Hanging

I've always hated hanging picture frames.  It doesn't make sense because it's not hard to do and doesn't take long but for some reason i absolutely hate it. I think maybe I'm a little too picky about the straightness and it bothers me enough I don't want to deal with it. But on an effort to make the new house more my own I hung some stuff today. 

This is a bunch of Virdon stuff.  The autographed bat is one Virdon used for fly ball practice at spring training.  It has hung in my office for almost ten years.  Inside the bat case is an autographed ball, an autographed spring training used batting glove, and a canceled per diem check from the yankees.  On top is a 1981 Stop and Go Virdon cup (because I can't figure out anywhere else to display it) and a Springfield Cardinals minor league Bill Virdon bobblehead.  The photo on the left also hung in my office and it's a picture of him after he was presented with his 1960 World Series ring. On the right is a painting I got from someone that purchased it from the Virdon Estate auction after he passed. (I promise the two pictures are straight, it's an optical illusion from taking the picture from an angle.)

Probably eight or so years ago I bought a shadowbox with the intension of making a collage of oddball Virdon items I have picked up over the years and don't really fit in a binder. I made several attempts and gave up each time because I don't feel like I'm very artistic and a never happy with how it looked. So it sat empty behind the credenza at my office all these years. I made another attempt at it and I'm pretty happy with it this time. 

Every other time I tried to display a whole bunch of Virdon items and it would always look too busy and haphazard. This time I went for simple.  Included is the nameplate from his his 1986 home jersey when he was part of the Pirates coaching staff. The number is just an autographed number I got off of ebay. He wore 9 when he played for the Cardinals his rookie year.  At the bottom is the sign off Virdon's locker while he managed the Astros. The name was hand drawn but the logos are stamped on there with and old school hand stamper.  I had his minor league all star belt buckle in there next to the number but I couldn't find something that was about the same size to balance it out for the other side. I almost went with a card but I didn't like the horizontal buckle on one side with a vertical card on the other side so I opted to just leave it out.  

Adding To My Least Favorite Vintage

I have never understood why people like 52 Topps so much.  I feel like I am chasing exorbitantly priced, not first year Topps cards even though that is how history incorrectly wrote it up.  I might understand it if those really were the first Topps baseball cards, but there was 48 Topps Magic and 51 Topps Baseball cards before 52 Topps.  however I am not opposed to picking up a 52 Topps Red Sox when they present themselves.

This is my latest vintage Red Sox pick up.  Luckily it didn't have the usual giant price tag that comes with 52 Topps.  For $4 I can ignore rounded corners and the pencil on Ellis's neck.  

Finding Some Organization In Chaos

 When I starting blogging again I didn't mean for the start and stop to happen.  I wasn't planning on a semi comeback I was shooting for at least twice a week posts.  Then things changed, but I guess that's life.  Back in February 2011 I wrote about a big change in my life, moving from MO to AZ.  Except for children being born I expected that to be the biggest change I was going to ever have to make.  Then this year hit.  In July I moved my daughter to TN so she could start college, then I came home and made a move myself.  I never thought I would have to start over a 50 but we don't always see what life is going to give us.  So new house (new address if your sending cards), new work, just about everything new.  There is a reason I collect old ballcards, I don't like new.  

There are some good things that come with new though.  I have kind of alluded to it before but I haven't had all the cards in my collection in one place in 10 years.  Probably 99% of the cards I acquire come from some kind of online transaction.  Since I spent all day at work on a computer I didn't spend any time on the computer at home.  So when I would purchase Virdon stuff I was doing it at work which caused a problem.  The Virdon stuff I don't have is mostly variations of things I already do have so I have to make comparisons before I do a purchase.  As an example I would find a Virdon postcard while I as at work but then I would have to wait until I got home to compare it to the postcard I already had.  That was bothersome so I moved all my Virdon stuff to my office.  That wasn't such a big deal Virdons at work Red Sox at home.  Only I used my work address for everything.  If you mailed me a card in the last 10 years, you mailed it to my office.  It started with a drawer in my desk.  I would get cards in the mail that needed added to my collection and I would throw them in that drawer to be brought home later.  No big deal it is just a few cards now and then but they started to pile up.  99% of them were in the vintage variety.  All my Vintage Red Sox fit in one 6" binder so I brought that to work too.  No big deal Virdon and Vintage at the office and the rest of my Red Sox at home.  Then I started buying the current sets each year.  I would order a binder and pages off Amazon which delivered to my office and then all the team sets would come to my office; once I filled that binder I just put it on my office bookshelf next to the Virdons and Vintage.  Then again a year later, and a year later, and it didn't seem like very long but all of the sudden I had 2017 to 2025 in my office.  Well no more office for me so now my cards are all under one roof again.  

