card size. 

I do actually know where I got these from...a local card shop had about 1000 of each of these in a box in the back, so I bought a couple of them a while ago.  I am puzzled as to what to do with them and this is obviously not the first time I have been puzzed by them since they ended up in one of these boxes.  Should I put them in top loaders and treat them like cards, or should I find a garment and treat them like textiles?  I guess this conundrum is why there haven't been more issues like these.

OK, crazy food issue time.  It is a promo sheet of Ritz Cracker Don Mattingly cards from 1989...

...in fact, there are two of them...

...and I would be lying if I told you I didn't just look these up on ebay to find out what the hell they are.  My love of wacky food issues would usually be trumped by the subject being a Yankee, but since these aren't licensed, perhaps I made an exception seeing as the interlocked NY is nowhere to be seen.  I also found this in an envelope with these:

A Don Mattingly autograph from a 3x5 signature book.  It is not an index card but a page from one of those little scrapbooks (how odd is it to have this of a living recent ballplayer?).  Somehow, I imagine I was going to combine this bizarre cut signature with the Ritz Cracker sheet to make some kind of framed Mattingly collectable .  Or something like that.  Maybe, I dunno.  I really have no idea where I got either of these things.  Maybe I will now shift gears and make my own Donnie Baseball custom card with the cut signature, perhaps when a streak of arts and craftiness strikes me.  Sounds like a fun project to me.

Oh boy!  A box...a flat box with no identifying marks whatsoever...



It's a collector's plate.  Um, OK.  It 's all gold a shiny, even through the wrapping.  Let's see who it is...

Why, it's Nolan Ryan.  This is from Topps and it is from 1993.  I recognized the photo of Ryan from that card, but...

...the back of the plate clinched that notion as that is the back of his 1993 Topps card.  This thing fit perfectly on my scanner, which should give you some idea of the size.  I would love to eat my breakfast, lunch, and dinner off the all time strikeout king's face everyday from now until the end of time, but alas, that little blurb there on the bottom of the back says that this is a display piece and not suitable for food use.  Sad.  Yet it also says to hand wash the plate, so in a way, maybe they are daring me to eat off of it.  I just hope I didn't actually spend real money on this thing.

Let's go out on a better note than that.  I found these oddball oversized cards:

Well, I don't think they are cards, per se, it says on the front that they are pictures.  I don't remember these at all much less where I procured them.  I only have three of the packs and it says there are five.  I can't see if there is anything on the back of them.  Since they are career leaders, I assume there are some all-time greats inside.  Listings on eBay show that they are from 1983 and that they actually fold out, accordion style, just like on the front icon.  How freaking weird are these things?  I am torn, do I open them?  Tear them apart?  Sell them on eBay?  Does anybody really really want these things and has something to trade me for them?  I might keep the pitching leaders, though, no matter what, seeing as there is no doubt a Tom Seaver in there.  I just wish I could remember where I got them from.  See what happens when you don't organize and write things down?  Maybe I'll just throw all this stuff back in the box and wonder about them all over again 5-6 years from now.  Sigh.

Homemade.

       As I have mentioned before, I have a deep adoration for oddball cards and food issues.  It would seem that a very specific aspect of that particular kind of card has been fodder for some recent debate.  I'd be lying if I didn't often look at other posts and say "me too!" and I am going to do that here, but add a twist at the end.

Here is a page of random unsorted retired players that I have in a binder but have not fully organized nor integrated into the rest of my collection:

I am going to do something that haven't done on this blog (I don't think) and just focus in on three of the cards on that page:

What you see are three old school food issues cut off the sides and/or backs of boxes, all to varying success.  I am pretty sure whoever snipped off that 1976 Hostess Bake McBride sneezed somewhere near the bottom.  How else do you explain the sudden and inexplicable chunk taken out of the lower right corner?  That 1962 Post Felipe Alou has been well loved all around.  It was cut with B+ precision, but then obviously put into the kids' back pocket.  Those are some impressive creases, even by my low standards.  That 1961 Jim Coates is cut rather well, but it is the back thatI find much more interesting...

