My 90,000th card

I've been collecting baseball cards since 1985, when I was 34 years old. I didn't collect cards as a kid. In 1985 I bought some packs of Topps and I was hooked. I really don't know which is the first card I bought, but I'm sure it's a 1985 Topps card.

I really have no sense of what is considered a large collection but I guess I have a large collection. I'm a pretty eclectic collector and I never discard a card I've bought, unless it is a duplicate of a player I don't care for. When I say this is my 90,000th card, I actually mean I own 90,000 different cards. My collection, counting duplicates amounts to 103,898 cards. And I know this because I'm a careful collector who catalogs each card into a database. I'm not counting the pile of cards that I have waiting to catalog, including 2 blasters of Topps Heritage I found yesterday (one with a relic).

Yes, I am a nerd with an engineering degree. What's the point of having a collection if you don't know what you have? Better than that, I can put my hand on any one of these cards within maybe 10 minutes of being asked to produce it. What's the point of having a collection if you don't know where it is? And for a lot of these cards I can tell you when I bought, where I bought it and how much I paid for it. For me, a large part of the enjoyment of collecting cards is in cataloging them and maintaining the collection.


So without any further ado, my 90,000 card!

 I'm sorry it wasn't more exciting than a 2014 Topps Opening Day. At least it's Tim Lincecum, a Player I Collect. And it's a good photo. The other day I posted the Blue version of this card (which is a little more interesting).