Let's trade ... empty binder pages?

Huhhh? Yep. I need a binder page. A special binder page. The one that holds these little guys:

But I only need one really. I like the little Kimball Champion cards, and I want to keep a page of them to enjoy. I'm not going to collect the rest of the set; I've got a little more than 1/3 of the whole 150. I know there are still some more in the pile of '11 Update I didn't finish sorting last night.

I will get a list together, and I know there is even one I want that I don't have - the Tigers version of Miguel Cabrera. There might be one or two more, and then 30 some Kimball Champions will be up on the block. Babe will stay with me though.

This one here, though, is up for grabs:

I picked just 3 to scan to jazz up a post about empty binder pages somehow. I like the umpire being in the center of the frame. A long while back on this blog, I had this little card in mind in a post about the spring training game this year where for various reasons the umpire crew got so short-handed they had to call balls and strikes from behind the pitcher's mound — 19th century style. I had thought it might be depicted in this set, but it just doesn't go that far back.

This one gets a little closer to my thought:

...but I know that is just your usual 2nd base umpire. Brett's card can go to your house if you'd like, all 3 of them (yo, super-collector!). The A's starting staff shouldn't be called a rotation; it always seems more like a merry-go-round to me and I hardly ever have a clue about any of their pitchers. That is a puzzle too convoluted even for my baseball cards to untangle.

And yeah, I would like to find just one of those special pages that hold these cards.

I can offer up something you might not expect....a whole 100 pack of 9 pocket pages. Sure, a crazy imbalanced trade. But I don't want the things. I bought them at a memorabilia store. They came in a black box, and I didn't look too closely at it as I put together a few purchases. They are from BCW, rather than Ultra-Pro.

But they aren't Ultra-Pro Platinums. I bought a couple packages of those this spring, and those are what I want to keep using. I'm not that picky about baseball cards, but I definitely am about the pages I put them in. The BCW pages I have are serviceable enough, but just aren't the best they can be. They don't seem to be perfectly flat to start out with, like the Platinums. So I hardly want to use them for things like this year's color parallels, that slowly curl if they are not in a tall stack of cards. However they aren't as flimsy as the ones for sale retail in the Big Box card aisle, the ones with the faux perforated edges.

I haven't been able to find Platinums for sale retail since March. The store I go to in the winter months only carries those I think, because they simply are the best. Why mess with less? Oh, yeah, $$$ of course. I don't plan to own dozens of binders, and I do like to look at my cards, and I think they will look better in the nice flat Platinums.

I have some set to arrive imminently, and then I can get back to shrinking the stacks of cards into their new homes with their strange non-numerical neighbors the way I put some sets of cards together.

So please drive a little faster Mr. Brown, or Mr. Fed, or Mr. DHL, or whoever brings me the Platinums. I think some of those stacks are starting to sway a little bit.