Sportlots and The Summer of Slabs

As I type this, I've got no sports card orders currently en route to Collector HQ, which is fairly rare for me as of late. I've had a steady stream of small orders - usually from Sportlots - at frequent enough intervals that I almost always have a couple cards to look forward to. But not today. They've all arrived, and I haven't yet placed a new order. 

Here's my entire shopping list. This is all I have room for after attacking the team binder bookshelves all year:

Packers cards

1995-1998 -- room for 5

2003-2013 -- room for 1

2014-2024 -- room for 6

misc./draft -- room for 3

Devils cards

1983-1993 -- room for 2

2014-2025 -- room for 26

misc./draft -- room for 6

These arrived earlier this week during an oppressive heat wave that knocked out our power at home and at my office (I couldn't work Tuesday.) The only way it could have been more apt is if I'd ordered Heat or Suns cards. 

Whalers cards

misc.*/draft -- room for 7

*includes Whalers cards issued after 1998

I had two pockets left to fill in my third Whalers binder - comprising 1995-96, 1996-97, and 1997-98 cards - and a miscellaneous section of oddballs, draft picks, and retro-base cards featuring Legends or Whalers Night photos. Thanks to Andrew Cassels and Keith Primeau here, the Whalers Era pages are now full... but I've still got room for a lot more cards. Kind of. 

Before I explain, let me mention that Upper Deck did not include any Whalers Night photos in their flagship 2024-25 set, and I haven't seen one in any other set this year. I'm really hoping someone at UD finds a way to memorialize Mikko Rantanen's 13-game stint in Carolina with a photo like this:

This would be perfect for a UD Canvas insert

Okay, so.. my Whalers binders are currently full. However, I have one small binder that can hold about 20-25 9-pocket pages. That's completely empty, waiting for me to bulk acquire about 100+ Whalers cards so I can move out the miscellaneous and make room for what's left on my wantlist. 

I also moved some things around in my Connecticut Cards binder, which was shared with Whalers extras until recently. 

Connecticut cards

minor league baseball -- room for 1

UConn men/women -- room for 2

minor league hockey -- room for 4

CT hockey isn't necessarily AHL only. If I can find new-to-me NHL cards of players who played in or hailed from my hometown, I'll count those. 

CT baseball is actually two binders - I've got a mini-binder full of New Haven/West Haven teams, and a second binder with some pages for New Britain Rock Cats, Norwich Navigators, Hartford Yard Goats, and a team set of Connecticut Tigers (I don't have any Waterbury Reds 😒)

However, that one isn't exclusively Connecticut cards. I needed to make room in my (non-PC) baseball card boxes for all the 2025 Topps Heritage I bought (couldn't resist) and realized that the best way to clear out cards without throwing them in the trash or messing with my sorting system was to make some new player PCs. 

The problem with that? I have every single player PC card (base, inserts, parallels, anything) in a top loader. I have 12 player PCs - not including Pedro Martinez Dodgers/Expos/Mets/Phillies cards and David Ortiz Twins cards, because I didn't have room in the PC box or the baseball-only boxes. So now I have those cards in the baseball mini-binder, along with Kris Bryant cards and my now-official Terry Francona PC.

I'd been passively picking up playing-era Francona cards at Cardbarrel and baseballcardstore if I saw any unique issues or anything under 15 cents. Now I've got enough to try and fill in Francona's entire playing career (unless there are some unexpected rarities that cost more than a couple dollars.)

The binder bookshelf is basically my penultimate project. It's a fun and affordable warm-up to the grand finale, which is definitely not happening any time soon. 

My eBay buddy Baseball Brittie had been holding some sales credit for me and I cashed it in. This Joe Adcock gets me to less than 56 cards away from completing the 1956 Topps baseball set. {side note: he just informed me that he sold a card of an MLB batting champion to the mother of said batting champion}

I've considered buying more ungraded singles to get closer to completion, but I just cant. There's an auction up on eBay for three cards. I need all three, and two are Red Sox. The seller wants $53 + tax and shipping. And there's a print line through one of them. Ugghhh...

