…Where Life's a Pitch

Beginnings

Posted on March 28, 2019March 28, 2019 by BBCARDZ 2 Comments

I really love this time of year, the time of the year when we can all take a deep breath and smell that new baseball season smell. Mmmm…oh so good! This is the time of the year when all of our baseball teams are at the starting line and beginning that journey to make the playoffs. No team is ahead of any other team in any standings or stat race. All of the teams and their fans can share some degree of optimism. Most teams and their fans feel they have at least a decent chance at making the postseason and perhaps doing well there if some breaks go their way. However, there are some teams and fans who aren’t so optimistic because their teams are in tear-down/rebuild mode. Still, Opening Day is finally here and I think we can agree that we’re all happy that the 2019 baseball season is finally beginning. It’s also the beginning of the fantasy baseball season, woohoo! Speaking of beginning…

At the beginning of this year, I wrote a blog post listing some hobby goals that I want to achieve. Number one on my list was this:

Complete at least three major-release baseball sets (not including chase cards) from my backlogged collection of cards. This means for each set, creating an Excel checklist, checking off the cards I have, making a wantlist of the cards I need and then transferring the cards from a monster box to a D-ring binder (and then add the chase cards and even a wrapper). And then I’ll add the wantlist to this here Stadium Fantasium blog to get the remaining needed cards.

And I’m happy that I’ve actually got my 2017 Topps flagship base set (including Update) finally completed and bindered. Well almost–for some reason I can’t locate 22 Series 2 cards of only Angels and A’s. I know I have those cards somewhere. They can only be on my desk or on my card-sorting table, so I think they’ll turn up as soon as I do a thorough search.

This set set takes two binders. I bought the binders through Topps online store a couple of years ago and I’m glad I’ve finally put the cards in them. I view these sets as a sort of chronicle of the previous MLB season. Thus binder #1 is organized as follows:

Wrappers (Series 1, Series 2, Update)
World Series subset cards
League Leaders, National League
League Leaders, American League
All-Stars, National League
All-Stars, American League
Home Run Derby participants
National League teams (starting with the Dodgers of course)
A few Topps ad cards to fill out the last page

So the National League binder is filled almost to the max. The American League binder gets only these cards:

American League teams
A few Topps ad cards to fill out the last page

Now just to be clear, I don’t have all of the variations but I do have a few of the short-print variety. Some of the pockets are empty waiting to be filled with yet-to-be-obtained short-print variations. I do not plan to go after the super short-print variety. Luckily, I pretty much finished my 2017 Topps spreadsheet/checklist which lists the cards in the order in which they appear in the binder and also tracks my wantlist. I expect to add my wantlist of variations and inserts to be added to Stadium Fantasium soon.

So while putting the cards in the binder, I ended up with lots of duplicates. I’ll be putting a list of the 2017 duplicates in the Stadium Fantasium Trading Block soon. Speaking of which, I recently added 44 cards to the list of 1969 Topps cards available for trade on the Trading Block.

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