As I got older and I got closer to completing a set I would shift my collection to number order to keep an easier track of what I needed. For some reason I never really liked checking off cards on a checklist.

When I was the in the eighth grade (1977-78) a comic book store opened in my neighborhood and I began buying boxes specially made for trading cards. From then on it was always number order for me.

I always kept my cards separated by teams - a stack of Reds, Dodgers, Yankees, etc. Each with a team card on front and a rubber band around the stack. Team card, manager, pitchers, infield (1B to 3B) and then finally the OFs in that order. And if someone got traded, then all of their cards went to the new team.

And all of those stacks of cards were stored in shoe boxes. 1977 - 1979.

In the late 70's-early 80s I kept them in shoe boxes with rubber bands. Sorted by team but in no particular order. All my other non-sports cards were usually kept in paper grocery bags. When I got back into cards briefly in 1985 they all made it into proper card boxes, and then my vintage cards were stolen in 1995 in a move or where I was living at the time. The only ones I miss are my 72 football cards, where I had a bunch of them, including Staubach's rookie card.

When I was a kid in the early 80s I did not want to keep my cards in a shoe box. My father suggested a computer punch card box and brought one home from work. I kept my cards sorted by team in a single computer punch card box at first. From there, I added a second box, so the NL and AL had their own box. Then each division had it's own box and I was up to four. At one point, my father had brought home about 20 of these boxes which I had filled by the mid 80s, but now by year and number order. If I remember correctly, I stored the cards in two rows from the front to back. Each box could hold 1000+ cards....for me these were a precursor to the monster boxes.

Here is an example:

Very much the same here. Organized the same way (catchers after pitchers as well). No rubber bands for me though. I thought of players as being with a certain team, and that was just the logical way to me. Digging through for trading would have been a nightmare if organizing numerically it seems. '72-'79 for me.

I collected baseball cards primarily in the 1950s and I would agree with some members that cards were more often organized by teams, not by number. In fact, we did not even know all the cards in the set until 1956 with checklists, so we would have had less reason to organize numerically. And for some of us with modest means, we never dreamed of buying enough cards to get all the cards in the set. We were more interested in getting all the cards we knew existed of our favorite team.
Thanks to learning from the 1953 Topps issue that differentiated between players in the National and American Leagues, I would first organize cards by leagues, and then by my favorite teams in that league with my favorite players first and then put them in cigar boxes.
I only put rubber bands around cards when I was taking some out of the house. In addition to damage from rubber bands, cards, especially those on top or bottom, were not treated well when they were jammed into your pockets when you wanted to take them with you for a possible trade. A rectangular bulge in your pocket would occasionally prompt a warning from a teacher: Whatever is in your pocket stays in your pocket! Those were the days!!

You're right, 50's - that's why I always carried my stack in a back pocket!:D

I have almost the full first series of 1957 Topps in what would be EX to EXMT with the top right corner cut off. I did this back in 57 so my older brother would not claim them as his. It must have worked because I still have them.

I collected from 1974 to 1981. A friend of the family, who was a woodworker, made some sweet storage boxes for me that kept my cards in great shape. I always collected in numerical order going for complete sets. Never by team. Here is a photo of how I do it now, which is exactly how I did it when I was a kid.

I still have my card locker, a couple vintage Cubs and Sox stickers on it, had them sorted by team, favorite players or coolest looking card on top. I recall the cards being difficult to get out of the locker. My overflow of cards were in a shoebox, all with rubber bands diagonally corner to corner.