Happy New Year everyone! One of my favorite Baseball Card collecting things to do,
though decidedly in second place to finding brand new Baseball Cards, is to flip through my card binders. One of my favorite such flips is of a small binder that holds a single set: 2014 Stadium Club.
GOAT
I can no longer recall if this was the first release in the product's "re-boot" after a hiatus of a little more than a decade or so. It might be it's first year back, or second, but that matters little. Nor do the particularities of the design, another matters little on this "full bleed" set that is all about the baseball photography. And usually, I don't even care for the design choices made for it, with it's seemingly permanent love affair with foil printing — which I like even less / dislike even more, with each passing year. These 2014 cards are one that improve greatly via scanner views. But that also, matters little. Squinting at tiny foil printing just isn't necessary for a Babe Ruth Baseball Card.
I somewhat wish I owned a run of Stadium Club sets from every year since it came back. Maybe if I did I would have figured out the project I have been working on recently, way earlier. But Stadium Club is not generally a cheap set to acquire, more of a 'mid-tier' set than a 'low end' set. Ultimately I do enjoy assembling a 9 or 18-best-of page(s) from the different sets, a kind of permanent collecting activity whenever I stumble across discounted Stadium Club cards, one or more years after release. Or when I (rarely) summon up the energy to deliberately scroll through the cards from years needing anywhere from 1 to 7 more cards to complete a page — which is most of them.
In 2014 however, I did a (rare) smart thing in acquiring brand new Baseball Cards: I simply purchased a copy of the whole Stadium Club set, all at once, in a single box, all correctly sequentially collated by someone else. Oh how simple Baseball Card life would be if I could just do that more often. And, possibly/probably cheaper.
And it was very enjoyable to place it in binder pages, a long time ago, and also enjoyable to do it all over again less long ago, in order to cut down the space the pages take up by doubling it up to 18 cards per page, despite the nice inset photo on the back of each card. And like a dutiful collector of Baseball Cards, each time I kept all the cards in their sequential checklist order, because, well, at this point ... because, Why? I can no longer answer that question, or even explain why I would keep Baseball Picture Cards in some sort of random order made up at Topps HQ.
Baseball is played with a definite "line-up" at all times, the teams have officially defined rosters and the teams are always in order in the "standings" as well, but the order of the cards themselves in a set are almost always just totally random, with just an occasional checklist where all the cards from each team are in sequentially numbered order — one would think that lots and lots of collectors would prefer things that team orientated way, but that is the exception, not the general rule. Random, the cards must be. Why?
I think it has been this binder in particular which really moved along my interest in re-building my binders based on several things. Though when I first "bindered" it I even declared otherwise. Firstly, the far, far better visual appeal of pages of all horizontal cards, and all vertical cards. And, some other concerns. Let's take a look at the starting condition:
Page 1
6 verticals, 3 horizontals. Job one.
But even this first page in the set shows off odd things about checklist construction, such as a near instant Who Dat? problem and I don't mean the way it is virtually impossible to know which exact Boston Red Sock is individually named on the checklist. Rather my man Ricky Williams, err, uhh, I mean Jon Singleton, he of the GOAT RC Logo card in my collection. 
Son of GOAT RC Logo card
This Stadium Club RC fits his Baseball oeuvre just exactly perfectly, telling us there's 2 Outs so he won't be needing his glove now. Singleton actually returned to the Major Leagues this year after a lot of hard work on his part, which lead to a rehabilitation in the Mexican Leagues (oh how I wish those had Baseball Cards as I expect they would be ¡fantastico!), but in yet more just exactly perfectness he played for two different MLB clubs in the 2023 season and did not receive a new Baseball Card for his efforts; more's the pity. Maybe this particular RC foreshadowed the future ingeniously.
But this combo of Babe Ruth, GOAT, at card #3 in the set and Jon Singleton, 488 MLB career At Bats RC Logo GOAT right next to him at card #4 also illustrates a key reason I want to re-arrange this set. Now I do like finding Babe Ruth Baseball Cards in new products mostly featuring contemporary players; however later on the incongruities inherent in these checklists just create LOLs rather than awe, check out this cool new Babe Ruth Baseball Picture Card I found back in the year 2014. I hate to dis my guy here, but Singleton's card simply lessens the enjoyment of The Babe card right (almost) next door.
