Thursday, May 8, 2014

35,000 Cards or How to Make Your Wife Angry

I have a bunch of unused vacation time at work, and they made me take a week of it even though I had nothing planned.  So I decided to use this time to catch up on household projects I've been putting off - things like repairing the backyard gate, replacing rotten wood, some painting and tiling, you know - man stuff.

One of those projects was to go through the absurd amount of cards I have for trade and weed out all the overproduction era "junk" wax.  Pretty much anything made from 1987 through 1993 with the exception of any desirable parallels, stars, and inserts I came across went into piles on my sorting table.  I also threw in the boxes and boxes of 2013 and 2014 Topps and Bowman my card shop guy has provided to me.  By the time I was finished (it took a solid six hours of work), the table looked like this:


No one photograph can do this awesome pile of cardboard justice, so here are eight more:










Were there such a thing as baseball card porn, that was it.

I put everything into two boxes.  Here they are on the hand truck without which they would be utterly immobile:


That bottom box is full to bursting.  I hate the word "literally," but there is literally not even a cubic inch of space remaining in it.

I would donate them all to the nearby school, but they already have tons of these things (as I will mention in a later post).  Instead, I've listed them on Craigslist.  I'm asking $75 for the lot.  I'm assuming somebody will try to talk me down to $50 and I'll end up accepting $60.  That's no problem.  I just want them gone.

Anyway, when my wife saw all this cardboard at once, she was shocked.  I've always been pretty good at hiding the massive number of cards I have, but the very nature of this project prevented that.  At least she was happy to hear it was all going bye-bye.  Hopefully.

9 comments:

  1. Make sure you put in your ad that you have no idea what are in those boxes and don't have time to go through them. I find that in almost every sportscard craigslist ad over this way.

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    1. I've noticed people doing that, too. I purposefully noted in the listing exactly what the buyer should expect. I don't want anyone thinking they're going to pull Ripken rookies or '52 Topps out of this thing.

      But if it doesn't sell, I may change my tune.

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  2. Some days, I just wake up and the wife is mad at me.

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  3. How much would it cost to ship that?!

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  4. That table...I can't believe it held up. The mess would have been unreal! I gave 30,000 cards to a local children's hospital back in 1994 or 1995. It was a good feeling. Good luck selling them!

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  5. That Sir, is a thing of beauty (but nice to rid yourself of too, I've been there).

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  6. Those photos should be hanging in a museum. Beautiful stuff. Best of luck selling them. I listed 20 binders filled with cards for $5 each and didn't get a single bite. On the flipside... sold a bunch of commons last year for $100, so it never hurts to test out the market.

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