12 Steps To Properly Page a Topps Flagship Set

For years now I've paged my Topps flagship sets with complete disregard to the numbers that are on the back of the cards. The haphazard order of these sets has always bothered me. I think of my Topps sets not just as a collection of cards, but instead a yearbook, that flows from one year to the next. I can pull a binder off the shelf and it's an orderly review of the year that was in baseball as well as card collecting. Because I absolutely love my system of paging cards, I've decided to share it in detail with the rest of the #collectfam. I hope you enjoy, and even better, come up with a system of your own to share. As you will see, I borrow heavily from the beloved method that Fleer used to organize their sets in the 80's, but with a few changes of my own. Here are 12 easy steps to take your flagship album to greater heights.

1. DO NOT DRINK ANY ALCOHOL WHILE ATTEMPTING TO PAGE YOUR SET.  TRUST ME. I CAN'T FUCKING STRESS THIS ENOUGH.

2. Purchase this binder at your local Target, Walmart, Office Depot, etc. This binder will PERFECTLY hold a 1,000 to 1,100 paged set of Series 1, 2, & 3. It will also hold a customizable spine so you don’t have an endless wall of blank binders spines on your binder shelves.

3. I use these pages because these are readily available at my local Target. A couple of bags will do. If you have another source of pages, I'm sure that will work just fine too. But I'm no longer responsible for the outcome if they don't. It's kinda like a chili recipe. If you want to add beans, that's on you. 

4. Take your SERIES 1 & 2 SETS ONLY and sort them into teams and subsets. (Set Series 3 aside for later) In 2016, there were 4 subsets: World Series, Team Cards, Highlights/Checklists, and League Leaders. 

5. Once you’ve sorted everything as shown, alphabetize all your team piles before paging. This also works as a great double check to make sure you don’t have an Indians card in the Twins pile. Yes, this does happen. Frequently in fact, if you don’t follow step #1. 

6. Page in the following order (all according to the previous season, in this case 2015)

a.     World Series winning team

b.     World Series losing team

c.     LCS losing team with better record

d.     LCS losing team with worse record

e.     Four LDS losing teams starting with best record to worst record

f.      Wild Card losing team with best record

g.     Wild Card losing team with worse record

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h.     The rest of the remaining teams starting with best record to worst record.

7. With the remaining subset cards, I’m fluid about the order I put them in. To me, the whole point of paging a set this way is to give it a nice visual continuity. Preferably, the subsets would all consist of 9 cards each so they could all be on one page, but it’s never that easy, is it? I do the best I can then to arrange them so they are not broken up across pages. 2016 actually worked out well for this. There were 4 slots left on the page after placing all the teams, and there were 4 World Series Highlights cards. Well there you go. After that it flowed nicely with the 30 Team cards, 6 AL Leaders cards, 6 NL Leaders cards, and the 10 Highlights Checklists cards.

8. Taking a break here for a FAQ.

a.   Why isn’t the front page in alphabetical order? Taking a cue from 1981 Fleer, which instead of just alphabetizing the cards by team, more or less had the best player on the team first, working down the worst player on the team last, I thought it would make for a great look to have the biggest stars of the World Champs staring at me when I opened the binder to page 1. I've even altered it in recent years to have the World Series MVP be the first card in the binder. Now I could’ve easily put those 9 cards in alphabetical order, but as long as Topps keeps putting horizontally laid out cards in their sets, I cannot do that.  So I mix them up to make it visually appealing to me. Vertical cards together and horizontal cards together. (Hey Topps! Pick one or the other!! Even if it's horizontal, which looks horrible paged!!!)

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b.   What do you do when teams have the same record? This is very easy to answer. I just pick the team l like better and page them first. Obviously, the Tigers break all ties and the Red Sox lose all ties. The Marlins win most ties and the Indians lose most ties. You can see where I'm going with this.

9. OK, so now it’s time for Series 3. This will be short and sweet. It mostly works the same way as Series 1 & 2, but this time paging according to the results of the current season, and not the last one (in this case, 2016). 

a.   Thinking of my flagship set as a yearbook of sorts, this method allows the binder to “flow” from one season into the next. I put the Rookie Debut cards first as their own subset, since they are not true rookie cards anyway that should be with the teams. Then go the Home Run Derby cards, followed by the All-Star starting lineups and the reserves. Then the World Series winning team down to 2016’s worst team.  I like breaking it up this way so that when I’m looking at this series I can see who the big pickups were, as opposed to mixing them with Series 1 & 2 and not being able to tell (I guess I could look at the numbering on the back, but I’ve already come this far and besides, I like it this way)

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b.   This method also allows you to go ahead and get Series 1 & 2 paged up as soon as you complete them during the season.

