It’s that time of year again. The National Baseball Hall of Fame has three new members, so it’s time for me to move some of my baseball cards around. My C.C. Sabathia, Ichiro Suzuki, and Billy Wagner cards go from my “Potential Hall of Fame” section to my “Hall of Fame” group. It also would be a good time for me to evaluate my entire collection.

While I don’t have nearly as many cards as I used to, I still have way too many. A stack of 50 cards is around an inch thick, so using that as my scale, I figure I have somewhere between 2300-2500 cards.

Every so often (but apparently, not often enough), I get out my storage box and cull through my cards, discarding most players whom I don’t believe ever will be in the Hall of Fame. At some point a few years back I decided I didn’t need a bunch of cards of guys like Kurt Bevacqua, Bob Dernier, Gregg Jefferies, or Bob Walk, so I got rid of the bulk of my collection.

My collection comes down to four basic categories. In addition to the Hall of Fame and Potential Hall of Fame groups, I have a group labelled “Disgraced Potential Hall of Famers.” This is the section of my box where I exile guys like Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, Álex Rodríguez, and Pete Rose. Who knows? Maybe someday a few of those guys will get in, and I will be all set.

About a third of my collection is a conglomeration of Atlanta Braves cards from various years, including complete sets of the 1966 and 1969 teams from Topps. I’m also hanging onto several older Topps cards of random Braves like Felipe Alou and Mack Jones. I no longer buy new cards, but if I’m strolling through an antique mall and see older Topps cards of guys like Ed Mathews and Joe Torre, I will snap them up if the price is right.

As I mentioned in a post last month, I am partial to the 1966 Topps set, so I’m hanging onto several cards from that year for no apparent reason. I have quite a few high number cards from that set that my pal Lee Mathis gave me over 30 years ago. He told me that in his younger days, he bought a few packs, opened them, put them in a cigar box, tucked them away in a drawer for safe keeping, and forgot all about them. He stumbled upon the cards while cleaning out an old chest of drawers and thought I might like to have them.

Back in the pre-eBay days, the best way to check the value of a card was to look it up in the Beckett Baseball Card Guide. Apparently, Topps didn’t print as many of the cards I got from Lee as they did the rest of that set, and I quickly discovered that Lee had given me several valuable cards. All the cards were in mint condition, and included in the stacks was a beautiful Willie McCovey card that, at the time, listed for around $200. Even the cards of common players like Gene Oliver, George Smith, and Roger Craig were going for upwards of $50.

After seeing the value of these cards, I took them back to Lee the next day and told him that I couldn’t accept them because he had several valuable cards in his cigar box. He said, “Baseball cards? I don’t have any baseball cards.”

Maybe I’ll finally get rid of a few of those cards…or maybe not.