Happy Birthday - Blake Corum

Blake was born on this day in 2000, making him 23 today.

NFL Debut - N/A

Years Active - N/A

Cards on TCDB - 177 cards (up 142 cards from last year)

Cards I have - 4 cards (up 2 from last year)

PC Rank - #98 (#1425 overall)

TCDB Rank - #5

Where they came from -

• Sluggo (3 cards)
• Man Cave (1 card)

Happy Birthday Blake!

Last Weekends show pickups

Kevin and I ran to our LCS today and dropped off our sorting as well as picked up some more. I also went through his dime and quarter boxes and threw a small stack together that he let me have. I also picked up an autograph of a player I didn't have an auto of and he's one my favorite former Sox but you'll have to wait until I get that post as I'm still trying to catch up from last weekends shows.

The last post, other than my sorting post, was cards I got at the Lake Station show but what Kevin bought and gave me out of it. It was a slow show and I got bored and went shopping and picked up a few more for myself, paid for them and everything.

I actually got these at the Fort Wayne show last Saturday. Jason, another dealer who has a shop in Warsaw, wanted to do some shopping around so he asked me to watch his table for a bit, which I did. He said I could have a $40 Andrew Vaughn card but it was graded and I don't keep graded cards in my PC. I told him I didn't need that just to help him out but I found these 2 in his cheap boxes so he gave me these instead.

The Billy Williams is the Holo variation and is my 122nd card of him. The Mike Schmidt is one of the phone cards for us older folks, you younger folks can Google it. I like these unique things so I grabbed it up as well.

The table next to us at the Lake Station show on Sunday had a bunch of Vintage. He had a couple of tupperware containers with cards thrown in them that were vintage. I looked at the price and they were $2 so I started stacking them up. After seeing some of them, I looked again and only 1 of the tupperwares was $2, the others were $5 so I had to put all those back and just kept the 2 above for $2/each.

They both go to the Seaver Collection. The 1984 True Value on the left also goes to the White Sox Collection and the 1970 on the right goes to the Vintage Collection as well. These 2 give me 576 cards of Seaver.

I also bought from 2 other tables, I'm going to combine the rest of the post so I can put the players together.

The 2nd table I hit had a bunch of stuff at $.50/each which is where these 3 Sox cards came from. The Mercedes is a base, the other 2 are color parallels.

I picked up these 2 Kwity's at that same table. The Chronicles on the left is the Pink parallel. Both of these also go to the Michigan collection since they are wearing their Maize and Blue.

I picked up these 4 of David Ojabo, all are parallels. The top 2 are a Mosaic Silver and the Purple from Donruss. The bottom row is the Purple Phoenix and the Holo Donruss. The Phoenix is also numbered to /125. These 4 bump up the Ojabo Collection to 27 cards.

I picked up this Purple Shock Daxton Hill as well as this base Huntchinson from that same box. The Hill is my 15th of his. The Hutch is just a base but he's been a stud so I can see why it was in the same box.

I also picked up this purple shock of Haskins from the $.50 box but I grabbed this relic from the 2nd table. He had autos and relics for $3 or 4/$10 which I grabbed more than 4 so he discounted the stack.

The base Nico came in the $.50 box and the Hill autograph came from the relic/auto box. It's my 3rd card of LaVert and also my 3rd autograph. This one is the gold parallel.

I picked up a couple more Michigan autos in that box as well. My 3rd autograph of Ryan Glasgow out of 4 cards and my 1st autograph of McKeon out of 6 cards.

This is my 3rd autograph of David Long out of 17 cards. It's really nice to see him in the Maize and Blue because there is another David Long jr that went pro the same year so it's easy to mix them up. I've picked up the other one a couple of times only to find out it was the wrong one when I went to enter them on TCDB. The Denard is a thicker card and is serial numbered to /112 and is the Blue parallel. This is my 111th card of Denard.

2 more Maize and Blue autographs or at least a helmet on the Bredeson. The top one is the black parallel, I already had the red one and those are the only 2 cards of him. The Chesson, however, is my 25th card of him and my 6th auto.

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.

Freebies and new PC

I spent most of the day working on sorting cards for my LCS. I took back what I had finished last week and then picked up 2 more 3 row boxes and a bag of cards. I had to sort the bag of cards and the 2 3 row boxes I had to put in player lots. I got almost everything done, I'll probably finish up tomorrow but I took some photos and videos of my process and I'm going to work on a post showing what all I do for him.

However, today, you're going to get more cards from Sluggo. Technically, I got them from him but we were at the Lake Station show and I was shopping around. I saw a $.50/each box with a lot of color parallels and inserts so I told Kevin about it. He went over to the table and bought the whole box for $70 which was a great deal for us. So, as I always do when he buys a box, I went through it grabbed everything I need, this is what I came up with.

Did I mention there was a row of autos and relics as well? When Kevin asked, he was only asking about the 2 rows but once he bought it the guy through the lid on the whole box and handed to him. The first card is the rainbow parallel and the second is the Silver. The bottom is a dual relic of Demonico, not really a huge fan of relics anymore but it doesn't mean I won't add them to my collection either. Sadly, this was the only relic (or auto) that I needed in that row.

I picked up 1 other White Sox card, this is the sepia refractor of Moncada. At least he is still with the Sox, so far. It is my 227th card of Yoan. 

The rest were all former Wolverines as most of the box was football.

I've been picking up quite a few of Nico recently, including these 2. The left is the retail version, the right is Chronicles.

I've actually been getting quite a bit of Chris as well. It's nice there are so many Wolverines getting cards in the pros now. The left is the base Prizm, the right is the green Mosaic.

These 2 give me 53 of Evans.

Another guy I've been getting more cards of. This is his rookie Optic.  Last I heard he was on the IL, not sure for how long.

A couple more of Daxton Hill as well. The Prestige Galaxy on the left and the base Mosaic on the right. Always better when they are in the Maize and Blue.

2 more base of Ojabo. A Mosaic and a Donruss.

I'm realizing now that even though be bought that box for all the color, I came away with a lot of base, including the 2 above. I mean they are still shiny I guess, but not parallels.

This is a parallel however, it is also my 1st card of Mazi Smith. It is the Green Disco parallel from Donruss Elite. So another player collection started. It is my 131st PC, this is getting out of hand.

Last but not least, just alphabetically, I grabbed this parallel of Charles. It is the Holo parallel.

You'll notice that some of the above guys I didn't give how many cards I have, that's because I have more of them to come, in future posts. The next post will be the cards that I actually paid for at the Lake Station show.

Happy Birthday - Nick Eubanks

Nick was born on this day in 1996, making him 27 today.

NFL Debut - N/A

Years Active - N/A

Cards on TCDB - 70 cards (up 1 card from last year)

Cards I have - 3 cards (same as last year)

PC Rank - #92 (#1846 overall)

TCDB Rank - #2

Where they came from -

• Hollisters (1 card)
• Sportlots (1 card)
• the National (1 card)

Happy Birthday Nick!