Today I held my first 2023 baseball card. Five years ago I stopped building current Red Sox team sets. I didn't stop collecting Red Sox cards (even though my blog activity makes it look like I quit), I just stopped trying to build new team sets. I switched to outright buying the current year's team sets.
I haven't been trying to build team sets but every year I cave in at some point and buy a random pack at Wal-Mart or I get one for Birthday, Father's Day, or Christmas. But not this year, I haven't held a single 2023 card until today. This is the first time that has ever happened.
While may think of this as cheating it is so much more economical that I can't justify building them anymore. The extra money saved I can spend on what I really like, vintage cards and Virdons. There is the added bonus of getting the cards a year late because I can sort of relive the prior baseball year as I binder them up.
This is the first batch of 2023 cards to come in the mail. I get about half of my team sets from TeamSets4U and they just so happen to be the fastest getting them to my mailbox. Actually what came first was my new binder, it came from Amazon and arrived the next day, it's hard to beat Amazon shipping.
This is eleven team sets: Bowman Prospects, Bowman Chrome Prospects, Bowman Platinum, Big League, Donruss, Heritage Low Numbers, Pristine, Pro Debut, Topps All Star, Gold Star, and Holiday parallels.
My process is to go to ebay and start putting the three lowest priced team sets of each brand in my cart for every single brand I plan to buy. Then I go to my cart and weed out the ones that screw me on shipping. Sometimes that set that was $8 with $2 shipping is more expensive than the $9 team set that had $5 shipping but free shipping if combined. Once I weed out the more expensive ones I go to each seller I am going to use and see that else they have available to combine shipping on. Many times I will find a team set from an older year that I can get for only a couple dollars and free shipping. Mostly though I end up with more and more parallel sets. I find random things I never heard of like Montgomery parallel team sets for $5.
I have fourteen more team sets besides these just waiting to show up in my mailbox. Living in Phoenix it is about to be stay in the house hot so I will have plenty of time to watch the current year Sox while I relive last years Sox.
1 comment:
I could be wrong, but I don't think I opened any 2023 packs until early 2024... or right at the end of 2023. I do have some retail waiting for me to open though. Just haven't gotten around to it.
P.S. Oh man... I can't stand "stay in the house" hot weather. It's already hit 80 at least a couple of days here. That's too hot for me.
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