2025 had its ups and downs, both personally and on the grander scale, but it was a year of hard-earned lessons that I believe will prove valuable in the future.

I have three collecting resolutions for 2026:

1. Gather the remaining 7 cards I need to close out the 1995 Select Certified Mirror Gold football set (my Jerry Rice is pictured here). It’ll be the first set I’ve hand-collected since 1996 Score football almost three decades ago, and it goes toward my greater goal of collecting in a more focused manner.

2. Finish collecting the other half of the 1995 Topps 1000/3000 Yard Power Boosters football set, of which I currently have 18 of 40 cards remaining.

3. Launch a collecting-focused podcast that has a unique theme that I believe will resonate with a wide audience. It’s still very early in the planning stages and I’m open to the possibility that I abandon the idea, but if things go my way I hope to launch it this time next year.

Excelsior!

Fun Fact: Bob Hamelin retired from baseball in the middle of a game.

After middling for a few years following his 1994 Rookie of the Year award, Hamelin found himself playing AAA ball with the Toledo Mud Hens. During a game he grounded out then cryptically told his coach that he “was done”. At first the coaching staff thought he meant he was simply taking himself out of that game, but later when they met him in the clubhouse he clarified that he meant he was done playing baseball. An inside source told me that Hamelin made the decision to retire about ten feet out of the batter’s box on the play.

When you know, you know.

Mike Piazza’s drumming hobby helped create what I argue is the greatest sports moment ever captured on film.

During the opening of the 2005 Home Run Derby, the band Alter Bridge played a lengthy ballad over player video introductions. Halfway through their set, Mike Piazza and Johnny Damon (another player who had a rock star aura) were invited on stage in a pre-planned bit. The problem was…neither of them were given instruments or microphones. What resulted was several minutes of them wandering around awkwardly on stage, with Piazza playing air drums and Johnny Damon getting disturbingly close to the guitarist during a solo. The video link is below and the ridiculousness begins at 2:40.

https://youtu.be/lZnvVrtPqyI?si=tes3Vzd2KtYhzCtP

I see these kinds of eBay listings all the time: Somebody selling a mass-produced junk wax common for hundreds or thousands of dollars while claiming that it’s a rare error card.

It’s one thing if an uninformed seller makes a good-faith mistake; it’s another thing when each of a seller’s listings claims their card features some generic error. It’s bad for the hobby and bad for selling platforms.

Anyone have experience with this kind of seller, either online or in person?

I recently acquired a sealed original press vinyl copy of Public Enemy’s 1991 album “Apocalypse ‘91”.

This album generally marks the end of Public Enemy’s original style of layering samples to create their songs. Tracks like “By the Time I Get to Arizona”, “Can’t Truss It”, and “Shut ‘Em Down” continued their production and lyrical excellence.

A sealed original press of this album is difficult to find, but there are no solid metrics that quantify just how rare it is. The math is so much more uncertain than with sports cards. For example, when you pull a Panini parallel numbered to 100, you know that 100 copies exist and maybe 10-20% of those will forever remain in sealed packs, so 80-90 will eventually reach circulation. Calculating the number of sealed vinyl copies of this record is much more of a black box. North of 1 million copies were sold, but that includes CD, cassette, and vinyl - the last of which was fading from common usage. Perhaps we estimate that 25% of all copies sold were vinyl; that means about 250,000-300,000 vinyl copies exist. How many of those were never opened? Impossible to tell. If media grading takes off like I think it will, eventually we’ll have a more clear picture of rarity.

I’m planning to get this graded and slabbed next year.