Some News For The New Year

I've been wracking my brain, trying to come up with a clever way to come out and say something, but I think I'm just going to have to go ahead and say it.

2024 was the last year that I'll be buying baseball cards.

Actually, that's not COMPLETELY true - I'm still hoping to knock off the remaining cards in my want list.  And I'm expecting Topps to release a Topps Now team set for the Premier 12 Samurai Japan set.  But I don't intend to buy any other baseball cards - NPB, KBO, ABL or MLB - from this point on.

I've made this decision for a simple reason - it's time for my wife and I to start seriously thinking about downsizing.  My parents had lived in their house for almost 40 years when my mother passed away in the summer of 2023 at age 89.  It was a major undertaking - mostly done by my sisters and their husbands - to get the house cleared out and ready to go onto the market and move my 89 year old father into an independent living facility.  It really brought home to me that I don't want to put my kids through something like that.  I have something like 85,000 baseball cards and I'd like to have some control over where they end up.  

I should mention that I have no plans to sell anything just yet and I'd prefer not to dispose of my collection piecemeal.  So, please, I don't want to hear from anyone asking to buy my Ohtani cards and nothing else.

I do intend to continue writing the blog for now.  I'll probably write a little less frequently than I have been lately - I was on a kick to set a personal record for most posts in a year in 2024 and I made it - just barely.  I'll try to still track what new sets are being announced - I just won't be writing about them when they come out.  Frankly, with the fact that there aren't many changes in BBM's main sets from year to year lately, I was running out of new things to say about them.  And I was quite happy when I realized that this post was the last time I had to try to explain the Fusion set!

I used to collect minor league cards and paid close attention to who all the prospects in the MLB farm systems were.  When I switched to collecting Japanese cards, I stopped following the minors very closely.  I worry some that I may do the same with NPB now that I won't be collecting the cards but we'll see what happens.

It's going to be strange not getting any more cards.  I started collecting baseball cards in 1975 when I was ten years old and, with the exception of the years I was in college, I've collected ever since.  So 2024 was pretty much my 50th year collecting which makes it a nice round number to stop at.