Regrets

I see the question asked all the time around card circles: what are your biggest personal regrets as a collector?

The question is, of course, usually framed and understood in a monetary sense. People trading/selling cards of prospects before said prospect became a star, etc., etc. A better question would be: what's the most money you lost collecting cards? I once owned the illustrious 2011 Topps Update Mike Trout rookie, and its liquorfractor parallel, but I sold them both a long time ago for a small fraction of what they're worth now. Would I like that money? Sure. But do I regret it? Not really -- I got what I wanted at the time, and it's not like I could've known how huge that particular bubble would get.

To me, regret works much differently, and is nowhere near as monumental as most people's definitions of it -- in my experience it's way more about the things I didn't do rather than the things I did. 

It's true that I once sold a Mike Trout rookie for almost nothing -- but as far as personal anguish goes, I'd rank the years I spent ignoring cards from the 1980s higher on the regret-meter higher than anything involving that Trout. 

When I was a kid, I either wanted anything that was brand new, or really old (i.e. vintage) -- '80s cards fell in between the two extremes, and were thus pushed aside. I've done by best to close those gaps since, but I'm still missing quite a few obvious '80s cards in my present-day collection, thanks to those years of ignorance.

Which makes me thankful people like Jeff of "Wax Pack Wonders" are so quick to patch those holes when I put them on my Dime Box Dozen list, as he recently did with the '82 Donruss Rick Monday at the top of this post that fell through the inevitable cracks of my collection for so long.

Jeff's been sending me cards for a while now, and while he hasn't blogged in a couple months I'm hoping it's more of a hiatus rather than a permanent pause.

Whether he's blogging or not, Jeff always seems to come up with cards I need -- oddball mini-collection hits this great make me regret not starting mini-collections a long time ago.

A couple mini-collection parallels here -- only problem is I still need the base version of that magnificent Kris Benson.

I regret not knowing about an insert set called "Boyz with the Wood" until way too recently.

Bert of "Swing and a Pop-Up" fame -- another blogger-on-sabbatical -- reached out to me not long ago, saying he'd be able to help with some of my recent Topps Archives needs.

Packages like this make me regret the years I spent not maintaining a want list -- because deleting a large chunk of numbers from my needs sure is satisfying.

Bert included a bit of other miscellany from my want lists, and even hit a Dime Box Dozen need with that Cavan Biggio.

I know I had that card at one point -- I must've sent it to someone somewhere along the line, a decision I kinda regretted when I decided to start collecting him and found I didn't have a second copy of it in my dupe boxes.

Lately I've regretted not tracking how many Dime Box Dozen needs you wonderful readers have taken care of in this blog's history -- I imagine the number's pretty high up there by now.

You can add one more notch to that list with this '94 OPC Mark Grace, generously sent to me by John of the relatively new "Adventures of a Baseball Card Collector" blog -- I collect Grace anyways, but the goofy photo catapulted it to an all-out need.

John was even nice enough to throw a couple more Gracies into the mix, including one from an early '90s SI for Kids set that always gives me the warm fuzzies.

It's an honor to say that I was the second party to John's first trade on the blogs when I sent him a stack of cards in exchange for a handful of reprints he unearthed at his LCS.

I don't remember my first blog trade, but I know I was hooked right from the start -- and almost instantly regretted all the years I spent making dull book-value trades on the forums.

I dunno if anyone else does this, but sometimes I regret already having a cool card when someone sends me a second copy of that cool card.

That TCMA Hank Aaron would've been the surefire centerpiece of the cards John sent me...if I didn't already own a copy of it -- I actually thought to myself, oh man, I wish I didn't already have this!

I also recently received a second huge box in the mail from reader Mike W., who some of you may remember from the first amazing box o' cards he sent me a while back.

There were quite a few surprises for me in there -- namely this Brewer-era Hank Aaron oddball -- but one thing I didn't expect to see fall out of Mike's box was a random stack of vinyl 45s for my dad (which I want Dad to write a guest trade post about soon).

