A Little About Me

My life in collecting began in 1992. During this period of time many of the changes that would become a given in the modern hobby were still off in the future. Jersey cards were yet to exist, autographs were an exceedingly rare occurance within hobby card products and graded cards were a phenomenon which was off in the future.

My collecting started out humbly, with the previous years issue (1991 Donruss). Of course in 1992 these were still in convienience stores and pharmacies because the "new" 1992 cards hadn't come out yet. My dad bought me a ton of these packs and would surprise me with a bunch almost every day. I would then open them and proceed to put together the puzzle that came with 1991 Donruss. Interestingly enough even with all those packs I opened I still never completed that set and still have tons of the cards lying around (Anybody need 11 Eddie Murray's?). I continued accumulating cards in this manner, buying a few packs here and a few packs there. I would also occationally end up with some "older" cards like 1988, 89 Topps as well as some 1990 stuff and some "real old" cards like 1984 and such. All these cards would then end up in a single binder. I was really young and I wasn't shooting for sets just trying to get the biggest collection I could put together.

1993 was my first exposure to the realities of sportscards as a business. It was in this year that I got my first price guide (The 1993 Beckett Annual Baseball Price Guide). I sifted through it's pages looking up the many cards that I had accumulated and found that combined they were worth about the price of a wrapper. Astoundly enough even though I collected and accumulated alot of cards from the time period 1987-1992, I never managed to come across a single Griffey, Bonds, Sosa, Bagwell, Maddux, Palmeiro, Thomas or any other Rookie from this time period. I did have a pair of Chipper Jones Rookies but those were from Boxes, goes to show my luck with such things. Also in my endless investment wisdom I also avoided such "loser" sets as 1989 Upper Deck, 1990 Leaf and 1992 Bowman.

After this period were I established a disillusionment with my collection I drifted away for a while. Persuing other hobbies I had and playing some baseball.

From this point in the original version of this story I proceeded to 1996 when my collecting life was revived through the generousity and genuine enthusiasm of like minded individuals that enjoyed cards as a hobby rather than strictly as a business and that valued trading and the relationships one could build above simply accumulating cards.

And this certainly is part of my collecting journey, and from 1996 onward for several years, OBC was a large part of my collecting life. I met some wonderful people, learned about them and traded cards as well as life stories. As time has moved on however I found myself with less time to persue the various vintage projects I had set up for myself and unfairly falling behind in even attempting to repay those generous souls who helped me build my collection.

For that reason I moved toward inactive status in OBC.

UPDATE: In recent months I have started to get back into the swing of things with the completion of my University career and the ability to more effectively participate in various OBC related activities. As such I have been reinstated to the active OBC and have been spending increasing amounts of time looking at the odd list, sending out the odd package and beginning to scour Ebay for bargains and cards to fill out my lists and replenish my dupes box.

With my hiatus concluded I stand as one of the longest continous members of OBC, although I suppose that could be seen as a somewhat dubious honor :P

I look forward to seeing where my collecting life and my life in general go from this point forward.