Around 2000 when I was 13 my dad came home from the flea market with a bunch of baseball cards. By this time I had already been selling on ebay for about a year and been collecting cards for quite a while, but my only real collection was Marlins cards and hand collating every Topps base set. Included in this haul he got for $20 were about 100 1971 Topps cards including a few of the nicer ones (Reggie, Bench, Rose). It was the first I'd seen of the set and fell in love with it and decided I was going to complete it. A few years later when ebay and the like really started booming I promised myself I wouldn't buy lots of cards online or single cards from any sale sites (only from forums). Then a few years back when I went to a show and someone literally had multiples of every card in the set I promised myself I'd never spend more than 50 bucks in a single transaction - otherwise it would make completing the set too easy and would end the fun. Pleased to announce that as of this week I added Nolan Ryan and am now only 10 cards away from finishing the 16 year long project - for now. I have a looooooooooot of condition upgrades to make.
My main player PC is Chris Coghlan. I went to school at University of Florida and saw Coghlan play while he was at Ole Miss. I've always liked scrappy infielders and being a lefty I'm a sucker for lefty batters too. When the Marlins drafted him I was ecstatic. Later that year my buddy and I were at our LCS. He opened some 2007 Bowman Chrome and I opened some football product (didn't collect football but it was cheap). He hit a Coghlan Xfractor auto and I hit a Patrick Willis jersey card. Since he was a 49ers fan we traded and that was the beginning of an obsession. Got lucky enough to get most of his early rare stuff before he became ROY and got hot, and his later stuff came out after he dropped off again.
I also collect Duke Snider cards and other Brooklyn Dodgers cool stuff. My grandmother grew up in Brooklyn and was a huge Dodgers fan so I started collecting mostly reprint or new issue Brooklyn cards for her. Then I ventured into the real vintage. Her favorite was Duke Snider, so mine was too (plus he was a lefty). Being Jewish I also collect Sandy Koufax things, but not as much because of the price tag. When I found this site I wanted to collect T206 cards and so decided to tackle the Brooklyn team set, only graded by SGC because they're so attractive.
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