New Member Intro....

[TheBigRedOne]

Having joined over the weekend, wanted to introduce myself....I'm Alan, my alias is a carryover from my Wargaming days...

Collected cards as a youngster (I'm mid-40s), stopped around 1982 or so. Held onto my card collection, somewhere around 7000 cards mostly from the late 60s through '82. Most are in the 72-77 time frame if I had to guess. Favorite cards in my collection were two tobacco cards I picked up at an auction at a local baseball card show when I was a teenager. American Caramel E90-1 #62 Willie Keeler/Portrait Pink and a T206 #8 Red Ames/Hands over Head. I bought them because I thought they were really cool looking, not because I thought they'd be worth anything. I pulled out most of my 'good' cards and used to scan through them every so often, just for fun. Never thought about getting back into collecting, until....

I read Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty by Charles Leerhsen a few months ago. Got me thinking a lot about the dead-ball era and all of the legends from that time period. I then, foolishly, asked myself "I wonder if they sell t206 cards on eBay".......

And here I am.

I'm not looking to 'tame the monster', I fiddle around with the auctions looking for reasonable deals, which seem to be harder and harder to come by. My two main projects are to collect the team sets of the Cleveland Naps (my hometown) and the Chicago Cubs (where I relocated years ago). I'm a Cy Young away from finishing the Naps, but am unwilling to pay the high prices for one at this point. I can be patient. The Cubs will take a bit longer, although I just picked up 4 new ones at a reasonable price yesterday. I buy only graded cards at this point. Seemed to be the smarter thing to do. Second project is to pick up interesting players, both from a fame and infamous standpoint, using The T206 Collection: The Players & Their Stories as a guideline. Have picked up a few, my favorites are the Tris Speaker and Christy Mathewson. Would love a Cobb, but don't want to get divorced!

That's it. Glad to be here, if anyone has any good advice, always open. I'm sticking to the t206s at this point....