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As soon as I saw it I knew positively, without a doubt, that this was not a double. I don't really chase autograph cards so I have zero autograph doubles. How it got in my doubles I have no idea. I don't even remember getting it. After I found the Piersall auto I also found two team bags in my doubles that was very suspect too. The team bags I knew were the cards came from, one was a card show and one was a card store in the west valley but I don't know how they got mixed into my doubles. I then knew I had to go through them all. I has been many years since I went through my doubles. I have been in Arizona for 12 years and the last time I went trough my doubles was before I moved here. It took me about two and a half weeks of sorting almost every single evening but the project is finally done. What a pain! This is probably going to make me change how I store cards. The final tally is 39. I found 39 cards that were in my doubles and not in my collection. Most of them were in those two aforementioned team bags but there were a few scattered here and there also.
The reason the sort was such a pin is that I originally started putting near complete team sets in binders. I stopped that practice years ago but those partial team sets that I originally put into binders are still in binders mixed in with the completed team sets. After I sorted all my doubles by year I then had to get out the appropriate binder and the corresponding box of cards that had not been put in a binder yet and start comparing that to both my doubles and my checklist. It was so time consuming! And I don't even want to get started telling how much time I spent on just the confusing mess that is Bowman vs Bowman Draft vs Bowman Prospects vs Chrome with some of those aforementioned Bowman sets also having Chrome Inserts; plus the dates on the back of early 00s Bowman are not always the year the cards were issued. So while I found 39 "new" cards to add to my collection I took out close to 20 Bowman cards that I had doubled up between my binders, my box, or had the same card in two different years.
I know it is blasphemy to many people but I am now seriously considering unbindering my whole collection. I already did it with my "vintage" cards. I couldn't make myself put things like a Yaz RC or Ted Williams cards from his playing days in the binder with the rest of the team set and this cause me to have a Vintage Red Sox binder with an additional Vintage Red Sox box that housed the cards that were not in the binder. I hated that the cards were not together so I unbindered all my vintage a couple months ago and I really like how they are stored now. I top loaded everything up to 1979 and then team bagged each top loader because I hate scratched top loaders. I made a label for every year and I put that label on some of those non rigid tall top loaders? I never saw the point in those flimsy top loaders and I just threw them away when I acquired cards in them. To me they were always inferior and people just used them to save a few cents on top loaders plus they are too tall for a card box so they are also inconvenient to store. But too tall also means that they stick up about an inch taller than the top loaders and perfectly display my year labels. To overcome the inconvenient tallness, I got graded card boxes instead of regular card boxes so that everything fits with the labeled dividers. I am really liking it and I think I am going to do the rest of my collection the same way, minus top loading and team bagging every single card. Yes I will probably still use some top loaders on certain rookies and insert cards but not everything will go into a top loader like I did with my vintage cards. I am on the fence if I will penny sleeve every non vintage card before I box them. Right now I am leaning towards the penny sleeve but when I see how many penny sleeves I will need to buy I might just balk at it.
I now have all my doubles sorted by year. I just need to find some Red Sox collectors that have want lists to fill because it will be so easy now.
2 comments:
Good call on unbindering the collection.
It's always fun hearing about how people organize/store their collections. As for scratched top loaders, I refuse to use them in my collection as well. Even if they're in great condition, I keep them on the side and use them for mailers or for cards I might sell one day at the flea market/card shows.
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