Ever since I started this blog I’ve been intending to write about how I keep my recent cards organized by every team’s current 40-man roster, as well as talk about how organizing my cards this way effects how I collect each year’s cards. If I could invite you into the room that is Shlabotnik World HQ it would be easy to show you, but putting it into words and pictures was a daunting task and I kept kicking that can down the road.
It took a blogiversary to force my hand. Today is the 12th anniversary of this blog – Yay, me – I wanted to do something special and I couldn’t think of any interesting ways of commemorating a twelfth anniversary. Instead I caved in and started working on this one in earnest.
I’ll warn you up front, this is a pretty long post. It has lots of images, if that helps.
And so…
On a shelf in my man cave are six binders. Each binder represents a division in Major League baseball and within each binder I keep recent cards organized to reflect the current 40 man rosters of each team in that division. For example, the AL West Binder has a Texas Rangers section which include cards of Max Scherzer and Jordan Montgomery, both of whom had been acquired at the trade deadline. The cards I have for both pitchers show them with other teams, but that’s not the point.
A huge reason for why I haven’t abandoned new cards and just focused on vintage is because I enjoy the visual connection I get with the players.
I see Gabriel Montero playing in the World Series and I think of his 2023 Heritage card where he’s photoshopped into a D-Backs uniform (the photo was taken while he was with the Blue Jays).
I see Evan Carter in left field for the Rangers and I think “Hey, it’s one of the guys from 2023 Donruss!” (and I’ll touch more on this later).
As an extension of that, keeping the cards organized by up-to-date rosters helps me keep track of who’s on which team. If I’m about to watch the Padres I can flip through their binder pages and I’m reminded that Rich Hill was picked up from the Pirates at the trade deadline.
The roots of this go back to sometime around 1976 when I was a couple of years into collecting cards and had started to keep my collection in a dresser drawer. I had all of my cards organized into 25 stacks of cards; 24 for each team at the time and another stack for checklists, league leaders, World Series cards and so on. A few years ago I tried to simulate what the drawer might have looked like in 1977 had I thought of taking a picture of it:
Because I liked to sort my cards in various ways (and what kid doesn’t?), I started to organize them based on who was on each team at that particular point in the season, regardless of what team the card showed him with. This type of concept certainly isn’t something I’d pioneered…
…although I would never write on my cards! Well… OK, some of my doubles from the first few years got lovingly defaced, but that was more about my wanting to grow up to be the guy who airbrushed photos for Topps (even though I didn’t fully understand how Topps was updating those photos).
Every day I’d take the newspaper into my room, look at the transactions in the sports section and if I saw one day that the Orioles traded Dyar Miller to the Angels for Dick Drago I’d move the Miller and Drago cards to their new teams.
After 9-pocket pages became available to me, my dresser drawer became a place for clothes again, and my card stacks moved into binders. That’s pretty much the way they’ve stayed ever since, with some reorganization, periods of slight neglect and of course replacement of the actual binders.
So that’s the history. Here’s an overview of the way I have it now…
As I mentioned, there are six binders each divided into five sections for the teams in the represented division. Each player on a roster has a 3-pocket row devoted to his cards, so three players per page. Normally it’s the three most recent cards of that player I have, but if I have fewer than 3 cards of a rookie or fringe player, I’ll fill in the gaps with some “filler” cards (team-related when possible, but I have a bunch of non-sport cards also factored in).
I figure that the easiest way to explain how each team is organized is to virtually “flip” through the pages of a particular team… For several reasons I picked the Phillies (and please be aware that these scans were done in the middle of October, several of the players shown have filed for free agency at this point).
Phillies Page #1
The top row of a team’s first page used to have a team card followed by one or two cards of the manager. Since both proper team cards and manager cards have gone the way of all things, they’ve been replaced by logo stickers, mascots and the like. The 2nd and 3rd row on the first page tend to show either the best pitchers on the team, or maybe the pitchers I like best, depending on my mood at the time. None of this is written in stone.
Phillies Page #2
My next three rows go to Taijuan Walker, Craig Kimbrel and Matt Strahm. Walker ranks pretty high as a former Met. Kimbrel is Kimbrel. Strahm gained some notoriety in my house from being a collector and the host of the syndicated TV show “The Card Life”
Phillies Page #3
The top row features Ranger Suarez and the first example of a “filler card” – I have just two cards of Suarez. Seranthony Dominguez nicely illustrates the plight of the middle reliever; until his appearance in this year’s Topps Update, one couldn’t find his cards in the packs of anything since 2019. Michael Lorenzen was picked up around the trade deadline so he naturally isn’t shown on the Phillies on any cards I have yet.
Phillies Page #4
Here we have the first example of non-sports filler cards. The cards in Dylan Covey’s row are from the 1993 “The Beatles Collection” set and a promo card for the 1995 Cornerstone Monty Python’s Flying Circus set. The Phillie Phanatic card in the lower right is from a 2006 Upper Deck “Collect The Mascots And Win” contest insert.
