Player Collecting the Easy Way

Tonight I completed a most pleasant Baseball Card collecting task — I pulled a plastic-y fresh binder page from a box of Ultra•PRO Platinums, filled it with cards, and placed it in a brand new binder. Hooray!

I have been wanting to install cards on this particular page for a very long time. It is my first Player Collection page. I refer to it that way because this binder will not be full of cards of a single player. Instead it will be full of single pages of a lot of players.

I do have one large and perpetually expanding Player Collection, which is cards of Miguel Cabrera. I quite look forward to assembling those on pages as well, but one can only collect Baseball Cards but so fast of course.

This whole idea of collecting other players, instead of sets, probably started with...

The Card That Started It All

2018 Opening Day "Before Opening Day" insert

This was a small checklist of (theoretically) Spring Training themed cards, befitting the sorta-around-Opening-Day release date for the product. Here, Anthony Rizzo is sporting a green Cubs cap, something only seen on St. Patrick's Day each year, probably not for every team even.

I only know of 2 other cards featuring such caps. A 90s (?) Mets card I am forgetting right now, but do own, and one I suspect I will never own, a 2013 Topps Chrome photo variation of Miguel Cabrera wearing such a cap. Those cards were "case hits" and rarely surface for sale. No one knows the print run of the cards but it could be as low as /25. I am sure one would easily command a 3 figure price when sold. I would quite enjoy owning one for my Miggy collection and am slowly becoming able to entertain the idea of owning a card that costs > $100. But the bigger problem with that card would be ever finding one for sale.

So, I have this cool card of Anthony Rizzo wearing a green Cubs cap. What am I going to do with it?

I like the the Chicago Cubs well enough. If they were still on my TV (if I had a TV) every afternoon essentially as a 'free' part of basic cable service, the way they used to be, I would probably still follow them a fair bit, and that might even motivate me to keep a TV hooked up and in paid service, too. But I can't say even that would result in me assembling a collection of Chicago Cubs Baseball Cards. I am a fan of the Detroit Tigers and that is that.

I could scan it and "cast" it to a wireless digital picture frame that slowly scrolls through a collection of digital images - something I will probably do with a lot of my card scans, some day.

But that still wouldn't solve a key question - where would I keep it? I'm not really into just keeping Baseball Cards in a box that will rarely be opened. The whole point of Baseball Cards is to look at them.

I could put it in a binder page, but what else would go on that page? There are some more "Before Opening Day" cards that I quite like, such as Mookie Betts playing Ping-Pong, & a Detroit Tiger you've never heard of wearing a Spring Training only jersey, a few others. But in typical Topps fashion, the bulk of the images just show baseball players with no particular indication of what is "Before" Opening Day in the image. Do I want a card of Cody Bellinger just sitting on a bench? Nope. I long ago lost the desire to complete insert sets like that one, just, because.

Now 2018 Opening Day is probably the best year of that whole product line, with some 25-ish-% of the set featuring images that are not the same image as the Topps Baseball set that year, probably a record quantity. So that probably leaves a spare binder page slot, iirc, as 2018 Topps Baseball has a sweet design that looks great on binder pages, particularly pages full of essentially photo variations from their more well-known cards in the big set. (This is my semi-annual plug for some cheap, fun, colorful cards you might like to see from your team if you never have.) I look through those on the regular.

But that would still leave that cool St. Patrick's Day card of Anthony Rizzo kind of orphaned by itself in a non-pleasing way.

Finally I realized what the card needed: more Anthony Rizzo Baseball Card neighbors. And thus my Player Collection was born. 

Having a goal in mind when I find a Baseball Card of a player I like, or just a great Baseball Card I want to keep, somewhere, has been a tremendous aid in deciding what cards to keep and which to forward on to new owners, somehow. I can't keep them all, but neither do I wish to stop randomly acquiring new ones, either.

So there we have it. Let's get back to looking at Baseball Cards.

Specifically, the other 8 Anthony Rizzo Baseball Cards on Page #1

2012 Heritage

2013 Topps

Of course I have the 2013 card in a binder already; it is one of my favorites in the 2013 set, which is one of my favorite sets. It is probably also a card that helped inspire me to move into Player Collecting as I knew it would look good with some page-mates.

