Friday, June 8, 2012

The summer project


One of the great things about collecting baseball cards is organizing.

While I've tried to convince myself otherwise, I really do enjoy sitting down and putting away new cards, or simply browsing through ones that are already in my collection. It can have therapeutic benefits as well, which is something I've previously discussed.

The greatest thing about organizing is that everyone does it in their own unique way.

I'm not a "box guy", as many other collectors are. There's nothing wrong with them, but I've always personally found that binders are a much better way to display my collection.

It's like a filing system. If you wanted to see my cards of John Olerud as a Mariner, I'd be back in two seconds. I'd just have to grab the first of the two Seattle binders I have and look under the "first baseman" section.

Even with that, I knew that something wasn't quite right with the way I display my cards within the binders. I never wanted to devote the time to fix that problem, though.

As you can see, one of my pages of Stephen Drew cards is a bit disorganized. They're all together, but something was missing.

I've decided to devote some time this summer to fixing this problem. I'm always looking for a new "project" to keep me occupied anyways.

What is that problem, you ask?




While my cards are grouped by individual players, they were pretty messy within each section.

This was the real reason I've always kept cards in binders in the first place. It just looks good, to put it simply. You can't get this kind of aesthetic pleasure by putting cards in a box.

Now, all my different variations of Stephen Drew's 2007 Topps card are together. If cards could talk, I think they'd be happy about it.

There's at least a few other bloggers out there are binder fans. I'm sure Night Owl's "Awesome Night Card" binder is the best collection of those cards on the planet. And BA Benny left a comment on yesterday's post saying he was a "binder guy".

I may be different than some other collectors in a lot of areas, but I'm glad to say that this isn't one of them. The cards that are most near and dear to me are and always will be stored in binders.

I don't see a time where it would be any different.

4 comments:

Hackenbush said...

I'm only semi-organized but I guess I'm different in that I like my favorite cards in top loaders. That way I can pick up each card individually and look at it. I also like to put them in my home built display case as well. That being said, I do have some cards in binders , including all of my non-baseball tobacco cards.

arpsmith said...

I am a binder guy too for my Giants collection but I do it based on year, with 1 or more years per binder. Then for each year, I organize by set and card number alphabetically. It follows my master checklist.

Spiegel83 said...

I go with binders for the most part. Random commons that I don't collect are in boxes by set. My binders are only for my keepers.

AdamE said...

I put my team sets and my Virdon collection in binders. My partial team sets go in a box till they are done, except for the last few years I have put partial tem sets in a binder too.