Doubling Down

Every six months or so I make a concerted effort to “streamline” my collection. Simplify, if you will. Purge, if necessary. It starts out simple enough—I vow to only collect cards from certain sets, eschew unnecessary parallels, etc. The specifics vary every time I do it, but the basic idea is the same: spend less money, get more cards I like. The problem is, after not too long, I find that I end up in the exact same place that I was before.

Here’s the thing: I’m hard pressed to turn down a trade for Tigers cards that I don’t have. What do I care about some extra Pirates or Dodgers or Blue Jays in my collection? I’ll gladly ship those for some Tigers, even if those Tigers just end up in a box somewhere. The problem is that I have very little interest in actually collecting those team sets. I mean seriously, is it worth agonizing over adding that last Bill Gullickson card to finish your 1996 Donruss set? No. 1993-2003ish was a black hole for Detroit Tigers collecting with very few players actually worth remembering. Still, some of these cards are kind of nice and I’d hate to see them go to waste. At the same time, I have a bunch of Tiger doubles that aren’t worth anything to anybody courtesy of the era of baseball card overproduction.

With this in mind, I give you my semi-annual card collection revision: Not only will I collect Topps Tigers, and the UD Tigers Base set, and Curtis Granderson cards, but I have decided to add the only bright spots of years of disappointing Tigers teams to my collection. The All-Stars.

Bless the man in the MLB front office that mandated the one All-Star per team rule. Robert Fick, welcome aboard. Good to see you again 1991 Score Cecil Fielder. In my effort to restrain myself, I’m going to keep it to just Tigers, but it doesn’t have to be that way. I could easily expand to All-Star cards from any all star. My sextuples of a 1987 Cal Ripken All-Star? Make that quints, baby - one of you just found a new home.

There are too many fun cards out there and too many good seasons gone unremembered to just stick with the Topps and Upper Deck basic sets. But some of these teams are so bad, or designs so unappealing that its not worth picking up more than a card or two. So let’s relive the highlights of some players careers and remember some crazy futuristic cards with some good, cheap fun. Nuts to autographs and relics, we’re talking about base cards, glossy inserts, and mass-produced cards that you can find for next to nothing just about anywhere. So get out of that box, Mickey Tettleton, say so long to Roger Cedeno, Tony Clark, you guys are moving up to the big time. Starting today, if you have a card from your All Star season, or from the next year in commemoration of your All Star appearance, you now have a place in my binder.

Sure, it’s not that exciting, but it is easy and fun. No pressure to collect them, just go with the flow and enjoy them as they come in. They won’t take the place of my main sets, but will fill this deadly gap between Series I and Series II (or worse, between November and February). Now excuse me, I’ve got some Studio, Pinnacle, Leaf and Skybox that are calling my name from a box that hasn’t seen the light of day since 1994. See you in six months.

Dan Taylor runs Grand Cards (http://grandcards.blogspot.com) and hopes that his new All Star binder will soon include 2009 Curtis Granderson cards.