Meet the new card shelf.  Those boxes on the top left are what used to be my vintage binder.  It is all top loaded up to 1980. The four boxes below those are partial team sets and inserts from 1980 to current.  None of them are labeled yet because I'm not totally happy with it.  Three row boxes fit on these shelves better than two row boxes so I am going to be swapping those out in the near future.  Below that is supplies and some autographed stuff I don't know how to display yet.  (That is an autographed crown, next to a boxing glove, ontop of a baseball glove, ontop of boxing shorts.)

The two boxes on the top right: one is autographs and relics, the other is a bunch of oddball stuff that doesn't fit in regular pages or binders. (the divider is taken out of one of those boxes.)  Below that is Red Sox doubles and all the cards from other teams. 

It isn't just a shelf, it is a whole closet.  Up top are all my binders.  The first one is boxing then it goes 1980 Red Sox to current.  That empty spot in the middle isn't there anymore, I filled up with my Virdon stuff.  I took the picture before I added the virdon binders in and reinstalled the the closet doors which I had to take off to get that shelf in there.  I like it better without the doors but I don't know what I would do with two giant mirrored doors so I put them back on.  

There are my Vidons in place half blocked by the door.  The first binder is Virdon cards.  There is going to be a change to this binder I just haven't decided what yet, future post I guess.  The second binder is my Virdon postcard to 8x11s.  I have posted about that binder before.  The third binder is magazine and program covers.  I don't know if I ever even mentioned that one on here before.  Magazines take up a lot more space than cards so I had to find somewhere to go with them.  The fourth binder is my unlabeled 2024 binder.  I is also stuck 2025 series one in there since I do not have a 2025 binder yet.  I still have lots of organizing to do still.  That black thing on the bottom left is my Virdon spring training fungo bat that needs hung.  That brown box on the right hold my Virdon 1982 Home Jersey.  

At least my cards are pretty organized even if everything else isn't!

Duped

I get excited when I see a Virdon item that I didn't know existed.  It doesn't happen often but when it does I try to jump right on it.  Recently there was a postcard that showed up on eBay that while familiar it was different.  

As soon as I say it I knew it looked exactly like a postcard I already have but the one I have doesn't have the name block at the top.  So for $10 I jumped in it.  (actually I set a snipe bid and paid for it last second)  Here is the new postcard scanned with the one I already had.

I actually like the name and position block.  I probably would have put it at the bottom and not thetop but it looks like it belongs, it looks like a totally new to me postcard; only it's not.  That "BILL VIRDON OUTFIELD" is a label that someone stuck on the postcard.  In other words someone duped me and now I have a postcard dupe.  

There is a small silver lining.  The backs are reversed.  

I am pretty anal about chasing down Virdon variations but even I would not have chased down a reversed back to a postcard.  If the wording on the back was missing all together or even if it was just slightly different wording I would have chased it. (there are some Expo postcards I chased down English and French back) 

The Card That Started The Project

A couple weeks ago I was going through my Red Sox doubles looking for cards on Angels in Order's set wantlist.  In my doubles was this card.

 As soon as I saw it I knew positively, without a doubt, that this was not a double.  I don't really chase autograph cards so I have zero autograph doubles.  How it got in my doubles I have no idea.  I don't even remember getting it.  After I found the Piersall auto I also found two team bags in my doubles that was very suspect too.  The team bags I knew were the cards came from, one was a card show and one was a card store in the west valley but I don't know how they got mixed into my doubles.  I then knew I had to go through them all.  I has been many years since I went through my doubles.  I have been in Arizona for 12 years and the last time I went trough my doubles was before I moved here.  It took me about two and a half weeks of sorting almost every single evening but the project is finally done.  What a pain!  This is probably going to make me change how I store cards.  The final tally is 39.  I found 39 cards that were in my doubles and not in my collection.  Most of them were in those two aforementioned team bags but there were a few scattered here and there also.  

The reason the sort was such a pin is that I originally started putting near complete team sets in binders.  I stopped that practice years ago but those partial team sets that I originally put into binders are still in binders mixed in with the completed team sets.  After I sorted all my doubles by year I then had to get out the appropriate binder and the corresponding box of cards that had not been put in a binder yet and start comparing that to both my doubles and my checklist.  It was so time consuming!  And I don't even want to get started telling how much time I spent on just the confusing mess that is Bowman vs Bowman Draft vs Bowman Prospects vs Chrome with some of those aforementioned Bowman sets also having Chrome Inserts; plus the dates on the back of early 00s Bowman are not always the year the cards were issued.  So while I found 39 "new" cards to add to my collection I took out close to 20 Bowman cards that I had doubled up between my binders, my box, or had the same card in two different years.  

