My Blog about my Trading Card Hobby.
While going through my huge sorting/organizing project ("Project Hercules"), I came across this card I of course forgot I had. A 1993 Triple Play Baseball card #164 Mascots featuring the Pittsburgh Pirates Mascot "The Pirate Parrot".
Anyway I signed up with them first as just a buyer and then decided to try my hand at selling over there. They have a "standard envelope" system similar to Ebay, but I think it might be more user friendly than the bay's. Not sure yet. One of their advantages over Sportlots (which buyers don't like) is that the sellers can use stock photos of base cards. Many have said the images are stolen from other sites. Stock images speeds up the listing time for sellers. For serial numbered cards or relics or cards that are less than Excellent condition (but still sellable) scans are required, or actually requested. Some cards get up without images anyway but the sellers are supposed to supply card images if possible.
My bank account got the test deposits of 7¢ and 8¢ from the site and I verified I received them so I am unlocked for listing. I started listing. I have added 100 cards in 3 days, some baseball, football and hockey. For the task I switched off my "store" so the listings are "hidden" as they like to say. While I load up my inventory I will keep the store "hidden". Long ago I heard from some Sportlots sellers that is the best strategy to use. That way you are not interrupted with sales notifications and not distracted from listing. I plan on keeping the listings hidden until I have at least received a couple of the cards I ordered to see what the standard envelope labels look like. I am hesitant of having too many cards available for fear of getting overwhelmed with an unmanagable number of orders to ship out within their 72 hour time limit. At this time I am limiting the cards I am listing to cards that are a minimum excellent condition so I can let the card catalog on the site use the stock image for my listings. There is one card I added that has a serial number, so I added the image for it. I noticed that once you add a listing you can make some edits to the card attributes if you goofed up, but not the condition. To change the condition it looks like you have to delete your listing and redo.
For my first purchase I decided on ordering the remaining cards I needed from 2010 Topps Baseball The "Million Card Give-Away" cards insert/contest set. The prices for cards at BSC start at 25¢. There is a minimum order total of $3.00 order value (items + shipping) per seller, so I had to search the seller's "stores" to find more cards to get. The minimum amount is to make the sales worthwhile for the sellers so they don't lose out with just one or two 25¢ sales. In just about a week I have received 7 of the 8 packages (PWE). I have noticed that the BSC standard envelope tracking is similar to the Ebay standard envelope tracking system which means it isn't all that accurate. Most of the time when checking the tracking numbers (all of which ended in "23" for some reason) the status is unknown. Once or twice I found a time when it provided some updates. I guess that is something as a buyer I'll have to get used to not being able to tell exactly when my order will arrive. That is par for the course, when I order through Sportlots most of those are regular PWEs with NO Tracking whatsoever.
I have accumulated 1,000s upon 1,000s of trading cards in my life. I started so early as a kid I don't recall when I "first" started collecting. As a kid I was limited to what I could buy mostly due to allowance at the time and other interests. When I was in Jr. High a friend of mine introduced me to an LCS which is still in business, they are at their 4th location over the almost 40 years. Sometime around the late 1990s to early 2000s my collecting stopped a bit then with the internet and discovery of Ebay and online forums it picked up dramatically.
Not finishing a major reorganization of my baseball collection (pre internet days) from being sorted by player name (with A to S maybe only Ms in binders and the rest of the alphabet neatly in boxes, to going back to the Year/Brand/Set way of things helped make the collection just a heap of a hoard of cardboard. Add to that Ebay auctions and eventually "Buy It Now"s listings, Card Forums, Card Purchasing sites, group box breaks, and team trading groups, plus a lifelong tendency to procrastinate and you have the organizational mess I am in today.
Things improved in late 2023 when I had a mandatory apartment inspection, where I went from probably a level 3 hoard down to level 1.5 my collection went from being almost anywhere in my apartment mostly in boxes but also a few dozen binders on shelves (in the den and dining rooms) to having those now 35 binders in the living room and dining room on shelves and the boxes in the den filling and overflowing two 6 foot tall bookcases. Unfortunately most of the boxes are unmarked and as I mentioned earlier and are unorganized. Plus there were tons of cards that were condensed from boxes and piles of original packages to just the cards in large non-card boxes.
Enough about that messy stuff. I am getting past all that.
Over a recent weekend I made a bit of progress all but one of the monster boxes are just one sport or non-sport now and some other boxes the same. I have a few large boxes that still have mixes of card types to go through and many small card boxes to sort through.
The more I work with the boxes the more I know of what I actually have, or rather where it actually is or could be now. There are a few boxes that I am dreading organizing but I will have to get to them eventually.
Oh I didn't mention the unopened materials I have. There are some blaster boxes, a few of those random pack boxes in various forms by Fairfield and a bunch of packs all over the place. I also have about 1/2 a dozen unopened boxes from the "Collectible Card Club" I used to get the monthly boxes of 15 packs of cards of both Baseball and Football from them.
I also shipped off 140 football cards to CheckOutMyCards (COMC). Now some people refer to that site as "Com-C". I don't like that name for it and I don't use it I usually say "Check out my cards" or "COMC" (saying each letter like an acronym). My blogging I usually just use COMC and readers will read it the way they like.
I recently signed up on "BuySportsCards.com" (BSC) as a buyer primarily and then as a seller. I will try my hand at that. I started populating my "store" over there. My seller handle is my usual "captkirk42". So as I am sorting stuff I am putting doubles and very shiny cards aside to go to sale somewhere.
