The Yount Collector 2017 Year in Review and 2018 outlook

Here we are another year gone.  This year marked a very low point in my collecting in just about every way I collect.  The biggest event was buying a new house.  Late in 2016 I pretty much boxed up most of my collection and moved it into storage so we could get read to sell our old house.  That took longer than expected, but eventually everything fell into place and we moved into a beautiful new home, or at least new to me, in early June this year.  What that meant was a lot more space.  In fact my wife was nice enough to offer up one of the larger spare bedrooms as an office/man-cave/studio.  That also meant I got to unpack, organize, re-organize, re-re-organize, stack, unstack, restack,  you get the idea.  It's taken the better part of the last half of the year to get the office to a point where I could find stuff.  My winter project has been going through my major collections, which include my player and team collections and finally using the tools that the Trading Card Database has to catalog those collections.  I've also been scanning and adding images of anything that need one on the database and that's been time consuming.  I have yet to fully tackle my Yount collection, but it's on the list.

I also took over a year off of eBay.  Both buying and selling.  I started to dip my feet back in this past September selling a few cards and I bought my most recent Yount autograph.  Most of my collection acquisitions have been through luck (opening packs), trades, the occasional justcommons.com purchase (which is now cardbarrel.com for those interested), and my annual COMC delivery.  Actually I would say 90% of my new Yount cards came from my most recent COMC delivery from their Black Friday event.  I had been picking up Yount cards all year.

Last year, by my count and Beckett's, Robin had 139 new cards released.  Many of those were 1 of 1's and very low numbered, but there were still quite a few base cards, inserts, and parallels to be had for a budge collector like myself.  I did not add the HITS Memorabilia cards for lack of a decent checklist and product description.  I'm still not sure if it's just two guys in a garage cranking that stuff out.  But I also haven't taken a lot of time to look into their products, I've just seen a lot of their cards pop up on ebay. I did include the Topps Online 10x14 and 5x7 cards.

As it stands my collection stands at 1130 pieces.  That includes cards, magazines, drinkware, rulers, art, etc.  I've set a goal to get the collection to 1200, but I'm not worried if I don't make it.  I've always found it funny how we put milestones like hitting 100, 500, 1000 in such places of honor.  We humans like a our round numbers. 

As for the year to come.  I still plan on featuring individual cards from my collection on the blog.  I also plan on posting about and adding images of new Yount cards as they come out and adding them to the running 2018 checklist.  I really like the format I've got on the blog and I plan on keeping that up.  My goal is to still have every item on my collection page linked to a featured blog post and it's a project that's still years away from being complete if it ever is.  I would like to add at least one new Yount auto to the collection this year.  I follow a lot of auctions simply to track what prices are doing and it seems like Yount autographs have been dipping in price pretty significantly.  That's not to say that the old products and rarer stuff doesn't pull in decent prices, but I think Robin's autograph is now averaging about $30 a pop, down from about $50 from the past couple years.  And I ended up picking up my Leaf Q auto numbered to 15 for under $20.

I want to thank all the readers who stop by and occasionally leave a comment.  I'm not a writer by any means, but I do love to blog about my Yount cards.

With that said I hope everyone had a great holidays and here's looking to a great 2018!!

The Year in Review - 2016

Well Yountophiles with the release of Panini National Treasures we've pretty much come to the end of another year of Yount card collecting.  This marks the third year I've tried to keep a detailed running checklist for card release featuring Robin Yount.  And while I strive to try and have to most complete list, I know I'm missing some cards.  Most notably are the online 5x7 and larger cards put out by Topps Online.  I do have some of them, but some cards were issued in sets and Topps seems to think that checklist for those sets don't matter I guess.  The other missing section are a lot of the HITS Cards cards.  Also because they don't maintain a good checklist on their website, although it's been awhile since I looked.  That being said knowing the areas I'm lacking I can try to correct as best I can.

Still this year we ended up with at least 217 new cards for Robin.  A lot of those were very limited higher end cards, but the budget collectors also had plenty to chase.  I didn't keep track of how many new Younts I acquired this year.  I probably could figure it out, but meh.  I ended the year with a cataloged 1103 items in my collection.  Not too shabby.  I have noticed discrepancies here and there in my blog list and my master spreadsheet.  The wife and I are in the process of trying to sell and buy a house so most of my collection is in storage, but one of my goals for the coming year is a thorough review of my collection.

Over at the Trading Card Database we ended the year with 5,247 cards listed on the site with just over a third of the cards having images uploaded.  That's not bad considering all the low numbered and 1 of 1 cards out there.

For the second year in a row I've sponsored Robin's player page on the site.

And I'm proud to say I'm the leading contributor of images for Robin's cards as well, it has almost become a mania with me.  I've also started actively adding missing checklists for sets and cleaning up checklists and sets that have sat way to long with out proper card labeling, notations, and teams.


Another interesting trend I've been noticing is that Robin's autograph cards have come way down in price.  Almost 30%.  That's not to say that older issues and some of the rarer cards still don't bring in big bucks, but just through observing lots of auctions I've noticed that the average price per autograph has dropped from about $50 to right around $30.  This was bound to happen with all the autos Topps and Panini have been releasing the past couple years.  But if you're a collector it's a great time to pick up some really nice and sometimes very rare cards for a decent price.

Well my dear fellow Yount collectors I hope you had a great holidays and here's to a great new year of card collecting!

