Full Circle

 My Kyle Freeland collecting experience is starting to enter the stage that all collections of mine inevitably enters, slowing down. I've assembled what I think is a solid collection of his cards and I'm pretty content with how it is right now. There are a few other cards of his out there that I think would be nice to get but they're kind of rare and I think I'm good for now.

Among the last few cards of his I added, there was one that took me back to where I originally was in 2014 when this blog was first starting out.

Yep, an all too familiar design.

It seems forever ago that I was once working on both the New York Highlanders team set and also sending people T206es to form "Club T206". Good times, but little did I know that it would be dead and gone by 2016 as prices for vintage started inflating in a hurry. A decade ago the beat up T206 commons could be had for anywhere between $10 to $20. Nowadays you'd be lucky if you got a deal around the $30 to $50 range for T206es for the same, or maybe even worse, condition.

Maybe I can use whether or not T206es are overpriced as a benchmark when responding to polls asking me if I think America is in a recession.

Being the sucker that I am, I picked up a vintage T206 at these higher prices a little after Freeland to help beef up this post a little more. The Ray Demmitt is the first New York Highlander I've acquired in quite a while and it cost me about 1.5x what beat up copies of this card I had on my watchlist all those years ago were going for.

 

Also picked up a non-Highlanders T206 of Frank Arellanes too. It doesn't help my Highlanders set but having T206es lying around is never a bad thing. Especially when it's a Boston Red Stocking and also a very rare Mexican-American player from this time period.

Maybe one day I'll revisit the T206 Highlanders project, given my collecting habits I'll either go nuts and assemble the rest in like a week, or get bored and move onto some other random thing.

Even so, no matter how much my mind wanders from that project I still do get a kick out of how I've got these little pieces of cardboard from over a hundred years ago before baseball was even considered a noteworthy sport.

To this day, Jack Chesbro is still one of my favorite legends in the game, and someone who's routinely given me a great score in Immaculate Grid whenever the Pirates, Red Sox and Yankees are involved.

Man, who'd have thought that Freeland would be sending me back into a headspace I hadn't been in since 2015. It was nice, and maybe just a teeny bit surprising given how overused the T206 design is in recent times, but unfortunately none of the other players I've collected these past few years made it to these designs. At least not yet.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care :).