...I believe that is a baseball rubdown from one of the 1960's oddball sets floating around (someone with a better knowledge of the 60's could help me out on that one), a rather ingenious use of them, by the way, to fill in the empty brown cardboard void.  That is why that random Yankees common has remained in my collection all these years.

But those three cards are before my time.  How did I do as a kid when the scissors were allowed out of the drawer (there was a nasty incident in my extreme youth where I played "haircut" with my little sister, thus eternally banning me from using scissors without permission.  Even as an adult I find myself asking permission to use the scissors, rather than asking where they are.  But I digress...)  The following cards have been in my collection for decades and each and every one of them were cut off of their cardboard panels by yours truly:

Not too bad, if I do say so myself.  The top two 1987 Fleer cards are box bottom cards.  The Grote is a 1976 Hostess card that I cut off of a panel I bought at a show in the late 80's.  That one is the only one with some suspect trimming.  It would seem that I had the same issue with a lower corner as the aforementioned Bake McBride card, though quite not to the same extreme.  Perhaps there is something about those cards that just begs for poor trimming.  The 1986 Topps Gooden is also a box bottom card - very sharp.  The other four drakes cards are slightly smaller by nature, not by butcher.  I included that Gooden Glossy All Star card as a visual guide of a standard issue size card (I am also amused that the two pictures on the 1986 Drakes and that card are practically identical).  So, perhaps it is cheap 1970's cardboard that makes for bad card cutting, not over-caffeinated or under-intelligent children.  Oh, and it seems I have doubles of that 1986 Drakes Gooden in the middle, so if you want/need/desire that card, drop me an email. 

So where was this twist I promised?  Well, I have done other things with scissors and baseball cards and  boxes.  First, I like to make binder labels out of them...

I have about a million of those "Topps of the Class" cards laying around, so it made sense to tag my Topps binders with them. Here I do the same thing for a football binder...

I also noticed that the graphics on the boxes were kinda neat, so maybe I could make labels out of them:

I am pretty sure that football label is the first one I consciously made to be a label for my binders.  I also noticed that recent modern binders use a label that is the standard size of a baseball card.  So making binder labels out of card boxes then grew into me finding the best 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 bits on a box and making my own unique cards out of them:

One of the obvious drawbacks of this little art project is they use a lot of Yankees on baseball card boxes.  Luckily, I have Big Papi and Bruce Lee to balance out all that Jeter and A-Rod nastiness.

That middle card there is from a blaster of 2009 OPC, I believe, and it makes for a better ad than any of the advertisement cards Upper Deck put in their packs the last few years.  These cards are also the only time I ever put cards in back-to-back, since the opposite side is either blank cardboard or very abstract bits of the reverse of the box. So what you are seeing here is only two pages:

That middle card is the closest I will ever get to having the Abraham Lincoln DNA card in my collection, but that is certainly good enough for me.  I even got some of the A&G box seal onto that one.  I like to see if I can get odd little bits into the card like that...like the hologram on the Drew Brees card, or the kung-fu dude flying out behind the Ken Griffey card.  The bottom right card is not from a baseball card box, it is actually from a Whiffle Ball display.

Since I so rarely buy any new product, much less entire boxes of new product, I am afraid those last four or five spaces might never get filled in.  I have a bunch of other homemade box cards scattered in my collection, so perhaps I will bring them all together just to have the pages complete.  I thought with all this talk of cutting out cards off of boxes, I would go a little outside the lines and show you what someone with a pair of scissors and a lot of time (and boxes) on his hands could do.

Progress? Eventually.

       There is a room in my house, as I assume there is in many of your houses, that has become "The Slash Room."  In this case, it is the guest/closet/junk/spare/hobby room.  It is a room that seems to draw all the extra crap that doesn't have a place.  It is the room where out-of-towners too cheap to spring for a hotel sleep.  It also is where childish things get banished, things like say, baseball cards.  This is where I spend a great deal of my spare time, in this spare room.  My mission?  To whittle down all my excess cardboard into a manageable and enjoyable collection.  The "small collection" idea has been a work in progress 2+ years running.  Once you could barely walk into this room without nearly killing yourself on a crate full of 800-count boxes, now there has been a lot of headway made. 

