Aliens, Junk Wax Variations and White Whales

If you disagree and are rolling your eyes, don’t worry – I’ll get to the baseball card bit here soon, and it will all tie in together shortly, I promise 🙂  

Here are some interesting points: 

– The earth is huge, right?  The sun is huge…er.  So massive that if earth were melted down, 1,300,000 earths could fit in our sun. 

– The sun is crazy tiny compared to the biggest of stars (check out this quick video for comparisons  )  

– We have an estimated 400,000,000,000 (400 BILLION) stars in our galaxy

– We have an estimated 100,000,000,000 (100 BILLION) galaxies in our solar system

Jaw dropping, right?!  If they taught this stuff in school, I must have been asleep, because this stuff is now INSANELY fascinating to me.  

I’m not sure if many folks don’t believe there aren’t aliens out there anymore, but it seems to me that it would be highly unlikely no other intelligent life exists anywhere else.  That would be kind of like me finding a grain of sand that is green on a beach and proclaiming that it is preposterous to believe there is not a single other green grain of sand on any other beach!  

Being the baseball card nerd that I am, I began thinking about cards.  The junk wax era AND those gorgeous 90’s inserts in particular.

You may recall the one million sports card acquisition I made at the end of last year – they were all shoe horned into one 850 square foot house.

Wall to wall, they were stacked ….

Even in the bedroom …

Heck, even the kitchen!  (Note the nook where the fridge should go.)

It was absolutely … dare I say … amazeballs.  (No, I was not able to secure the hamburger buns in the picture above as a part of the deal!)

Needless to say, one million cards is huge.  It is insane.  It is massive.  Did I mention that even the car port was used as card storage?

Now, could you imagine every single one of those cards being the exact same?

Back in the junk wax era, that is what they did.  Some sources say that 1991 donruss printed 3 million and 1991 topps printed 4 million … of each and every card!

Can you imagine four small houses being stuffed to the gills with the exact same card?  Better yet, let’s extrapolate that out to all 792 cards in the set … can you imagine about 3,168 houses filled with 1991 Topps?

Sit back and think about that for a while.

When I was a kid, I bought a lot of baseball cards.  A lot.  We are talking maybe 20 boxes of everything.  That is a ton for a kid.  After all of the ripping was done, you are talking about close to two monster boxes full of cards.  That’s it!  Not one time did I hit anything crazy.

Not a single Donruss Elite card.

Not a solitary vintage Topps card they randomly inserted into packs of their 1991 product.

But when you think about it, how feasible would it have been?  Sure, it would have been cool to get *any* card out of the norm (such as an Elite autograph) but for me, I would have been looking for a Canseco Elite.  #’ed out of 10,000.  By today’s standards, that number would be utterly ridiculous.  Could you imagine a card being #’d to 10,000?  Heck, they probably make some regular cards with that type of a print run nowadays!

But think about it for a second – how difficult would it be to find a card #’ed to 10,000 in a product that had over two BILLION cards printed?  Sure, there were factory sets that probably accounted for a good chunk of it, but lets say it was *just* 1.5 billion.

If memory serves me properly, there are 15 cards per pack, so that means perhaps 100 million packs.  Divide that by 10,000 and you have 10,000 packs.  The odds of hitting the Canseco Elite were one in 10 thousand packs.  (Yes, I know they had jumbo packs and other types most likely, but HOLY COW!)

10,000 packs is about 278 boxes of donruss.  Back then, boxes were $15 each, so if I had about $4,500 burning a hole in my 11 year old pocket, I too, could have near-assurance of having the Canseco of my dreams….and enough ’91 donruss to keep my house warm for 427 winters.

Nowadays, you can pick up one of these dudes for $20-30 off of ebay.  Everyone complains about how the internet made the house of (baseball) cards crash, since everyone now knew that their “rare” cards weren’t exactly so rare.

I’ve mentioned this before, but the growing up, the big time collectors may have had 5 autographs of the guy they collected.  Nowadays, it is not unheard of for a guy to have 100 autographs of their favorite player.  Think that could have ever have happened without the internet?  Not a chance.

The most rabid of collectors would have been stuck on house #4 of the 1991 Topps neighborhood trying to find that one card they were hoping to get, after 12 years of search through the previous 3.