I  know it is blasphemy to many people but I am now seriously considering unbindering my whole collection.  I already did it with my "vintage" cards.  I couldn't make myself put things like a Yaz RC or Ted Williams cards from his playing days in the binder with the rest of the team set and this cause me to have a Vintage Red Sox binder with an additional Vintage Red Sox box that housed the cards that were not in the binder. I hated that the cards were not together so I unbindered all my vintage a couple months ago and I really like how they are stored now.  I top loaded everything up to 1979 and then team bagged each top loader because I hate scratched top loaders.  I made a label for every year and I put that label on some of those non rigid tall top loaders? I never saw the point in those flimsy top loaders and I just threw them away when I acquired cards in them.  To me they were always inferior and people just used them to save a few cents on top loaders plus they are too tall for a card box so they are also inconvenient to store.  But too tall also means that they stick up about an inch taller than the top loaders and perfectly display my year labels.  To overcome the inconvenient tallness, I got graded card boxes instead of regular card boxes so that everything fits with the labeled dividers.  I am really liking it and I think I am going to do the rest of my collection the same way, minus top loading and team bagging every single card.  Yes I will probably still use some top loaders on certain rookies and insert cards but not everything will go into a top loader like I did with my vintage cards.  I am on the fence if I will penny sleeve every non vintage card before I box them.  Right now I am leaning towards the penny sleeve but when I see how many penny sleeves I will need to buy I might just balk at it.

I now have all my doubles sorted by year.  I just need to find some Red Sox collectors that have want lists to fill because it will be so easy now.

Card Package From Night Owl

Right after my PWE from Tom I got a mailer from Greg at Night Owl cards.

First up is a batch of 2025 Heritage.  To me this is the worst year of Heritage ever.  I can't put my finger on it but it doesn't give me any 1976 Topps vibes at all.  It has the two colors at the bottom and the little cartoon but for some reason it just doesn't have the nostalgia factor that any other Heritage product had.

You can't tell from the scan but these are no ordinary 2024 Heritage these are all of the mini variety.  I had zero 2024 Heritage minis before this mailing.  It has been surprising how little I have missed Devers since the trade.  He went from my favorite current Red Sox to virtually forgotten about in no time.

In all the thousands and thousands of Red Sox cards I have this is my fist Laughlin.  I have seen them at shows before but always found something else to buy instead.  The set wasn't even listed on my checklist until this card came. 

This Hostess Fred Lynn was my favorite card of the package.  How can you not love an almost 50 year old food issue.  For some reason most of my Hostess sets are complete or really near complete except for 1977.  This is just my third of eight Red Sox in the team set.

 Like Tom in my past post This mailing completed a team set for me.  1987 Hygrade is now complete.  If you would have asked me a week ago if it was complete I would have said yes even though it was two cards short.  If I had seen them in a box of cards I would have automatically said I already have those and went right past them.  Somehow they fell through the cracks in my collective brain.  

Major Happenings and An Angelic PWE

 I took a longer than expected break.  I made a bitter/sweet trip to Eastern Tennessee.  My oldest daughter graduated high school this year and decided on UT as her college of choice.  Of all my kids I was always closest with my daughter.  All those long hours of driving in the car to soccer practices and games all over the country gave us more time to bond than any of my other kids.  I spent two weeks driving her stuff across the country and getting her set up in her new place.  (set up means putting furniture together and staying out of the way.)  Then there was the long drive home alone.  I did listen to the radio broadcast if every Red Sox game during my trip and it was nice for them to go on that win streak right before the break.  I just hope it didn't kill their momentum.  

I came home to a PWE from Angels in Order.  It wasn't totally unexpected, he had emailed me for my address right as I was leaving town.  

His email said something about it not being much but little did he know it made a big impact, both on my collection and myself as it was a nice thing to come home to after the long "not vacation trip".  These two Minor League cards finished off my 19 Line Drive AA Red Sox team set.  

This 1992 Classic Best card of Tony Scheffield knocked of a team set for me also.  Like Fox and Randle above Scheffield never made it into the majors.

This Carlos Quintana card is the entirety of the 1989 CMC All Star Red Sox team set.  This also makes the first time I completed three team sets from one mailing. (that wasn't three complete team sets bought and paid for from the same eBay seller)  I don't even think I have had a COMC order that finished off three team sets before.  

My early 90s collection is riddled with Frank Rodriguez cards.  He played nine games for the Red Sox in 1995 before being traded for Rick Aguilera in July.  This was the first of seven seasons spent in the majors. 

When trying to figure out what to write about this 1992 Red Sox prospect I found out that there has never been an MLB player named Boo.  Lots of Bos but no Boo, though there was a former Red Sox named Dave Ferriss that evidently was nicknamed Boo who has a museum at Delta State University.  

Even with those three finished off sets this was my favorite part of the package.  Six 1982 Fleer Stamps.  Luckily Google image search is a thing because I would have struggled with putting a year on them otherwise.  The stamp portion of my Red Sox collection is severely lacking. 

The Yaz is really different.  I can't think of a single card that is a picture of someone posing for a picture.  

Thank you for the mail day Tom is was much appreciated and a heck of a pick me up for an otherwise terrible summer.  I will have a return package coming your way this week.