Cardboard OCD Chapter 6b: One Player At A Time

Continuing my series on listing your collection, I'm going to turn to player collecting.

Some collectors concentrate only on one player, or just a few.  They might want to "supercollect" that player and try for basically every issued card of that guy.  I've seen certain forum sites define a "supercollection" as having a certain ratio of high end issues, and a qualifying number of rare cards and/or 1/1's.

There are ways to easily generate a workable list of this kind.  You just have to know a good reference.  I used to pull listings from the Beckett site, but I find that the Trading Card Database is pretty much as thorough and is somewhat easier to collect data from.

Here is my list for Sergei Fedorov.  It's a printed Word Document that I'm pretty sure I pulled from Beckett and then edited and formatted.  I color coded the listings by the team he was on.  Red for Detroit, Purple for the Ducks, Blue for the Blue Jackets, and Dark Red for the Capitals.  Made it two columns and added the circles to check off.  This is way too big a list to put on my site, but if one player is the majority of what you collect, then it would be fine.  More on this later.

Looking at the current Beckett site, I wouldn't recommend trying to cut & paste any player with more than a year or two worth of cards.  There are too many buttons and funky formatting now to get a reasonably workable list.  Plus you have to go page by page and keep adding to the end of the document you're creating.

Use the Database.  It pretty much does it all for you now.  If you go there and search a player, you get the full cardography and most of the easy cards have pictures.  I went with "Big Sexy" Bartolo Colon.

But they also provide a very nice printable list at the click of your mouse.

Just click the printer icon on the player page.  And then click on Part 1.  I haven't seen a list long enough to be broken up into more than one part.  The resulting pages are printable as they are.

The only drawback to this list is that it contains all the 1/1's and printing plates in among the other cards.  I like to separate (or eliminate) these from my lists because of the astronomical odds that I'll ever actually see one of them.  Trims the list down significantly sometimes too.

Bartolo's list is 15 printable pages.  The card listings with pictures are 45.  So either way, it's a bit labor intensive.  In this case, the .pdf file pastes into Word with both columns mushed together into one line.  You'd have to use Word's Replace function to change " 1997" to "<paragraph mark> 1997" and then sort the whole list alphabetically to put them back in order.  The one quirk is that your list will put parallels above the regular card in a set. So you end up with this:

2001 Topps - Employee 245 Bartolo Colon
2001 Topps - Gold 245 Bartolo Colon SN2001
2001 Topps - Home Team Advantage 245 Bartolo Colon
2001 Topps - Limited 245 Bartolo Colon
2001 Topps 245 Bartolo Colon

The base card is last in the list.  Not a huge deal, but it can mess with your OCD.  :)

I won't go into the detailed procedures here, but I am available for coaching if you'd like to try this.

For my players, there are two levels below "supercollecting" that I put most of my PC's.

My vintage players have much more limited catalogs for those cards issued when they were active players.  Mostly base Topps and oddballs.  If they played from 1981 to about 1988, then they have Donruss, Fleer, and some others like SportFlics, etc.  And a lot of my guys appeared in Kelloggs and Hostess issues, and the various Topps inserts in the 70's and 80's.

So those were the default issues that I pursued, along with each oddball set as I discovered them for sale or trade.  There is a lot of regional issued stuff that I wouldn't worry about unless I happened to find it, but that never really showed up on lists.  As I went along, I would add different sets to the rosters, which I still kinda do now, especially since most of the basic stuff has been completed and I haven't added any more players from this timeframe.  As a result, my vintage PC listings are relatively short.

The modern guys - players who started in the late 80's to 2000's - have so much more stuff compared to the older guys, that I had to separate them onto a whole other web page.  I took their full listings (as active players) and pasted them right to the site.  Obscure parallels and other subtle variants make it tough to keep accurate, but I just roll with it.  I color coded these guys so when you're scrolling through the middle of a huge list, you can tell whose it is.  For some reason, the spacing comes out different sometimes.

Remarkably, people ask me if these are HAVE or NEED lists.  I would think it is obvious that a lot of the regular base card listings are missing and there's so much other oddball and parallel stuff on here, but I still get the question.  Sometimes I figure it's people who aren't really reading it that close, especially since I'll occasionally get a base card in trade when there is only a parallel listed.

There are a couple other special cases in my player collections.  One is Tom Cheney.  I added him a year or two ago, which means for some reason I don't integrate him into the rest of my vintage player lists.  He only has a few regular cards.  I've also included his post-career issues as well.  I don't usually do that since it would quadruple the volume in some cases.  I guess since he's so short, I just keep the printed list and that's it.  And a couple of his are oddballs that I wouldn't necessarily recognize on sight, so I like the visual aids.  It also helps to know at a glance which of the easy ones I still lack.

Another late comer to my PCs is young Pirates pitcher Chad Kuhl who made his debut against Clayton Kershaw and won.  I watched the game and was so happy for him that I decided to collect his cards.  His catalog consists of one year of Bowman rainbow (not my favorite, but decent looking cards), a few minor league issues before that, and the last two years of Topps Flagship and Heritage.  So if nothing else than to track all the Bowman parallels and autograph versions after I bought the lot that I did, I printed his list from the database too.  I included the pictures too 'cuz it's still only two-ish pages.  I wouldn't usually go for a guy who has a lot of prospect cards, but since the volume is relatively low, it's not bad.

That's not even all the different players I collect, but the few that I didn't show aren't much different.

What I do want to present is some of the unusual parallel sets and references I've made for special cases.  I'll do that in the next post so this doesn't end up being a novel.  (Who said "too late?")