A good fit

 

A couple of comments in my last post, combined with a long-overdue discovery, combined with the mailman apparently not feeling like delivering on my street today, led to this post.

 

Some folks mentioned yesterday how they skip oversized cards because of the difficulty in storing them. I'm assuming this mostly pertains to fitting them into pages, because you can probably find a box to fit just about anything card-like, unless it's enormous.

 

I've never shunned non-regulation-sized cards because they don't fit 9 pockets, if I like them, I'll get them, no matter what size. But I understand, as a binder guy, not having a place to store them. I felt that particular collector pain for a long time. Because I didn't have all the different page configurations.

 

But I do now. I have 2 pockets, 4 pockets, 3 pockets, 8 pockets, 15 pockets, just waiting to complete a mission.

 

I've shown this binder before, a couple of times. It's what I use to store cards and various other baseball collectible material that doesn't fit neatly into a standard page.

 

The stuff inside is not as packed as it one was. That's because recently I went through the binder and tracked down the pages that would fit various items. I also took some of the pages inside the "it doesn't fit" binder and filed them in the proper pages and binder, stuff like the '70s Topps Supers.

 

The two following old pictures are items that were once in the binder but now most of them have been paged and filed in another binder that's more appropriate.

The '80s tattoo stickers are in the proper '80s 9-pocket page, the '94 Fleer Extra Bases have been filed in 4-pockets. The various Laughlin cards are also in 4-pockets. The oversized '90s Pinnacle/Upper Deck /Topps Chrome cards are in 2-pockets. The Wheaties cards are in 8 pockets. I even asked for help with the Baseball Bucks (the Drysdale is from '62) and followed the recommendation to put it into a card-saver and then put that in a 4-pocket.

 

 

That's what's leftover in the back of the binder. If I had some one-pockets, I could file those, too, and I'm sure there's a better way to store some of the others.

I've been sitting on this reorganization for awhile and it makes me happy to finally get all the oversized and undersized cards in some sort of order.

Then, just today, while thinking on what to write about (thanks again, mail person), my eyes settled on a box sitting on one of my card shelves.

That's a nifty box and it was sent to me quite awhile ago. When I got it, I automatically figured no pages would fit it -- it says "over-sized" right on the box -- and since the box was so neat and a little fancy, I left them where they were, for years, barely looking at it.

But today I opened it.

"Hmm," I thought for the first time, "I wonder if that would fit in a 4-pocket page."

 

It does fit! (Probably shouldn't have displayed that page on a white marble countertop).

 

I actually let out an audible "yes" and executed a mild fist pump when I discovered that. Yeah, I lead a boring life.

 

This excited me quite a bit. I can now put these in the 1996 portion of my Dodgers binders, where they will fit quite well with everything else that was happening in cards in '96, there they will be all together, instead of way too many feet apart, in separate houses.

 

And I'll view them a lot more than when they were sitting in that box, which is kind of falling apart now, too.

 

So, anyway, to each his or her own. But I know that when I acquired those different-sized pages it was a godsend.

 

A day the hobby makes me smile is a good day.