Monday, January 07, 2019

Collector's Log: Stardate 198203.6

(The second entry in my 1982 chronicle of card trading & buying, playing sports, games, and other kid's stuff back in the day)


There was an old abandoned barn over the hill from our housing development.  I'm guessing we tried to play a form of paintball-type war (without involving actual projectiles).  Apparently it wasn't very entertaining.

Then I moved on to Billy's house.  He had a significant volume of the Classic Space Lego sets with the old-school minifigs etc.  I think I had a few sets too, but we ended up combining all ours together.  Those were great fun.  This was before minifigs were custom and collectible.

I know I had this set

But the big event in this entry is the documentation of how many cards I had at that point. 

3515 baseball and 2269 football cards.

It sounds like a lot, but if you break it down, it isn't that much - at least to a set builder.  I probably had these complete sets:

Baseball                                Football
1980 Topps - 726                1979 Topps - 528
1981 Donruss - 605            1980 Topps - 528
1981 Fleer - 660                  1981 Topps - 528
1981 Topps - 726                

Total 2717                              Total 1584

Remaining baseball - 798     football 685

The remaining numbers were vintage singles and stars, player collections, Redskins, and other oddballs like Fleer stickers & team action cards.  This early in the year, the '82 sets hadn't come out yet.

Of course, that inspired me to try to count what I have now.  The bulk of my stuff is still sets or partials, so I won't have to sift through every box I own.  There will be a little bit of estimation and guessing, just so it doesn't take all year.  The player collections are mostly in binders, so it's really a matter of counting the empty spaces and otherwise calculating multiples of 9.  The Redskins collection will be the hardest, since it's all bulk singles and there's no way to count them in big chunks.



I might also have to break it down into regular cards and hits (GU & autos).  I'm not separating serial numbered cards, that would take forever, even though the majority would be in my player collections. 

Hopefully, there will be a few weekends with lousy weather (or how about SNOW DAYS!) that will be perfect times to get started on this project.  I will keep you posted.

1 comment:

  1. This post brought back a big time card collecting memory. I remember the days of sitting down and counting my cards too. At that time, the more the better. Quantity was way more important to me than quality.

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