For those of you that follow my ebay page, I have started to sell off some of my McCutchen collection. At last count before selling things off I had nealy 3,900 unique cards of Cutch (3,876 to be exact).
Andrew McCutchen will always be my favorite athlete. I really don't see that changing. I followed sports and trading cards until I was a teenager (mid 90s). I stayed out of the hobby and sports entertainment in general until 2005 when I attended a baseball game between the Pirates and Phillies. You can revisit my origin story here.
So if Cutch is my favorite athlete and I self proclaimed to have built the largest Andrew McCutchen sports card collection (even getting the attention from Cutch himself by following me on Twitter), why on earth would I start to sell some of it off?
Financial reasons? Yup. I have had some difficulties over the past year due to health reasons. I damn near tore my achilles last year mere months after buying my first home and was out of work for nesrly 4 months. Because it wasn't a work related injury I couldn't return to work until I was able to perform all my job functions (I have a physically demanding job) so yeah...that sucked. Then I have had not 1, but 2 epic bouts with kidney stones that landed me in the hospital for nearly a week at a time. So between those two health related financial problems I started to unload some cards.
Pure hobby enjoyment? Yup, that is another reason why I have started to sell off some of the stuff. I never attended the National, but would attend small local sports and collectible shows and if I am being perfectly honest I never got much enjoyment of those shows. Often times I could find the cards I needed of Cutch on eBay for cheaper. I didn't collect much besides him in terms of the hobby.
Mental anguish with the collection? Yup. Trying to keep up with all of the new releases and the parallels... oh the parallels... was nearly a part time job. It was several hours a week to catalog what was coming in, still needed, uploading pics, etc to maintain the collection. It just wasn't fun. It wasn't stimulating anymore.
Change of scenery for what I am collecting? Yup. I just talked above about my lack of interest in seeking out Cutch cards locally and the frustration with maintaining a digital catalog with what I owned, but I have rediscovered a new collecting adrenaline rush and that is comic books. When I was out of work and unable to walk for nearly 4 months I spent a lot of time rereading my old trade paperbacks (graphic novels) and it reignited my love for the comic book medium. Same for when I was in the hospital for several days on multiple occasions with the kidney stones. I love the comic book medium. I have attended a few small local shows and attend a flea market every weekend seeking out stuff for rebuilding a collection of some of my favorite titles and it has been a lot of fun. Add to it the ease of diginltally cataloging the collection with apps like CLZ and Key Collector and the beauty of not having 27-50 different parallels for each new release every few weeks it is a lot of fun. Yes comic books have 1-5 variants each month, but I don't feel compelled to grab every variant the way I felt compelled to grab every parallel for Topps Flagship or Panini Prizm. It's weird in that I am content saying yes, I own Spawn 344 or Daredevil Volume 2 issue 5 cover A and thats good enough for me. I don't need the B covers or C covers or Virgin (logo less) variants.
Hobbies should be hobbies.
When they take up too much of your time, they become like jobs and I don't know about all of you, but I am content with having just one full time job. That's enough for me.
So where do I stand with the Cutch collection now? I have sold off probably 400 cards and some very big heavy hitters (2009 Rookie Card Bowman Chrome Superfractor 1/1 for example), but I'm ok with that. Many years ago I received a custom build display case that can hold 100 slabs or roughly 150 toploaders or some combination there of. My goal is to one day own just enough Cutch cards to fit in that custom case. I plan to include cards from every team he has been on so it will have basically a greatest hits of his career, but I know it will take a long time to resell what I have bought for the past 15 or so years.
With that said, if you are still reading this blog, please leave a comment below and I will show off some of the cards I have sold over the past year and talk about the dozen or so cards I have gotten over the past 12 months. Yes...I did buy some cards over the past year, but it wasn't many at all.