I spent much of Spring shopping on Sportlots and Beckett Marketplace. But I'm going big-game hunting this summer, Because Mrs. Collector is expecting to have surgery right around Labor Day. They might extract all of the cancer, they might not. She might be back to 100% in fall.. or life as I know it may get much, much harder. 

BGS is currently working on grading some of my cards. Once those arrive, I'll add some from that batch to a stack of my own and send some slabbed singles to 4 Sharp Corners for consignment. Some of that cash will be set aside for home repairs (hopefully).. and some will be set aside for cards that I've wanted since I was a teenager...

Thanks for reading!



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Packin' 'em in

Welp, the Red Sox are definitely done now. Rafael Devers is a Giant, and Boston didn't even get Yastrzemski in the deal 😉 So many Sox fans renounced their fandom when the team traded Mookie Betts - but this one might be worse. Raffy was already signed long-term (unlike Mookie) and they depreciated their own asset by jerking him around about his role with the team until he didn't want to be in Boston anymore. Also, most fans forget that the Sox convinced the Dodgers to take on David Price's albatross contract in the Betts trade. 

The players coming back from the NL West team based in California this time are... slightly better. But they gave up many more years of a superstar under contract and sent the wrong message to the three blue chip prospects who just arrived. Ugh...I'm not just done with this team, I'm done with this sport. 

So let's look ahead to football. 

My Green Bay Packers collection is close to complete, thanks to an order from Sportlots and an order from the Beckett Marketplace. 

Filling in the 1980s requires doubling up on '86-88 cards (I've already completed these sets.) The Tim Hauck Pro Set fills the last spot in my early 1990s binder. You don't see '93 Pro Set singles nearly as often as their first three sets; Hauck and Brett Favre are the only two Packers I have from that set. 

I though I had most of the basic Sterling Sharpe cards but Playoff snuck this one by me - until now. These were 20c each on SportLots. Hold that thought. 

Really wish I could expand the selection of Packer players but Robert Brooks and Edgar Bennett were in just about every mid-'90s set. (Now you see why I picked the Tim Hauck card from '93 Pro Set.)

More Brooks cards, but at least there's some new faces here. I'm not seeking out Mark Chmura cards but I wanted the Action Packed single because I had that hat back in the day. Still do somewhere in my hat bag.

John Michels was the Packers' 1st round pick in 1996 and I'm just now adding him to my collection. Offensive linemen (who washed out of the league within two years) didn't get many cards back then. 

I picked out exactly enough cards to fill my 2000s Packers binder, but the seller couldn't find an Ahman Green card and issued a refund. 

Sportlots still has Beckett beat, especially on price. Regardless, I had to fill a cart with 50 cent commons for one specific single that no Sportlots seller had in stock...

More mid '90s here. If I'm going to pay half a buck for commons they'd better be HOFers like Sharpe and Butler.. but the 1994 Ultra and UD singles are now duplicates because I didn't check them off after buying them 30c cheaper at Sportlots. Oh well, wasted 90 cents there. 

But it came out in the wash when the Eddie Lacy Finest RC I purchased (for 62c) along with another Ahman Green single were out of stock and I was refunded $1.12. where are these Ahman Green collectors coming from?

Here's the 2010s Packers single that prompted my return to Becket marketplace after nearly three years. Can you guess which of these basic looking base cards has finally been crossed off my want list?

That's right, it's the Scott Tolzien Prizm base card. This is one of very few Tolzien singles that depict him as a Packer; he started two games in place of an injured Aaron Rodgers during the 2013 season and was ...not good. And yet - none other than the Dallas Cowboys hired him to be their quarterbacks coach for two seasons!

We'll wrap this up with the newest Pack singles, including a trio of Davante Adams cards.
 

So.. how much room do I have left for more Packer cards?

