Towards the end of last year, I saw quite a few collectors on Twitter post goals for their collections in 2020. I thought this sounded like a great idea, and immediately took up pen and paper. Sadly though, these goals didn’t translate into an electronic transmission until now. I just never got around to it.

I’ve been working on them throughout the month of January anyway, and have made tremendous progress on a couple of them already. So let’s get into it. I’m proud to present my 2020 Hobby Goals:

Establish www.apackperday.com and get into a routine of publication - I want to make this blog another stop for your content consumption when it comes to Hobby related reading. It might take a while to get rolling, and I understand that, but I just need to make it a habit to write content and post it. Whether it be #MailDay write-ups of eBay purchases, or Twitter trade completions, or which card within a set is my favorite and why, you should expect to see something new at least four or five times a week. Hopefully once the routine is established, and towards the end of 2020, we will naturally flow towards an every day article.

I also will be using the site to maintain up to date want lists of base sets I am trying to collect, and use it as a medium to facilitate trades with other Hobby Collectors. I want this place to be a valuable part of the broader baseball card community. Cards that go into my personal collection will be scanned and added to the various slideshows that accompany each player in my PC. This way, when a trade is discussed for PC items, we can look through the slide shows and see what is needed and what isn’t. Hopefully that will help prevent duplicates from being shipped.

Establish YouTube channel with pack rips, completions of sets, Mail Days, eBay sales - Much like with the site as a whole, I aim to integrate myself into the broader collecting community. YouTube content viewership continues to increase year over year, and there is always room for one more. The challenge will be to create creative content that goes beyond pack rips, live case breaks and PSA Submission reveals. These are cool in their own right, and I am definitely guilty of watching hours of this content myself, but there is more to be done. I know there is. In addition, how does one get found in a sea of otherworldly noise? I can’t get discouraged when no one watches right away. This is a rest of my lifetime project now. I have to take the long road.

Buy/obtain 100 cards from 1976 Topps Base - I bought my first pack of baseball cards way back in 1983, when I was able to purchase around 150 ‘83 Donruss cards. The next year, it was around 200 ‘84 Donruss cards - including two Darryl Strawberry Rookie Cards. In ‘86, I went backward though, as most of my card purchases were Garbage Pail Kids. However, in ‘87 I was back. Those wood bordered Topps cards really grabbed my attention, and it was full throttle for the next 6 or 7 years, spending nearly every cent of my lawn mowing money on wax packs. The height of the junk wax era. And I loved it.

Since those early days, I always envisioned having a complete set of cards for every year since 1976 (otherwise known as the year of my birth). I never really committed though. And since I have been sporadic in my collecting since 1993 (when I decided going on dates was more fun than pieces of cardboard with sharp corners), there is quite a large gap in my complete set foundation. So I’m going to have to work hard to fill in those gaps. If I can obtain 100 well centered cards from 1976 Topps this year, that will be a great start to filing in some of that vintage from the beginning.

Update: As of today (29 January 2020), I have been able to purchase one lonely 1976 Topps card at one of my local card shops. It’s a start.

Complete 1988 Topps Base and put in a Binder - Right before Christmas, I went through my five 5,000 count boxes (see below) and pulled out all my 1988 Topps cards. My first set I ever finished was 1989 Topps, but in ‘88 I came really close. I needed only 100 or so more. I looked carefully at all these cards as I put them into a new binder and new Ultra-Pro pages. Any that were off centered or had severely dinged up corners were discarded. It’s junk wax after all, and I thought they would be easily replaceable. Looking on eBay, I was able to find and purchase three full wax boxes of packs and 12 rack packs over the span of a couple of weeks for what I considered to be fairly cheap. As I opened them, I carefully inspected each card for gum stains and centering. Corners I can deal with, but I don’t like the massively off centered stuff. If I already had the card, it was tossed into a box to send away to other folks.

After the third box however, I was still around 50 cards short, and I didn’t want to keep throwing money at wax packs. I could spend another 150 bucks and still not get the last couple. I was shocked to see on eBay and COMC that singles of ‘88 Topps are being sold for a dollar or more after shipping. Kind of ridiculous for 30 year old commons that are worth a nickel. Enter Twitter, and the hobby community. Through a couple of different posts and users, I have been able to work out trades with others for the vast majority of what I need. As of last weekend, there were only two cards that had not been found. Once they ones that were Twitter-mined have been received, I’ll know just how close I am.

Re-binder/Re-page all previously completed sets - All of the sets that I completed when I was a kid have been entombed in cheap binders and a mish mash of pages since then. Those binders have been kept in Tupperware since I went away to college, into my basement once I got married, and transported on a boat across the Atlantic Ocean when we moved to Europe and then back again. They deserve and need a refresh. There are around 15-18 binders that will be replaced throughout the year.

Buy one of 2011 Topps Update Mike Trout or 1984 Fleer Update Kirby Puckett - These are the dream PC Cards for me. I want to take all of my eBay selling proceeds and put it towards the purchase of one of these two cards before the end of the year. It can be a buy it now auction, a regular auction, or at my local card shop, but I will have one of these two cards.

With regard to the Puckett, I am aware there are numerous fakes out there in the universe. And with the research I have done online to learn what is a reprint and what isn’t, you still can’t look at a raw card and tell. So I think I will splurge and go for a lower graded PSA one. I don’t care about the grade. I just want the card.

Sort and organize the 5000 count boxes - As I mentioned above, I have five 5,000 count boxes that need to be sorted and looked through. So far in January, I have made it through three of them, organizing by major brand and year. The last time I got them out, I decided to put all the Topps cards in one box, all the Donruss in another and so on. This will actually make it easier to look through them when I am trying to complete trades with other collectors. With three boxes sorted, this goal will be done soon.

Obtain 1% of Mike Trout All-Star Game 2019 Gold cards (Serial #/2019) #US146 - I will never be one of these corporate shareholders that owns 5% of ACME Computer corporation. As cool as that might be. But what if I owned 1% of a particular players serially numbered cards? That would be awesome. And who better to choose then the game’s greatest player, Mike Trout? So I will be a super collector of this Trout card from Topps Update. By the end of the year, I want to own a minimum of 21 of the 2019 (or 1.04%) cards that were made for this particular card. As of 29 Jan 2020, I have 14 of the 21.

Donate commons to Twitter Hashtag @Commonsforkids - When I got back into the hobby, my wife was skeptical. She had never really seen me look at my cards, and over the years had expressed dissatisfaction with the amount of space they took up in our basement. This was especially evident when we moved to Europe and didn't know how much space we would have. I definitely listened to her opinion, and value what she says though, so I made her a deal. I told her about my desire to have the complete sets going back to my birth year. I said that once I complete a set, I will donate or other wise get rid of all the duplicates for that particular set. So for all the packs of gum I’ve opened with 88 Topps, all those extra cards have gone into a Medium Flat rate shipping box, and will be shipped off to Twitter handle @Commonsforkids. This way I get rid of them, and this person can use them in whatever means they choose to generate future interest in this hobby. Everybody wins.

So there they are. Eight goals for the collecting year already underway. Some are easy. One or two might be a stretch. This is how it should be with goals. Now it’s time to move my collection forward.

Did you put together Hobby goals for 2020? I would love to read them, so drop me a note below. Don’t forget to leave me a link to your want lists. Lets work out some trades! Later.