In the immortal 'Field of Dreams' speech, James Earl Jones' character says "America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time." In certain ways, my collection has embodied that same sentiment within my own life. My love of baseball started around the age of seven, when I first started in little league. I got to go to the occasional Mariners game with my family, but not as often as one would have liked given that we lived a few hours from Seattle. I believe I made it to my first game in 1993, with my Grandpa and cousin. I brought a baseball and managed to get it signed by outfielder Rich Amaral. I went to a couple of Buhner Buzz Cut nights, both times with my mom, who also got her head buzzed. By 1998 I had fully committed to my collection being all Mariners, all the time. I started tracking everything in the very spreadsheet I use today. I started my account on the still reasonably new Beckett.com. My username, an homage to the size of my collection at the time: JS2300. A few years later I made my way to Seattle full-time and very unexpectedly ended up working for the team. This happened to be not long after I stopped collecting cards and started focusing on memorabilia, so that was good timing since I was about to have a much easier time getting my hands on some. I would continue working for the team for a few years, and when I left, I ended up taking a break from baseball for a few years too. Eventually I would lose my mom, start a career, and otherwise get to a very different point in life. And so it was that I found myself getting immersed in baseball once again. It was as if I'd dipped myself in magic waters.
All of this has been a very long way of saying that I hit a huge milestone today. With the arrival of the mail, and opening a 2021 Topps Update Memorial Day Camo Logan Gilbert /25, I have hit 40,000 different Mariners cards. While there really are no comprehensive checklists, this works out to something over 1/3rd of the roughly 120k Mariners cards. Even more than that if you remove the 15,000 or so unlicensed cards that I don't collect. Better still when you remove another 15,000 printing plates, because I can only get so many of those (though with over 300, it means I have about 2% of them). Point is this is a pretty big number to hit, and something I am exceptionally proud of. To anyone reading this, thanks for coming along on the journey.
