Winter sports

When I was a kid, I noticed that card collecting followed the rhythms of the sports seasons.

During the late winter, spring and summer, you could find baseball cards in the store. So, I collected baseball.

In the fall and early winter, baseball cards disappeared and football cards replaced them. So, I collected football.

I was never aware enough of when hockey and basketball cards showed up in stores -- I didn't follow those sports -- but I imagine the few packs that I bought from each happened during the dead of winter.

My collecting habits were one with Mother Nature back then. You could tell what season it was simply by what packs were sold in stores.

It hasn't been that way for a long time. You can find baseball packs in your big box stores any month of the year. Right now, it is as far away from baseball season as you can get. Yet, I bet right now, in my local Target, there are more baseball packs than those of any other sport (ain't no way I'm going to the store at this time of year to confirm my theory).

And, so it is with the other sports. I'll see basketball blasters in July and football packs in May. Collectors are more specialized and card companies are trying to catch as many collectors as they can whenever they can.

However, I still can't help but get that feeling that I need to collect winter type sports at this time of year.

I haven't gotten to the point where I will carry out that feeling with my own money, but that could be because other collectors are in a winter sports frame of mind as well.

I recently received three separate packages in the mail. Out of those three packages, there was one baseball card. One.

That right there is a card of a summer sport.

It is a 1983 Topps glossy card of Cecil Cooper that arrived from GCA of The Collective Mind. It's going toward my quest to complete the glossy set from that year (yes, I know I can buy the whole thing cheaply online, just let me do it my way, OK?).

All of the other cards that GCA depicted sports that are happening right now.

Well, the Bills have one more game left anyway.

Even though I welcome Bills cards, I just can't excited over them. As I've mentioned many times in past posts, I've grown apart from the NFL, and I try to get interested in Buffalo each year but the team doesn't do much to keep me around.

More Bills from the recent past. I know you can't read the names. Just know that they are guys who eventually disappointed.

A pretty relic card? Robert Woods, of course, is now enjoying great success with the Rams, which is typical. But I will enjoy this jersey card because I think it's only the second Bills one I own.

OK, this is more like it. NFL cards on actual cardboard, like when I collected as a kid. It amuses me that both of these are from 1988 Fleer and that 1988 Fleer baseball is the most familiar and pervasive thing in the world but I can't tell you a single thing about 1988 Fleer football.

I admit I was much more interested in the Sabres cards that Greg sent (including a sticker auto of current Rochester Amerk Justin Bailey!). This Buffalo team is doing much better than the pigskin version and besides hockey comes in O-Pee-Chee.

Another package that was filled with nothing but winter-sports cards arrived from The Chronicles Of Fuji.

I'm keeping the above card of former Bills receiver Eric Moulds. There was a time when Buffalo made sure they had a top-line receiver on the roster at all times. Moulds was supposed to be the heir to Andre Reed and he did quite well. He wasn't Mr. Reed, though.

Here are two fun relics from Fuji of former Sabres winger Daniel Paille, whose career took an unfortunate turn when he was traded to the sickening Bruins. I believe it was one of the few times that the Sabres and Bruins swapped players.

I like these relics side-by-side because it shows the black-and-red Buffalo sheep uniforms and the blue-and-gold Buffalo slug uniforms.

The last package came from reader Greg (I think the number of collectors named Greg has nearly surpassed the number of collectors named Matt) and was nothing but Sabres ... well, almost.

Greg smartly kept the cards he sent to the Sabres I find most interesting. I love, love, love the '91-92 Pro Set cards and these two Sabres bring everything back. These are probably the best two cards of all three packages.

I like collecting cards from the Sabres' turn-of-the-century years because those were good teams. But I keep forgetting that the designs at that time were pretty gross.

That's a little better, although Dominik Hasek improves on everything all by himself.

Greg also sent me a sampling of some stickers he's created in the style of the old NES video game characters:

Those are the Dodgers stickers (home and away).

And here's the Sabres guy! It looks so much like the real thing I can hear the music that played in the background of just about every NES game (this post could have been published earlier but I just got lost in a video on how 8-bit video game music was made in the '80s).

Greg creates his stickers and markets them on Redbubble, if you want to check them out.

I know I'm probably going to want to stick these, but it will take me like two weeks to figure out the exact right spot.

Even though I feel the need to collect cards of the sport currently in season, I will always be primarily a baseball card collector. But it's been nice these last few months discovering what's been going in the hobby for those winter sports.