where is my line?

being a player collector can be as difficult as you want it to be. conversely, it can be very simple. i am definitely in the middle; probably skewed more towards difficult, at least when it comes to steve garvey cards.

including "named" cards in a player collection is the very basic building block.

these are easy - it's their card!

i would say the next tier are cards which feature the player as a prominent subject in the photo, but they are not named. an example of this would be a postseason summary card or a card

like so.

from there, i would go to team cards

i discussed their place in player collecting in this post.

and then there are the cards wherein a player appears on another player's card as a "lurker" or "cameo", if you prefer.

it's not their card, but they are happy to be there.

i would say that this is pretty much where my line is drawn. i have a pretty sketchy lurker card

in my garvey collection, i admit, so maybe some of these other types of cards should be added as well.

i'm talking about "name" cameos - as in checklists 

or card back text. collecting cutch covered this topic in this post and i've come across some decent candidates for my garvey collection, like the 1986 fleer star sticker box card checklist above, and this 2005 topps rookie cup davey lopes blue parallel card back

other strong examples are the cards i wrote about in this post and this post, too. 

so far, i haven't added these cards to my garvey collection, although i do have a signed 1978 checklist in the pc and my partial signed set binder.

i have a lot of non-card items in my garvey collection which is a relatively new (last 10 years or so) phenomenon. this includes ticket stubs that bear garvey's photo. greg at plaschke, thy sweater is argyle is collecting ticket stubs for games in which mike trout did cool stuff which is a heck of a endeavor, but i don't plan to do that for garvey's 272 dingers or his 1,207 consecutive games. what an undertaking that would be!

still, if you merge a garvey ticket stub with a card, i don't care whose card it is - i am adding it to the pc! so that's why i have an alfonso soriano card

an aaron rowand card

and a ryan braun card

in my steve garvey collection. those three cards are from 2009 topps a ticket to stardom, and they are great. the card set just happened to coincide with the fantastic tickets the dodgers issued in 2008 for their 50th year in los angeles. 

i don't see any garvey stubs in cards over at comc right now, but maybe some other player collectors will find something to add. where's your line?

bloggers made me do it

i am thankful for the blogging community as it affords me the opportunity to see cards that i would not otherwise see. of course, sometimes seeing is not enough and i have to track down cards to add to my collection. case in point, a while back bo posted about some asa sets, including frank robinson's, which included this card

it's always a good thing to add a frank robinson dodger card to the collection! robby's 521st homer tied him with ted williams for 7th all-time. he would retire with 586 home runs which put him 4th all-time, although he has since fallen to tenth on the career home run leader board. the card sort of reminds me of steve garvey's 1973 topps card in that he was also greeted at home plate by wes parker after hitting a home run.

bo also posted about a yogi berra asa set, and i went out and found my own copy of this card:

berra took over the met managerial duties following the death of gil hodges, and here he is with dodger skipper walter alston.

in one of nick's dime box bounty posts, he showed this 1986 fleer star sticker juan samuel card:

which drove me to sportlots to find one for my dodger stadium collection. i decided to peruse comc to see if there were other cards from the set with the colorful strata of seats in the background, and added this bruce sutter card

to my sportlots order. upon close inspection, the young fan is holding what looks like the back of a 1983 fleer card, i assume to be sutter's. you actually get a closer look at it on sutter's 1986 fleer mini card

which i also added to the order for my dodger stadium collection.

then, night owl posted about his pursuit of the 1986 fleer set, and showed a claudell washington card

i realized that i hadn't mined that set for dodger stadium cards, so off to sportlots i went. the braves had an inordinate amount of fleer cards with dodger stadium used as a backdrop in the early years of that brand.

finally, diamond jesters posted a repack haiku using barry lyons' 1988 donruss card

which was absent for the dodger stadium collection, largely due to the fact that i did not buy any donruss back in 1988 and it's not really a set that gets displayed too often.

thanks to everyone for continuing to blog and show off cards that i didn't know i needed!