Bad influence

I am confident enough in my collecting personality to know that I will never be this kind of collector. There is nothing wrong with that kind of collecting -- I'll always defend the "collect how you wanna collect" philosophy. I just can't bring cards into my collection that have been intentionally defaced, whether through cigarette burn holes, or an attempt to give a card more than four corners, or good, old fashioned doodling.

Cards that have been altered through normal effects of time and handling -- scuffing, creases, paper loss, rounded corners -- are a different matter, especially for older cards. I'll take those every time. They are cards with character that have been allowed to age gracefully.

But defacing is usually a no-no to my sensitive sensibilities.

Or so I thought.

While reading through this Dime Box post from yesterday, I came across a comment from beefman, who runs Baseball Cards in Oz. He said that he bought a 1989 Bowman Dodgers team set and the irregular size (it is one of the most defective sets of all-time, you know) drove him to trim the tops and bottoms of the cards so that they would fit into a regular nine-pocket page.

That intrigued me.

I have the '89 Bowman Dodgers team set. I'm sure I have it three times over. I also have eight-pocket pages and that's where my team set resides. It's quite happy in its eight-pocket pages. But what would it be like for it to reside in a nine-pocket page, like the majority of the cards in my collection?

Well, I wonder no more.

I gathered up a small selection of my '89 Bowman Dodgers dupes -- I wasn't going to dig through the giant doubles box to find them all.

Then I grabbed this card ...

... for measuring and straight-edge purposes. I certainly have a few of these '91 Mickey Hatchers to spare.

Then, following beefman's instructions, I trimmed the top and bottoms off of the '89 Bowmans so that they would resemble your average 2 1/2-by-3 1/2 inch card.

There is a trimmed Alfredo Griffin standing toe-to-toe with '91 Mickey.

And there is a trimmed Mickey Hatcher even up with '91 Mickey.

Because I have such a thing about defacing cards, I started out drawing cutting guidelines on the back, because I don't want to see pen marks on the front.

But that didn't work because I wouldn't get as clean a look on the front of the card. So I drew the guidelines on the front and carefully cut off the pen markings.

They're not perfect, but now they all fit in a nine-pocket page.

It looks pretty good, if you ask me. I might even put them in with my other 1989 nine-pocket pagers. Although, then what am I going to do with my 1989 Bowman eight-pocket page cards? I can't have duplicates -- even trimmed duplicates -- in my binders. I'll have to take my OCD pills for that.

Maybe I can put the eight-pocket page Bowmans in my irregular binder, with the giant 1985 Topps cards and the off-size TCMA cards. 1989 Bowman probably belongs there anyway.

This was a pretty good idea beefman. Thanks!

But now the question is, can I stop at 1989 Bowman?