Still kicking...

It's been ages since I last posted on the card garage.  Not because the garage is no more.  I just haven't had a whole lot of non-primary-hobby-collecting-time-and-energy to go through things out there.  But I would like to start doing so again at some point because looking through all that stuff is fun and I always find interesting and different things.

A couple updates for anyone that might care.  The garage was expanded a couple times since the last post on here.  There is now somewhere in the range of a million cards or more out there.  At first I thought that was an exaggeration but I don't think it is.  There were two other "collection" purchases made in the last year that added to the enormousness.

As a result, I installed shelves along one entire side of the garage to house all of the cardboard wonders.  I also had to remove many of the boxes that were moved inside the house out of fear of domestic violence.  So shelving was the logical step and it looks way better than it did before.

I was putting stuff on the shelves this morning and as I was going through some of the boxes, I noticed a few cards that I had never seen before.  I figured I would share here since this is my outlet for all things that come out of the garage.

These were the first two out of the box.  When I first saw these I was kind of mesmerized because I had never seen a set like this before (actually if you look around the blogosphere, countless collectors have featured this set...I'm just oblivious).  The cards are from the 2001 Upper Deck Cooperstown Collection Hall of Famers Set.  This was issued as a hobby only set when it was released.  The boxes can still be obtained from places like Dave & Adam's but they are still over a hundred bucks!!  And remember, if you do pull the trigger on one of these and you get a redemption card...you are SOL.

To give you an idea of what we have here, the set is broken down into 90 cards that feature the greatest players, builders, and moments in baseball history.  There are four different categories of cards in the set.

The main vets are cards 1-50,

a subset called Origins Of The Game make up 51-60,

 
The National Pastime make up 61-80

and the Hall of Records finish out the set with 81-90. 

Despite the fact that a bunch of the photos are a little grainy and some of the design placement could use some work (especially on the backs), I think this set is one of the nicest sets I have seen in a long time (pretty good considering it is almost 12 years old).   The photos that are used on these aren't the typical ones you find in retro sets and Upper Deck did a real nice job of capturing some history that has long been forgotten by many baseball fans.  

The best part, for me anyway, is that these are the kinds of things that randomly pop up when opening boxes.  These were in a couple jewel box cases at the bottom of a Home Depot shipping box that was otherwise filled with early 90s overproduction era stuff in both baseball and basketball.  

You never know what you will find in the Card Garage.