Hobby Rabbit Holes

 If you are like me you've probably been down a hobby rabbit hole a time or two. One thing leads to another and all of a sudden you are are buying a 300 count lot on eBay of something you weren't interested in 5 minutes earlier.

I want to reduce my collection. I promise I do. The other day I was thinking about how to do that and I thought I would start with cards of members of the 500 Home Run Club. About 4 years ago I spent several months sorting out a significant portion of my collection by player alphabetically. I figured I'd start at the top and so I grabbed the stack of Barry Bonds cards I have and started counting. 272.

My original thought was to do 100 cards per 500 Home Run Club member. Then I thought 99 would be better since that would be 11 sheets of 9. Then I came across about 40 of the 2005 Topps Barry Bonds Home Run History cards and I thought that would be a cool project. About 5 minutes on eBay told me that it would be pricey and be fairly difficult to acquire the 762 cards. Plus then I would have those 762 cards, plus another 272 Barry Bonds cards and I am trying to downsize.

So then I thought I could just add to the 272 cards I already have and get to 762 unique Barry Bonds cards.  762 is of course the number of home runs that he hit. I posted on Twitter and was given the idea of putting together a collection of 762 cards featuring each pitcher that he hit a home run off of. That's a pretty cool idea. I had thought about something similar before. My idea was to have one card for each of Nolan Ryan's strikeouts, but then I realized how much money I would need to spend in sheets just to hold the 5000+ cards.

Okay, back to Barry Bonds. I spent another 20 minutes or so on eBay looking at large lots. There is a lot of 2200+ Barry Bonds cards for around $180 shipped. The listing doesn't have many details and the pictures didn't either so I messaged the seller asking him how many unique cards there were. His response was "No idea sorry thanks". I won't be pursuing that any further. My guess is there are maybe only a couple hundred different cards in the lot.

I did find a few other decent lots of 100 - 200 different Bonds cards, but who knows how many of them I already have, plus I'm on a budget, so I'm not really looking to spend several hundred dollars on this project. Maybe I'll just make it a long term project and pick up cards from dime boxes until I get to 762. Maybe I'll just pair down the 272 to 99 and call it a day. What do you think I should do?