Why do you collect what you collect? (+ Introduction)

[JTysver]

Being from a nomadic clan, my travels often took me to the nether ends of the globe. I traversed the Kalahari solo with just a camel and a bucket of water at the age of 6.

By the age of 8 while playing stickball with my friends on the streets of Ceylon, I was captured and forced into servitude by the king of Siam. Thank you very much oh great Ceylon-Siam war!
At the age of 12, after four years of hard labor, I escaped by burrowing a 247 mile tunnel to the sea. Used my hands too! By that time they had turned as hard as shovels from all of the hard labor I had done. (Note to self- If I ever become king and seek servants, don't build up their strength, speed and endurance with hard labor). I crossed the sea by creating a raft out of bamboo shutes. A little trick a wise old man taught me in the camp.

For four years, I was completely bothered by not finishing that game of stickball. We had just finished the top of the ninth with the score being 87-20 and the other team ahead, but we were home team so I knew we had a chance still.

I had to find all of the players and convince them to finish the game.

I started seeking the players. They weren't too hard to find, but they were very hesitant to finish the game. The opposition claimed that I vacated the field and thus forfeited. The players on my team claimed they had moved on. I hadn't. For four years, I had nothing else to look forward to than that game. That argument, however, was not nearly enough to convince them. I needed more.

Around this time, the great baseball card glut of the late 1980s was beginning. All of the players were collecting them. This was my opportunity. I could find cards and use them to convince players to resume the game.
I started out hoarding a stack of 1985 Fleer Glenn Davis rookies. Two or three of these per man convinced half of the opposition to resume the game. I then moved on to 1983 Topps Willie McGee. This convinced all of the rest but one of the other team's players to resume the game.
Convincing Grixto (that was his name) to join in the game would be difficult. "I only want a rookie Red Rolfe" he would say. I searched for the inaugural Rolfe high and low. My travels took me to many more places. I wound up buying lots from dealers, hoping I could find the elusive Rolfe. I had 27 Rolfe cards, 42 Jackie Robinsons but not a single one of the Rolfe cards were rookies.

Then, I met a dealer on the outskirts of Wyoming (otherwise known as South Dakota) who had the Rolfe. It would be difficult to obtain. He was planning on traversing the Badlands and wanted some reliable transportation. I didn't have a horse to offer him. Just then a light went off in my head. GET THE CAMEL. I went back to the Kalahari and found my old camel grazing in the same field I had left him in 8 years before. I took my camel back to the dealer, traded it for Rolfe and was back to Ceylon to finish my game.

I had forgotten to ask my own team to play. That, I thought would be easy. Just hit them up with a couple of Davis rookies (Glen, not Eric) and a Galarraga or two and throw in one of the Jackie Robinson cards and they should all comply. It worked like a charm!
So, I was stuck then with 33 Jackie Robinson cards, 14 Mantle Rookies and about 12,000 other cards before 1954. So I decided to broaden my collection and try to finish out the Topps run.

And that is how I got into collecting a Topps run!

[ullmandds]

Originally Posted by JTysver

Being from a nomadic clan, my travels often took me to the nether ends of the globe. I traversed the Kalahari solo with just a camel and a bucket of water at the age of 6.

By the age of 8 while playing stickball with my friends on the streets of Ceylon, I was captured and forced into servitude by the king of Siam. Thank you very much oh great Ceylon-Siam war!
At the age of 12, after four years of hard labor, I escaped by burrowing a 247 mile tunnel to the sea. Used my hands too! By that time they had turned as hard as shovels from all of the hard labor I had done. (Note to self- If I ever become king and seek servants, don't build up their strength, speed and endurance with hard labor). I crossed the sea by creating a raft out of bamboo shutes. A little trick a wise old man taught me in the camp.

For four years, I was completely bothered by not finishing that game of stickball. We had just finished the top of the ninth with the score being 87-20 and the other team ahead, but we were home team so I knew we had a chance still.

I had to find all of the players and convince them to finish the game.

I started seeking the players. They weren't too hard to find, but they were very hesitant to finish the game. The opposition claimed that I vacated the field and thus forfeited. The players on my team claimed they had moved on. I hadn't. For four years, I had nothing else to look forward to than that game. That argument, however, was not nearly enough to convince them. I needed more.

Around this time, the great baseball card glut of the late 1980s was beginning. All of the players were collecting them. This was my opportunity. I could find cards and use them to convince players to resume the game.
I started out hoarding a stack of 1985 Fleer Glenn Davis rookies. Two or three of these per man convinced half of the opposition to resume the game. I then moved on to 1983 Topps Willie McGee. This convinced all of the rest but one of the other team's players to resume the game.
Convincing Grixto (that was his name) to join in the game would be difficult. "I only want a rookie Red Rolfe" he would say. I searched for the inaugural Rolfe high and low. My travels took me to many more places. I wound up buying lots from dealers, hoping I could find the elusive Rolfe. I had 27 Rolfe cards, 42 Jackie Robinsons but not a single one of the Rolfe cards were rookies.

