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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