Wednesday, December 1, 2010

What is my Braves Collection?

In one of my (vain) attempts to bring some focus to my card collection, I decided I wanted to put together an Atlanta Braves binder. At first, I was just going to find and keep in one place as many "cool" braves cards as I could get my hands on. That would be easy, but it didn't really bring any focus to my collection.

I thought about creating a "team set" binder that would include every Atlanta Braves card put out in a base or traded set by Topps. Well, I don't figure I'll ever really have the money to get all those Aaron, Spahn and Matthews cards. I thought then about limiting my Braves collection to team sets from those years where the Braves made the post-season, but that seems too limiting. There are a lot of players that I loved for the Braves who never played in the post-season.

Finally, I arrived at what I decided would be my official "Braves Collection". I was going to create a bunder with a card of every single player who ever wore the "Atlanta" Braves uniform. This seemed like the perfect balance for me. By leaving out the "Milwaukee" only Braves of the Topps years, I save money. By only collecting a single card of each player, like Aaron and Matthews, I also save money. Still though, I get the cards for those players I love and loved on those Braves teams that came up short of the post-season.

Of course, there are down sides to this project. I'm starting to discover that not every player who played for the Braves had a Braves baseball card. (Jim Bouton, where are you?) Worse yet, I fear that there are any number of players who may not have had a baseball card at all. Yikes. I definitely want a Braves card of each player if it exists, but I can settle for putting a different team's card in the bunder. I have no idea what I'll do for any player that doesn't have a card. Abandon the project?

So far, I've put several hundred cards in the binder and I have a stack I need to go through. I'll have my want list put up sometime in the far flung future. Anyway, to celebrate my Braves collection, I'll post 30 cards this month, one for each day remaining.

(I'm really curious how my fellow Braves fans are collecting the Braves. I do have a small auto and relic collection where I'll take anyone wearing the Braves uniform, but even these I've been known to trade for the three guys this blog is named after.)


2 comments:

flywheels said...

If the player is depicted in a Braves uniform I collect it. I too prefer Atlanta over Milwaukee. I place everything in binder(s) by year. I wanted to try to keep the base card and it's parallels together, but ultimately I've ended up trying to keep the cards from the same set together. I'm tempted to just throw everything in pages by year and not worry about it, but I guess I'm too anal!

Derek Hill said...

Good post, I think thats a touch call too. I'm just starting and I know I want to collect Chipper & Brain, (& maybe prado) but how to deal with all the other players is tough