Archive for Player Collector

Collecting Kershaw: Today begins a new page, the first of 2019

Posted in Collecting Kershaw with tags , , , , , , on February 10, 2019 by Cardboard Icons

Today I woke up and saw that I left my Clayton Kershaw binder on my kitchen table. I opened the binder and the first page was that containing various 2018 Topps Heritage cards. It’s a beautiful page, but it also represented cards from last season.

2019 Topps is by my count 11 days old today, and since the product hit shelves I have been trading for and buying various Kershaw inserts and parallels. I’v e had several maildays over the last week or so, and today I decided to put them all in the binder to effectively begin the new card year in this collection.

The page has seven of the nine pockets full, but by the middle of the week this page will be filled with parallels of this base card, and a second page will have been started.

For the record as of this moment I have the Base, Gold, Rainbow Foil, Black, Independence Day, Father’s Day Blue and Advanced Stats back; I have the “150th” gold stamp and the Meijers Purple versions on the way to fill out this specific page. And a pair of inserts are on the way, and of course I’ll need the parallels of those at some point.

Collecting these parallels has kept me away from buying more of the 2019 Topps packs for the most part. Typically I would have gotten several blasters, tons of loose packs and other type of packs by this point. Instead I’ve kept it fairly light — a hobby box, two blasters and handful of packs. And I’ve managed to trade off some base doubles for Kershaws, so that’s a win.

Have something I may need? Hit me on Twitter @cardboardicons.

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The love and hate of Topps Moments and Milestones for player collectors

Posted in Collcting Clemens with tags , , , , , on January 25, 2019 by Cardboard Icons

Over the last month or so I’ve spent a good amount of time locating all of my Roger Clemens cards, sorting them, cataloging them on Trading Card Database, and then placing them in my binders.

The process has been tedious but fun. When I started this process I had an estimated 1,400 unique Clemens cards, which feels like good amount, but by the time I had most of the base, parallels and insert cards entered into My Collection on the site, I was sitting just under 10% of his entire run, which is like an artificial threshold that I felt like I wanted surpass sooner rather than later.

While I paged through the site and tallied what I had it became inherently obvious that a good chunk of the Clemens cards cataloged on the site were from 2007 and 2008 Topps Moments and Milestones, and from 1999 and 2000 Topps Tek.

Topps Tek has a certain following — and sometimes those base cards especially the early ones — can be tough to locate and quite pricey when they are found. While I intend to obtain some or all of those at some point, the Topps Moments and Milestones cards I felt might be a good place to mark off a good chunk of my checklist for relatively cheap.

For the record, I hate this set. I hated it when it was released, I hated it when I used to run into them while checking bargain boxes, and I hated it when I started this cataloging process. The only love I have felt is when I acquired 75 of the damn cards recently and started checking them off my checklist. My completion percentage seemingly rose by more than half a percentage point.

The reason I disliked the Topps release so much was because I felt like the company took the idea it implemented in 1999 with the Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire Home Run Record Cards and bastardized that cool idea over the next few years with Barry Bonds HR cards in 2002, and then those Mickey Mantle and Alex Rodriguez Home Run cards in subsequent years. And then in 2007 (and 2008) the company went all in on this idea of creating one card per any given stat hoping that player collectors would flock toward them.

I’ll merely speak for myself here, but I HATED the idea. So I stayed away. Hell, in the 12 years since the initial release I had managed to obtain just one card from the 2007 set — and it was a printing plate that I scored for under $20 like five years ago.

I’m sure there are people who loved the product, or others who feel like I do. But this one was just not for me. That said, I am looking for more Clemens cards from this set. If anyone has them available, I am seeking the base /150 and looking to pay about a quarter per card on the ones. I’d also trade for them as long as you’re not expecting Mike Trout or any hot players in return. I hate that I am soliciting for the cards, but this is the life of a player collector. I mean I don’t HAVE to have them … but I kind of do, if you know what I mean.

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