I've never been huge on oversized cards, mostly because I still haven't quite figured out how to store them.

Problem is, I've ignored them for so long that I've overlooked a lot of stuff I need for some of my bigger player collections, like this quartet of oversized oddballs.

Today on Is This A Baseball Card? -- flash cards?!

My general apathy towards oversized doesn't extend in the slightest to these '70s Sportscasters cards -- they're awesome, and I don't think anyone's ever sent me any via trade before this.

(One thing I don't regret is the Hank Aaron theme this post has unwittingly taken.)

I noticed the box Mike sent me had quite a bit of weight to it, which made sense because, in addition to Dad's records, I found a book inside!

While Mike couldn't have known it at the time, passing this book along corrected a huge regret that's been sitting with me for a while now. I ran the sports section for a brief time at my last used bookstore gig, and we got this same book in stock one day. I debated whether or not I wanted to buy it for myself, and, for some reason, I passed and put it on the shelf. 

By the time I came to my senses and went back for it, the book was already gone, and I've never seen it since. Until Mike sent it to me out of the blue, that is. There's nothing quite like the feeling of lifting the weight of a once-heavy regret, and the stuff I've shown in this post was like an avalanche being carried off my back.

Whether it's books, baseball cards, or whatever else, I've started to realize that collecting is basically just a prolonged series of smaller regrets we do our best to rectify over time.

2020: The Year of Dad

Safe to say 2020 has been the Year of a lot of things, mostly bad, but I think we should decree it "The Year of Dad."

As you may already know -- and as he himself has written about on the blog before -- my dad works a side job stocking Target shelves, and one of his regular tasks is putting out sports cards. It's sort of two jobs, in that he has to a) actually put the cards on the shelves, and b) do it while dealing with the flipper-hungry mobs. Things seemed to have calmed down a bit in the early fall, but from what I've been hearing the flippers are back in full force now. (I've been pressing him to write a sequel to his guest post with the stories he's told me lately.)

On a human level, I truly sympathize with my dad, and wish people would leave him alone when he works (his fuse is longer than mine would be). But on a more selfish level, I love that Dad works these jobs, because it means he gets first crack at whatever new cards come out, and more often than not sets a few packs aside for his card-collecting son who'd otherwise never see new product. This is doubly the case because my dad, for whatever reason, seems to have a magic touch with the packs he picks out. And while that's been the case for a long, I don't think it's ever been more true than it has in 2020.

Example: over the summer, my dad grabbed me a blaster of 2020 Big League, decided to open the first pack in it for kicks...and promptly pulled a Jim Abbott autograph, numbered to 99 copies -- not a huge deal except if you consider the fact that JIM ABBOTT IS ONE OF MY FAVORITE PLAYERS IN BASEBALL HISTORY.

Way back when everyone was going insane for Bowman, my dad picked out a few packs for me, and wound up pulling a card most retail flippers could only dream of.

This was, again, a pack my dad opened before giving to me, and he sent me a text at the time saying something along the lines of -- hey, I think there was an autograph of some Rays guy in there. I don't know much about Vidal Brujan, but apparently he's a somewhat highly-touted prospect in the Rays system, and thus a key target for "investors" (my heart hurts a little just using that term). I'm no investor, but I work a minimum-wage job and am thus partial to extra cash. And having no attachment to Mr. Brujan myself, I quickly sold it for more than I'd ever sold a baseball card before.

Since it was his pack and all, I wanted my dad to take the profits, he insisted I keep the money, and funnel it back into my own card collection (more on that in a bit).

Nearly the same exact thing happened a few months later, when Topps Chrome came out.

I still haven't seen a single pack of Chrome out in the wild at any of my Targets, but once again, Dad grabbed a couple for me to sample...and once again, he pulled an autograph. I at least know who Trent Grisham is, and recognized him as a somewhat popular prospect. Like the Brujan (and the Abbott), this was a parallel of an already bigger-money base autograph, and I quickly sold it for a handsome sum. My dad, again, made me keep the money. If I didn't know any better, I'd think he was searching packs.

