Some Old School Set Building Fun

My wife it getting on me for the stacks of boxes of cards in the basement.  She spends very little time in the basement but when she comes down it frustrates her clutter-less sensibilities.  Over the last few weeks I have been reengaged with the large collection I bought over a year ago trying to figure out what I have, what I want to keep and how to move the stuff I don't want.

In the last couple weeks, I gave away a couple of "junk wax" sets as part of a contest then I posted a lot of 85 sets for sale on a couple local Facebook pages.  Within a couple hours I had a guy who was interested in all of them, and while I didn't get the per set asking price, the allure of only having to meet one person and of not being left with double digit sets of 1991 Donruss or 1990 Fleer made me decide to negotiate and make the deal.  Last weekend I met with the guy in the freezing weather and offloaded all 85 sets for about 25% of the price I paid for the entire collection.  That coupled with selling 4 football sets to another guy (2 from the collection, 2 I had prior) made it a nice week to clear some space and get some cash in my pocket.

Last night, the family went to bed early after a marathon viewing of 4 Young Sheldon episodes (it is hard to find a TV show that entertains 2 adults, a 14 year-old boy, an 11 year-old boy and a 6 year-old girl).  I decided to dive into the collection and watch some hoops.

I was going through a 5000 count box I hadn't yet looked at and found about half a row of 1988 Topps Baseball Stickers.  I had previously run across an original box from Topps of the same set that had a bunch of opened sticker packs in it.  I decided to spend my evening seeing how close I could get to a complete set.

It wasn't the easiest organization project as most of the "cards" have 2 stickers on them and they are not consecutively numbered.  My tired eyes struggled a bit to read some of the numbers and there are no names on the stickers.  I decided to copy a checklist from Beckett.com and start crossing off those I found.  It took a while but I was able to put together a complete set and had tons of fun doing it.

Here is a picture of the set in a stack with one of the foil All-Star cards on top:

These stickers also have players on the back, there are 67 different players featured on the backs.  I couldn't find a rhyme or reason that matched up a particular sticker with a back so I just put together a completely separate set of backs.

I think I am going to keep the sticker box and perhaps have it house my completed set, it is in pretty good shape and is still solid have 30+ years.

However that box now holds all of my extras, need to figure out what to do with all of them.

I had a blast spending some time last night in front of the TV recognizing old faces and building a set.  The only thing that may have been more fun would have been being able to rip all the packs myself.  However I was left with no trash and I am very happy to have the entire set.