True, card shops are on life support, and card shows seem to be going the way of the buffalo too, but isn’t that how life is right now anyway?  We pay our bills online, deposit checks via smart phone…heck, black friday and the “Christmas rush” *can be* obsolete at any moment, because it can all be done online!

After having over 4 to 5 million cards go through my fingers in the past 6 years, I had always set aside the Canseco cards.  My philosophy was this:  I knew I was going to be buying up inventories and collections, so I would get all of the Canseco cards I ever wanted and needed.

I was wrong.  I dug up a picture of my old collection from childhood up until a few years ago, and here is what it looked like:

I knew that “one day”, I would go through them, organize and put in a checklist, etc.  As it grew, I ended up simply not knowing that I did and what I didn’t have, so it got frustrating.  With no time or desire to go through and make a checklist, I decided to sell it all.

Sure, a lot were different, but there were also a lot of duplicates scattered throughout the collection as well.  Close to 3,000 cards, but quite possibly over half were doubles, and *maybe* one of them could fetch over $10.

I took the funds from the collection and found a guy who was selling a lot of his Canseco.  I ended up buying a ton of early refractor cards, donruss press proofs, collector’s choice gold signature cards and jersey cards, etc.  These types of cards simply were cards that I never could find.  Logically speaking, it makes sense, too.

Remember the math exercise we braved through a few short paragraphs ago?  I can speak from personal experience – figuratively speaking, I was on house #28  in the 1991 Topps neighborhood and had yet to find one *really* special card.  Sure, I’d find a 1994 bowman’s best Canseco … but the refractor? fuhgettaboutit.  A 1995 Collector’s Choice silver signature?  *Maybe*.  But a gold signature?  Not in a million years!

I decided to continue on, slowly but surely, to intentionally pursue my collection.  To maybe, hopefully one day become a featured collector in Beckett or something.

After finding a few big-time Canseco collectors selling their collection, I ended up buying a ton from them.  I found myself spending the time (and I mean hours upon hours) pouring over my checklist and theirs to see what I did not yet have.

The end result (up to this point) is over 2,700 different cards – something that would not have ever come close to happening if I just kept rowing through collections and inventories I was buying.

If you were to come into my office today, this is what you would see…

But upon closer inspection, you would see that every single card has a holder, and I am doing something that I had not done previously:  I am organizing them.  (Yes, I am *that* sick to put a 1990 Topps send-in advertisement w/Canseco on the front in a holder…and salivate over any variations it may have!)

As my checklist now has more x’s next to each line than not, I have found myself going into full obsessed mode.

You know what I’m talking about.  If you are a hardcore PC collector, you probably do the same thing.  Here are some possibilities:

– Wake up in a cold sweat, remembering the card that got away because you got out-sniped.
– Search for various mis-spellings of your PC guy’s name
– Hit up ANYONE AND EVERYONE you can find that may have cards you need
– Secretly open the ebay app on your phone and discretely check what new listings … 800 times a day.  “Me?  Oh, I’m just checking my email….”

That is where I have found myself.  For the better part of a month, I don’t know if a day has gone by where there hasn’t been something in the mail for me or where I haven’t purchased something.  It is a full.blown.sickness.

Here are a few things I just got in today:

I threw in a few from yesterday as well since they were still on my desk:

The most expensive of the group is the 1987 Topps card – it is actually a buyback autograph #’ed to 99.   It holds special meaning to me, in that the 1987 Topps Canseco is the first card I remember having.  Being autographed from Topps and hand numbered is extra special for me.  You also see a holo gold Donruss Greats #/100, a dual auto of Canseco/Eckersley and a buyback 1991 Leaf auto #/33.

This brings me back to my point – the odds are slim to none that I would have ever been able to have come across any of these cards in any collection or inventory I purchase in the future.  Heck,

The autographs are nice and all, but don’t throw out your “junk” commons just yet.  The other day, I did the unthinkable.  I bought a lot of 1988 Topps Canseco.  Yes, you heard me right.  The card that they probably made one to four million of:  I bought 12 of them!

Here is what one looks like, if you don’t recall off-hand.  A young Jose in his early 20’s about to become the charter member of the 40-40 club.

Did you know that this card has a variation?  I didn’t either, but take a look ….