Past, Present, and Future

It is Christmas Eve day and I have the day off. I already have big plans for the day. I'm assembling an Ikea display cabinet for my wife.  We recently recarpeted and repainted the master bedroom and are taking advantage of the empty room to get rid of a lot of the crap that had accumulated over the years and to better display my wife's glassware collection.  Additionally, I am cooking Christmas dinner today.  We have tickets for the OKC Thunder-San Antonio Spurs game that is at 1:30 on Christmas Day and afterward we are going to drive around some of the swanky OKC neighborhoods and look at Christmas lights. So, dinner is today. I figured I could do a quick year in review and look at my goals for 2026.  I also figured that as long as I was at it, why not do a quick post of how I have started back collecting again.  So, here we go.

2025 was a lost year.  I put collecting on hold in March and have only started dipping my toe back into the water after Thanksgiving. That is it. No sets completed.  Only two cards added to my Fleer project.  

As far as my recent activity, I discovered WhatNot.  If you don't know what it is, let me explain. WhatNot is what I can only describe as a rapid fire, live action auction site.  My wife has been on it regularly buying marbles for her collection.  There are plenty of sports card sellers on there as well. It works like this.  The seller shows a card on video and starts a counter which is usually 10 to 30 seconds for initial bids.  After that time expires any additional bid will add 10 seconds to the counter until bidding stops.  

It works well for how my wife collects. But it doesn't work for me as a vintage set collector.  There are a number of vintage sellers, but the way they run auctions is.....odd.  The sequence of cards auctioned off are random.  A mid 60s Roger Maris will be followed by an early 80s Rickey Henderson.  No rhyme or reason.  There is no way to know what is next and no time to figure out what a card should be worth before bidding starts and ends. Consequently, it was my observation that the winning bidder often overpaid relative to the cards value.  Example: one seller decided to auction off a graded mid-1960s star card (I don't remember who, unfortunately) and talked about how much it was worth. He started the auction at $2,500 and someone bought it (I also don't remember the final price) I looked the card up at PSA and the average of recent auction prices was $1,800.  To be sure, 99.9% of the cards that are auctioned there are not high end cards.  That is just the one example that came to mind.

Since the format didn't work for how I collect and the site process invites overpaying, I deleted the app from my phone and left it quickly behind. I did get a few things. Nothing fancy, but I did end up buying a binder of 1970s hockey cards. It appears to have been a dealer's binder since there were only common cards included and there was massive duplication. I mean like 5 copies of an individual card level of duplication.  I'm still working my way through it, but I have finished sorting through the 1970-1971 Topps hockey set.  In the end, I had half of the 132-card set and I've already put together my want list.

I have a couple observations.  First, unlike baseball, the Topps hockey set is actually smaller than its OPC equivalent.  The 70-71 OPC set is 264 cards. Second, the set is not organized randomly but rather by team.

I am not sure why Topps did this, but it seems odd. Though they did set it up so that each team appears in the 132 card set and also shows up again in the second, OPC only series. So, an American collector would have gotten cards for each team but may not have gotten his favorite player who was only in the OPC second series.

To be sure, the orderliness of having similar card designs grouped together has an appeal.  But, it also leads to messes like cards 23 to 25.

   

Both Bob Baun and Pete Stemkowski were traded by the Red Wings early in the season prior to the cards release, so Topps airbrushed the Detroit logo off their jersey's changed the team's name at the bottom of the card. Done and done in Topps usual slapdash way.  With their baseball sets they at least chose photos and/or airbrushed so that it is not completely obvious the player is in their former teams uniform.  They didn't even put that much effort in here and it is made worse because teams are supposed to be grouped together.

Anyways, the binder includes small groupings of cards for each set from 1970-71 through 1979-80. I'll be deciding which I want to build and getting my want lists together in the days ahead.

Speaking of the days ahead, now that I am (hopefully) clear of all the adult things that stymied my 2025 collection, I feel ready to set some goals again. And here they are.  My 2026 Goals:

1. Get my hockey cards and want lists in order.
   
   
2. Add at least one card each to my signed 1960 and 1961 Fleer sets
   
   
3. I'd like to finish 1967 Baseball, but that Tom Seaver high number RC is still out there and is going for over $1,000 even in mid-grade condition.  I'll be happy if I finish the set except for that card.
   
   
4. Finish 2 of these 3 football sets:
• 1969 (126 Cards left but all commons and minor stars), 
• 1970 (7 cards) 
• 1974 Football (55 cards)

I hope to have another post before New Years, but we'll see. Happy Holidays!

What I am listening to: Take Five by The Dave Brubeck Quartet.