Auxiliary boxes

Fighting the apathy - with auxiliary boxes.

During a given year, I'm adding, subtracting and basically moving baseball cards around - organizing them gives me an opportunity to play with my cards in a creative way, keeping up to date. How do I see the collection of trading cards I have as a farm system of sorts, where there is classifications [and levels] like a Major League Baseball team has its AAA, AA, A and short-season teams?

A.) Collecting topics box – my bread and butter collecting activity because it is sort of a scavenger hunt, where every card matters. I try to put all the cards I've picked up into a database.

There is no official checklist, so if I see a card fitting the description, I have to grab it or else you may lose for a while - I have to look for baseball card images online to see if there is a card I can find in-person through common bins.

When you sort through cards in-hand, it is nice watching unique theme come together as I am able to classify cards - I'd otherwise overlook.

B.) Cards for autographs box – arranged by ABC order and team, constantly updated.

I need to stick to picking up cards of younger players - guys who are more willing to sign.

As far as veterans who can still be accomodating - I'll see if I can stick with the high-brow set builder products like Topps Allen and Ginter.

C.) Free agent/no-team transaction box – this stack of cards feature players who have bounced around and may still be looking for a team. To thin it out, at any particular time, players' cards can be removed from this box if the player has been MIA long enough, where he isn't likely to appear anywhere.

D.) In-season/off-season update box – traded/free agents/et al; one a set of cards for a particular year covers in-season transactions and another set covers off-season transactions up to the next season's opening day. It probably isn't realistic to cover every update made, but I hope to cover 50-100 updates through individual players' cards.

I figure I can always add on a card of a player I missed later on, though I make to make updates as they happen - I want some kind of cap on the number of cards I have for any particular year at probably around 100-150, without missing any of the 'big moves,' but also covering the more obscure ones [with Major League and minor league players].

E.) Baseball rookie box – I hope to have about four or five rookie represented for all the teams, though I probably don't have cards for every player and may have to hunt them down the following year. Any card before a particular players' actual MLB rookie season is ideal to use and any card released the released after the rookie season. There will be cases where a handful of cards used in a given year's collection will be autographed; the goal is not to have an autograph set, though it is nice to have autographed cards to use for the particular box.

F.) Auxiliary A-Z box – I dump the cards I'm not going to use for autographs [within a season] here and once there is some 'build-up,' the cards are broken apart to be put in the main A-Z archives of cards.

G.) Team box – I dump the cards I'm not going to use for autographs [within a season] here and once there is some 'build-up,' it is sometimes fun to see a handful of assorted cards of one Major League team, sometimes featuring players of different eras, various brands of baseball cards and different years.

H.) Star A-Z box – I've got many cards of 'stars' from the last 20 years in binders, but when I get lazy, this is where I dump base star cards.

I.) Semistar A-Z box – have an 1980s/before section and a 1990s/present section; may lump in cards of the eras' stars if they aren't in plastic sheets yet.

J.) Award winners – I don't want something just cobbled together on the fly, though that may have been the idea. You haven't tracked down certain players and maybe the card types are too broad: non-certified autograph cards, retro cards, maybe beaters, GU cards, ugly subset cards, non award-winning year appropriate cards.