Sorting Duties

If you're a regular reader here, than you know that I sort cards for my LCS. I figured I'd do a post and show you exactly what I do to earn all those free cards. I'll even show you the latest free card that the owner gave me when I went in last weekend.

He buys in all kinds of collections. He has a ton of people that buy wax, pick out what they want, and sell everything else back to him. I go through a couple of these peoples stuff and to be honest, sometimes I can't figure out what they take out because they leave good stuff in them but whatever.

There are 2 different sorts that I do, the sorting from the stuff listed in the paragraph above, and I sort list players. He has (we do as well) a guy that buys certain players back and he also buys commons so the LCS will buy all that stuff cheap, and then turn it around and sell it to this other guy with the lists. The list guy doesn't pay a bunch per card but he has a tier system. Players in the first tier he only gives a penny for, and the tier's go up. Some of the player, like superstars, he'll pay as much as $.50 a card. It doesn't sound like a lot but in comparison to what he pays the seller for these cards, he makes good money. Generally once he's built up 10 or so boxes, he'll sell them to the list guy and get over $1k back. We (Sluggo's) also sell to this guy for a profit on cards that would just sit around. We buy boxes of stuff from other dealers at all the shows we do. I go through these cards and pull out players on the lists (there's a couple of hundred on each sports lists, plus any HOF'ers) and put them in a box.

The 2nd sort I do for the LCS is to take the boxes of list players that have already been sorted and put them in player stacks. The list guy pays more if this is already done for him but he will take them unsorted. On top of these list players, he also buys commons from 2000 to current. We (Sluggo's) also have a guy who buys our older commons so the LCS will sell those to us. It's a nice little racket on cards that nobody (very few) want. It's a lot of work but it's work we love.

Last weekend I picked up 2 3 row boxes of already sorted list players and a bag of cards to pull list players from which is why I thought about this post, because I was doing both sorts in one shot. I started with the first sort.

This particular lady will buy blasters/megas and take out what she wants and throws everything else in Walmart bags and sells them back to the LCS. As you can see, this bag has a bunch of 2023 Topps Update among a few other sets. The worst part of this stuff is just getting everything oriented the right way to flip through them. I make a few stacks.

This is everything in the bag, sorted. The 2 big stacks on the left are all the commons. The next stack are rookie cards (I forgot to tell you I pull those out as well). The next stack are the list players and the last one are inserts and parallels. The LCS has a guy who buys just rookie cards as well which is why we pull those out. The inserts and parallels the LCS will go through and see if there are anything that he can throw out in the boxes in his shop. The parallel stuff he usually sells back to us because we load up our $1 boxes for shows with color stuff. Being as this was mostly update, there weren't very many color variations but there was a little bit of Chrome in that bag as well so we got a few parallels to buy.

I also set aside a few stacks to the side for me to keep.

You see 3 stacks of White Sox cards. The 2 in the bottom row are series 2 so I was pretty sure I had them so I set them in a different stack because I had to look and see if I had any. The other Sox stack at the top were all Update, which I had none and a couple Bowman Platinum which I also had none so those were all definite keepers. The stack on the left side of my laptop are Braves that I checked with Kevin to see what he needed and the last stack were cards I set aside to check with TCDB to see if Dennis needed any. (BTW Dennis, if you're reading this, that stack on the very top left is what I have to send to you so far).

Usually I send this sort back to the LCS in a box but since I also have 2 3 row boxes of stuff to sort. I just put the commons, rookies and inserts/parallels back in 1 box and threw the list players in with the other list players I'm sorting.

I took a few videos to show what I do. I essentially start stacks in alphabetical order and stack them up that way. Here's a 30 second video of me sorting, you can see why I can go through these pretty quickly.

Nothing exciting but you can see once I get rolling I can fly through these. Although by the end of 2 3 row boxes, my stacks on certain letters get very high and I tend to be stupid and just keep adding to them. It's usually fine until you get to some chrome or prizms because they tend to slide on each other. Usually that's the hardest part but yesterday, I looked in the 2nd box for the first time and I shot a text to the LCS owner that said "What did I do to make you hate me?" 2 and 1/2 of the 3 row box were all sleeved. I also have to take all these cards out of the sleeves. Luckily it was all newer stuff so most of it came out pretty quickly. Usually the worst are 90's stuff that have been in the sleeves since the 90's (yes, it happens) and the Panini shiny stuff for some reason likes to stick but there wasn't much of either. I'd grab a stack, desleeve them and then sort the stack. Here's a video of me getting on a roll desleeving them.

After I get all those sorted, I grab each stack and sort them in player stacks. Once they are in player order I put them back in the 3 row box. I don't have to label them and they don't have to be in any kind of alphabetical order just as long as each players cards are all together. There are list players that I collect so after I finish sorting that letter of the alphabet, I put all the players back in the box and leave out the ones that I collect. Check TCDB for what I need and add what I don't back to the box with the rest of that letter and go to the next one.

Off the top of my head, a few of the list players that I also collect are Dylan Cease, Yoan Moncada, Eloy Jimenez, Luis Robert plus HOFers such as Harold Baines and Frank Thomas (if they are Sox cards) and most of my Tier 3 collections are HOF'ers plus Barry Larkin.

I ended up with maybe 20-25 cards for myself once I was finished. As I've told you before, I just keep those. Last weekend when I took back the previous sorting, he asked if I had the following card. I told him no and asked what he wanted for it and he just told me to keep it.

It looked familiar and I have the base autograph but this is the blue parallel. For those non White Sox players out there, this is former MLB player Larry Sheets son. He's shown some flashes of a decent player. He's a lefty so he was on the roster last year. I like him and was happy to add this auto.

That's about it. I started the sorting around 9 am and finished around 4 pm yesterday so you can see it takes some time. It's been very lucrative for me as well as working for Kevin. So far this year, I've spent just under half what I did last year but have added more than 7400 more cards to my PCS than last year.