Carded - March 24

Scanning the new Beckett on my lunchbreak the other day...their cover story is on player collectors, but like so many other 'stories' published in the pages of Beckett nowadays, once you actually get to the story it's nothing more than a few graphs, some photos and maybe 200-300 words. Oh well. Besides, it seems that one of the qualifying factors for a great player collection for them is sum value of the cards, which seems to me like a needless statistic...maybe that figure is there just to give the rest of us perspective on how much the passion has consumed the collector.

I've always been a big Fred McGriff and Eddie Murray fan. McGriff because he was, for the most part, a classic over-looked superstar. Like most of the national media, I have a complete big-city, east-coast bias that does not include Toronto. If McGriff had played his career on the Yankees (by whom he was drafted) or the Red Sox, he'd have been forefront in the media conscience for the past twenty years. Instead, he played in fringe cities like Tampa Bay, Toronto, and National League towns like San Diego, Atlanta and Los Angeles. He could very well be the first Hall of Fame inductee with a rookie card worth less than ten dollars. I always liked Murray because he was tough. I liked Steve Carlton and Jim Rice for these same reasons.

But the one thing I never did was move my player collections to the Internet. Don't get me wrong, I wanted to. I just never found the energy. I never had the commitment. Luckily, there are others to fill the void. Here are a few great player collections, some I've always admired and others I just found today.

Collecting Ichiro We are talking a seriously high level of unintentional comedy here. But also a fairly large Ichiro collection. Good times will be had by all.

Thrill 22: The Will Clark Gallery This is one of my favorite sites. What else can you say? Clark was the reason so many little kids got hooked on cards in the first place. The Links page also has great listings for other player collections.

Mark Grace Collector I had heard of this collector a while ago, but just found the site this morning. Good to see he understands the necessity of including co-star cards in his collection (cards where player appears on another player's card).

Don West Really, this wouldn't be a list of player-related websites without the Don West website, as there was really no bigger player. I can't think of anyone else who could almost convince me to buy a 1976 SSPC set at 2AM...