Matthew’s Baseball Card Collection
Matthew is an avid baseball fan and collector. He has been collecting baseball cards for the past five years and has amassed an impressive collection of 18 complete sets. Each set contains cards for every player on each team’s roster for that particular season. Matthew enjoys putting together the sets and learning about the players and teams from each year.
His collection includes sets from 1990 all the way to the current season. One of his earliest and most cherished sets is from 1990. That year marked Matthew’s first season really getting into baseball and collecting cards. He remembers going to the drugstore with his dad every weekend and searching through packs of cards, hoping to find stars like Ken Griffey Jr., Jose Canseco, and Nolan Ryan. It took Matthew almost the entire season, but he was finally able to complete his first set. Looking through that 1990 set now brings back so many fun memories for Matthew of going to games with his family as a young kid.
Some other notable sets in Matthew’s collection include 1992, 1994, 1998, 2000, and 2004. The 1992 set stands out because that was the first season after an extended players’ strike that wiped out part of the 1991 season. Players like Barry Bonds and Tom Glavine were really starting to emerge as stars. The 1994 set holds significance as it was right before the players’ strike that canceled the rest of that season and World Series. Sets like 1998, 2000, and 2004 featured stars like Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Ken Griffey Jr., Chipper Jones, Derek Jeter, and Curt Schilling in their prime. Flipping through those sets takes Matthew back to the excitement of those eras in baseball history.
As the years have gone on, Matthew’s collection has grown greatly in size. Newer sets, especially from the 2010s, contain way more cards since team rosters have expanded. A set from 2010 contains over 700 cards compared to just a few hundred in the early 1990s sets. That presents more of a challenge to track down all the role players and pitchers to fill out a set. But Matthew enjoys the thoroughness of having a true complete set with all players represented. He keeps very organized albums to store each set in protective plastic sleeves.
In addition to appreciating the nostalgia and history represented in his baseball card collection, Matthew also enjoys the math and data aspect. He carefully tracks statistics on his collection like the total number of unique players across all sets (currently around 5,000), the average and median set sizes per year, breakdown of cards by position, and percentage of Hall of Famers in each era. Matthew created a spreadsheet to track it all. He finds it fascinating to analyze baseball card data and explore things like which teams had the most players or who were the most prolific players to appear across multiple seasons and sets in his collection.
A few times a year, Matthew will go card trading with friends at the local card shop. He looks to fill in any missing cards that may have eluded him to complete his sets. Often times other collectors are also trying to finish sets, so trading duplicate cards helps everybody make progress on their collections. Matthew also uses the opportunity to look through boxes of loose cards the shop has accumulated, hoping to find valuable vintage rookie cards or other gems to add to his personal collection apart from the sets.
In the future, Matthew hopes to one day pass on his love of baseball to his own kids. He looks forward to taking future sons or daughters to games, teaching them the sport, maybe helping them start their own baseball card collections. For now, Matthew continues to enjoy building on and researching his impressive 18 complete baseball card set collection, a hobby that has been a lifelong passion combining his loves of history, statistics, and America’s favorite pastime.
