It has been over a year since I’ve written on the blog, and after a disasterous disappointing end to the promising Phillies season after winning the division for the first time since 2011. They had the dreaded bye in the first round, to promptly losing to the Mets in the NLDS with 1 win to show for it.

Cards

So I haven’t been going to shows much in 2024, nor buying much online. A lot of distractions and my heart wasn’t in it. Series One 2024 designs were awesome so I picked up a few packs, one at a Phillies game in April. Much more active in the beginning of the season with Series One, and only to a few shows around this time.

Inventory

Inventory spreadsheet has the sets copied from TCDB up through 2011. I haven’t added my quantities yet, still organizing. I want to write a web scraper to pull from TCDB since the sets with all the inserts take a lot of time to pull over. It’s not just getting to know the players anymore by copying over, there are hundreds of parallels and I’m only going to really going after the unique or significant ones that interest me. Automating the copy/paste is something I think is worth investigating, so I’ll tackle that before I copy over another set. I don’t mind copying over the base cards, that is kinda fun. The inserts and parallels are a chore, and I lose interest after so many.

Collecting

Over Christmas break I went with Shaun and Jeremy to Knuckleball, and that was a tremendous time. The trends have impacted the store, as there were no modern hobby boxes of any kind to be found. No new Topps product in the store, I was shocked. The auction still is going on, no wax in it, but there was a Schmidt rookie that caught our eye. I picked up some off-value vintage cards, something I’ve been doing every chance I get, and some wax boxes.

Ryne Sandberg Rookie Card Topps 1983 #83

Updating this post to add the cards I picked up at Knuckleball. The first I have to point out is my favorite player as a kid growing up, the Ryne Sandberg 1983 Topps rookie card. I’ve been after this card for awhile, but I wanted to pick it up in person at a shop. I’m really glad to pick it up at Knuckleball! I was lucky enough to get the card on a deal, with a bunch of other vintage cards as well.

Unopened Wax Collector

It’s time I admit it. I am an unopened Junk Wax collector. I’d love to be a set builder, and I think once I’m organized enough I can get there, but one thing I struggle with is opening those boxes of unopened wax. I know it’s about the cards, and it’s about the players and each player has a story, but my goodness something about the unopened wax boxes really appeals to me. I have started to track the unopened wax collection on a separate spreadsheet as well. This will prove helpful when I go to further shows and I can quickly identify if I have that box or what boxes I’m on the hunt for.

Sunday Nights

I’ve chosen Sunday nights as a way to end/start the week on a calm note, really easing into the next week in a way that will help me get through my collecting goals, and give me an excuse to keep working on the collection.

That about wraps it up, next week I go through the annual Christmas trip to Knuckleball, the items and the new place to eat we discovered!

-PhillyJunkWax