• 5 more cards from the mid-late 1990s
• 1 more card from the 2010s
• 6 more cards from the 2020s
• 1 miscellaneous card 

Overall, I'm about 60 cards away from filling all my team PC binders. I'll have one more inventory update by the end of June, and then -- assuming my wife's health holds up -- it's the Summer of Slabs.

Thanks for reading!

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Taking Inventory

My card collection is once again organized, and due to time and space restrictions I will probably call it complete once these spaces are filled. I can't plan a whole lot beyond the next month or so, and I can't keep making $10-20 sports card purchases every few days. But I can keep detailed records of what I have room for, so I don't add anything I can't squeeze into a box or binder.

This Kevin Dineen Topps RC arrived Saturday along with some other Whalers and Devils from two of my Sportlots orders. It was one of the last significant base cards I needed to cross off the Whaler list.

Ray Ferraro's Topps RC was the other one. I now have every Hartford Whalers base card (Topps and OPC) from 1982-83 to 1990-91. 

I'm seven cards away from completing 1990-91 Whalers in all mainstream sets (need one Score Canadian and six more Upper Deck French/Canadian.) Unfortunately I only have room for one Whalers card from 1979-80 to 1991-92, and my 1992-93 to 1994-95 Whalers binder is completely full. 

I do have room for 17 Whalers cards from 1995-96 to 1997-98, including Carolina cards where the player is still pictured in green and blue. My original plan was to try to accumulate every Whalers base card from 1979-80 to 1997-98; if I had the time and money to see that through I'd need another binder. 

Here's my Whalers wantlist on an Excel spreadsheet if anyone reading this is interested. (note: this includes cards I have in my collection as part of completed sets only.)

As for my favorite hockey team that still exists, I haven't made a detailed Devils wantlst but I'm pretty close to completing the first nine New Jersey seasons. 1982-83 through 1987-88 are complete, and I need just two O-Pee-Chee cards to complete 1988-89. 1990-91 is a bit tougher, I need 14 cards to finish the year - mostly Score Rookie/Traded and Upper Deck Canadian. 

These cards and others were purchased from Sportlots seller barriere, who issued me a partial refund. Not because anything was out of stock, which was my initial thought. He simply gave me 50% cash back perhaps he felt bad taking two dimes for overproduced Kevin Todd commons lol. That $2.67 refund covered the cost of the Kevin Dineen at the top of this post - which was $2.65 from davekas4. Sportlots is so addicting!!

Out of all my various card collecting project the one that I have the most available space for new additions is/are New Jersey Devils cards. My inserts/parallels/relics boxes for Red Sox, Packers, and Whalers are full -- but I have room for 12-15 more Devils hits.

I have room for 20 Packers base cards - mostly in the 2010s-2020s binders. 
I have room for 20 Whalers cards across all three binders.

Devils 1 (1982-83 to 1992-93) has room for 10 cards.
Devils 4 (2004-05 to 2013-14) has room for 6 cards.
Devils 5 (2014-15 to present) has room for 35 cards. Maybe more if I insert additional 9-pocket pages. 

You'd think that it would be easy for me to acquire cards of Jersey's team since I live in Jersey. But my LCS doesn't sell singles, Target rarely has hockey packs/boxes, and the card shows in town always seem to be on a weekend when Mrs. Collector's health is at her lowest. Probably for the best since I'm guessing those shows are 70% Pokemon and overpriced Yankees stuff anyway.

Very few card bloggers collect hockey and I don't have any connection to a Canadian trader who can get their hands on low-mid end Devils inserts and relics like I can with Red Sox cards. So it's all online ordering for me, which is a total drag. I used to fill my boxes with 30-cent ePack crap from COMC -- but they've completely jacked up the shipping charges, discarding their flat $5.99 rate (which was $4.99 not that long ago) in favor of a per-card charge. I'm probably never ordering from them again. 😢

Next week, I'll update my NFL inventory. I should have the rest of my Packers purchases in hand by then.

Thanks for reading!

 

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