All this, then, begs the question: what did I do with all that found money?

Answer: I bought more baseball cards, of course!

I don't often have this much extra spending cash available, so I wanted to specifically knock out a few bigger wants with the money. One was an absolutely HUGE card I'd wanted for a long time that I had trouble finding at a price I was comfortable with -- and in a weird coincidence, many long years of waiting were finally put to bed...just this afternoon. I'll post about that one when it arrives (sorry to be a tease).

One of the other biggies that instantly came to mind was a '62 Topps Lou Brock rookie. I've never seen a copy of this card at anything near an affordable number -- the cheapest copy I saw at the last big card show (remember those?) was triple-figures. So, then, you could understand why I thought a '62 Brock would eat up a good chunk of the money I got for Dad's cards. I stumbled upon an auction for a particularly well-loved Brock one afternoon, with a very reasonable starting price, and threw in a bid as almost an afterthought, thinking there was no way in heck I'd win it.

But imagine my surprise when it turned out I was the only bidder on that '62 Brock...and that I won it for all of $9.99 and a couple bucks shipping -- white whale, speared.

I also treated myself to a few photo-variation SPs from this year's Topps -- which included pitchers hitting(!) and a Reggie Jackson play at the plate with cameos from Sal Bando and Steve Yeager(!!!).

A couple more variations: another pitcher at the plate, and a true Ichiro sunset card that I wish didn't have to be a short-print, but a card I'm thrilled to have nonetheless.

But in the end photo-variations were small potatoes, because I had much more pressing matters at hand.

This is, indeed, the same Joe Charboneau you know and love, a few seasons removed from his years (year?) of glory and languishing in the low-minors of the Pirates system. It was his last stop before retiring, but you'd never know that by the smile on his face there. I kind of laughed to myself when I put this card on my Keep Dreaming list, because it truly seemed to exist in a dream -- I'd never even seen a copy of it offered for sale.

This is one of those cards, though, that I was determined to have, even if it took months, years, decades. At some point I decided to see if the whole Prince William Pirates set was up for grabs anywhere, and if, by chance, it was anything near affordable. 

To my surprise, I did actually find a dealer who had a partial set available (including the Charboneau) at a fair price, and, after a chase that wound up at so many dead ends, it seemed something like a miracle when I found Super Joe on my doorstep a few days later.

In the process, I learned a valuable lesson about buying minor league cards -- try to find the whole set, because a lot of the time that's cheaper than any of the singles, for some reason.

That was my strategy with this '83 Pawtucket Red Sox set, and it paid off, because the whole thing ended up being cheaper than any of the copies of the single card I really wanted from this checklist. (Even better was the fact that there was an Ebay coupon going around right when I bought it, and I basically ended up getting it for free.)

While there are a few familiar names here, anyone who's seen this set, and has read this blog before, probably knows the card I was after.

To my knowledge, this is the only card to come out of Mark Fidrych's failed comeback try with the Red Sox at the time it was happening -- there's a couple other "flashback" minor league singles out there, but I think this is the lone contemporary one.

It's a bit painful to see The Bird looking so haggard and worn-down -- boggles my mind that he was only a year older than I am when this came out -- but it's still a card that was right near the top of my Want List Mountain for a long, long time, and I can't tell you how thrilling it was to slide it into that empty slot in my binders.

Dad may have not been a direct supplier of the cards I bought with the cash generated from his pulls, but he indeed selected and purchased the last couple things I'll be showing here tonight, an early Christmas present for yours truly.

I had the insanely good fortune to find Bobby Murcer's fantastic '72 Topps In-Action card (an uber-high-number) in a 3/$1 box at a show a while back, but it's always felt kinda orphaned in my collection since I didn't have Murcer's standard '72 Topps single to go with it. Which is why it ended up on my Keep Dreaming list...and stayed there, because have you seen how much '72 Topps high-numbers cost?