Then, I met a dealer on the outskirts of Wyoming (otherwise known as South Dakota) who had the Rolfe. It would be difficult to obtain. He was planning on traversing the Badlands and wanted some reliable transportation. I didn't have a horse to offer him. Just then a light went off in my head. GET THE CAMEL. I went back to the Kalahari and found my old camel grazing in the same field I had left him in 8 years before. I took my camel back to the dealer, traded it for Rolfe and was back to Ceylon to finish my game.

I had forgotten to ask my own team to play. That, I thought would be easy. Just hit them up with a couple of Davis rookies (Glen, not Eric) and a Galarraga or two and throw in one of the Jackie Robinson cards and they should all comply. It worked like a charm!
So, I was stuck then with 33 Jackie Robinson cards, 14 Mantle Rookies and about 12,000 other cards before 1954. So I decided to broaden my collection and try to finish out the Topps run.

And that is how I got into collecting a Topps run!

holy shnikes...my life has been relatively uneventful in comparison!!!!! still have those mantle rookies?

[JTysver]

Originally Posted by ullmandds

holy shnikes...my life has been relatively uneventful in comparison!!!!! still have those mantle rookies?

Didn't mention that I had to use them to get my camel back from South Dakota guy. But the camel was priceless, so I won in the end.

[egri]

I got started collecting in late 2005, when I was in 5th grade. A collector in who lived nearby gave me Bobby Doerr's address, so I wrote to him and that got me hooked on autographs. I collected both modern and vintage (mostly modern; one of my regrets from that time is not writing to more of the guys from the 1930s and '40s when they were still around). I stopped after about my freshman year of high school. Wasn't sure what the girls would think. I got back in towards the end of my freshman year of college. What brought me back was a signing that Jon Lester was doing with Steiner; since 2008 I had been trying to put together a signed 2007 Dunkin Donuts PawSox set. They were given away as a promotion at one of the games that year. There are probably only about 10,000 sets in existence, and mine is the only one I know of that is signed. At the time, I had 24/30 (all TTM), and Lester made 25. I overpaid horrendously for it ($150 plus shipping), but it got me back in to collecting.





I sent out a few more TTM requests that spring, and by the summer I realized that I wanted to focus on vintage, and complete a signed set. I wasn't sure what year, so I picked up a few cards from the years I was looking in to (1953, 1956, and 1957) and sent them out. I was blown away by the artwork on the 53s, which is why I focused on it, and by the graciousness of the players in the set. At the time (summer 2014) there were roughly 50 players still alive, the handful who didn't sign were either in poor health or Willie Mays. I wrote to 44 of them, and all wrote back. They mostly signed for free, or for very low fees ($5-10). A lot of them were happy to be remembered, and would write notes or include signed photos with my request. Like Pilot172000 said, history is a big part of it as well: almost everyone in the set was in either World War II or Korea, and many of them saw combat.

[midmo]

My main collection is Brooklyn type cards. I grew up in SoCal so Dodger history was one of my first interests. I like that sticking to Brooklyn gives me a cutoff date to help keep me focused.

[kmac32]

I have several things I collect for different reasons. First of all, I am a diehard Cub fan. I started with collecting all the Chicago Cub from Topps base sets and updates from 1951 to current with all errors and variations. Set is current so I only add new cards when they come out.

Second in prewar, I collect Cards of Elmer Miller who is my great great uncle who played for the yankees in the teens and twenties and as a side branch of this, I collect E121-80 and E121-120 Yankees and Giants. My so called 1921 World Series set.

I also collect T207 Cubs with all the back variations. Missing the cycle back Ward Miller and Several Napoleon backs.

I started collecting T205 gold border Cubs with all the back variations. Currently up to 72 out of 151 possibilities.

My final collection is a set I am working on. The W572 strip card set. Up to 107 out of 121 cards. All of these cards are raw and in pages. The other prewar cards are all in SGC slabs. I like slabbed cards because I can pick up the cards and play with them. My total prewar is around 250 cards and post war is nearly 2000 cards.

[Louieman]

I feel I collect what I collect because, first of all, it's a passion I've had since I was really young. And that passion hasn't waned as the years have passed...strengthened, if anything.

I suppose part of it is that I love the history of the game as much as the game itself. And I see baseball cards as art, art that captures that history and folklore in this super-iconic sort of way.

My collection is an extension of that. My number one priority for my collection is that the particular card in the particular set is aesthetically pleasing to me. Probably why I almost exclusively care about colors and registration over anything else. I ask myself, "Does this card encapsulate the art of baseball to my liking?" Players are secondary to that criteria. So for example even though Willie Mays is one of my favorite players ever, I don't own a single card of his, and don't plan to (at least, yet) because I've never seen a card of his that really blew me away in terms of its aesthetics.

Instantly one of my favorite threads ever, by the way

[polakoff]

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.