Let's check out some more of these cards for a little more context -
Page 2
Hey, there's The Babe again, with yet more all-wrong horizontal mixing. Although that is a fantastic Elvis Andrus card, an exciting player (named Elvis, how cool is that?) who had a very good MLB career, there is no possible way to connect him to Babe Ruth & Lou Gehrig. And we get a little more Who Dat? issue with the appearance of Matt Adams, who had a respectable but more Journeyman type career. While Andrus looks to have Triple in his eyes, Adams looks like he is the Outside Tackle setting up a Screen.
Now I do quite like Stadium Club's inclusion of Black & White Baseball Cards without making them a foolish parallel nor printing them in a special set of online-sales-only, $3.89/card, buy now or forever be locked out of /412 cards if you don't order in the next 39 hours, so, hurry. Black & White cards are nice, but that particular fine example loses a fair bit of gravity there when Elvis is rockin' his great solid color Road (or Home, one can never tell with those sneaky Texas unis) Alternate Uniform there right alongside. The Babe and Lou Gehrig didn't have those.
So that's just some of the material I have to work with. Let's see how things turned out.
New Page 1
Ahh, now that is sooooo much better.
I quite like that the set now starts with that Matt Holliday card which I have always found to be a painterly-like Picture Card. And I am a bit pleased that I didn't end up attempting to start a Horizontal collection for Anthony Rizzo; I have a few of those going for other players. Assembling 9 Horizontals on a specific theme is not easy. But pulling them all from a mixed Horizontal/Vertical set is very easy.
Note also that those are in a sequential checklist order. Just, because, I guess. I am actually fine with the contemporary players, i.e. the ones that actually played Baseball against each other (that year), appearing in random order on a checklist. That's how Baseball Cards arrive in packs after all.
And you may notice the nice Black & White Ruth/Gehrig card is not included in the sequence. That will re-appear a little later in the project. These assemblages of 9 Horizontal Stadium Clubs are so nice, let's check out Page 2:
That's gotta be the happiest Mike Trout card I can recall. Don't see too many of those lately. Manny Machado is again Mr. Inscrutable while he is playing; that card is a like a re-run of his Rookie Card from a year earlier. And it sure seems like the Topps Setlist Constructor might have known I would be filing all the horizontals together with that fun look at the Giants' starting rotation there.
Regular 'ole vertical Baseball Cards are no slouches in Stadium Club either. How'd that go?
Ahh.
But....what happened to The Kid, who quite nicely lead-off this famously 1990s-associated product?
That is another bit of the Re-Arranging - I would rather see cards of players that played together, all together, on their binder pages. Mixing cards of players from different eras is a routine part of these re-booted Stadium Club checklists, but also happens in Archives and many insert checklists as well. I can't explain why I prefer this; it just seems more natural to look at Baseball Cards this way. For an effort like this I have gone with placing the cards by date of the players' debuts, so the baseball history kind of flows along on the page(s).
On these new arrangements you might notice that I have the Todd Helton and Roy Halladay cards still there with the 2014 players though each played their last game in 2013. That could become useful as I work through this project.
The Clemens > Bo page is actually the 2nd page of 20th Century color veterans; page 1 is also great -
I thought about spotting Tom Seaver there in between the of-a-pair Schmidt and Murray cards just for the giggles but I think I will leave that one for my next re-arrangement of these some other cold crappy day outside in the distant future. The Ripken card also seems to possibly call out for some Sunset Card neighbors, like the Helton card back up there on the first Horizontals page, or the Mariano Rivera card deep in the unscanned Verticals of contemporary players. More, options.
And what happened to The Babe? Don't worry, he is in very, very good company:
There, no more young whippersnappers with their riotous color uniforms making Grandpa all upset in his non-technicolor memories. I quite like how the Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson photos complement each other, something which would be lost mixing them in with 2014 All-Stars and some Rookies no one can remember now.