As fate would have it, Dad came through with the illustrious '72 Murcer, which I'm pleased to announce has finally joined his action-packed brother in my Yankees binder.

But Dad went a step further on my Keep Dreaming list and unearthed a card I never thought seriously about owning until recently: a 1963 Fleer Sandy Koufax.

Koufax's Topps catalog dominates his legend, and for good reason. But while '60s Fleer mostly gets treated as a forgotten chapter in vintage history, you can't tell me this isn't just as good as any of the Koufax cards Topps made at the time. Like most Koufaxes, it's a bit pricey, but Dad was able to secure this miscut copy (not my scanner's fault) for a tag that matched our light pockets. My Koufax collection is among my favorites to flip through, and by some miracle, it just got a whole lot better.

So I think you can see why I'm all set to announce that 2020 is indeed, and always will be, The Year of Dad.

--------------------------------

If you've made it this far, I thank you, and I might even have a little reward for your troubles.

In thumbing through my Keep Dreaming list, my dad accidently read the '63 Fleer Koufax as being a '63 Topps Koufax, and bought a copy of the latter. A great card, yes, but the problem is I already have one -- COMC took care of that a while back in those ancient times when they were actually shipping orders to people. So, with Dad's blessing, I'm holding a little pre-holiday giveaway where you, the reader, could win this very '63 Topps Koufax from Dad!

All you have to do is comment on this post, and you're in. Entries will be accepted until Sunday, December 20th, at 11:59 PM. I'll put the names into a randomizer, randomize the list three times, and announce the winner that following Monday. The victor will get the aforementioned Koufax, along with an accompanying prize pack of cards. All I ask is that you don't share this giveaway anywhere, as I want the winner to be someone who actually reads the blog. Also, due to shipping costs, I'm gonna have to limit this to US-only addresses (sorry, Canadian readers/friends!).

Other than that, however, please comment away -- and here's hoping the good fortune of The Year of Dad spills over into your household, dear readers.

Things I want, and things I need

The way I see it, the  my collecting brain is fighting an eternal battle -- there's the unhinged side willing to chase anything and everything I even remotely want, and the more sensible side that's begging me to settle down and just go after the cards I really need.

The fact that I currently have over 90 binders of baseball cards scattered around my room should tell you which side of my brain usually wins out. True, the prospect of chasing cards I need, and only cards I need, is a bit irrational to me, and doesn't sound very fun -- I'd end up adding like five cards to my collection a year. But I admit I can get carried away on the other end of the spectrum, gobbling up anything that catches my eye without really questioning how important said cards are to my collection outside of that pure I WANT! feeling. 

I often wonder what the want-need ratio is for an average collector, and if mine is as outrageous as I think it is. Most collections, I imagine, are scattered with wants around a small treasure trove of needs. And despite what it may look like around here sometimes, I think I've gotten a better handle on cutting down the ratio a bit over the years. At least sometimes.

I've still got a long ways to go, and I think a good example of that is admitting I claimed the above Yoan Moncada -- a glorified base card with a little All-Star stamp thingy -- via a Free Card Friday offering from Jay of "Card Hemorrhage" a while back, and chalk up another win for the want side of my brain, because there's absolutely no reason I needed this card.

In addition to the Moncada, Jay's sent a bunch other things via a few different packages and envelopes recently that toed the line between want vs. need.

I actually received these from Jay before I'd opened a single pack of 2020 A&G -- at the very least, I have Jay to blame for opening up another Pandora's box of needs, because I went out and bought that complete "Field Generals" insert not long after, mostly because of how much I loved that Girardi.

A&G's always good for a couple of those weird insert sets that I don't really seek out, but end up keeping all the ones I stumble upon -- like these two strange minis I'm not quite sure what to do with.