Year in Review

Wow hard to believe the year is really over.  This year flew by.  All in all a pretty good year. This has been the first summer in a long time I've gotten to stick around home for most of it.  Got a trip down to Wisconsin for my brother's wedding and a trip down to Indiana for my wife's family Christmas.

On the posting side I've reached some big blogging milestones on this blog. While most of my other blogs have really suffered from my general malaise in the overall trading card world, my passion for my Yount collection has really kept me going.  It's been  few years now since I really refocused the blog on featuring every one of Robin's cards in it's own solo post so that I can link it to my collection checklist.  I have no intention of stopping that. As a matter of fact I have almost 400 items scanned and drafts ready to go.  I also blew away my previous yearly post total and if I had tried a little harder I might have doubled it.

I also decided to sponsor Robin's player page over at the Trading Card Database.  It's something I've wanted to do for awhile now, not just to promote the blog, but I also wanted to help support the database, as it's  one of my favorite card collecting resources.  I've also made it a mission to try and find as many images of Robin's cards I can to help archive them in the database and to correct and add any card information I find.

On the collection side I really haven't added that many pieces to the collection.  That's due to a couple factors.  One is available funds and the fact that I've reached a point where most of the cards I don't have in my collection are expensive relics and autos.  But I have managed to add a few great pieces I've featured recently.  As it stands the collection holds about 1050 items.  That includes everything, cards, magazines, drinkware, bobbleheads, etc.

The other aspect of the blog is collecting Yount card news. Whether it be new cards, like sorting our the Cooperstown inserts and base cards, documenting all the cards Topps put out in it's Archives Signature Series, keeping up with the fringe card producers like Leaf and Hits, or just finding out something new about something old, like Hostess cards. I want the Yount Collector to be that place that documents, archives, and educates the few of us who love to collect Robin Yount. But I also want it to be a tool if you collect other players and are looking for information on sets, maybe you'll gleam a little info from here as well.

I've also added a link list to other great player collection sites and blogs.  Like 4192 Cards that's all about Pete Rose, The Tim Wallach Collector, The Mark Grace Collector, The Junior Junkie, Collecting Sandy Alomar Jr., and Nachos Grande where Chris loves the Barry Larkin. That being said if you have a blog committed to a player collection drop me a line I'll add you to that list.

I've also kept a pretty up to date checklist with all of Robin's cards released this year and I plan on doing that next year as well.  With National Treasures pretty much being the end of the 2015 Baseball card releases Robin's card count stands at 251, but that doesn't include a bunch of cards from HITS, so when I can figure that checklist out I'll added it. I also updated the Trading Card Database with all of the different variations of the Brewers Police issue cards thanks to Tony L for the checklist of issuing towns and cities.  Right now Robin's total card count stands at just under 5000 cards.  As I continue to add and help correct checklists on the site I'm sure that total will over top the 5K early this year.

I'll have a State of the Blog post soon, yep another one of those.  Thanks for reading.

The Year in Review

It was a good year if you're a Robin Yount baseball card collector. Robin had almost 300 card released with this visage this year.  Sure a bunch of those are really rare and super expensive, but those of use of meager means had plenty to chase and acquire.

This year Robin had at least one card released in almost every issue from Topps and Panini.  As a matter of fact he had 23 cards in Panini's almost last baseball product of the year, National Treasures.

By my count Robin had 294 cards issued this year.  I made it a point to try and keep track of all of them this year, scouring checklists and grabbing images off of ebay.  I myself was able to add close to 40 to the collection this year.

I also hit a milestone by adding my 1000th unique Yount card to my collection thanks to COMC's Black Friday deals.  My biggest additions this year were my Topps Finest autograph and the two rarest base card variations from Topps High Tek.  All of which I thought I got a great deal on.

The large number of cards issued for Robin was helped by him being included in the base sets of both Topps' Allen and Ginter and Gypsy Queen.  Since both sets have lots of mini card parallels.  This year also saw a huge amount of new Yount certified autograph cards enter the market. This lead to a depression in Robin's autograph card prices.  As it were you could expect a typical autograph card to go for about $50.  With the exceptions of the super high end stuff like Dynasty and National Treasures, I have seen Robin's auto prices hovering around $30 when cards are being bid on eBay.


Panini has been putting out some great high end HOF sets.  It's too bad they can't use logo's because that would probably send the cards over the top.  But Robin has featured prominently in every Panini HOF set so that leads to lots of awesome high end cards and a few lesser cards for us mere mortals.

This year also saw the change of format for the blog (Actually I started the new format in 2013, but ramped it up in 2014).  Since the blog began it had pretty much been without direction.  More of a place to store my Yount checklist than anything else and maybe show off new cards I got.  So after contemplating I decided to actually put some effort into what I was trying to do here.  Hence the 2014 comprehensive checklist.  I decided to keep track of new stuff, highlight stuff from my collection with high quality scans and a write up and then link that post to my checklist page.  I also decided to try and do checklists and gallery's of sets that had lots of rare and interesting Yount cards, that I'll never own, but I really wanted to be able to archive the images all in one place.  Basically I wanted the Yount Collector to be a one stop Yount collecting experience and hopefully have some value.

One of my unwritten goals this year was to try and put out more posts in 2014 than I'd put out in all previous years. As a matter of fact I put out 25 more for a total of 117 posts.  Yeah a lot of the posts were single card spotlight's, but since that was going to be a focus of the blog I'll take it.

So I want to thank all the readers out there. And the 25 people that decided my blog was worth following.  And a welcome to Tony L. a fellow Yountophile that I hope I can help out with his collection.

Happy New Year everyone.

CB out.