goin' for it

I'm a set builder. A terrible one but a builder none the less. As it stands I have every Topps flagship issue from 1982 to 2011. Want to know how many of those I completed myself? Three. A paltry three sets I completed myself. Those being the years 1987 (due to childhood significance), 2010 and 2011 (out of convenience for being recent and buying a ton). Oh sure I've put together a few others, 2010 Chrome and Opening Day, 2011 Allen & Ginter and 2009 Topps T206 (which is my greatest victory yet, some of those short prints were tough finds) but those were merely because again, I overbought and decided to finish it up. Others I've failed at were 1954 Topps and 2011 Heritage. the 1954 just became too costly and I had to sell off most of the bigger cards (Aaron, Banks, Kaline) to get by when it got rough in the summer. The Heritage just became way too annoying with 75 short prints at the end. Like I mentioned way back while it was fresh, I really didn't want to pay $3 a card for a no name player just because he was a short print. That set got sold too, in its incomplete state. Let someone else worry about it. I won't be doing Heritage ever again.

Today though, my local shop had asked me to open up and keep watch until he got there (opened at noon, he was there by 1:30). I decided to rummage through and sort out his two vintage boxes. Being around 6000 total or so, I had my work cut out for me. Thankfully most of it was labeled and kinda sorted. Meaning I'd find chunks of 1977s then some 75s and so on. While going through all these I had a moment of clarity and thought about set collecting and how fun it is. It was then that I decided I was going to try for a new set to collect. Which one you ask? See below:

Thats right. Good old 1973 Topps. What a set. These are the top nine cards I got today along with a few other stars (Carew, Palmer, Carlton, Fingers, Garvey) and around just under 200 commons. I already had the Hank Aaron and in the above picture I got what is my first Clemente card in his playing days, his final card, sadly. Why the home run and strike out leaders? Because they "book" for $40 and $25 respectively. Crazy right? Well as far as the commons go, they are all in various conditions and I won't be too critical in that regard when collecting this set due to the age. 1973 has no significance for me as a year but as a set it has a bunch of it. Its the final year for individual series, it has great action photography even still and it has a ton of Hall of Famer and all time greats. A solid year for Topps. I did toy with the idea of collecting this set a while back but never acted on it. Now is the time while I've become a little jaded with recent releases. Plus I think it'll be a great venture into collecting a set thats awesome and not difficult to find but still does represent a small challenge to complete. If anyone has some extras, let me know and we'll work something out. I'm watching a few lots on eBay that end tonight so I hope to score some more of the commons that way.

I do plan on getting around to my take on the Blog Bat Around, so keep an eye out for that soon. Work isn't as bananas this week so I should have some time to post a little more regularly.