Happy birthday to me! Hometown: A breakdown.

It's my birthday and I'll cry if I want to, or not! To start things off, I did NOT make that card show this past weekend. Family started in on me for my birthday Friday night to engage my time covering the entire weekend. So that is that. Family most certainly carries a higher priority than a card show especially if they are catering to me :). Lunch on Saturday (3 of us), lunch on Sunday (5 of us), and still yet a dinner coming this Wednesday (2 of us).  

Now for a teeny weenie rant and some humor. For years, decades even I have tried to STOP my local siblings (Kathy & Jack) from all of the holiday and birthday gifting. I've tried to get them to do a name draw for Christmas rather than buying presents for everyone (I'm the youngest and I'm pushing 60! They won't. I thought I had them calmed down on birthdays, let's do breakfast or lunch and we're good. Nope. My sister and her family took me to lunch after church yesterday my choice of restaurant, they bought me card, and a cake and even slid a $50.00 Walmart gift card in it. Now from a conservative standpoint (and we all are by the way) there are three of them (Kathy's family) and one of me. That math doesn't work. I thought we had this one handled, but not this year. Don't get me wrong, I believe in gifting, I do it all of the time, just I don't limit it to specific day. I see something that screams a loved one's name and I get it and give it immediately (most of the time). Maybe that is why they did what they did as I gifted the three of them a couple of months ago. Now on to my brother. My brother (72 next month) has always been a fuddy duddy, when it comes to Christmas and birthdays. You send a card or a gift he will not for any reason open them until the actual day. Me....I get a card I opened it when it comes to Christmas I display them. Again I digress. Jack on our morning visit after he walks his dog (she loves me more than she does him) stopped by and delivered his birthday card to me (he is taking me to dinner in two days), wasn't necessary. But he did and that is the humor portion.

Here ya go:

The above picture is from a few weeks ago after we won 1st place on trivia night (what made this win special was the team that wins most often is a 10 player team, and this is just me and my bro. We only play every two weeks. This was 2 wins in three visits, we lost the last time so to be updated we are 2 out of the last 4 the visits. We play this Wednesday....

There was also a $50.00 bill tucked inside too. I tried to scan that, but I guess my scanner says nope that is illegal. Serious it would not scan the money. Oh well, live and learn (that's a good thing). I now have $100.00 to spend on baseball cards to further celebrate my birthday. I'll spend today browsing ComC and Sport Lots. (I already have 200 cards in my ComC inventory, might as well add a few to it before having it shipped. I am waiting on a 600 card Sport Lots order to ship, I requested it a full week ago hasn't left yet and I have 50 cards in my cart....This is twice in a row, they are getting slower and slower while ComC is getting better and better. Fingers crossed.

Okay to the actual post!

Turning the focus away from me.  Nick Vossbrink won the Carter auto. congrats!

I recently spent a good bit of time on TCDB updating some of my collections. I did a major boo boo and it is going to take quite a bit of time to get those 2 boo boos corrected, but little by little I will. With that said I was doing some updating and "monitoring" the system member stats. One day I hope to be the top member in total cards as well as baseball specifically, and absolutely for Braves cards. You all know that I have lots of cards. Just getting the cards that are "keepers" is going to take a long time to accomplish the baseball task for sure. With a million plus cards in the NOT keepers aka. duplicates/trade boxes is another thing altogether. I may never get those input into their system. It would be a daunting task although then I could actually have a FOR TRADE section. My problem is that the system will not separate them from my "keeper" collections. I don't ever want to see them outside of the for trade only. I never want to see them while I am looking at one of the many "separate" collections that I have set up, which is how I did the boo boos to begin with. 

Now you may be wondering what does any of this have to do with HOMETOWNS. Well, while updating my Braves team sets which is where the ultimate boo boo occurred and trying to fix those one set at a time is daunting. I have about 30K dupes to get out of there. In short I am having to go card by card to eliminate the extras. At the same time I realized that all of those annoying copyright variations especially Topps * and **, E or F or D, and the Donruss with period no period etc. are hindering me from the top Atlanta Braves spot. So I decided to make those right.... as right as I could. 

When I got to the Donruss especially the late 80's I noticed something about the home towns on the card backs. At first It seems like half of all of the cards were from Florida or Georgia. Turns out that was way off, but I did do a breakdown and Florida was in the #2 spot. I am sure you can guess that there are some states that were not represented at all plus there was many from outside the continental US.

Here is the Breakdown after considering the base set is 660 cards and the first 27 (Diamond Kings) do not show a home state, nor do the checklists and a few special cards within the set. I am certain that as players move from team to team that home town changes but for the 1989 Donruss the following is what is listed.

California: 137 players.

Florida: 60

Texas: 49

Arizona: 28

Georgia: 25

Dominican Republic: 24

New York: 23

Puerto Rico: 22

New Jersey & Missouri: 21

Ohio: 19

Michigan & Illinois: 15

Massachusetts: 14

Maryland & Venezuela: 11

Washington: 10

Kansas & Pennsylvania: 9

Tennessee, Wisconsin,  & Louisiana: 7

Indiana, Mississippi, & Minnesota: 6

Alabama & Kentucky: 5

North Carolina, Utah, & South Carolina: 4

Nebraska, Oregon, Colorado, Oklahoma, Nevada, & Connecticut: 3

Canada, Arkansas, Virginia, Hawaii, Virgin Islands, & New Mexico: 2

The rest have one each:

West Virginia, Mexico, New Hampshire, Panama, Idaho, Montana, Curacau, Wyoming, & Iowa.

California shouldn't have surprised anyone nor Texas, but FL and GA sure did me. 

I know everyone just gets all giddy, mushy inside, butterflies even when discussing junk wax 1989 Donruss, but this was a distraction for me while I was working on fixing my boo boos (one card at a time). 

Inc., Inc , *denotes, *denotes* are the 4 variations on the 89' copyright. Turns out that I have basically all of the first 3 variants including my Braves.

I also decided that I am going to have to redo my 80's and 90's Fleer and Donruss binders. Probably give them new pages and put all of the variants in together as one card. Right now all of those very old pages are double bagged. I will cut those older pages up and use them for PWE mailings.