Card Thoughts: Craigslist Finds Box-by-Box (Box 2)

Bill May 29, 2018 2 Comments

Very rarely do I check out Craiglist, and very rarely do I find anything worth dealing with when I do. I don’t know what it was, but maybe I was just in the mood. I came across a deal (to me anyway) and I scooped it up. Luckily I was dealing with a seller who wanted to get rid of things. And now as I go through the boxes, it makes me wonder exactly what kind of collector this guy was.

Box 1          Box 2          Box 3

This is the second box in a group of three that I was able to get. All three came in these smaller cardboard boxes. Two of the three were chock full of cards including this one. In fact, after I went through the box, I couldn’t fit everything back into this box. There were definitely some interesting finds in there, but maybe even more interesting are what was here and how it was sorted.

That’s the main box, but like I said, it was so full I couldn’t get everything back in. That means I had trouble getting it all out. It was definitely packed in. You can see that half of the box was sorted into sets. They weren’t in the order above, but they were together. This guys actually made his own little dividers from what looked like old folders (stronger than your typical manila folder though). Actually when I opened the box the player section (now on the right) was in the middle to sections.

The cards below were not in the plastic boxes you see below. Those are from the first box I opened and I put these cards in there to keep them sorted and together since I couldn’t fit the back in the box. They represent the oldest cards in the box.

Oldies, but Greaties

We’re going to start from the oldest and work our way to the newest. From this ’60s this box had two ’64s, two ’66s, five ’68s, and three ’69s. If you add that to the Phillies team set that’s probably something like 30 ’60s cards for the lot. Not too shabby. Unfortunately for me, the quality wasn’t great on all of them though. I don’t have many ’64s though so those were a welcome site. It’s actually one of the designs I like best. I wouldn’t say favorite, but I dig it.

Getting into the ’70s there was a bit more there. The amounts didn’t necessarily go up with the year, but rather there were spikes. There were a lot of ’72s and ’74s and then when it got to ’77 it definitely started increasing by year. My guess is this guy really started collecting in the late 70’s as ’78 and ’79 are very prevalent years within this lot. I love that Doc Ellis card as when I think of it I always think of this video about his no-hitter (I’m sure you’ve seen it, but I had to watch it again). That Davey Johnson represents like four of his cards from the early 70s that were in there. It’s funny to see him so young because I just always think of him as an old man.

So how much of this was from the early ’70s? There were three ’70s, 41 ’72s, ten ’73s, and 49 ’74s plus 12 of the Traded variety. There were no amazing rookie finds or anything like that. But there were some star cards in there and some iconic cards/images. Plus there were some cards that are my favorites. As a Met fan I love the Seaver cards but the only thing I had were a few “Leaders” cards that featured him. The Pinella card is one of my favorite cards ever. I’m no Yankee fan but that picture with those sideburns is one of the most ’70s things I’ve ever seen.

There were only four cards from the base ’74 set in the box, but one of the best things in the box were the 14 ’74 minis. Of course that picture of Oscar Gamble is awesome. Included in that batch were a couple “Leaders” cards and a World Series card. ’75 is a set I have a connection to because it’s the year I was born, but it’s not really my favorite set design-wise. I’m always torn about that. I like getting them, but I’ve never had the urge to go after the set formally.

After ’75 you can pretty much measure how many cards there are in inches aside from a few years. There were 1.5+ inches of ’76, 23 ’77s, 3.25 inches of ’78, no ’79s in this box oddly and then we get into the ’80s. The same thing continues, no big rookies but some nice cards. The quality overall was pretty good aside from the earliest cards and a few set in the middle years.

Custom 1981 Donruss Cards

When I got to the ’81 Donruss section I was a little surprise. For all the cards to this point, none of them had any signs of a little kid on them: no stickers, no writing, etc. And while there were a lot of ’78s and ’79s in the whole lot, I wonder if the first year this guy collected as a kid was 1981. An alternative theory is that these belonged to a younger sibling or something like that. But the funny apart about all this still is that the ’81 Donruss are the only cards in the lot that had anything like this on them.

There were a good amount of them that had positions or teams changed out on the front. Others had writing on the back, mostly in pencil. Then many others, like Carlton, had some kind of marking like it was written on. I find ’81 Donruss to be one of the oddest cut sets ever with not just a lot of miscuts but also sometime different sized cards. So add the writing on top of that and they get a little crazy.

