Welcome to Mark Wing's Baseball Card Page

Currently, I am taking an extended break from baseball card collecting. While I can't say there is any one thing that caused me to lose interest, I think the following were contributing factors:

1) The MLBPA decided to interject themselves into the hobby in order to make *improvements*. One of *brilliant* their ideas was to limit the number of sets and card companies. With consumer artificially choice limited, card companies increased the size of their sets and increased production runs.
2) The post office revamped their rates. While I suppose this was a smart business decision for the post office, it dramastically increased the cost of trading through the mail.
3) I collected primarily Topps sets. The quality of the cards has diminished. The card stock is inferior to previous years and Topps idea of *variety* now includes creating 100s of variations of the same card.
4) While I was never in collecting for the money, I insist on getting value for my money. Between the higher cost of postage and lower value of the cards I was collecting, it was getting harder to justify making trades online to fill in gaps. This assumes I can even find another willing trading partner.
5) My vintage collection was killed by success. I have most of the commons from 1969 and up. The cards I am missing are the $10 to $100 cards. As much as I love collecting vintage, I am not ready to increase my hobby budget so that I can fill these gaps.

My site still has some collecting resources including my Condition Guide and Want List Helper.  The Want List Helper is a small application I developed to help me manage my want lists.  I find it useful and hope others will also.   Finally, I developed the Condition Guide so help traders who are not comfortable assigning grades to less than NRMT cards.

When I was collecting, I found a great way to build up my collection was through online trading. My favorite site is the The Bench.

If you like what you see here, would like to contribute or wish to make a trade, please drop me a note.


Thanks for looking. Last update June 4, 2011