That page was actually the very first one I assembled for this project, and it quickly reminded me of a key problem with placing a set of Baseball Cards in binder pages: I have yet to find a checklist that is perfectly divisible by 9. There in a pocket in the inner cover surface of the binder, I found this card, #200, hanging out in a penny sleeve all by itself -
Where have you gone?
Shazzzz-bot. Now I have 10 wonderful Black & White Baseball Cards. What to do?
I have a few options here. Being a Tigers collector, I have what feels like piles and piles of Ty Cobb and Al Kaline cards, from sets that I am not going to be placing in binder pages. (Topps: 1984 Tigers? Who Dat?) But, neither am I going to put those in a find-a-new-home-somehow-somewhere, else box, either. That Cobb card looks suspiciously familiar in that if I were to crack open the box of Tigers cards needing attention, I think I might see that picture again in there, possibly in a colorized version. And if I pull the Cobb card so I can put Joltin' Joe in there between The Babe and Bob Feller, I won't have quite the harmonious Ruth/Robinson duo in the middle of the page any more either. So maybe Al Kaline's many pages (yet to be built) might could use a B&W card. Hmmm. It's also not a terrible thing to leave Your Team's cards mixed in with the rest of MLB in a set, either. A Stadium Club "Team Set" is only going to be a handful of cards anyway and it is nice to see Your Team in every binder.
This all reveals a key problem with keeping a Complete Set while also generally always building Team &/or Player collections. Sometimes, the solution is simple: use a duplicate card, one in each particular binder page. But for this set, I have zero duplicates — a slight disadvantage of just purchasing a set, if you ask me.
And....wasn't there another cool Babe Ruth Black & White card on the original page 2 for this set?
There was. How'd that work out?
Not too good.
Now that will be a perfectly good looking triumvirate of classic mid-Century Baseball, eventually. But in the short run, this it-was-a-simple-plan bit of Baseball Card re-arranging has gotten complicated in a hurry. Those are the only 3 Horizontal B&W cards in 2014 Stadium Club.
For that dilemma I have a most excellent, simple solution, one no collector would disagree with:
More Baseball Cards
(mostly) 2018 Stadium Club
That is another page that lead to some of the conclusions I am now putting into practice here with 2014 SC; it was my first pass at selecting 9 favorites from miscellaneous purchases of '18 SC. All 9 cards I quite like, but not a binder page I quite like. That Nolan Ryan plus B&W? Nope. And I am really going to need to find another Horizontal Yankee Stadium card, somehow, somewhere.
Those Black & Whites plus the ones I have assembled here back in 2014 made me realize I just want to collect all (as in: all of them) B&W Stadium Club Baseball Cards. Problem solved. I don't know exactly how I will flow them along from one year's set to another, but that will be a pleasant chore for another day, probably not long after a fresh box of funzies arrives from COMC.
So that takes care of bindering the vintage photos in SC at least - a perpetually growing set of pages of them. This post is now making me start to regret not snagging a pair of $17 blasters of 2022 SC I saw on the shelves recently during another B1G1 50% off sale, which would have made the pair cost just $12.75 each. Bummer. Discounted Stadium Club cards never last long and I won't make that mistake again. But then it still will be cheaper to just cherry pick the singles I want from '22 SC. When will I ever learn?
This set might have helped show me The Way, however. Part of the reason I say that is the Rookie Card cards. How could I get this far into a post about a Complete Set and still have shown only one RC? The only cards people collect, right?
I did find some quite endearing Rookie Card cards in 2014 Stadium Club:
A classic Baseball Card, seemingly posed in an old-time dug-out, probably in Port St. Lucie. d'Arnaud has been a bit of a late bloomer, compared to the breathless chase of Rookie Card cards of 20 year old phenoms. A bit like his Mets RC team-mate in the set -
This Flores card is headed towards another fun page, made up of interesting Mets uniforms. I can't recall Mr. Met making such a great shoulder patch appearance on any other card, just yet at least. That goes back to the angst of holding a Complete Set together --- but also making fun side collections. This next card magnified that quite a bit as well:
This has to go with my Detroit Stars collection; I haven't pulled them all into their own little pile but I know there will be other Horizontals in there to assemble. Recently I pulled a brand new Phillies Baseball Card of Nicholas, which once again sends a definite Slugging-First player back to the field for his official Baseball Card appearances. Topps just can't help themselves with this guy.
