Most baseball fans and even some non-baseball fans are familiar with the following quote from Rogers Hornsby:
“People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”
The view from my window can’t captivate me for months on end. I fill most of the time by getting together with my baseball buds (I have some super awesome baseball friends), acquiring, dusting, and organizing my baseball memorabilia, and planning my summer schedule around baseball games and events. When I’m not doing that (or working my 40 hours per week to pay for food, shelter, and my baseball habits), I’m watching hockey, attending concerts and the theatre, or playing games on my phone or tablet.
The fact that social media is teeming with baseball posts and notes has helped keep my spirits up in the offseason. It allows me to get a small fix with my favorite teams’ news, Dominican Professional Baseball League action, and peeking into what players (and mascots) do in the offseason. My favorite follow right now is Joey Mellows (Twitter: @BaseballBrit) and his passion for the game of baseball and its culture, regardless of geographical location or level. In an upcoming post, I’ll be chatting more about him and his Summer 2020 United States tour plans.
On a recent Sunday, I had a baseball card morning. My iPad was charging and there was no hockey on television.
I had been neglecting to file nine team sets that I acquired last year; five 2019 Mariners-affiliated minor league sets, three older Tacoma Rainiers sets (thanks to one of the aforementioned super awesome baseball friends who found them at the team store at Cheney Stadium), and a 2017 set of Class AAA Pacific Coast League prospects. A note on the prospects set - I bought it for the Rainiers prospects (of course), but in looking through that card set two years after print was quite interesting. While you’d expect most AAA prospects to make their way to the majors, not all of them do. Some of those players that I wouldn’t have paid any attention to in 2017 have become common names to me. Do Matt Chapman, Josh Hader, or Cody Bellinger sound like anyone you’ve heard of? No? Okay, never mind then. I was impressed, anyway.
I’ve been collecting cards for almost 30 years. Over the past several years as I’ve watched minor leaguers come to Everett and move up or move out, I’ve expanded my minor league team set collection beyond just the local team. One thing I enjoy about collecting the team sets for an entire franchise is seeing who was on each team at the time the set was defined. There is always a lot of movement among the levels, so players that spent a lot of the season with the AquaSox (for example) may have been in West Virginia (one level higher) on photo day. Apparently teams don’t assemble their “lists” at the same time, so there are generally players that were on the move between photo shoots and appear in two sets. There were ten double-takes in the Mariners system in 2019, including a pitcher I had never heard of. He's in the St. Louis organization now, so I guess I don't have to feel badly.
I’ll provide a primer for those who don’t understand or can’t justify collecting 2.5" x 3.5" pieces of cardstock with photos of baseball players (many of whom are destined to melt into obscurity). One storage option for sports cards are 8.5” x 11” clear pages with pockets for the cards. The pages can then be put into a 3-ring binder. This method makes the cards easier to look at if one is collecting for entertainment rather than investment, but the binders do take up an amazingly large amount of space when compared to a shoe box storing the same number of cards. Since the cards are printed on both the front and back, I choose to have one card per pocket so I can see both sides without removing the card. Four words: Heavy duty shelving unit.
My pages of choice are made with non-PVC, acid-free, ultra-clear polypropylene film. If I’m going to spend money on 2.5" x 3.5" pieces of cardstock with photos of baseball players (many of whom are destined to melt into obscurity), I’m going to spend money to keep them accessible and looking nice.
These card pages have nine pockets. This is a key point in my describing the pages because there are almost no team sets that come in a quantity that, when divided by 9, results in a whole number. I don’t mind having a few empty pockets here and there (especially if it means I can showcase a mascot card by having open space around it 😉), but when a team has 28-30 cards in the set, I whine a little bit. It is what it is, and I know it’s all on me. I’m unreasonably particular about arrangement; I no longer will mix sets to avoid having empty page pockets, but open space is not always appealing to me.
Through patience and creativity (neither of which are an everyday occurrence for me), I can declare victory. It didn’t actually take a great amount of time, even with the added self-imposed challenge to separate the teams’ cards in a way to avoid similar logos being next to each other. Example: The logos for the Fresno Grizzlies and the Sacramento River Cats look similar in shape and color, so I couldn’t POSSIBLY put them next to each other.
And that, gentle readers, is the difference between “unreasonably particular” and “neurotic.”
But it keeps me from staring out the window.
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