General Forum

Thank you for the link! I will explore that a little!

Yes, I am trying to get a card of every Red Sox player who has appeared on a card as either a major or minor leaguer. I am down to need a card of only 84 players, excluding new arrivals this year. I put together a list here of who I still need a card of. Since most of the one players I am missing played before WWII and only had one or two cards, I likely will never get to 100%.

There are other sports where getting a card from everyone on the team (who has a card) is possible. NASCAR is one even though many people don't consider it as a team sport and soccer would be another (like MLS or US Olympic Team). In NASCAR, my top 3 drivers all raced for Hendrick Motorsports for all or part of their careers. Since HMS only started in the mid-80's (and NASCAR cards only got annual & mainstream in 1988), I might already have a single card for every driver for the team's history. I also have cards of the owner and several of the crew chiefs. Where that would become tricky is the pit crew guys. Some of those changed every year and they don't really get cards anymore unless it's a pit stop card with all of the guys on a single card. In the early days of NASCAR cards, all of those guys might have their own card. Since about 2000, none of the pit crew get an individual card and are just all together on a single card. That might go back into the mid-90's though. Driver, Crew Chief and Owner all got individual cards until about 2012 or so. Panini focuses purely on the drivers, but they do tend to have some pit stop cards in Donruss. However, they don't usually list the pit crew members on the card and they don't have those cards for every single car that raced that season. For about the first 5 years of NASCAR cards, even engineers, mechanics and the big rig drivers on teams got cards in sets. None of them get cards now and in most cases, it's difficult to even find out the names of those people.

However, I was thrilled to make it a VERY special Christmas for the descendant of one of those NASCAR mechanics a couple of years ago. His wife was looking for the only card her husband's grandfather ever appeared on from 1992 and I was the only person on this site with a copy of it (the grandfather had passed away in 2002). After she was led to me by another member here and she told me the story of why she wanted the card, I only asked for her address and shipped the card to her (still using a bubble mailer as that is my way). I only asked for a photo or video of him receiving the card as a Christmas present in return. The video of him opening that present of socks to find a mint condition copy of his grandfather's only card inside of it was priceless to me. And I know what it meant to both of them just from their reactions in the video. I just hope that any other card in my collection can someday create the same emotions that I saw and felt that day!!! It was the most amazing freebie I've ever sent and the card is considered a pointless common to 99.99% of the rest of the world! The guy doesn't even collect cards, so that was the only one he ever wanted and I was very happy to be able to send it to him.

Crew members stopped appearing on cards regularly in 1994. Crew Chiefs and car owners stopped appearing regularly in 2000...it was my biggest complaint with Press Pass. When they put six crew Chiefs in the 2009 Main Event set it was a big deal. 

Roughly half of the people I'm missing from my project of getting at least one card of everyone to get one in NASCAR history are the crew members who appeared in team sets and All Pro sets. 

Team owners were in the 2010 VIP set for sure. I know it wasn't a common appearance in sets, but they were there. I hated when PP dropped VIP after that year and then dropped Eclipse the next year. However, Fanfare was a fantastic replacement in 2011 as it added a bunch more lower-tier drivers than anything besides the flagship set had provided up to that point. As for "crew members appearing regularly", I have to disagree with 1994. You are correct that they didn't get their own individual cards after that, but they were listed individually on every Press Pass base pit stop card until at least 2010 and maybe even after that. 

I only count it as a card of someone if they have their own card. Not shared with anyone else. I too missed VIP when it went away, I was not a fan of their rebranding they started in 2009...although FanFare was a fun set, it wasn't the same feeling as the earlier stuff. 

It's funny, I was very critical of Press Pass when they were in business...I barely bought anything at all in 2011/12 because I was so annoyed with them...but now that they are gone I actually kinda miss them. 

I'm clearly a lot older than you, but I'm also trying to collect cards from my favorite teams 'back in the day'!  The three teams are the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s, Milwaukee Braves (only as Milwaukee) and Philadelphia Phillies.   The problem with the teams of the 1950s is that there were not cards made by the national brands of very player back then, particularly the poor guys who had the proverbial 'cup of coffee' with the team.  I've expanded my search to include  local cards (Johnston Cookies for the Braves for example) and some higher end 'custom' cards like AROC (sp?) who are clearly trying to fill this void with their cards.  Failing all that, I've searched for autographs, etc.  I even have a letter from one Brave who somehow missed the card market entirely at least by my research.  For the Brooklyn Dodgers, I've concentrated on  the World Series team of 1955, as that is the firstt baseball team I followed to the degree of knowing all the players.  Fortunately back then there wasn't as many trades, free agents, commuters back and forth to/from the minors, so it is possible, if expense, to at least get the strrting line up and the regular pitchers.  For the Phillies, who I still follow, the problem is the later years went there were so many cards and so many bad players on the team.  I decided to try for all the guys who played at the Vet where my daughters and I saw a lot of games.  At least it gives the collection a limit which implies a possible completion.  

Good luck with your chase,  I've found it fun to research some of the more obscure players and even follow what they did after baseball.  You might start that for some of the early Rockies who are certainly doing other things now. 

One of my current projets is collecting team sets (Calgary Flames / Atlanta Flames) of only O-Pee-Chee brand. I've expanded it a bit to include Traded To / Traded From other teams, and if the players rookie card is from another team, but they played for the Flames before that. I suppose this approach will allow me to collect very close to every player who has suited up for them. There's only 640 players between both franchises according to hockeydb, so I might be well on my way.

This is a great idea!  I've been working on hand collated team sets of the Astros, mostly Topps, but also my favorites sets from the 80s and 90s as well as Heritage in recent years.  The site has been a fun way to do it.

This is a very cool undertaking.  I've tried it with the Detroit Tigers, but I'm limited by the fact that there are a ton of players who have appeared in games with the Tigers who either never made it to a card at all or never made it to a card with the Tigers.  This is especially true for players from the mid 1990s to the mid 2000s when the Tigers were terrible and cycling through lots of players at the same time that card companies were drastically cutting the size of sets to pull out of the "junk wax" era.  Some of those Topps sets of the late 90s seemed like they would have 20+ cards of guys from teams that were playoff condenters and winning World Series at the time (Yankees, Braves, Indians, Cardinals, etc.) and 8-10 players for teams that were terrible at the time (Tigers, Royals, Pirates, etc.).  Some of the early 2000s sets helped a bit, especially Topps Total and Upper Deck 40 Man...but there are too many Tigers players who never made it to cardboard to ever have one of every player.