…and now we move on to the position players…
Phillies Page #5
When a new Trea Turner card is added to this binder, the 2022 Donruss card will most likely get jettisoned from my collection. Because there is a ton of clutter in my collection, I’m trying to be good about asking “Do I really need this card?” once it’s Current Rosters obligations are fulfilled.
Phillies Page #6
Jake Cave doesn’t get a lot of current cards, but he does also spend a lot of time in Triple-A.
Phillies Page #7
You might have noticed that many of these players are represented by just one 2023 card. This is part of my attempting to limit the bloat in my collection, I decided at the beginning of this year that most players will be represented by just one 2023 card, unless they fall into one of my ongoing collections. Once I get a 2023 Heritage card of Rhys Hoskins, for example, this 2023 Topps card is likely leaving my collection (my 2023 priority is Heritage, and cards from other 2023 sets are mainly obtained for these binders).
Phillies Page #8
Not much to say about these guys, other than my appreciating when a throwback jersey and a Heritage or Archives design goes together nicely.
Phillies Page #9
And here we are at the back end of the current team set, filled out with a 2011 Topps team card, a Fleer team logo sticker and a 1993 Cardz Flintstones card of Barney Rubble.
The one card of Darick Hall is from the 2019 Grandstand Eastern League All-Stars set. I used to buy a number of minor league sets each year, but that’s fallen by the wayside recently.
For players where I don’t have cards, I’ve been writing the players name and position on blank-backed advertising cards I’ve accumulated over the years, reusing the cards by crossing out one name and writing a new one below it. I didn’t scan those pages because nobody needs to see proof that my handwriting is horrendous.
These are the kinds of blank-backed cards I make use of, I accumulated a lot of them and get a ton of mileage out of each one:
One other page I didn’t bother scanning is one of Phillies “prospects”… which is a nice way of describing Bowman, Donruss, Topps Pro Debut, Elite Extra Edition and other cards of players who are in a particular team’s farm system and, in theory, on their way up. When I see a transaction which states that a team has “selected the contract of” a player, I will look to see if I already have a card in that team’s prospect page(s). Otherwise, I grab a placeholder card, add the appropriate handwritten player name and move forward with that.
I mentioned earlier that a couple of these Phillies are now free agents, and you might be wondering what happens to their cards when they get dropped from a 40-man roster. Near the desk in my man cave I keep the “Free Agent Monster Box”, which is divided alphabetically by last name, but within each letter the cards are kind of chronological. When Aaron Nola filed for free agency, his card went to the front of the N’s. As time goes by and rosters churn, guys who don’t make their way out of the Free Agent Box will eventually migrate towards the back of each letter section, and twice a year I go through and remove these players who haven’t had a job in a couple of years. Of course, if I find out a player has retired or maybe got a job coaching a college team, his cards will also get plucked from the Free Agent Monster Box.
Maintaining binders this way has resulted in my chasing after cards of relievers, bench players and other fringe-y guys who don’t appear on a lot of cardboard these days. If I’m diving into monster boxes full of commons, in addition to looking for cards which are “needs” I’ll also keep an eye out for cards of players I don’t already have.
Because of this type of card chase I went fairly big into 2023 Donruss base cards, but only the ones which picture prospects (as opposed to the retired players who take up roughly half of the checklist). Many of them got a “who dis?” when the checklist was released, but there are a bunch of players who were on 2023 Donruss cards and played in the Majors this season, including Evan Carter who was a starter during the World Series.
Here are a few other players from 23D who made it on to a 40-man roster during the season…
At the beginning of the year I was questioning the wisdom of creating an unlicensed set populated with many non-40-man players; Now I’m hoping that it’ll be back in 2024.
To wrap things up I thought it would be fun to go through my binders and find some moderately interesting combinations of cards for particular players, and also to find some players who are represented by some particularly old cards.
Here’s another example of a player who was represented for a little while by a minor league card. The filler card is from four guys who I hear just released a new single.
Braves pitcher Tyler Matzek was out of affiliated baseball for a few years and made his way back to the Majors with Atlanta in 2020, winning a World Championship with the team in 2021. Since 2015 he’s had just a handful of cards, including a 2022 Ginter insert and a 2021 Topps Now card.
I get a little too excited when a player represented by a lone 13-year-old Bowman Prospects card gets updated in my binders with a new Major League card.
Hoby Milner has been a source of fascination for me for a while (and I’ve written about him before)… He’s appeared in 633 Major League games, including 67 games last year and 73 games this year… yet the only Major League cardboard he has is the below 2019 Donruss and it’s many parallels. Meanwhile, his father Brian Milner played in two games in 1978 and appeared on two Topps “Blue Jays Prospects” cards in the early 1980s
And just so you don’t think it’s always relievers who get neglected, there’s Rob Refsnyder who has an 8-year career but my cardboard is lagging behind. He’s been in 2022 and 2023 Update (which I clearly need to track down) but before that he hadn’t been on Major League cardboard since 2017.
…and that pretty much sums it up in (probably) way too much detail. If you got this far, thank you for reading this post.
I want to give a very big THANK YOU to everybody who’s been reading my ramblings since 2011. It’s been fun and continues to be fun, but it wouldn’t be if I were just shouting into the void.
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