Down With OPC and An Early New Years Resolution...

I am done with school for the day and I don’t have to work tonight at all. I have a bunch of posts pre-written that I had planned on putting up today. I was actually going to slap one up right after class, but it seems like people are actually reading the last one and that is a good thing. This will not be my final post today, but it follows the theme of what I am doing with my collection right now. Basically while the wife is at work I have the entire bedroom floor covered, wall to wall with cards. Including dupes and my player collections I have nearly 6,000 Tampa Bay Rays cards and up till now they have been in no particular order. The super fancy cards like relics, autos and refractors have gone into the Rays’ display cases, but everything else just goes in a stack by the scanner when I get them in the mail, then goes into a box with absolutely no sense of order. When I saw a card and called it new, it’s based on whether I recognize that card or not. I spent the early part of this week digging out all of Carl Crawford cards and making a web page to track them. This is still a work in progress, but you can see what I have done so far- http://collectivetroll.webs.com/crawford.htm As I mentioned in the last post, I got rid of a ton of cards, this week I have spent 40 bucks at the Post Office and I still have a few more packages to get out. Some of you may be getting a surprise package from the Troll. If you didn’t, it doesn’t mean I don’t like you, it means I am just tapped out of cards right now. I have been planning on taking a step back and evaluating what exactly I have for a while now. I went to the card shop this week and didn’t buy any cards, but did pick up 300 pages, 4 new (used) binders and 2 more shoeboxes for top loader cards. My first step was sorting out all of the Topps base cards that I had of the Rays. I have a binder for these and I will put together team sets of Topps from 1997 on up. I have 2004 complete, the rest need work. For 1999 to 2002, I have almost no cards, so if you have any old D-Rays lying around, I will gladly take them off of your hands. There were a few other products that I had intended on making teams sets with, too, but had lost track and focus. I don’t think anybody has given too much thought to O-Pee-Chee lately, but I remembered that because of the player selection, I really wanted to build this team set. The blog-o-sphere was very generous with these cards and I got a bunch of them, let them sit in various corners of the house in stacks and boxes and I totally forgot about them. Today I sorted them all out and realized I have more of a mess than a set. Now, if you are a Rays fan and I know that I am not the only one in the blog-o-sphere, you are going to want to pay attention to this blog over the next week. I have come across quite a few doubles already. If you collect Carlos Pena, BJ Upton, Matt Garza, James Shields, Scott Kazmir and even Crawford and Bartlett, I have uncovered dupes of all of these fine players. I plan on taking all of my dupes of the Rays to All Children’s Hospital in St. Pete next month, but I can give a few bloggers first crack, especially if they can help me out with cards that I need. When I started this blog, it was basically just done on a whim. I wasn’t ripping wax at that point and the first few posts were about trying to resist the urge to rip, then the next few were all about ripping. Basically, I didn’t really intend to get back into collecting or post on a card collecting blog on a daily basis, but I did, I love it and I don’t plan on slowing down or stopping anytime soon. I am going to make a personal pledge to be organized though. Get cards in the mail, scan them, post them, and put them away in their specific location. That’s the plan anyway… So, back to O-Pee-Chee. I really thought I was done with this and when I sorted all of the cards into a stack, it was a big one. Maybe because I have 4 copies each of Matt Garza, Scott Kazmir and Dan Wheeler, I don’t know. I am not worrying about getting black bordered or regular border; I just want one card of everyone in the set. I have a copy of Jason Bartlett for the set and my player collection, so I am good there. I could use a black bordered for the PC though. The cards I am missing I was totally certain that I had, but I have checked in every drawer and under every box in the house and I am still 4 cards short of a team set. The cards that I need are: number 53 of BJ Upton, #96 of Carl Crawford (2 copies if possible), #317 of Akinori Iwamura and #400 Evan Longoria. Other than that, I have the checklist (two copies actually), the Moments card, the Longoria Face of the Franchise card and I am golden. As I progress in the sorting process, I will post more cards that I need for team sets. I am focusing mainly on regular old Topps cards, but there a few sets, especially from this year, that I really want to fill for the binder. Goodwin (still need Crawford!) and Allen and Ginter (Need Navarro) come to mind, but there may be a few others. Also, I threw this out there a while back, but does anyone have any extra pages that will hold minis that they would be willing to send my way? Thanks blog-o-sphere! Troll out.