For the most part, Rookie Card cards in Stadium Club aren't quite so why, why, Why? as in other, bigger sets. I think the lowest how-low-can-we-go in the RCs assembled here is around 200 At Bats, which is a far more sensible figure than the occasional 4 At Bat RC found in Topps Baseball sets. And not far short of half of the 2014 Stadium Club Rookie Card card class are still around the Major Leagues ten years later, which is a lot more than can be said for so many other checklists. These cards should not be overlooked, and I am fine with Rookie Card cards being on my checklists (I collect an entire binder of nothing but Topps Baseball RCs), as long as they are kept in their proper place, which is, all together -
Ultimately, Stadium Club Rookie Card cards shouldn't be overlooked. And, perhaps, placed directly into toploaders after opening the packages. CJ Cron, like ALL Rookie Card cards, still had Babe-esque potential back in the day of his sweet "That Mountain in Arizona" RC there, after all. However I probably should have placed this next card straight into The Vault:
This one has several upsides. It is a sweet reminder that Betts came up as a middle infielder, something that surprised many a baseball fan this past year. I was also pleasantly surprised to discover that this card is now worth about as much as what I paid for this entire Complete Set of Baseball Cards, which was $40. I like that card too much to ever sell it, but it is a cool thing to think that just this one Baseball Card made the other 199 cards kinda sorta free. The downside of this one is that I don't have more Complete Sets of Stadium Club.
This set ends (well, at least of the 2014 players) on an excellent note with another card that was just forlornly hanging out in the binder's inner sleeve -
Hypnotic
I always love this First Baseman card trope. This card appeared to me after nicely filling up 4 pages of Vertical cards of 2014 Major League Baseball players, with no slots left over. To do that I had selected one for a Player Collection which needs a bit of help to reach the finish line:
Which is needed for one of those player collections started up after pulling a pretty cool card, in this case an on-card auto in the all-illustrated National Chicle set which both has minimal resale value and is just too nice of a card and signature to not keep anyway. You'll see it here, some day.
So after all this page re-assembly and delightful like-likes-like harmony, the end result is more ragged than I am going to scan for you. I have a couple Horizontal RCs not placed, 3 Horizontal 2014 MLBers stranded, and a half-dozen or so Horizontal and Vertical 90s/00s Stars still needing some page-mates, somehow, somewhere, someday. Maybe some of those will end up like the Ryan Braun card, which is now perfectly hidden between 2 other cards in this binder, helping maintain Complete Set integrity while not bothering to remind me of a lack of integrity amidst a great set of Baseball Cards. Or maybe possibly launching yet another Theme collection, of Sunset/Farewell images, might help free up just enough page slots to get this probably a bit overthought project over the finish line — Topps didn't have all these thematic worries when they issued these cards and their checklist finished with just 2 extra cards, quite unlike my sequencing now.
Along the way over the past week I discovered a possibly hidden photo selection theme in this set that I will be watching out for, now, going forward. That might someday also help with a few of those ragged edges to 9 card page harmony. The discovery was of some Absolutely Fabulous Fans -
I feel like I should absolutely know who is the guy with the on-point street cred Dodgers fan look there in the front row. It can't be cheap to sit there and the Dodgers generally have the most famous fans. But I just can't place him - except in my Baseball Card binder.
This next one I have a dim memory of a remark or two when this set was new:
Most Beautiful Hair, 2014 Stadium Club
Ultimately Stadium Club cards are almost too good to keep all together when one collects Teams, Players, and Themes, like I do, so about a half-dozen of these are leaving Complete Set behind and moving along the bookshelf somewhere else. One type of card I like to collect together features Wrigley Field's famous Ivy, so I have always enjoyed this last card in particular. But I also enjoy Andre Dawson cards, so, I guess, I will just need another copy to enjoy, twice -
Or, thrice?
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