Almost exactly a year after I started, I have all my baseball cards available for trade input onto TCDB. I was guessing it was somewhere over 100,000 and I was right. I've been doing it backwards, starting with tradelists rather than wantlists. Besides getting me more involved with TCDB as a resource for trading, it has also been a great way to trade with bloggers who have player collections, because it automatically sorts by player. I've reached out to some of you already, will be reaching out to more, and welcome any others to use my
TCDB trade list to generate some new trades. I sort my cards by set, so PC trades were always difficult, and this makes it much easier.
When I started this project, I figured I would eliminate my own tradelist at the end, but I've decided to hold on to it. (I was definitely going to keep the wantlist up for ease of use if I needed to quickly access it at a store, vendor, etc.) However, it is still useful to have an easy list by set, and the site is still buggy enough that I would be wary of losing my whole list, temporarily or permanently.
The stats feature is pretty interesting (when it works, fortunately it is today). TCDB "values" the cards at a total of $28.051. Honestly, I'd take 10% of that if someone wanted to take them all at once. Here are my top 20 highest value cards. Not that high value for the most part. The biggest ones are vintage (which are generally in rough shape) and some modern rookies. #4 is a shocker - even though it's a copyright variation, no way it's a $2 card let alone $20. TCDBers do love those variations though - the majority of trades I've done recently on there have been from people reaching out to me about them.
Here's my top 20 most common players. TCDB counts multiple copies of a card here, so for example Tom Glavine gets boosted from the 95 copies I have of his 1991 Upper Deck. Nolan Ryan gets a boost from all of those Pacific cards. Naturally these are all junk wax era names, and heavy on Yankees and Mets from buying local collections. If you've been thinking about PCing any of these guys, let me know!
I'll always be a blogger first, but TCDB is a great resource for trades. I'm not sure how involved, if at all, I'd get involved in the community there. For example, I'd like to be able to note card errors where they're not noted. Sometimes in player or photographer interviews, they've mentioned a wrong photo or other error. I tried submitting one once, using "See Any Inaccuracies?", but never got a response. Does anyone know the proper way to submit an error?
Anyway, in the 12 months of going through all of my dupes, finding interesting variations, mistakes in my filing (another reason I decided to do TCDB is that my tradelist was getting pretty mistake-filled), and learning more about my cards, I spent a lot of time looking at cards I hadn't looked at in a while. This was actually the genesis of my vintage equipment series, which will extend to modern cards. And sometimes I would have some fun with the large quantities of individual cards. Mitch "Tarzan" Webster had a pretty good rope to swing from in 1988.
But he had a much longer one a year earlier.
OK, one more and then I'll stop.