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C.A.: 1977 Topps Dennis Eckersley

(A quote about appreciation from Mark Twain: "To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with." I think that translates to card collecting and this community of collectors quite well. This is Cardboard Appreciation, the 188th in a series):


That nagging cough. You've had it for weeks. You really should go to the doctor. But it's just a cough, it'll go away eventually, right? Or it could be a sign of a terminal illness.

Fortunately, the consequences of ignoring the warning signs in baseball card collecting aren't quite as dire. But they can be frustrating.

For me, a freshly completed set, just placed in a binder, is akin to that nagging cough. I complete sets in a certain way. When I'm fairly certain that I want to complete a set and am a couple hundred cards away from finishing it, I'll go ahead and put the cards that I have in a binder, leaving spaces for where the missing cards will go. Then as I acquire cards, I add them to the slots. It's an enjoyable and very satisfying way to complete sets. I like it much better than acquiring all the cards in a box, or wherever first, and then adding them to a binder all at once.

But because I do it that way, there's always the chance that in paging out the set, I didn't count correctly and put a card in the wrong slot. All those empty spaces can confuse.

And then, when my want list says I've completed the set and I've placed all the cards in the binder that I have, I do that thing when people avoid going to the doctor.

"The set's complete. I don't have to look at all the pages again."

What nagging cough?

But there's always that hounding voice talking back to me. "Check it, check it, check it."

And I always break down. I have to check it.

I know what's coming. Because it's happened to me before, and I've written about it before on this blog. More than once.

Five months ago I was pretty certain I had completed the 1977 Topps set. I wrote a tribute post and everything. Because I had been burned before, I was pretty confident that I had dotted my eyes and accounted for every last card. So I added the last few cards that I had received into their corresponding page pockets and shut the door tight on the binder.

One of the cards was this one:


Larry Parrish's second-year card. Pay attention to that card. We'll come back to it.

I was receiving so many '77 cards at this time that a number of them were dupes. I'd get a package in the mail, and then two days later I'd get another package in the mail. And some of the '77s were the same. I can't possibly update my want list on a daily basis and I know that nobody in the world is checking it on a daily basis, so that's going to happen.

Add this to the fact that some of my '77s wants were merely upgrades -- meaning I was actively looking for doubles -- and an error in inventorying was bound to occur.

Months after completion, I was looking through my '77 binder for some other reason -- probably relating to the cartoons on the back -- when I happened upon the page that houses the Parrish card.

Parrish is card No. 526. He sits in the middle row on the left-hand side -- looking into the page, which is something that would make any newspaper layout person happy.

I double-bag my pages because I'm not made of money, so when you open the binder, there are 9 cards on the left-hand side and nine cards on the right-hand side. Parrish was sitting on the right-hand side in his required spot, middle row, left.

Then I happened to look to the cards on the facing page.


There was the Larry Parrish card AGAIN. It was sitting in the bottom row, left-hand side. Two Parrish's in my complete 1977 set!

(*gulp*)

This obviously meant that one of my Parrish's was taking the place of another card that should be there. I took out the extra Parrish and looked at the cards nearby and determined that the card that was supposed to be in the slot was No. 520.

No. 520 is Garry Maddox. I had the Garry Maddox card. It was sitting in the top right-hand corner, just before the Larry Parrish ca ...


Uh-oh.

Maddox is No. 520 and Parrish is No. 526. That's not right.

I took out the Garry Maddox card and the extra Larry Parrish card, and then I started doing that thing:

"It's just a cough, it'll go away by itself, it's just a cough, it'll go away by itself, it's just one card I probably have it in a dupes stack somewhere."

But knowing that the card I was missing was No. 525 -- a so-called semi-star number -- I had that feeling of dread: I still needed a card to complete the set.

I dutifully looked up the number and knew:


The Dennis Eckersley card wasn't in my collection yet.

I decided to put it on the Nebulous 9 list, because people look at that thing a lot more than my want lists. But the card sat there for a month or two and I couldn't stand it anymore.

I went ahead and bought the card online.

And now it's mine, and the '77 set is complete and I've checked to make sure there aren't two Jim Holts or Tom Veryzers sitting in the pages in my binder.

So, let this be a warning.

Like they say in the public service ads:




DON'T WAIT UNTIL IT'S TOO LATE.






(Much better).

Comments

Robert said…
I'm very much like you in that I have to check and recheck as well. I've had a couple of instances with more recent sets where I've forgotten to include cards on want lists, only to have to chase them down later (a la Eckersley).

Congrats on completing my favorite set of the 70's!
jacobmrley said…
Those beet red Indians unis of the 70's are so ugly they almost come back around to being kind of cool. But they are not ugly enough to be that cool, so they end up in this no mans land of ugly and cool. A lot of 70's uniforms do that - Padres, Pirates, etc. Really, by extension, a lot of the 70's are like that - Disco, Jimmy Carter, etc.
steelehere said…
I've had a habit in the past of putting cards in sheets prior to completing a set, making an error by putting a card in the wrong slot and then putting in 50-60 more cards until I notice the error.

As a way to try to prevent myself from doing this, I make sure the number of the card on the bottom right of the nine pocket page has numbers that add up to 9 or 18 (or in the case of very large sets 27).

Thus a card numbered 423 would be found in the bottom right because it's numbers add up to nine (4+2+3=9) and a card numbered 648 would be found in the bottom right because it's numbers add up to eighteen (6+4+8=18). If a card's number doesn't add up to 9 or 18 then a card somewhere in the set wasn't put in its proper spot.
Jeff said…
To follow up with the previous comment, you can add up the numbers for any card and it will tell you which slot it goes into. Take card 456. That adds up to 15. Adding again, it adds up to 6. That card goes in the 6th slot (middle row, far right). To use 648 from the previous post, that adds up to 18. Adding again equals 9.
Anonymous said…
I have a complete run of sets from 1974 to 1978, and have had that complete run since the late 1970's.

...but the more I read stuff like this, the more a voice in my head says "You'd better double-check those sets, juuuuuuuuust in case..."

Thanks a lot. :-/
steelehere said…
Jeff, thanks for the follow up comment. I never knew that.

Night Owl, your 1977 Topps Lyman Bostock show on one of your plastic pages reminds me that MLB Network ran the Lyman Bostock story last night and will probably re-air it again during the next week. If you get a chance, it's well worth the half hour of viewing time.
petethan said…
I see the problem. It was Dan Meyer's radioactive hat that threw you off. Temporary radiation poisoning. I spotted it right away, thanks to that fabulous consequence of the power of Random: the Coincidence. I was just writing about Meyer's potentially dangerous hat today for an upcoming post... a post featuring that very card... sent to me by you. Random.
night owl said…
That's pretty cool, Jeff. I never knew that either.