2018 Year in Review and State of the Blog or Being Left Behind

Greetings my fellow collector's.  It's been awhile since I sat down and just wrote a decent blog post. I have lots of excuses, but the main one is and continues to be I just didn't or don't feel like it.  This blog will be celebrating it's 10th Anniversary this year. I'm not bragging, but I'm surprised as anyone I kept with it this long even if I barely post anymore.  You can look back through my posting history on the side bar and see just how less I'm posting now.  The first 4 years I was pretty gung-ho about it.  It was new.  I was in a good place and really enjoy the hobby.  Over the last couple years though it's been tough getting excited about cardboard.  2018 marked the lowest I've posted on here since I started up the blog.  2009 doesn't count as I started the blog in October.  And most of the posts I put out last year were in conjunction with my 2 annual contests.  But that doesn't mean I've stopped collecting cards, or reading other blogs, or that I plan to shutter Collector's Crack.  It also doesn't mean I haven't been posting elsewhere.  I contribute to A Pack to be Named Later all the time and post pretty regularly on the Yount Collector, my Robin Yount PC blog.

So if you have a few minutes, sit back and listen to me rant and rave I want to just get this all out of my system and talk about what's happened this year and about the hobby that's starting to leave me behind.

I didn't bother to look back but I'm pretty sure I haven't done a retrospective post in a couple years or a look ahead for that matter.  The last couple year's have been a big whirlwind.  We bought a new house, my job has gotten a little more challenging, but mostly in a good way, I got to visit Hawaii for the first time (and loved it even if I got to only small parts of the whole), and I was also finally able to clear off my drawing table and work on some art.  If you're curious of the stuff I do, I do occasionally post on my art blog, 13 Tenets of Cynicabuddhism.

This post really is about me, the hobby I love, and changes.  Both changes in the hobby and changes in me, or more accurately my life.  When I started the blog almost 10 years ago, I was unmarried, mortgage free, and well 10 year's younger.  Oh how the times of changed.  Now I'm married with a child, got a nice house that bank owns most of, and I'm 10 year's older and the hobby has drastically changed.  We are now in entering our 10th season of exclusivity in the baseball card market and a time where every major sport has only one licensed card manufacturer.  The shift from these card makers has gone from sets with large base sets to products that are almost entirely hit driven.  The cost per box has skyrocketed and really the way the hobby works has just passed me by.  I'm stopped buying boxes to break.  The main reason is financial, I just can't afford to waste the money, but secondarily I've just changed the way I collect.

When I started blogging in 2009 I considered myself a 3 pronged collector.  I was a set builder, a player collector, and a team collector.  I really enjoyed putting together a nice big base set, or even a small one, from ripping packs and then finishing that set off with a few trades or purchases.  To me the hand collation of a set was very therapeutic and relaxing.  I've reduced my set building to just a Topps Baseball flagship set and have completely stopped working on any football sets.  I'm still contemplating giving up the set building all together or just purchasing the set. 

I use to love ripping wax.  It's like playing the lottery.  Most of my hits I would trade away or sell to buy the cards I wanted, but with eBay continuing to change for the worse, in my opinion, and the fact that just about nothing I get in a pack or box fits into my collection, ripping wax and busting boxes just doesn't make sense, and getting rid of the cards is getting harder and more expensive..

I've found over that last couple year's I've really started to focus on my team and player collections.  I'm proud that I finally got most of my collection entered into the Trading Card Database.  I still have some organization of by Brewer's team sets that needs to be done, but that's more on me getting the supplies I need to do it.

I've also found that I've started to really narrow what I buy in regards to my primary Player Collections.  More importantly just one, my Robin Yount collection.  As a matter of fact I would say my collecting focus is around 70% Yount, 10% other player collections, 15% Brewers team sets, and just 5% set collecting.

While it may seem I'm complaining about the way the hobby is changing, and I kind of am, I've been collecting long enough to have seen the hobby change, and change again, and change yet again.  Sometimes for the better, sometimes not.  I remember the junk was era, the end of the junk wax era, the almost collapse of the industry, the rebirth of the industry in the early to mid 2000's, the consolidation of the industry in the late 2000's, the start of exclusivity, and the birth of super high end products.  None of these changes has once made want to stop collecting cardboard, but they all had some influence on how I collected and still do.

Wow you're still here?

Let me conclude I'm not going anywhere anytime soon.  I may not post much, but I'm still around,  I enjoy reading other blogs, and using my blog to keep track of my set needs.  I still enjoy holding my World Series and Super Bowl contests and we get a nice manageable turnout for those.

And if you made it this far and read the whole thing, thank you, and thanks to the great blogging community, it's been a great almost 10 years.

Card Anatomy 2018

Well the 2018 card season started a couple weeks ago.  I decided a while back I would not be putting a set together from pack buying, but I did break down and buy a couple packs when Series 1 came out.   And my overall feeling for the card design is: I don't hate it.  How about that for an endorsement?  Let's take a really close look at the base card design and break it all down.

The front of the card is the glamorous side of the card, the party, the looker,  from now on I dub the front of the card the Mullet.  I just so happen to have a very nice scan of Mr. McCutchen's last Topps flagship card as a Pirate to look at.  Overall the basic design isn't bad.  I wouldn't go so far as to call it great or groundbreaking, but it's not bad.

This is the third year in a row that Topps has gone borderless.  I kind of miss the borders, but the 2015 set was a tough act to follow, arguably my favorite set in the last decade.  I've only casually looked through the set, but of the cards I've seen Topps has done a nice job with photo selection and the card design really reflects that Topps is letting the photos shine.

While the lower banner takes up a good section of the bottom of the card for the most part it's unobtrusive and presents the basic elements pretty well.  The player name is large enough to be easily read, team name present, team logo a tad large, but not imperious.  Waterslide?  Present, but I don't hate it.  The only gripe I have is the digital disintegration at the end of the name and team banners seems pointless and unnecessary.

Alright we've had our fun time to get to the business side of the card.
There's a lot going on back here.  The card number is large and readable, although I think it could have been bigger. It's also harder to make out with some of the colored backgrounds like the yellow here.  Once again Topps is putting the series on the back of the card.  Not a terrible idea, but honestly unless they are going to start putting our 3 or 4 different series again it's kind of pointless.  I will say having what series the inserts came out of is much more helpful.

We also are still only getting the last five years of stats on the back of the card I guess that's to make room for the much more important social media handles the player uses.  This is the second year for that addition and it seems timely and odd.  In 10 to 15 years will anyone care what McCutchen's Twitter handle was?  Would it hold up if Topps had put player's Myspace account on cards back in 2006? 

Topps also has just enough space for a short blurb or factoid.  I think McCutchen's trade took most people by surprise so can't fault Topps for the mistimed platitudes.

So to sum up, not terrible.  It seems Topps has this cyclical pattern of coming out with something pretty awesome, like the 2015 design, and then they tone it down and play it safe for a few years.  While the waterslide design seems a little funky it does show that Topps put some effort into the design.  I do like the full bleed photos on the front, but maybe it's time to mix it up with a border, or an inset photo or a back photo. 

So how do you guys like the set this year?