Wednesday, March 29, 2023

Extending Immortality

Here's a "completist" project I did a few weeks ago.  And by "completist", I mean I'm way too obsessed with variations of cheap 80's cards.


The Baseball Immortals set, otherwise known as 1980-87 SSPC HOF, is a total count of 199 players.  Card #1 thru 173 were printed starting in 1980.  An update in 1984 added 174 - 189.  Then 190 thru 196 were added in 1986 and the whole thing reprinted again. And finally, in 1987, the final three cards were added.  As a result, the set actually has four different variant backs.  Not all of them encompass all 199 cards.  Around the card number, there can be "1st Printing", and an MLB logo.  


They go something like this:

1st Printing & MLB logo - cards 1 thru 189.

1st Printing & no MLB logo - cards 1 thru 189 again.

No 1st Printing / MLB logo - cards 190 thru 199.

No 1st Printing / No MLB logo - cards 1 - 173 and 190 - 199.

So I already had a set of these in a binder, and then got most of another one to fill out the 1st Printing or not category.  I didn't figure out about the MLB logo part until afterward, and then pulled a bunch of those out of the original setup and relisted them to accomodate that.  Later I came into a good stack of the MLB logos and finally decided to reconfigure my binder.

Instead of three separate sets, I combined them all to show the backs together.  

Which means I started with two stacks of pages and a pile of loose cards, all in order.  

As you can see above, I put them in order by 1st+logo, then 1st only, then neither.  So the first paged ones could be put in the first column in the new sheet, then the 1st only's in the second column, and on and on, 3 by 3.  

To complicate matters further, there are five of what I'd call "real" variations in the colors used on the front of cards depicting the same player.  I mocked some of these up since they don't have images on the database and I don't own them all yet.






But since a lot of the last 23 cards only have two different backs, it works out OK.

That's where I'm going to leave it today.  Probably more than you ever wanted to know about this quirky Hall Of Famers set.  Anybody else now motivated to fill out the better part of them three times?  

Didn't think so.  It's just me.....

6 comments:

  1. No, not just you. I have this set as one to tackle at some point and yes, I'd be tracking down all the variation. The completionist in me...

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  2. I love this set, but completing it without the variations was tough enough. I can see myself maybe trying to find the color variations someday but that's it.

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  3. It's not something that I would want to do, but I still think it's neat that there are other people out there trying to build a master set.

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  4. I acquired a few of these recently--looks like they're all "1st printing"/no logo. I don't see myself trying to track everything down, but I'd certainly grab the variations if I see them in a dime box or something like that, so good to know!

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  5. Love this set. Good luck tracking down the variations you need. I'm still struggling with the 1-199 set, so the variation thing is something I'm not worried about at the moment (but maybe one day).

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