Organizing my Ken Griffey Jr Card Collection Part 1: Raw Cards

[music] Welcome back to Cards and Comics, guys. Today I want to talk a little about organizing your collection. And for the first time ever, I am going through and organizing my uh Kangri Jr. collection. I am uh cataloging the entire collection, the raw cards, the graded cards um and putting them in boxes, sorting them by year, um and then creating a spreadsheet with all my cards entered in a and a uh sort of estimated price based on, you know, current comps. So, I'm doing all this, right? And so, it's it's a massive undertaking. You know, I'm well over 500 cards. I've already cataloged uh a Griffy, you know, unique cards already. So, I have quite a big collection just from a total volume perspective. But, you know, the big thing is just to be able to find a card to to be able to see what I have, you know, like when a card pops in value like the 90, let's say the 95 bubblegum card did, you know, do I have any of those in my collection? Can I find it quickly? you know, if I want to get one graded or if I want to sell one to to to buy other cards. You know, just not knowing if I actually have the card, not knowing where it's at. It's very stressful and I think, you know, just organizing makes me feel better. So, for my I'm going to talk this video is going to be about my raw cards, uh the ones that aren't top orders. So, what I've done is I've separated out cards that are worth more than $40. Uh put them in, you know, in one touches in in holders that look like this. uh the Mac Pros and so you know that's where and then those are in a in a different box. These are all cards that are $40 or cheaper and um they're raw. They're in top loaders. And so I bought this case uh Micro Mako on mic mro I believe is the name. Uh the the vendor uh got this on Amazon. did a lot of researching on what I wanted and this met a lot of my criteria and I'll show you why in a second. Um, I also have been using these cool King Griffy Jr. logos for all my boxes. Uh, this came off of a seller on uh I think he's on Etsy. He's on a few different sites. You can he's got Instagram and he makes some custom Griffy stuff. And so I use these stickers uh for my boxes for Griffy collection. That way I know exactly what boxes have the Griffy cards in them. Um, and then I also uh because this box came with dividers, but the dividers were too short for top loaders. So, I bought these tall top loaders from BCW. And I'll show you how I use them in a second. So, this card, this box is magnetized, so it just folds over. You open it up. You can kind of see everything sideways. I'm going to reposition it to go the other direction. Hopefully not knock everything over. Um, it's loaded the card, so it's pretty heavy. Um, so, yay, I didn't knock anything over. And I'm going to open it up the way it normally would go. And you can kind of see how I have it kind of set up. [snorts] and kind of zoom in a little bit and you can kind of see how I have it set up a little bit. Now, um, so what I've done is, you know, I've sorted by year and this box did come with these foam inserts and and at first I was didn't think much about them. I'm like, okay, well, I don't know how I'm going to use them. Um, and I thought, well, unless I had the cards, when I first saw them, I'm like, well, unless I have a row that's almost completely full, like, they're not going to be useful. They are extremely useful to the point where in my next video where I'm going to show my Mac Pro boxes. Um, I'm actually going to look to buy some foam to use them because you can do some cool things with them. But first of all, um I did create, you know, I did sort everything by year and I I use these uh top order, these tall dividers. I pit them in a top order. And I do that for two reasons. One is it makes them a little bit taller, right? It gives them a little bit more height. That way you can clearly see the numbers. So when I put it in here, it stands out a little bit more. So, I just put this tall divider from BCW and a top loader. I just wrote on them. Now, if I was more professional, I would maybe make a sticker or use like a paint pen, be more creative. I just use a Sharpie. In future, I might do like something cool like try to incorporate like Seattle colors or whatever, but I didn't. Um, so I just did, you know, I just did a Sharpie, you know, just to to start, you know, um, and you can see I have very few cards from 90 to 19, 1990 94, 95, 96. It starts to get more and more every year. And then here is just 2000s. I don't even have the 2000s sorted by year yet. I just have them all in one big grouping. But it is a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be because as a collector I would stop with Griffy around the 90s. In fact, that was sort of my whole point was, you know, and a lot of Griffy collectors don't collect anything past 1999. Now, the 2000s are about 50/50 it looks like about with Griffy cards and and a red or minor uniform. So 2000 seems like a year you would say, "Okay, well, I'll collect some 2000s." But no 2001s and and beyond