Now part of my Project Hercules effort will be to set up some boxes of the cards I want to sell. Most of these cards I will have to find ways of getting rid of in large batches because trying to sell everything card by card is more than insane and mostly impossible.
While going through some containers of unsorted cards, many of which were still in the envelopes and packages I had gotten them in, I came across these beauties. Literally Beautiful.. Some of the cards from the packages I blogged about years ago when I got them, others I might have had plans to blog about the batch but never got around to it. These are a few that fall under the latter category most likely.
I forget how I acquired these beauts. It might have been from a Sportlots auction or possibly part of a "just because" card gifting from a card forum member. Does it really matter? No not really.
This is a lot of 4 cards from the Bench Warmer series a PG-13 Rated Pin-Up Series of pictures of young women usually clad in bikinis. There have been a few times where I have considered getting rid of any of these type of cards, but then one of the beauties catches my eye and I decide to hold on to them a little while longer.
2002 Bench Warmer
2003 Bench Warmer
Of these four cards (women) I think I like Mercades the most. Christine looks a little bit like Britney Spears.
This past year for my card sales over at Ebay I only sold one item an Adrien Peterson relic card. In attempts to get things to sell on Ebay a few times I have played with lowering shipping (which I shouldn't do and it bit me on this sale) and lowering the asking price of items. Yeah I did both of those for that card and ended up losing about $1.50. Dems is the breaks over at my Ebay with only 67 items now.
Meanwhile over at COMC (previously "Check Out My Cards") I had a record year in sales. My biggest year in sales over there. My first year 2009 I had 9 sales for $25 ($24.90). Sold 40 cards in 2024 for a total of $65 ($64.59). My previous biggest year was 10 cards in 2015 for $4.45. Thinking back this surge in sales is mostly in part to adding 364 cards there earlier in the year with them being added to the site in May, which was a month into my medical leave from last year.
I will soon start prepping some of my Trading Cards for purging. Way back when I used to belong to some team trader groups I had a fantasy of having one monster box filled with trade fodder for each of the four major US sports (Baseball, Basketball, Football, Hockey) even though I only belonged to team trader groups for Baseball and Football. For the football group I did have a monster box filled with trade fodder for each team in the league. As I would make the monthly trades I would replenish the teams that I was out of or low on. As part of the organization I used those worthless "card savers" as divider tabs. I use a simple file folder label w/ the team nickname written on it in sharpie and put that on the top of the card saver and load that team's cards behind the card saver divider. I now have a Basketball monster box set up and ready for the cards to find a new home. I currently have most of the current teams available. I plan on Purging by team lots.
For interested parties I can send you a nice team lot of NBA cards. All I ask for in return is $6 for first 2 teams. Please add $1 for each additional team after that.. Sorry I'm only sending to USA addresses. For Basketball I have team lots of about 90% of the teams in the league. I even have some draft cards of college guys who were "free agents" and never made the NBA, a handful maybe went pro overseas. Unfortunately for me most of the cards are from the decade of the 1990s. Yes like a ton of other card collectors I have a problem with super overstock of "Junk Wax" cards. Year ranges for team lots are from 1989 to around 2007 with most teams having cards from 1990 to 1996 or 97. Not many 1992 or 93. Some brands and years will only have 1 card, some might have a dozen or more. There are duplicates and in some cases multiples some 3 or more copies. Sorry I don't have time to go back over the lots to cherry pick for specific players, brands or years. Some lots may have a super star and some may not. These lots are excellent for trade fodder if you are in a team trading group.
I have even been toying with the idea of signing up to sell on Sportlots (been buying from there for years), but I am a bit leery about selling there. Mostly due to the high fees they charge especially if you have low sales. Plus I would have to make sure I had close to a 1,000+ cards ready to roll there to start seeing some results. I would also open my sellers account under a different user name. I'm already "captkirk" as a buyer, hmm but not "captkirk42". If I mess up as a seller there I don't want to be banned from buying there. If I were to have a huge selling day of buyers buying more cards than can fit in a PWE or small bubble mailer I don't have many small boxes or larger mailers on hand right now.. That fear is also what keeps me from adding more listings and larger items onto Ebay.
Current status of my Basketball Monster box, the card counts are approximate and for some of the teams might be off by a few cards as I added some rookies and draft cards of guys where the card doesn't mention the team they were drafted to but the player eventually went pro and I had to do a Google search to see if they ever played pro ball.
Wow I should do Blogiversary posts every other month. My Blogiversary post got over 400 views (414) in the first week. I olny have 116 followers so that is a lot of either new people or people who unofficially follow. Amazing!. Actually some of my numbers are helped a little bit by being on the blog roll at TCDB that tracks whenever I make a new post on my card blogs.
Now onto whatever this post is going to be about.
Lately more pressing things in life have forced my blogging to take a back seat. At times I'm not even sure if I'll get around to doing any blogging from now on out. I used to bust my butt trying to make sure I had a monthly post for all 3 of my blogs. Now I can't even guarantee that for myself let alone even one of the blogs. Life goes on and now maybe sometimes the blog.
Enough about that here is a card I got from a group box break. I wonder if it was a legit random card or if the host remembered that I collect cards of people with my name (and similar names) either way I like this card.
One thing I don't like about this card is the pattern of the shirt Daniel is wearing. I didn't notice it at first, it was only when I looked at the scanned image that I noticed how the shirt design looked like the scan was bad. This time it wasn't the scan image doing crazy things. It is probably time to get a new scanner I forget how many decades I've had my current Epson flatbed scanner. But it continues to work well enough and I hate having to get new electronic and computer equipment.