There was once about 20 huge boxes and crates, there are now only eight:

I consider this progress.  Those three postal crates have mostly junk wax era complete sets in them, so those will (eventually) be easy to either put into binders, sell, or give away.  The others are full of boxes and shoe boxes.  They are the tougher ones to get through.

See the boxes in the crates here:

Those are the better cards I like organized into teams.  When I trade with you, that is usually where your favorite team's cards come from.  Some of them are packed (Yankees, Red Sox) some of them are pretty skint (Dodgers, Pirates). I am not attached to those cards in the least; they will all leave the roost (once again, eventually). Those three boxes on the right?  That is a bunch of memorabilia I haven't gone through in ages.  Balls, Photos, etc.  I used to have about a dozen of those paper boxes full, so again, I consider this progress.

OK, that is what the stuff I am trying to get rid of looks like, what about the stuff that is staying?  Isn't that more important?  Why, yes it is:

This is one 6-foot tall bookcase from Target full of binders.  Next to it are six shoe boxes full of cards in top loaders.  Eventually, this is all that my collection will consist of.  This amount seems manageable to me.  The black binders are sets.  The old timey binders are mostly labeled by team, sport, or maker.  The bottom shelf was cut off, but that consists of newer binders and just a little empty space to add more.  And why six shoe boxes?  Because eight is too many and four is too few.  They will eventually reside on top of this bookcase.  What's on top of it now?  Don't ask.  And you gotta dig my collection of sports jerseys there.  Yes, I am eternally 10 years old.

I was looking for my Piazza boxes, which are two of my favorites.  One of them was given to me about 25 years ago by my Gramma for Christmas:

It was one of those terrible boxes was full of junk wax stuff and somehow it never got thrown out.  Now, I still have this awful, cheesy, beat-to-hell box...but it reminds me of my grandmother every time I open it.  I wouldn't get rid of it for the world.

As you can see, I keep some very random things in there.  My beloved Rookie All Stars, some smaller sets (some of which are even finished) that may or may not find a binder, and my Mike Piazza game used cards...yes, I have a boatload of them.  No, I am not looking to get rid of any them.  Yet.

The real problem with my organization is...I keep finding more stuff.  Stuff I didn't know I had.  Stuff I thought I already dealt with.


So this box was on top, easy enough to spot.  And I can always pick out my three-row monster box full of Piazza cards, since it is the only three row monster box I own.  But what were these boxes under them?  I took them all down. 

What mysteries await me?  First of all, that red box is a 1989 Fleer Factory set.  No, really.  I love that box because it has Gary Carter on the front.  I might ditch the set and just keep the box.  It somehow made it to the back of this pile.

Let's look inside the Piazza box...

...wow, it is a mess, I have neglected my Piazza collection for a while. I have a whole cigar box full of cards to integrate into this box AND now these cards I just tossed inside.  Ugh.  Gonna be a long night of sorting.

But what of those other boxes?  You must understand, for a few years there I would go to a show, buy a bunch of cards - both dime box type and high end stuff - and it would just be thrown in a larger box waiting to be sorted.  Needless to say, these boxes built up a lot faster than my sorting could get rid of them.

And now I keep finding them!

This thing is full of new stuff, vintage, autographs, ten cent cards, ten dollar cards, hundred dollar cards. I thought I was done finding these...but nope, here's more.

And the 800-count boxes?

Even more unsorted stuff.  If you look, you can already see a 3x5 Darryl Strawberry card.  And team sets. And lord knows what else.

How much is this like archeology?  These boxes were on top of a dresser (see the upper right corner of the first picture), take a good look the layer of dust that was under those boxes:

Just call me the Indiana Jones of sports cards. *whip crack*