A Couple Oddballs

As for some of the “oddballs” that I found, it started with a good chunk (1.25 inches) of K-Mart cards from 1982. I don’t think it was really a full set as a lot of them were doubles. The hobby box backs were back too. I found a lot of those in the player sorted section (more on that below). But my favorite of the oddballs in this set were the ’87 and ’88 Donruss/Leaf pop-ups. From what I can figure these came with a subset of cards you can get from Donruss. I love that you are popping up an “In Action” player, but what I find funny was that it also included “inaction” managers.

The Player Sort

Two sections of this box were dedicated to a sort by players. When I think of sorting by player I think about a PC or maybe certain cards or something like that, but that wasn’t the case with these. First, there were plenty of cards for these players in the other boxes. Second, there were plenty of doubles within these sections. Most of the cards were mid-’80s.

What I found interesting were what players were split out:

• Tony Armas
• Don Baylor
• Vida Blue
• George Brett
• Tom Brunansky
• Rod Carew
• Gary Carter
• Joe Carter
• Steve Carlton
• Ron Cey
• Roger Clemens
• Vince Coleman
• Ron Darling
• Storm Davis
• Andre Dawson
• Leon Durham
• Carlton Fisk
• George Foster
• Steve Garvey
• Doc Gooden
• Pedro Guerrero
• Ron Guidry
• Ozzie Guillen
• Tony Gwynn
• Rickey Henderson
• Keith Hernandez
• Tom Herr
• Reggie Jackson
• Tracy Jones
• Lance McCullers
• Oddibe McDowell
• Roger McDowell
• Willie McGee
• Keith Moreland
• Joe Morgan
• Eddie Murray
• Dale Murphy
• Dave Parker
• Lance Parrish
• Kirby Puckett
• Dan Quisenberry
• Tim Raines
• Willie Randolph
• Jim Rice
• Dave Righetti
• Pete Rose
• Nolan Ryan
• Bret Saberhagen
• Ryne Sandberg
• Steve Sax
• Mike Schmidt
• Tom Seaver
• Ted Simmons
• Ozzie Smith
• Darryl Strawberry
• Alan Trammell
• Fernando Valenzuela
• Lou Whitaker
• Mookie Wilson
• Willie Wilson
• Dave Winfield
• Floyd Youmans
• Robin Young

So there are a lot of really obvious ones that I can see picking out: Brett, Carew, Carter, Fisk, Jackson, Murray, Rice, Schmidt (just picking a few out). Those are what I would expect to see. Even some of the lesser folks in here I can see. But there are a few that confused me: Tom Brunansky, Storm Davis, Tracy Jones, Lance McCullers, Oddibe McDowell, Keith Moreland, Ted Simmons, and Floyd Youmans. While I know all those names, I didn’t really think of them as someone to separate when I was a kid. The separators he made were definitely older so it’s not like he did this later.

Further Into the Mind…

We’ve now dug two boxes into this collector. What does he look like?

I think we can clearly see that he cared about organization. He made this dividers and he kept a lot of card sets together. So he cared about how he had the cards placed. They were not in any card order or anything like that. They also are not ordered on the three boxes as a whole. Each individual box so far seems to have its own organization. Thinking about this makes me wonder what someone walking into my collection would learn about me. Would they understand how I organize my cards? How long would it take for them to figure it out?

I think we can expand on the organization and say that he cares about his cards because he has the boxes. But, based on the condition of some of the cards, maybe he didn’t always think or understand how he should take care of them.

I think we can say he was a collector from 1978 through 1987. Prior to ’78 there are a lot less cards and after ’87 there are less cards. I think the end date is a little clearer because there is a quick decline in volume. The beginning is a little harder. Just because he has cards from the ’60 doesn’t mean he was collecting then. Added to that, just because he has ’78s doesn’t mean he was collecting then. But I got the impression he was just a little older than I am, so I think ’78 is a good guess.

Here’s our high level points thus far:

• Organized
• Cares about his collection
• Collected from ’78 to ’87 at a higher level
• Collected some older cards somehow

One more box to go. Further down the rabbit hole.