10. BACK TO THE IMPORTANCE OF STEP 1. Since Topps is hell bent on designing every card in a 1000 card set to look almost identical, it’s very easy to get cards in the wrong piles and screw the whole thing up and have to go back and fix it. I have not followed Step 1 in the past and have always ended up screwing up somewhere. Case in point, with only a few pages left to go, I found that I missed the goddamned All-Star logo on Stephen Vogt and had to unpage TWENTY ONE PAGES to put him in the correct slot. (Note to Topps, or any employees who might be reading: PLEASE give the subsets different designs than the base cards. For some reason this was stopped around 2007 and it’s AWFUL. Look how beautiful that turned out in 1983 vs. 2013. Please help an old man out here.)

11. Another FAQ. What about inserts/gimmicks/parallels? Put them in a penny sleeve and a monster box. You're likely never going to get all of these anyway, and really, a binder with empty pockets just looks bad. 

12. Sit back now and disregard Step 1. You did it my friend! You can enjoy the weightlessness of being unencumbered by the arbitrary numbering system on the backs of the cards. Enjoy looking at that first page and not having to stare at a blank pocket in the bottom left corner where #7 would usually go. Disregard Step 1 even more as you turn the pages of your binder and enjoy the “order." And finally, if you are so inclined, disregard Step 1 even further, and write a blog post about it. 



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5150 + 1986 = Perfection

I read today that Van Halen’s 5150 was released 31 years ago today, which got me to thinking about 1986 in general, which in turn reminded me that 1986 was truly my last great year of card collecting. I suspect several factors combine into the reason why, none of which really have anything to do with the hobby itself. OK, maybe one, just a little bit.

Love Walks In

I still have such fond, vivid memories of collecting in 1986. Memories like walking a mile or so down snow covered train tracks to the local card shop on a blustery Maine Saturday morning to pick up a shiny new box of Topps (with bright red cards on the box bottom!). Or swinging by that same shop on my way to my after school job at Service Merchandise to pick up a box of Fleer (a box that had ZERO doubles!). Or walking into Grand City and finding what looked like thousands of packs of Donruss dumped into a barrel near the cash registers (the number of packs it seemed like anyways before I pulled a Canseco!).

I’ve never been able to duplicate those memories at Target or Walmart. Luckily the memories of opening a Topps box with my buddy while his mom made us grilled cheese sandwiches never faded. Nor did buying a pack of Fleer later one afternoon and getting ALL 7 cards I was missing for my set. Nor the dizziness I felt rifling through each pack of Donruss looking at that crazy design. Who knows, maybe now there's some kid somewhere who has similar stories, but I'm not holding my breath.

Best Of Both Worlds

I think a large part of it also has to do with the fact that I graduated high school that summer. As I went off to college that fall, discretionary spending habits changed considerably over the next few years. Schaefer, Lucky Strike, and numerous record shops started getting a lot of my money that had once been earmarked for cards. I was an avid football card collector as well, and I have no memory of buying any that fall. Probably why I still don’t have that damn Jerry Rice card.

Why Can’t This Be Love

Obviously the brutal changes the hobby was about to undergo in 1987 played a part as well. When everybody started trying to fund retirement portfolios, my “hobby” lost some of its luster.  I have continued collecting in the years following, but never again was it as much “fun” as it was in 1986. It became more like a dutiful chore.

Good Enough

So what really happened? Basically, I grew up. Well, got older anyway.  It happens. But when you think about it, is anything as good as it was when you were a kid? Probably not.

Dreams

PS: When 5150 was released, I was working as a sporting goods clerk at the local Service Merchandise (pictured above, it's now a Chinese restaurant). One of the guys who worked in the “Sight & Sound” department hatched a plan: a handful of us each chipped in a couple of bucks, he went up to the record store and bought the cassette and a box full of blank tapes, then came back to the store and dubbed copies for everybody ALL DAY LONG. I swear I remember hearing that album ten times that day. Much to the dismay of Van Halen fans, it remains my favorite VH album.

