Saturday, January 11, 2014

The Stadium Club Epiphany

No blogger wants to be nothing. No blogger wants to go on for years without any real rumblings going on. I mean, some bloggers do end up doing that, but not on purpose. Nobody just comes out and says 'okay, I'm gonna start posting in January, and then I'm gonna end up posting intermittently for the rest of the year.' Nobody decides that. Life just happens to people.

This isn't marking that sort of path for me for this year. Far from it, actually. I think I know what I wanna do with my blogging life.

The customs are not going, at least not yet. But really, one person cannot thrive on one thing alone and expect to get somewhere from it. Do I love making customs? Hell yeah. Do I see myself doing them for the rest of my life? Not necessarily. This year I'll be going to college, which means that for the last two or three months of baseball season, I won't have 100% of time blocked out for blogging and customizing. It'll go day-by-day, like 'do I have time to do this today? When do I have time', vice versa. So already I knew that the fate of my customizing by the end of 2014 would be uncertain.

However, I unintentionally had been drawing out a new path for my blogging career, through the last month. And it had to do with those boxes of Stadium Club I kept getting off Amazon.

See, when I purchased the box of 1994 Stadium Club, and the box of 1995 Stadium Club, they weren't the first boxes of the product line I'd bought. Back in 2011, when I was staying in Meredith, NH, I bought two boxes. One of 1993, and one of 1996, and I got both at a discounted price of ten dollars, because the guy was very nice, and because I was young.

The thing about opening these boxes that I absolutely love is that they're so fun, they have such great photography, and it's a great way to look at how cards were made in the 1990's. Plus, they have great full bleed photography, the backs are so detailed, every design is a little different, the sets are so big and widespread, the parallels aren't annoying, the inserts are innovative and GAAAH, I LOVE EVERYTHING ABOUT THEM!

And then I began to piece together something. This is a line of sets that I absolutely love, four of which I've gotten a copious amount of cards from. There are thirteen Stadium Club sets, not counting the 2008 set which really is more of a cheap way of pleasing the fans, like Whose Line on the CW. The sets aren't huge-time endeavors, and this is a caring community of bloggers that probably have Stadium Club cards lying around somewhere.

So I'm gonna make an outlandish goal: I, Jordan of Mint Condition, aspire to complete every Stadium Club Baseball base set from 1991 to 2003, unless those last three get me angry. This is not going to be easy, this is going to take a lot more Amazon purchases, and a lot more work, but before I die, I wanna say I did it when nobody else would.

I'm gonna put up wantlists in a couple days, or whenever I can, for the four sets I broke boxes of. I'm also gonna scour my collection for any loose singles I can find. And then the floodgates will be wide open. I do plan on doing a lot more trading this year, and doing a lot more in the community, and this will be the gateway.

Will this take a while? Hell yeah. Will this eventually be totally worth it? Of course.

Keep watching the skies, folks. Wantlists and such will be out soon.

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