unless he's in a in a Seattle uniform. But I do have quite a few cards from later than 2000 that are just a Griffy card uh in reds uniform and still cool, still collectible. So that's sort of how I have them. Now, how this foam insert really useful? Well, one thing is you can angle it so that it creates pressure. So it keeps the cards in place and as you pick up the box, move it around, your cards don't fall around and slip around and just move move everywhere. But once you want to sort through the cards, all you have to do is just straighten it back out and now you can sort and flip through your cards. It creates a great way to basically have this ability to, you know, sort flip through your cards and uh not have to really do much in a way of like, you know, pitying pressure so that they don't move around after you get done flipping. Now, you know, I'll go through a year. Uh let's go through 96. So, you can see I got them in order sort of by, you know, set names. Here's Aurora, but it's just sort of like, you know, Donner Elite, Excel, Finest, Laser, Metal, Universe, Pacific cards, you know, I've just got them kind of Pinnacle cards, SPX, uh, Top Stadium Club, Studio, Tops, there's a Hobby Masters. So, that's like all my cards for 1996 that are raw so far. This is not every card I own raw. Um because again I said every card that's over $40 is in a separate box. I also have boxes of cards that are worth $400 plus dollars. So those cards are in a different box as well. So I am starting to interchange some of these cards in different boxes. And it's not going to be the same when I'm done as I'm doing right now. But it just gives you an idea how I'm trying to sort and organize. At the end of the day, when I get this all done, this top of this box is going to I've got a Griffy sticker I'm going to put on top of here. Um, that's going to be really cool. So, the whole entire box top will have a a Griffy sticker and to go with the U logo here. And it's just a lot more fun to collect now when I have a place to store everything and a strategy. And even if I got, let's say, I go nuts and buy another 500 raw griffies, you know, I can put them in a box like this. I can organize them. I know how to create the headers. I know how to, you know, sort. And it just makes it where I was like, I got a place to store everything. Now, the box looks cool. Uh, again, 36 bucks for this. I think these dividers you I bought a 10 pack of these and so I got way more than I need, but that was like 14 or $15, I think. So, yeah, it's a little investment and the money, but honestly, $36 for this box is pretty darn cheap in my opinion because it's a very nice box. It's got, you know, felt on the inside. It's got magnetic. It's very thick. You can see how, you know, the faux leather on the front. I mean, you know, it is what it is. Like, it's it's sturdy. I'm not going to be taking it to card shows. I doesn't need to like survive, you know, travel. It just needs to hold up to just me sorting cards, putting it up and down off my shelf. And, you know, it's a lot more fun to have cards that are organized this way. So, this is how I'm doing my raw cards under 20 under $40 in value. Um, there's still a lot of fun cards in here. I mean, my 99 cards, you know, I go through these and, you know, I can pull up like, you know, like uh some Tops Gallery. Uh I think there's like Metal Universe cards in here. Yeah. Magnetic Fields, Diamond Dominators. So, it's like there's some 25 $30 cards in here. Um and cards that are very cool. I just did the video on, you know, cards under $40 and a lot of them are in here. So, now I know where to find them if I need to go back and get them. uh if I want to grade anything in the future if grading ever becomes more available uh right now. But, you know, it's just like it's fun to have raw cards and store them in a way that's easy to get to and easy to find and and sort. Now, um if you want, I can put in the comments um you know, links to everything I I purchased here um to do this, but again, it's basically you don't have to put stickers on your box if you don't want them. Uh you could do different box you know I've got different boxes I use for other purposes but this you know for the volume of cards I had this fit perfectly um you know using these dividers and handwriting the number the years just it all worked out uh the way I really wanted in my head how I wanted you how I had it planned and it came out pretty good. Uh, again, in the future state, maybe I print stickers or do something a little more artistic for the years, but other than that, it's it's a pretty cool way of doing it. Um, and I'd be interested to see how other people do this kind of stuff because, you know, we're all kind of finding ways to organize and do things um better. Um, and when you have good ideas, it's great to share them. So, let me know your thoughts and comments, how you would do it or how you've done it, uh, what you think of how I did it. and uh let me know and I'll see you next time in Cards and Comics. Bye. It's like a term at the time. I think all right.