Are these the wrong plastic pages to use?

For my decade stars / binder collections, I’ve been gathering just enough cards for individual players to see if I can display them in a page - maybe my decade stars collections is meant to be more of a passive project, but it's fun to churn out new pages to see loose cards come together by player.

During a card show pit stop last weekend, I wanted to buy some random supplies and there was an opened box of BCW plastic sheets for a quarter each - my go-to pages are usually Ultra Pro, but I'd used up my last box of 100 and to bide my time a little bit, maybe I'll try the BCW pages in case I end up liking it more.

To see if I can get something done through the afternoon this past Friday, I wanted to see if I can finally start displaying some loose cards for a number of subjects - my loose Tom Seaver cards were probably next in line to be displayed in pages since he was at the top of my current list of 'legends' with 12 cards.

I started to pull the loose cards out of penny sleeves to fit them into the pages one-by-one - though it feels like the BCW pockets are a little stiffer and tighter where they just barely cover the cards.

I still remember getting a box of Ultra Pro plastic sheets on eBay back in 2016 with a bad batch of pages - where the middle 4,5,6 pockets seemed ‘short’ and didn’t have a lip where there is a little gap ‘up top’ to cover the cards in their entirety.

For the most part however, the Ultra Pro pages give my binder cards a heftier, snugger fit most of the time - I don't know if I can leave these Seaver cards 'as is' in a BCW page without worrying the cards being subject to the conditions.

I might have wasted $5.00 on a 20 count of BCW nine-pocket pages that doesn’t give me peace of mind - the problem maybe obvious for the cards that have colored borders, but they seem to be spilling out of the page and I guess that is the risk I took in trying these BCW pages out.

A common sense solution for some peace of mind was using penny sleeves for each card, to add a little bit of ‘lip’ that might be missing up top - I just had enough 'still in package' penny sleeves to see if I can rejigger the page with an extra layer of protection of each card.

Maybe the cards end up being a little more secure, but after taking some pictures, the top portions of the cards really spill out a little bit - where these sheets look a little sloppy.

Where these BCW designed for sports cards or gaming cards where the dimensions might be a little smaller [?] - I might be able to use these BCW pages for smaller, odd-sized cards but the plan wasn’t to pick up loose sheets and prioritize all those itty-bitty stragglers unless there was a pressing need to put them away somewhere in the first place.

I might keep trying to play around with these BCW pages - but these are no good for me.

Some decade / binder stars updates Pt.2

Andruw Jones - he ends up being a ‘bounce back’ guy in my binders.

While I don’t believe 'Andruw' is a serious candidate to be inducted into the Hall of Fame any time soon - is he gaining support as a guy who actually has a case, notably when evaluating his reputation as one of the best centerfielders in MLB history either through the eye test or advanced stats?

Ernie Banks - I just don't seek out vintage playing days cards of Hall of Famers, but over the years may just have enough retro stragglers to fill out a page.

Garret Anderson

Mo Vaughn - Angels - he was a decent hitter who struck out his fair share while on the Angels.

Mo Vaughn - Boston Red Sox - he probably didn't deserve to be honored the 1995 American League MVP over Albert Belle but as he blossomed into a superstar through the early 1990s, this was the all-world slugger I was hoping the Angels would eventually get as a free agent 21 years ago.

I could care less either way but I'm thinking whether his Angels pages should go with my other Angels - perhaps they can be hidden away with his Red Sox pages.

Jorge Posada - A Core Four guy, I was never able to get his autograph in-person or through the mail but was able to pull a redemption for a certified autograph.

Tyler Skaggs

Kyle Tucker - he may need to up his walk rate but it looks like he has started to put things together as a future star.

Maybe it's just a random thing, but him not wearing batting gloves during his at-bats - makes him more of a 'real' player to me.

Will Smith - I thought I had all these loose cards of him to rein in but came up with less than I'd thought.

Despite a relatively impressive rookie season in 2019, I don't know if I was ever aware of him enough - to predict he was going to blossom into Buster Posey lite this past season.

Christian Yelich - his hitting numbers came down a bit from previous years, though that maybe due to bad luck and not being able to get on a real good roll during the 60-game 2020 season.

Some decade / binder stars updates Pt.1

I relented to buy a pack of these pages [$4.99] at a Target to see if I display some assorted cards of decade / binder stars - the pages feel a little thinner than the Ultra Pro Platinum pages I’ve used in the past, though several years ago I bought [and had to return] a binder / plastic sheets combo [at a Walmart] with the flimsiest, crappiest plastic pages.

Maybe these pages are not going to be as durable for long term storage but hopefully these aren't completely useless - using penny sleeves would probably help secure particular card (s) in the pages to give me some peace of mind.

I want to see if I can make use of these pages ASAP so they don’t necessarily sit around - maybe my last box of plastic pages lasted about 2 or 3 years just because I wasn't necessarilly gung-ho in displaying the assorted cards that had piled up for certain players.

Lucas Giolito - after being up and down early in his big league career, he has fulfilled the potential he showed as a top prospect.

Eloy Jimenez - maybe the attention went to Jose Abreu and Luis Robert as far as Chicago White Sox hitters, but in a partial season, Jimenez looked like he was getting better.

Keston Hiura - looking for a bounce back season in 2021.

Yoan Moncada - I guess it's no reason to exclude the guy from my binders, but before a spring training game a couple of years ago, Moncada simply ignored me as he signed some autographs.

He was once hyped up as the second coming, but after a good 2019 season and a bad 2020 season - I'm indifferent towards the guy.

Griffin Canning and David Fletcher - a pair of non-Trout Angels guys.

Julio Urias - because of an eBay lot I purchased several years ago, I have at least 40-50 cards of Urias, who closed out the 2020 World Series clinching Game 6 with a 3-inning save.

He was a wunderkind pitching prospect, but after getting hurt and needing Tommy John surgery - his star dimmed a little bit where his cards represented a bloat I just didn’t want to see.

Several years ago, Urias had a domestic violence arrest and was accused before nothing eventually came out of it - he gradually made it back to pitching in the big leagues, still possessing the electric stuff that may make him a starter for however long his arm holds up.

Alex Verdugo - he looks like a player to build upon in Boston, but who knows if he'll turn into a star outright.

I tried to think up players who I had enough cards of and wanted to showcase - I didn't want a bunch of partial pages, where I had less than 9 cards to display at the moment, but I made exceptions in some cases where I expect to pull or find more cards to make a full page.

Cody Bellinger and Walker Buehler - it might be hard to ignore the Los Angeles Dodgers players who helped lead the Dodgers to a World Series championship, so even if I'm not a fan of the team, the players really gel well together and they have fun.

In some instances, I just added new page (s) to an already existing decade / binder stars collection of a player - while I wanted to focus on adding new pages of first-time decade / binder stars guys in my book, I also dug out cards from in my A-Z archives that were once displayed in binders, but were weeded out for space considerations.

Bernie Williams - I don't know why he was dropped from my decade / binder stars collection, except he might have become irrelevant over the last part of his career.

As I tried to rejigger my player binders over the past 10 years, I weeded out certain players' cards for whatever reason - Williams might hot have been associated with the Core Four, but he was an important player during the New York Yankees dynasty run from the mid 1990s through the early 2000s.