Props and doubts

First off, I wanted to give a shout out to some great baseball card blogs. I'd like to thank, again, Cardboard Junkie for his wonderful baseball card blog and for linking to mine.

I'd also like to thank Stats on the Back and Tribe Cards for sending me some Expos cards for a project I'm working on. At the time they sent them, I didn't have any card-related blog to express my appreciation of their generosity for other collectors so I'm doing it now. A public thanks to you both.

That being said, I mentioned in the Blog Bat Around post of last week that I am having an existential and financial crisis related to cards. The existential side is determining what, if any, set I want to be collecting. Last year, when I started reading some of these awesome card blogs and seeing how much fun some of these other guys were having and the number of really nice folks who collect baseball cards there are, I wanted to be involved. I collected the one Press Pass NASCAR set and Upper Deck Baseball Series 1 & 2. Neither set got completed.

This year, finding a set a like, outside of the NASCAR, has been difficult. the card companies do so much to make a set uncollectable. Inserts, short-prints, "error" cards, variations. If you want completeness, it's about impossible to do. You have to pretty much shoot for the base set and just enjoy all the little extras. Or, you have to spend a fortune to get all the extra stuff. I'm just not enjoying that and I can't afford it.

Also, like other card bloggers, I'm taking the opportunity cost into account more so than before. The most I would spend on cards at a time pretty much was $20. That's a new baseball book. Which baseball-related paper product holds more appeal for me? Definitely the book. So why am I bothering? And that's disregarding my potentially moving up to higher-end product. Chris Harris of Stale Gum recently opened a box of Topps Heritage, a set I had toyed with collecting, and predicted it would take three boxes to complete the set. That's $240. That's a pristine copy of Effa Manley's Baseball Before Integration which I DEFINITELY would rather have more so than a set of Topps Heritage.

At this point, I think I am going to put card-related posts on hold. I'm pondering writing about collections in general on Fridays going forward but we'll see.

Hopefully you'll continue to find the posts about baseball, books, music and cooking to be of interest. I don't see myself giving up those things any time soon.