Little Big.

       I often wonder what I would do if I were rich.  I live a comfortable middle class lifestyle with very few complaints: I get to go on vacation, work on my terms (mostly), want for very little, and, hey, I even get to indulge in my hobbies.  I also collect baseball cards on my own terms with my own little group of rules - but much like my lifestyle, I can't help but imagine what would change in my piles if instead of $100 of disposable income a month, you suddenly injected millions of dollars. 

I adore old tobacco cards.  I love the look of them, I love the feel of them, and I even love the smell of them.  I really hate graded cards mostly because all you can touch is the little plastic prison and you don't get the tactile joy of colorful pieces of century-old cardboard.

I like to think that if I were suddenly flush with cash that the page you are looking at would be full of real cards rather than knockoffs.  Fourteen of these cards sit in a sort of limbo of unofficial reprint and unscrupulous counterfeit.  You'd know this if you look at the backs. 

The one in the middle is a Hygrade reprint from the 1980s.  It announces with great pride that this card, if real, would be worth $700! I have one of the t206 Honus Wagner that tells us it would be worth north of $8000.  Eight grand for a Wagner?!?! Sign me up with or without a lottery win, I'll take out a loan for that price. Today's hobby puts that card in a six-figure number and you can easily go into millions for it.  If I were rich, would I invest in Hans rather than stocks?  You're damn right I would.  Alas, they would all be in graded slabs but I would be willing to forgive that this one time.  I have even seen one of these in person at the Cooperstown hall of fame.  I am pretty sure that is as close as I will ever get to one, much less owning one.

Here in the top row, you see more beautiful legitimate reprints of t206s, this time by Capital - courtesy of our friends at Renata Galasso - also from the 1980s.  But then they take a turn, as now sadly, our narrative will as well. Let's get back to those backs for a moment. 

You will see that they reproduced the backs nicely and also, wisely, put the line 'Capital Reprint' at the bottom.  In that lower corner, you will see what looks like legitimate looking aged cards and yet when you look at the backs, you see that there is some paper loss, right at the bottom. Hmmm.... What that means is some low-life imbecile tried to make these look and feel real, and to the non-collector they might have gotten away with it.  I picked these up at a show in a dime box years ago and the seller and I had a giggle over them.  He forgot where he got them from but I am certain he was not the perpetrator of the awful attempt at fraud.  But see, in the end this is why we can't have nice things.  This is one of the main reasons we have graded cards in the first place and have to hide cardboard away forever behind plastic.  Sure, any good collector would know these are garbage, but they were made to fool the layman into thinking they had vintage treasure.  They make me sad and I am glad they are now in my collection, free to be ridiculed for the trash that they are.  But they still look neat in and of themselves and I like to think the other reprints make fun of them when I close the binder, like some weird outtake from Toy Story.

Let's cleanse the palate with the opposite in size and stature.  These are 1971 Topps Supers and they are firmly ensconced in the oddball section of the hobby.  And they are some of my favorite things ever.

Once again, it is definitely a touch thing.  They are the size of a postcard and they feel heavy in your hand.  They are made of a thick cardboard that almost seems like they'd make moving boxes out of them otherwise.  They even make a neat sound when they smack together (though I don't recommend doing that if you care about future value).  Plus the colors and faces on these really pop.  Topps did similar supers in 1969 and 1970 too, but I think they perfected them in 1971.  Of course, sigh, they never made them again after that.  They've made plenty of big cards, sure, but these were not just parallels or fancy inserty box toppers or anything, these were their own set and a completely different thing. These eight will have a place of honor in my book of weird things.

I added these recently in a Facebook marketplace purchase, in fact it was 10 cards for $10 (a bargain at twice the price) so if anyone needs a Rico Carty or a Larry Dierker from this set, let me know and we can work something out.  If I were rich, I could just altruistically send them to you but instead, we'll have to trade like the unwashed masses do.

***

Post script: the title of this post refers to a very odd band, if you know them you know what I am talking about, if you don't you can click here (so so NSFW) and feel your brain melt for a few minutes.  Give it a chance, it is catchy, though, seriously.

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*