Randomness and Maybe Some Sorting

 

I started on a Herculean task of going through the boxes that make up the bulk of my trading card collection. Including almost a dozen 5 row monster boxes. Some of the monster boxes at least I had just one sport in, but not all of them. Two or three of them are sorted, or were. Many of the other boxes at first were just filled with random cards, unorgainized. A mishmash sometimes a box of all baseball, sometimes baseball and football, sometimes all 4 of the major sports plus Non-Sport and sometimes a full set of something would be in there. Lots of boxes filled with surprises. There were only a few boxes that I had remembered exactly what was what and maybe marked. Very few actually "organized" and "in order".

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.