Journal Entry 1: Collecting, Curating, & Connecting
“So you collect cards? That’s cool, I have a whole box at my mom’s house, maybe they are worth something?”
Over the last few years, really since the beginning of COVID pandemic, and whenever I speak with someone who is not a collector, or forgot that baseball cards even existed, typically the person is very cordial and will entertain me for a bit. Then they will begin to wonder if they have a small fortune buried beneath a pile of VHS tapes, next to their old Creepy Crawler oven. The conversation is always the same, I begin to ask what they think they might have, and it's mostly ‘Wax Era’ stuff. They think it may contain some rookie Griffey Jr. cards, maybe some base Michael Jordan stuff from the 90s, and the ones who used to really be into may make reference to the infamous Billy Ripken card. It’s a brief conversation, never lasts more than a few minutes and then someone usually pivots to a different topic.
I can’t say I blame them. After all I am the guy that, over the years, has been smiling and nodding his head along at nearly every golf story ever told to me. It’s a great game, and I’ve been a bunch of times, but playing golf, nor watching it has never left much of an impression on me. Most of my friends and family members however, are huge fans of the game and ultimately I know that if they have a golf story/experience/thought, I am going to hear about it.
And that’s ok. I’ve always been a little envious of their ability to love the sport. I’ve tried several times, but it just never really took. My friends have always been so baffled by this.
“How can you not like the game? I’m telling you, you just need to dedicate yourself for like a summer, play 2-3 times a week, and you’ll love it.”
And people say the card hobby is not cost effective.
But I get what they are saying. Perhaps if I were able to play that much golf, in time, I would begin to appreciate exactly what they love about the game. Things like the sounds of early morning, the dew on those early morning greens. The solitude or the camaraderie of golfing with your buddies and like climbing a great mountain, a single stroke improvement is just another step toward the top.
I get all of that and I have had it explained to me, many times. But how do I articulate those same feelings and connections when it comes to collecting cards? This is something I have always had a hard time doing. Then I realized, when I started to get into the hobby again, that I was buying or trading for things, without any reasoning or rationale. I bought things I thought were cool looking, or had potential long term or short term value. I wasn’t really a collector, but I wasn’t a flipper either. I was a consumer.
As the card market took over during the pandemic I found myself, like so many others, consuming as much as I could. I would start a collection, sell off the same collection, focus on one player, sell that one player, invest in prospects, and then sell off those prospects faster than if I was Bob Nutting of the Pittsburgh Pirates. I just couldn’t maintain any kind of focus on something specific. While it was ‘fun’ trying to explain to my wife why it is fiscally responsible to invest in Luis Robert rookie cards, I knew that I either needed to get out, or re-evaluate why I wanted to collect cards.
So I got out. I sold everything off, that I could sell and it seemed that I was going to be out of the card game all together. But as the months went on, I would continue to talk to people who were still involved, like my brother, who loves to haggle and snag up as many Red Sox/Bo Bichette variations as he can get his hands on. He kept questioning why I got out of the hobby in the first place, since my interest still seemed pretty high, and just like my previous collections, I never had a good answer for it.
So one day I went back to my box of 12-15 cards I was still hanging onto, because I was unable to sell them and I came across one of my old favorites…
Now I know this isn’t the most valuable card in the world, and Pete Alonso (my favorite player in the game today) is not in the upper echelons of collectable players, this card has always been one of my favorites. I bought this card at the peak of the hobby, and this action variation of his rookie card was going for nearly $80 in its PSA 9 form. Again, in the grand scheme of the card collecting world, $80 is not a lot of money, but at the time it was the most I had ever spent on the card. It was also at the time when I really fell in love with the hobby. I toiled over buying the cards for weeks, checking comps, trying to find the best deal I could, and then finally I just decided I needed it. It was my treasure, and when I finally got my hands on it, it was as if I accomplished something.
From that moment on I started collecting more and more Pete Alonsos, but also more and more Heritage.
Why Heritage?
Heritage is not an attractive set to a lot of people. If you have ever bought a box of Heritage, especially the infamous 2020 set, you were appalled by its poor print quality and at times it's misshapen cards as well. Heritage rookie cards and autos rarely do as well as their Bowman and Topps Chrome counterparts, and aside from their chrome variations (purple, silver, refractors, etc.) the paper products in the hobby always seem to be the less desired. So to sum up, Heritage cards are often of poor quality (in terms of product and/or quality control) and are nowhere near as valuable as numerous other sets. And now, I am obsessed.
I go back to that day when I was looking at that Alonso, and reminiscing about purchasing that and others like it and how much fun it was to do so. Then I realized something, that while so many may hate on Heritage for all of those things I mentioned, there is great value in their mishaps.
Think about it? If you look at the population reports, there are way more graded Topps Chrome cards than there are Heritage. This is the case because, for obvious reasons, they are nicer, it has become the standard Topps Set and because of that, the hobby has valued them more. But let’s go back to 2019 and the hottest rookie that year Fernando Tatis Jr. Everyone was all over Tatis and all of his different Topps Chrome variations. Tatis, naturally, was in the Heritage sets as well that year, and had a few variations. So let’s see the pop report:
I don’t believe I am being too bold when I say 2019 was one of the best sets Topps Heritage has had. Not just because of Tatis and other phenomenal rookies like Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Pete Alonso and Kyle Tucker to name a few, but because the product was so solid. 98% of graded Tatis Jr. cards came back in mint condition, however only about 25% of those game back as PSA 10 compared the the Topps Chrome product which saw nearly 71% come back as PSA 10s. The bottom line is, it is harder to get a PSA 10 when it comes to Heritage, so therefore, shouldn’t a PSA 10 in Heritage be more valuable than in its Topps Chrome counterpart?
Probably not. My goal here isn’t to convince people to start buying up Heritage, because the last thing I want to see, and my wife especially, is a rise in my spending. But over the years I have found great value and great interest in collecting Heritage, whether it be base, its chrome variations, action variations (which are my favorite), and the on-card autos in both blue and/or red ink.
The Heritage Collector
So my journey has begun again, now with a renewed purpose and understanding. What I have realized with collecting my Heritage cards is that I am not going to go out and just anything and everything heritage. My goal is not to gather, not even to collect, but to curate. I want to build my own personal museum of a carefully curated collection of Heritage cards over the years.
For now I started with the year 2012, and I have selected three rookies from each class (with the exception of 2022, because for now there are a bunch I like, that I will narrow down over the years to three) and my plan is to collect, for each player one of the following:
a) Base
b) Chrome (Purple, Chrome, Refractor)
c) Action/Image Variation
d) Auto (does not have to be a rookie auto)
I will also want each one of those variations to be graded in a PSA 9 or higher. And here are the players I will be trying to snatch up:
And so far this is how the collection looks (with some added extras):
The Purpose Of This Blog
I have always enjoyed writing, there have been a couple of projects I have worked on over the years that I am continuing to work on, but I wanted something a little lighter and hopefully more engaging with people in the collecting community. Each month I will try to write 1-2 blogs about what I have added or subtracted from the collection and share this new collecting ambition. I love hearing about people’s personal collections, whether it be about cards and/or memorabilia so I thought I’d create a platform to do this for myself. Feel free to leave comments and share your personal sports card/memorabilia in the comments below.
Thanks for taking the time to check out the blog, and if you ever come across anything that can help me reach my collecting goals please let me know.
Happy collecting!