2013 Topps "World Baseball Classic" insert

I have no idea how Anthony Rizzo (Born 8-8-89 Fort Lauderdale, FL, one of my cards tells me) was eligible to play for Italy's national baseball team, but I don't care, either. And I had to have a card showing off his uniform #, which he picked because it was Hank Aaron's number.

2015 Stadium Club

I probably set that one aside first as an example of a "Pop Up" card, of which there are never very many and my little pile hasn't reached 9 cards yet. Rizzo's 2013 Topps card shown above has a "Great Catch" photo variation short print that I also quite enjoy (yes that blog will return, someday), but that one is best kept with the rest of the cards in that enjoyable checklist. 

2016 Topps "100 Years at Wrigley" insert

I am sure many a Cubs collector has thoroughly enjoyed building that set. That a single-team, 50 card checklist was included in Topps Baseball that year goes to show the nation-wide strength of the Chicago Cubs fanbase. A whole lot of that probably flowed from all those wonderful afternoons watching pretty-much-free baseball games with Harry Caray and Steve Stone. That the whole idea can't happen any more is just kinda depressing as baseball ever so slowly fades from being the National Pastime; and is one reason I no longer follow the Cubs particularly closely. Not because I dislike the Cubs, at all, but because I dislike pondering the state of Major League Baseball in this regard, which Cubs memories just tend to initiate.

Sigh. A few more notes on that insert set - a cool thing about it was of course that after it was released 2016 became The Year for Cubs fans. Also I felt good, in particular, about carefully individually selling each and every one of those cards I pulled rather than just leaving them to waste space in a box somewhere.

As for that card in particular, Anthony Rizzo is well known for off-field efforts helping children fighting Cancer, as explained on the back of the card. It was nice to see a nice tasteful acknowledgement of that on a major league Baseball Card.

2018 Big League "Player's Weekend" insert/parallel

2019 Archives 1958 Topps

This is one of the cards that suddenly made me wish to complete the 1958 portion of Archives that year. I never thought I would warm up to the '58 design, but the simplicity and basic primary colors just make for such great cards, even with the basic posed images. Anthony Rizzo. 1st Base. Chicago Cubs.

2020 Topps

Card Most On The Bubble: Probably this last one. Although I like Anthony Rizzo and Anthony Rizzo Baseball Cards, I like a lot of baseball players and way, way too many Baseball Cards. I can't just run around assembling binders and binders and more binders of all of those players.

So this Player Collection will be a dynamic collection in that I might add a card to it - but only if I like it more than one of the cards already selected. 9 cards, No Mas.

Also for now I have only been setting aside cards as I come across them, by buying new product. Eventually I will have to deliberately shop for cards of a given player to finish out pages, but that won't be the main way I finish these pages. I find it more fun to wait and see what the packs bring me.

The 2020 card is a classic sunlit Cubs day game card, of which there are probably thousands. That basic image does help overcome a too-busy design with that pointless Grey - leave that to the road uniforms & nowhere else, on a Baseball Card, please. Thus I could see finding an Anthony Rizzo Chicago Cubs Baseball Card that I like more than that one.

The 2018 Big League card is from a fun little set of such "Nickname" cards, as used during "Player's Weekend" when the nicknames were on the backs of uniforms — a challenge to well include on a Baseball Card. Big League pulled that off very well by simply printing the nickname on the card instead of attempting to use a photograph of a player's back. However "Tony" is kind of a whatevs nickname for a guy named Anthony, so I could see it getting cut as well, though overall the card is an excellent one.

A final oddity about this page in particular I should share is that I have a copy of an excellent, quite-valuable Anthony Rizzo Rookie Card - a 2011 Update /60 "Hope Diamond" parallel that was a lucky pull from a hanger purchased at Toys R Us in Columbia, SC, while working on the road one winter (never hard to remember precisely where pulls like that happened). I also have pulled 2 different Anthony Rizzo autographs and a couple swatch cards over the years. 

That key RC will be part of a fun project I hope to share with you someday, but I have been hoping that for way too long. Perhaps finally assembling this page will help kick me into gear on initiating that, we'll see.

Most collectors would make those cards (the ones actually worth money - unlike ALL of these 9 cards) the keystones of a Player Collection, but I would just rather not, and that is again that. I like these 9 cards more than those cards.

The Result