Picking a Project

What I Learned Today:

Never cook bacon with your shirt off

I love the collections I have.

My Mets team set collection, Mike Piazza collection and David Wright collection, every card I add to them is just as exciting as the last and the numerical milestones that are achieved add a little extra fun every now and then. Right now I'm closing in on 200 completed team sets and I'm only a few cards short of 750 for my Piazza collection. 

And while those three collections offer me a limitless amount of new cards to acquire, that also becomes one of their downfalls. There are a limitless amount of cards to acquire for those collections! Mets team sets, Mike Piazza, David Wright- none of those collections will ever be "complete". Sure, I can say "I'm done collecting Piazza after I get 1,000 cards" or "I'm only collecting David Wright base and common inserts and parallels". Maybe even give myself a cut-off date or a time period to focus the team sets on. But that just wouldn't feel right to me. That would seem to make each collection more incomplete than if they were to actually be incomplete.

The Mets history began in 1962, which is better from a cardboard perspective than if I were a Reds collector or a Cubs fan. But the late 90's and early 2000's alone make it impossible to put together every team set ever made and as long as there are baseball cards being made, there a new sets to build. Piazza and Wright are both extremely popular players so the number of sets they're in, plus the number of 1/1's and cards #'d/50 or less makes achieving all of their cards impossible as well. 

So I have to make "end points" within each collection to help give myself a small goal to achieve and not get overwhelmed with the enormity of it all. That's one reason the team sets are so much fun for me to build. I recently knocked off about 20 sets last month, but those were all one or two cards each. I wanted something that had more of a "project" feel to it. Obviously a vintage set would be perfect, but I don't have the funds right now to dedicate to one. An Upper Deck Flagship would be cheap to put together, but I wanted something smaller and with more flare to it. So I looked through my Mets "Parallels" binder and found that I kept seeing 2011 Topps Chrome "Orange Refractors". Five of them to be exact, which is exactly half of the Mets team set. 

An unnumbered parallel of a ten card team set in which I already have five cards of? Sure, I'll take that project up! 

The Orange Refracs look great on the Mets cards, but I can only imagine hideous they came out for the Brewers, White Sox and Marlins. Not that any design or particular colored boarder could make a Marlins card look good. 

I currently have Davis, Beltran, Thole, Reyes and Nickeas. I've already won a Wright, Bay and Beato on ebay leaving only the Santana and Pagan left to finish this off! 

All that's left for today is to end this post in an incredibly anti-climatic manor.

(...Joe)