Good Riddance 2024 and the art of hoping for hope in 2025

 

Ah, the way the years bleed into one another.

            Not that I should expect to feel differently waking up on January 1^st, after going to sleep on December 31 (the years of staying up until midnight have long since passed for me). Honestly, I feel the same sort of malaise in the early part of 2025 that pretty much haunted from the summer of 2024 that progressed into such a pit of anxiety from October to the end of last year, that I pretty much gave up on everything aside from just trying to get through my day without having a nervous breakdown.

            I stopped creative writing before Thanksgiving. I’ve been writing poems and fiction since the age of 17. That’s 33 years. For the past two decades I’ve (mostly) gotten up four to five days a week at 4:45 A.M. to get a couple of hours of writing in before I had to go to work.

            That’s all ended.

            I’m sad it’s ended.

            But I even sadder at the fact that I don’t miss doing the work.

            I sure as hell don’t miss 4:45 AM.

            But this is a baseball card/sports card blog, right?

            What do you want to hear my problems for?

            But collecting is a part of that general anxiety that’s really hit me. I probably had the worst (i.e. least fun/least productive) collecting year since I started back into The Hobby in 2019. Other than Update in October I haven’t bought a single card since I dumbly bought a box of Chrome in July. I didn’t even finish the 2024 base/update set. Haven’t bought singles for the PC/Pirates collections since the summer.

            Just nothing.

            Until I started trying to claw myself all out of this before I went home to Pittsburgh in December. There are good days and there are bad days.

            This past week has been a setback for me.

            But I wanted to at least start writing about cards again…or whatever it is I do on here. And while home for Christmas, I made a pilgrimage to Cranberry Township, in the northern Pittsburgh suburbs, to the Baseball Card Castle, which, hands down, is one of my favorite sports card hobby shops.

            The store is as old school as you can get. Glass cases throughout the front of the place. Battered and old showcases full of old baseball cards. Hobby boxes and old wax behind the counters. Pennants hanging al over. Posters of Pittsburgh sports heroes on the walls. The back of the Baseball Card Castle has shelving full of boxes of completed sets for the four major sports, going as far back as the early 1980s.

            It felt good being in the Baseball Card Castle.

            It felt right.

            I grabbed these two guys.

            The Mazeroski rookie I’ve been wanting since…well…since I was a child. The Baseball Card Castle had three under glass in a showcase, the first two quite a bit above my price range. But the third…the third fit the ol’ wallet just right. The same could be said for the 1979 TCMA Pro Japanese Baseball card for Sadaharu Oh. I’ve been wanting a card of the all-time Home Run champ for a number of years. I’ve always been intrigued by this set as well.

            You can find out why HERE.

            Both were welcome additions to the PC. A

            I got lucky this Christmas as Santa (okay my way) brought me a couple of blaster boxes. One each of 2024 Update and Stadium Club. Both were a fun rip. And my wife kind of has the Midas Touch when buying my cards.

            I started 2025 by buying myself I product that I enjoy but seems to garner a lot of (at times warranted) criticism from other collectors.

Topps seems to drop the ball a lot of the time in the archival continuity of the product. It doesn’t really rub me the wrong way, but if you’re a collector who’s really big on the company maintaining accurate fealty to the product, I don’t begrudge your complaints. For me, it’s a chance to rip and collecting an archival product that has both older and current players and doesn’t bog me down with seeking out short prints.

            I’m not wild about this year’s design choices.

            And there were a lot of inserts.

            24 of them.

That’s 3 packs worth of cards to an avid base collector such as myself.

I also managed to help a fellow collector finish his 1989 Donruss set this year and received these wonderful custom cards in the mail.

I don’t know what 2025 is going to bring for me. I hope it’s better than last year. I hope to keep a lot the anxiety and other demons at bay. As for my creative writing endeavors, we’re almost ½ through January and I have little to no desire for it. Let someone else get up at 4:45 and write poems and novels no one wants to read. 

I’ve done it long enough.

I do want to re-engage with The Hobby though. Collect more. Write about collecting more. I know I’ve made promises about The Blog, but consistency just hasn’t been my strong suit lately. I have a few posts coming up, so I’ll at least be consistent here for the next few weeks. I’d like 2025 to be the year I really re-committed to collecting.

I already like the 2025 Topps base design.

But I’m not getting fooled into trying to build that set by hand.

Anyway, thank you for taking the time read this.

I hope you’re all doing okay, or as okay as you can be.

 

Thanks for reading! Happy Collecting! Happy New Year!