The Waiting is the Hardest Part

There is a lot of waiting involved in collecting cards. And even, multiple kinds of waiting. I am experiencing a whole bunch of them right, now.

The most routine wait in collecting is for the new Baseball Cards. I entered that wait yesterday, when I saw from a (fortunately) text headline that the 2024 Topps Baseball design has been released. I always try as hard as I can to avoid seeing that until I rip a pack of the cards, which is not always easy. So until I rip that pack, I have to be very much more careful about where I peek at online Baseball Card sites. And thus there will be a lot of waiting involved, until next month some time.

The 2nd most routine wait is the never-ending search for a not-so-new card you want for your collection. That’s just a permanent part of the collecting deal. Working on a project involving cards now > 10 years old involves a whole lot of waiting. Some of that waiting is about to end, but first, there will be more waiting.

The best way for me to work on that project is to send cards I don’t want to COMC to put them up for sale, and then use the proceeds to buy the cards I do want. But that involves a metric ton of waiting. First you send in the cards, but you have to wait a long time for them to be processed before you can put a price on them. Then, you have to wait for them to sell.

Now for me, always operating in cheapskate mode in an all-too-easily-becomes-expensive hobby, each year I add a whole lot more waiting to this whole process by only shopping during the Black Friday sale. The vast majority of the cards I want to buy aren’t going to sell to anyone else anyway, so I might as well wait till there is the best chance their price is reduced.

But after all that waiting, buying cards at the same time as oodles of other collectors means, you guessed it, more waiting. I really messed up this year by not requesting a shipment until well after dark on “Cyber Monday,” which put my shipping request at the end of a very long line.

So there has been a whole, whole lot of waiting involved in that package up there which I received yesterday, one which I was very, very glad to see. That package owes its existence to a bunch of collecting work I did an entire year ago, when I managed to get a package sent to COMC.

It had a lot of cards for my all-parallel set build of 2013 Topps Baseball:

That’s a lot of Sea Turtles.

That will make for a long enjoyable bit of binder page flipping and wantlist editing, very soon. Another big snowstorm is just firing up outside and the best thing to have for a snowstorm is some Baseball Cards, if you ask me.

If you squint, you just might be able to tell that some of those are not parallels. I have always been ever-so-slowly collecting the 2013 Topps Baseball photo variations as well. I took a serious plunge this year, when I picked up one of the, in my view, four most difficult (not just expensive) cards to acquire from the set. To give you at least one regulation Baseball Card to gaze upon in this post, here ‘tis:

This is a big step for me, because it kind of commits me to looking for the other most difficult cards, which I feel will be even more difficult to find or afford. (Those are the Gerrit Cole RC SSP, the Baby King George Card, and most especially the Teddy Kremmer card.)

Although this package sort of arrived at a very good spot in my life and cheered me up immensely, I have only partially been able to enjoy it, so far. I have been delightedly flipping through the contents and imagining all the holes it will fill in various collections, or new collections it will start. But I haven’t been able to start those delightful processes just yet. First, there will be a little more waiting.

That’s because I am on day 3 of my first experience having Covid. It seems like this will be a semi-routine part of our lives now, one I had managed to duck away from previously. Typing out this post is simple enough, but hauling binders off shelves and flipping through them and just generally moving around very much is more energy expenditure than I feel up for right now. My whole upper body feels like it got hit by a truck while simultaneously, I seem to be moving around in super slo-mo. The respiratory symptoms with this respiratory virus are barely evidencing themselves, but the bonus features with this are quite a doozy. At least the headaches of day 1 and day 2 are gone.

So, too sick to Baseball Card. Never thought I would experience that reality, but here I am. I know I am fortunate that this isn’t more serious, for me, or my loved ones. And I know the symptoms peak, and then taper off. So soon enough I will have my scanner in action, enabling some fun posts to share with you all.

Until then, there is still just a little bit more, waiting.