A bit of housekeeping on a blue Sunday

Well, THAT certainly could have gone a lot better, but it's over and there's still 11 games and a Big Ten title to chase.

Anyway, because I spun this blog off from Too Many Verlanders I've finally got around to separating my player wantlists and player collections so I'd have more stuff organized over here.

On the top bar you'll now see a few new Pages.  The first is my Singles/Players wantlist, most of which was taken from the TMV list (so that's only baseball over there now).  Although it's probably obvious, this is a list of all the Wolverines players I collect, as well as images/links to COMC versions of some singles I'm interested in (and definitely don't have--I keep this list very up-to-date) to give you guys ideas of what I like.

Next is a direct link to my TMV trade bait page since there's no reason to duplicate that.  It's something I need to beef up a bit, but it has pretty much all of my better cards available for trades right now.

After that is Player collections, which is intended to show off the stuff I have of my three current supercollections--Bill Freehan, Rich Hill and Zach Putnam--as posted on Picasa, plus link to my Google Docs checklists of those three guys so you can see what I have (or have incoming) should you decide to send me anything of them.

Finally, I made a separate section for showing off any nameplates and rainbows I've completed.  While I've got a few things in the works, I've only completed the Cazzie Russell nameplate, but that's a perfect place to show it off, no?   Hopefully I'll have more to add to that section soon.

I hope these new pages/links make things more useful for the few of you that check in over here sometimes.  Thanks in advance for anyone that helps me with any of my PCs and projects!

Zach attack

I'm so excited!  I'm so excited!  I'm so...SCARED!

As I did with Bill Freehan and Rich Hill earlier this week, I decided to put together a supercollection checklist for Zach Putnam too since I'm basically going after all of his stuff anyway.  Right now, including 1/1s, he only appears to have 78 cards (though many of those are low serial numbers!) so it's not as much of a hassle trying to get after those as well.  Click the image below to see what I have, have coming in and need and please let me know if you happen to have any of them.  At some point I'll throw links up on the sidebar or tabs at the top for easy access to all three checklists and Picasa Web Albums as well.

An embarrassment of Riches

I have way more Rich Hills than Mario Manninghams, but I couldn't name my blog after Hill since it didn't fit with my homage to fictional Simpsons movie "Too Many Grandmas," after which my other blog was christened.  So while Rich doesn't have the honor of being this blog's namesake, he's my #1 baseball hit leader, and second only to football star Jake Long in the overall PC.  That, and today was a big day for the former Wolverine hurler as hit #50 arrived in my mailbox fresh from a Blowout seller:

Rich Hill 2008 Topps Triple Threads Sepia triple jersey auto (#09/75)

I worked out a mutually-agreeable deal with the seller and nabbed this beauty of a triple jersey/auto, my fourth such version from that set so far (out of an apparent 18), including a "base," Emerald, and White Whale version.  They've all come at pretty reasonable prices, especially considered how much of a premium people have to pay to pull them.  Hell, I'm often surprised they don't arrive with huge dings in them from people throwing them at the wall after yelling "I PAID $200 FOR A BOX OF THESE AND PULLED RICH FREAKIN' HILL?!"

Well, someone's loss was my gain, and now I have half a century's worth of Hill hits!  Please have a look at my scanning-in-progress selection of Hills in my PC, as well as the checklist detailing my pursuit of his supercollection.

Stay tuned for more on my supercollections as cards continue to trickle in!

Oh, and one other quick milestone I should mention:  please welcome this here blog's 100th post!  Thanks to all of you who actually read it and comment, and of course, to Jeff who wrote a good share of those himself. I'll do my best to keep content coming, but definitely look forward to more stuff come football season very soon.

A step in the right direction: player collections

I've got a lot of different projects going on right now, both in terms of player collections and getting organized.  Well this weekend I brought both of those types together to assemble my first complete checklists for a couple of my players I collect:  Bill Freehan and Rich Hill.

While this project is in its early stages--by which I mean I think I'd ultimately like to have each item in the lists link to a scanned photo of that card--I'm very happy with where I've gotten so far.  I picked those two players since they're the ones in my PC I'm closest to wanting to "Supercollect."  Like many of you who do this with one or more players, I'm not as strict about what that means, such as not worrying about getting every 1/1 of whomever I'm after.  I just see them both as more attainable because their total number of cards isn't as ridiculous as many modern players are thanks to the explosion of sets in the 90s-aughts, plus the onset of the relic/auto craze.

So if you have any interest, please feel free to click either player below to get an idea of how I've organized things and see if maybe you have any help for me with either player!  I've made sure to note if I have any cards of each guy incoming or pending so as to avoid wasting time for everyone involved.  I also separated out the 1/1s in their own sheets for simplicity.

If I find this goes well, I may put up similar collections in my Google Drive, just without the Supercollecting idea around those players; that way I can still show off parts of my collection and give people an idea of what I already have.  If you get the urge, please let me know what you think of this project as I'd love to get some feedback.  Thanks for looking!

2012 Blowout intermission: getting organized with Google Docs

Here's a quick post just to show off a little project I did this morning to get myself more organized.  Up until today, I was keeping my Michigan PC stats in an Excel spreadsheet stored on my Dropbox so I could get to it from anywhere.  I decided that was sort of decent, but not as useful and high-tech as it could be, so this morning I ported everything over to a Google Docs sheet, which can be accessed publicly right here, as well as from the "Oosterbaan Fieldhouse" sidebar on your right.

While this should be more useful to me, ("yay clooooud...") I hope it's of some value to some of you too, either out of interest in my PC, or because it interests you in doing something similar with your own PC.  I realize quite a few of you already use either this method or something equally as useful such as Zistle, but for those of you who don't or are more tech-challenged, I thought this could be both insightful and a way to use my day job skills to be helpful.  Plus, now I can do cool stuff like this:

Not bad, eh?  So if any of you find this interesting, or would like help setting up something similar, or just want to put in your two cents, please leave a comment below!