1981

     I'm always quick to tell anyone who will listen that I started collecting baseball cards in 1978, but it really wasn’t until the summer of 1981 that it fully kicked into gear and I became a dedicated collector. 1978 was the year that I fulfilled every father’s dream and began playing Little League. As an avid collector of Star Wars cards the year before, it didn’t take long once I discovered they made cards for baseball too that I fell madly in love with them. I still fondly recall getting some packs here and there that summer, devouring the info on the backs of the cards along with the sweet pink rectangle in each pack. I can only wish to relive the hours I spent stacking my deck to whoop my little brother in the PLAY BALL game on the backs of each card that we would play every day of that summer.

     Unfortunately for a budding nine year old collector, at the end of the summer we were stationed in Spain, where baseball cards could no longer be found on every corner! Save the occasional box of cards my grandma sent me for a birthday or Christmas, card collecting took a back seat to comics, which were readily available at the Navy Exchange bookstore. Our cards then only came back out when a new kid moved to the base, the rest of us picking his collection over like vultures, as that would be the only supply of new stuff until the next kid moved to the base.

     But then in the glorious summer of 1981 we were transferred back to the good old US of A! We would spend the summer in Arkansas with relatives before moving on to Florida at summer's end. The date we arrived back in the US was June 9^th to be exact, and boy howdy how I couldn’t wait to watch baseball all summer after three years without television in Spain. Well if you’ve read this far and remember any baseball history at all, it’s pretty easy to piece together the events that happened three days later (on my 12^th birthday no less) and brought my dreams crashing down. Thankfully though, I still had baseball cards to collect to fill the void.

     With three card companies instead of one, it didn’t take long for my plastic card locker to outlive its usefulness, so I “upgraded” to rubber bands and a Coca Cola crate. Despite the crudeness of my storage system, I was extremely meticulous in my sorting and filing methods. Each rubber banded “bundle” was sorted by team in the following order:

1.     Topps Team Checklist on top (marked appropriately of course)

2.     Topps players in alphabetical order

3.     Fleer players in alphabetical order, with the manager card on top

4.     Donruss players in alphabetical order, with the manager card on top

     Any multi-player, record breaker, post season, set checklists, and Fleer Checklists (marked appropriately of course) were banded into their own bundle.

     The team bundles were then placed in the box in the following order:

1.     AL East in alphabetical order

2.     AL West in alphabetical order

3.     NL East in alphabetical order

4.     NL West in alphabetical order

5.     Multi-player, etc. bundle

     I ended up getting on a Little League team in Arkansas (McGehee Bank), and despite the absence of Major League Baseball that summer, that and collecting fixed my baseball jones.

     By 1981 I was a Houston Astros fan, solely due to my having been a pitcher for my Little League team in 1979, the Angels. I knew Nolan Ryan was a bad ass (with his 1978 Topps Record Breaker card as my primary evidence) and so I became a Ryan fan. I carried on again the next year toiling with the Angels, even though Ryan had moved on to Houston, but I never stopped rooting for him, and by the time the Astros made their playoff run in 1980, I’d become a fan of the team as well.

     Throughout that summer, my first ever collecting goal was to finish the Topps Astros team set. Each week I'd narrow it down by a few cards until there was only one card remaining. Card #534, Dave Smith. For the rest of the summer, every time my grandma went to Walmart, I'd ride with her so I could search all the rack packs for Dave Smith. Never once did I see him. Never once did I come home with a pack that had him inside

     At the end of the summer, we left Arkansas and headed towards our new home in Florida. On a rainy morning of Day 2 of the drive, we stopped for gas at a 7-Eleven somewhere near Pensacola, FL. I asked my dad if I could have a dollar to go in and get a Coke. I bought that Coke, and one pack of 1981 Topps baseball cards. I got back in the U-Haul truck, riding shotgun along with my crate full of cards. We headed back down the highway and I went to work on that pack of cards. I still remember freezing up as I sorted through them and suddenly there before my eyes was card #534, Dave Smith. I did it! I finally completed the Astros team set!! I was on cloud nine the rest of the trip. I must have spent hours staring at that card. I still love seeing it 36 years later. 

     To this day the cards of 1981 hold a special place in my heart for the great memories of collecting that summer, and more importantly, the great memories of life that summer. I hope that all the collectors out there have similar memories themselves. But without a $%@#$&%^ two month baseball strike for crying out loud!