Storing your Team Collections...One Man's Opinion

One of the things I did during my few months away from blogging was a complete inventory of my Rockies cards which I had never really had grasp on how to store and display.  Some of you may know, but I am relatively new to the team collecting game.  I mentioned in one of my first blog posts that I never really had THE team growing up, so I was mostly just a set collector.  Even when I reentered the hobby I stuck to set collecting for a while.  Then I finally decided to pick a lane as it were and become a Rockies collector since they had been one of my favorite teams since 1993 and my overall favorite since 1994.

Anyway onto the point of this post, which is my particular way of storing my team.  The first choice was boxes or albums and that to me was a no brainer.  Gotta be albums. 

In my mind I had two options after that, by set or by player.  Storing by set would be the easier option and would be fairly attractive in pages, but I decided to go the more time consuming route of arranging by player.  I like it better because if I am curious if I have a player's rookie card I know immediately because it is on page 1 rather than having to search through set after set to make sure I didn't forget an earlier appearance.  Additionally, I think it further moves me away from set collecting and toward being a team collector.

In around 60 or hours, I transformed my hodgepodge of boxes into a collection of alphabetized, chronological Rockies.  When putting the players into pages I first separated all the players of which I had more than 9 cards and paged them up.  That was easy, but then I had to figure out a cutoff point.  I didn't have enough pages to give each player their own page, nor did I want to cram them all together on a page.  I decided to make the cutoff point 3 meaning if I had 4 cards of a player they would be on a page by themselves.  With the three of fewer players, I went alphabetically and went three players to a page.  Whether I had 1, 2, or 3 cards, that player would be on a "page line."  The next question I had was whether to separate "non-Rockies," (they appeared on a Rockies card, but never in a game).  I decided yes they should be separate, because they aren't true Rockies.  The final problem was multi-player cards.  With those, if there was one Rockie among the group it went with the regular player cards.  If there were two or more, they went to a team section at the end.


For those of you that have hung around reading this drivel for this long, here are a couple of rewards.

There now wasn't that worth the wait.

My question for you other team collectors is:  How do you store your team's cards?