Gellman at the Sports Cards Uncensored blog has floated around a very cool idea of sharing topics to get the numerous sports card bloggers closer together. Let me share in on his first topic: what type of card collector are you?
My story is nothing special. Like most, I collected in my youth in the 80s but grew out of it and my moving on happened pretty much as the industry was changing in the early 90s. I remember collecting the first year or so of Upper Deck but that was pretty much my cutoff.
Trying to get back in the last few years has been completely overwhelming. So many different products! Hobby & retail boxes, Price points all over the place, concepts like Rookie edition or hot prospects actually filled with veterans, Legendary cuts filled with cards of Marcus Thames & Ramon Vasquez, a product like SP Authentic selling for $2.99 a pack at Wal-Mart and not really having much of Short Prints (isn’t that what SP means???) or Authenticity (unless a fake background counts as authentic).
So what is a guy to do? Ask the hobby shop dude? When I actually reached above the clerks who knew nothing and the manager and I had a chat, all he wanted was to push high-end products. What about going back to the bible of old times for advice? Needless to say Beckett was useless. Blogs and vids were a bit better but it takes time to find the good ones among all the crappy ones out there… and then you could probably find a blog praising any product if you look long enough.
… So without being much more informed, I decided to jump and bust a couple of wax. The hobby box of SP Authentic baseball was okay… The auto was okay… the signed letterman of Huston Street was very sweet… was sweet to get a K for a pitcher even though it’s not part of his name… but the base set looks awful and those authentic speed & authentic power subsets are just lame and stupid. Wow Iguchi had 11 stolen bases last year! … this is totally making me forget about the 130 SB record breaker card from Rickey Henderson! What a card!
The retail box of NHL O-Pee-Chee was pretty much as expected. OPC was what I collected as a kid so I thought I would go back to it… but that set was just a low-end set with no tie-in to the old OPC except the name (though this year seems much more retro and nostalgia oriented). One no name jersey card as the only insert… but with a 700 card set, I wasn’t expecting so many duplicates and I doubt I ended up even 1/5 of the way through the set. No way I was gonna bust another 3-4 boxes to even reach a manageable number to start looking for singles.
Hey, maybe busting wax isn’t my thing with “modern” products… so I dabbled into player singles. Got a sweet Vince Young two color swatch (and I keep looking for that straight jacket swatch from this year product or that draft bust manufactured logo patch!), added a few Sedin twins autos to my collection, got seriously outbid on some Luongo auto patches, got the two coolest autograph cards I could afford from Russell Martin to be part of the display with my signed ball… but the real awesome cards are quite expensive for my means and I somehow felt that my money was badly spent looking at the few insert cards making my collection… pretty damn weak collection for what I paid! I should have more than a few cards.
I stopped buying last year after that, still keeping up online and brooding until I could find exactly what I wanted and which product would really satisfy me… but there are still a bunch of unanswered questions on my mind: how to get re-acquainted with the hobby, how to find out what product is good for my taste and my budget, how to avoid the pitfalls of fake patches, meaningless grading services, the irrelevance of Beckett and the world of innumerable parallels.
Masterpieces looks awesome, has a cool concept and with a small base set, it might be the way to go but I feel completely overwhelmed by all that is out there …
Anyways, that’s the view from the booth of the overwhelmed collector… or maybe I’m just the confused old timer noob collector…