Now we're definitely into need territory -- I'll always be a sucker for regional oddball releases, especially if said region is nowhere near where I live.

I have Jay to thank for adding the first of these west coast, Giants-centric Emerald Nuts oddities to my binders, and now I'm floored by how much better 2005 Topps would've looked with black borders.

I unearthed a minor goldmine of these '81 Topps Scratch-Offs at the flea market last year, which I thought took care of everything I could ever possibly need from this set.

Apparently not, because by some stroke of luck, Jay thought to send me a few more of these panels -- I was shocked to discover a couple I didn't already have (namely Rose and Carlton) and thus needed...yes, needed.

Hostess cards and weirdly-shaped inserts? Definitely needs.

By now, you may have noticed my dilemma -- I love so many different parts of this hobby, and collect so many different things, that in the end a vast island of cards are worthy of being catapulted into needs.

Minor league cards are always needs, especially ones that feature one-time general managers in horribly loud shirts and scarves.

Here's a couple cards from Jay I didn't know I needed, mostly because I can barely find any shreds of information on them.

I do know that's my first card of any kind of Archibald "Moonlight" Graham, which is kinda shocking given the unlikely legend he's become thanks to Field of Dreams.

But then there's this weird third category: cards I neither want nor need, but still keep around for some reason.

My feelings on graded cards are generally known, and I already had an ungraded copy of this particular Wade Boggs sitting in my Red Sox binder, but still I hung onto this odd slabbed one Jay sent me -- it's sitting in the box of oversized and/or miscellaneous stuff I own right now. Why? Good question...I'm thinking it might have something to do with the absurdity of a company called "Snaggletooth Grading," or the knowledge that otherwise ordinary cards like these even get graded in the first place, but either way it's in my collection, and here to stay. For some reason. I don't know.

No one ever said this was a rational hobby, and there's a certain relief in simply submitting to that, but man I wish the I WANT!!! side of my brain would just shut up sometimes.

Nine years

"Dime Boxes" turns nine today, but that can't be right because didn't I just start this blog a few weeks ago?

I feel like I say this every year around the blog's anniversary, but sometimes it seems like these nine years have gone by so fast...but then again sometimes it does feel like I've been doing this for a long time. I was still a teenager when I started this blog, barely out of high school. That's mind blowing to me. I had no inclinations towards writing then -- go back and read some of the first posts on this blog, if you must -- but talking about baseball cards was (and is) something I'd always wanted to do.

I wish I could say I had every intention of blogging for nine years when I started this blog, but truthfully I didn't. I thought I might do it for a few months, get bored, and move on to the next thing -- as teenagers so often do. But no: seeing people actually read my posts, and better yet, learning that some people collected and thought about cards the same way I did, sucked me in for good. It was a joy and an affirmation I never really got collecting in my own bubble. I blogged some more, and then people actually started sending me cards for absolutely nothing, and the rest is history.

Nine years later, and I'm still here, just as grateful for this universe of blogs as I was when I found it way back when. I don't blog nearly as much anymore -- I don't have the time and energy that teenagers have so much more of -- but make no mistake, the blogs are still my happy place. It gives me great joy to carve out some time to write a post these days, and in the end, I'm still every bit as entertained by the blogosphere as I was nine years ago.

I can honestly say my life changed the day I decided to start this blog, and I have all of you wonderful readers to thank for that -- so whether you've been here since the beginning, or if you're new to the blog, I thank you so, so much for reading.

Pen marks and mustaches (or, writing on baseball cards)

It's almost hard to believe that baseball cards were once regarded as items with no value further than the beauty in the eye of their beholders.

The cliche is, admittedly, true: the vintage era was a simpler time to collect baseball cards. Kids then would probably be as aghast about grading and toploaders as present-day investors would about flipping prized cards against brick walls. There's a reason most of the vintage I own is creased, battered, and generally look like they're 50, 60, 70 years old. Okay, yeah, they're cheaper (and I'm notably cheap) but it goes a little further than that -- they tell stories. So few places in life offer windows into a time well before one was born, and nothing does it quite the way cardboard does.

