Playing with the box

Young parents are always fascinated by their child's tendency to play with the box the toy came in, or the wrapping paper, instead of the actual present.

Well, I have a collecting version of that.

This fine, oversized card arrived from Mark Hoyle. It is one of two "bonus" cards that came with the 1979 TCMA Baseball History Series, a set of 291 cards that is one of the greatest-looking TCMA sets ever made, as it evokes the '53 Bowman style.

One of the bonus cards shows the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers championship team, obviously above, and one shows the 1957 Milwaukee Braves championship team. If you ordered the complete set, you got the two bonus cards.

That's all well and good and it's fun to pick out Newcombe and Campy and Snider and Jackie. But what I was really excited about was -- no, not the envelope -- but the page it came in.

See? I've already allocated it for my oversized, postcard-sized cards.

This is the four-pocket page and it's one of many kinds of pages that I desperately need but never seem to order.

I have plenty of standard, nine-pocket-sized pages. I also have an abundance of 15-pockets (tobacco-sized cards) and 8-pockets ('50s sets, mostly). But I'm hurting for the following:

• 2-pockets: I mostly need these for the quest to finally land most of those 1980 and 1981 Topps glossies. But they come in handy for may other items: '80s Topps oversized cards, some of the '90s oversized cards, and some of the boxtoppers from A&G and Gypsy Queen.

• 4-pockets: You wouldn't think there would be a lot of these cards around but there are. All of those team postcards, Cooperstown postcards, early '70s Topps Supers, 1964 Topps Giants, TCMA postcards, Donruss '80s oversized cards, '89 Topps Baseball Talk, '60s Baseball Hi-Lites, some '90s Upper Deck oversized items, etc., etc. Also, most of those many, many MSA discs from the '70s fit in these.

• 12-pockets: I probably need only a couple of these, mostly to gather up my Dodgers stickers that always go missing because they're not stuck or in pages.

• 3-pocket: Not the ones that hold uncut Hostess pages, but the weird-looking ones with one horizontal pocket on top and two vertical pockets side-by-side underneath. I don't even know which of my cards would fit in those, but I know I have cards that are annoyingly just a little too large for four-pockets and maybe those would fit in there.

• 6-pocket: For strange-shaped cards like 1997 Wheaties and probably those '70s Fleer Laughlin cards. I don't know, I'm just guessing.

• 9-pocket mini cards: The pages I campaigned for and won! I've used up my free box, thanks to the mini-craze Topps went on around 2011-15. I probably should get a few more since Archives is featuring '75 minis this year, as well as to brace for 2024 Heritage.

I once showed you my overstuffed binder of  "cards that don't fit." I can't find that post right now (Blogger limits its search function to the last four years now, unless you can figure out the labels you used).

But suffice to say that overstuffed binder is even more stuffed and landing a stockpile of pages would help ease the weight on the poor thing.

So someday you'll see a post with nothing except the binder pages I got -- kind of like this one -- and I will be the only one excited about it.

But I will be really excited. Enough for all of you.