But I admit that even I have a tough time imagining a time when baseball cards were seen as so historically insignificant, so overlooked as heirlooms future generations might enjoy, that people actually wrote on them.

I have vague memories of writing on a few of my football and basketball cards as a kid -- mostly little talk bubbles filled with things an eight-year-old thought funny -- but even as lax as I am with condition, I wouldn't dream of writing on any of my cards now.

Even in terms of vintage, writing is something of a paradox for me: if I'm gonna buy a "damaged" card, I much prefer soft corners, creasing, pinholes, etc. to writing. But in terms of general allure, I find writing to be by far the most fascinating "defect" of all. I own quite a few cards with writing on them, and while I'd be open to having other copies, I've never really sought that hard to upgrade them. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I'm so enthralled by the glimpses I get into their past owners.

The most common form of writing, I've found, is the transactional sort -- the collectors who, like me, find a certain pleasure in keeping up with the travels of their favorite players. Back then, though, kids had to manually update their cards, because it'd be years before any kind of Traded set came into existence.

These are a couple personal favorites in my collection -- especially the Frank Robinson, which was updated to reflect his later managerial stint with the Indians a full ten years after this card was issued (you can also notice scratched-out "LA" and "Cal." notations documenting his previous stops with the Dodgers and Angels).

Some collectors went the extra mile and tried to eliminate any possible evidence of the past -- though in the case of Fergie Jenkins, I suppose it could've simply been an example of someone really not liking the Cubs.

A few of my cards provided impromptu 2x3 canvases for future MAD Magazine artists.

Many collectors, it seems, were obsessed with facial hair.

I see a lot of older books come through my job with people's names stamped inside, or, in some cases, even lavish specially-made bookplates affixed to the front page.

A few of my baseball cards feature those same kinds of custom touches, and I can't help but wonder when and why we stopped having stamps and stickers made with our names on them, because I know I'd sure like to have one.

Often times, the collector took his pen to the other side of his baseball cards -- Post was a prime candidate since the backs are completely blank.

The front of this Post Sandy Koufax is obviously wounded enough, but that's before you flip it over and find the number "1,000,000" scrawled in a way that has always puzzled me -- is it an appraisal of future value? an aspiration? a secret code, etc., etc...

Some cards obviously belonged to devout baseball fans, including one who thought to pencil Home Run Baker's date of death onto this '61 Fleer Greats card issued a couple years prior.

Some pen marks tell a simple story.

Others are more difficult to figure out -- I've owned this particular '72 Milt Pappas for as long as I can remember, and I've never bothered to upgrade it because I've never been able to pin down with absolute certainty why someone wrote REPRESENTATIVE along the top of it.

I've long assumed it's because Pappas was (possibly?) the Cubs' player rep in the early '70s, and if you want to go all Occam's Razor it seems like the most logical reason, but for some reason there's still something telling me that might not be right.

Unless I missed a major chapter of baseball history, Carl Yastrzemski isn't and was never affiliated with the A's organization.

So why, then, does my copy of his '73 Topps card have the Red Sox team notation scratched out, and the words "On Ais(A's?)" written in the middle of it? I have no idea, and the only one who does is that lone person somewhere out there in the universe, the person who once owned this card, wrote on it, and then left me to decipher their mystery. And didn't even leave a note.

These are the mysteries that permeate the weird corner of the baseball card universe that I find endlessly fascinating. It's hard to envision a time where cards relapse in significance and value so much that we'd start writing on them again. But in some ways I find a certain comfort in seeing pen marks on a few of the baseball cards in my binders. They're fun reminders that this hobby wasn't always taken so seriously, that cards were once seen as possessions with no future to speak of outside of the lives of their owners. It's nice to imagine.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to sell all these eBay 1/1s.