A chance encounter at the airport, your favorite team or even a shared birthday, all are origin stories of where the Super Collector finds inspiration.
What is a Super Collector? There is no one definition, but many consider Super Collector to have a singular focus. In the sports card collecting hobby (and for this article) a Super Collector shall refer to someone that collects a particular player or team. Here are origins of three Super Collectors.
A Tale as old as Wax Pack Gum
A story that many collectors find themselves telling as a child of the Junk Wax Era and reaching a time in
their life in which they find their way back to collecting.
As a 10-year-old in 1987, sound familiar, Jacob Dalbol started buying packs of Topps at a local town café. A couple of years later he and a friend decided they were going to pick their favorite player and collect all their cards. Jacob’s friend chose Doc Gooden, and he chose Roger Clemens. “(I) liked the looks of the Boston baseball cap and the Rocket was an awesome pitcher,” said Dalbol.
Dalbol and his friend would go to shows with their pre-teen ten-dollar budget, make trades and open packs. Through his youth he amassed a collection of approximately 300 Clemens cards.
In 1995, Dalbol began serving with the Air Force and then joined the North Dakota Air Guard in 1999, where he still serves today. That is where the familiar story continues with college, work, and a family.
He rejoined the hobby at the peak of Covid and went back to his Clemens collection, to find out there are now over sixteen thousand cards to collect. He was able to purchase a collection and bring his count of Clemens cards up to about 1000. His Clemens collection has now grown to over 3000 unique cards.
In addition to Clemens, Dalbol has added Joe Ryan (Minnesota Twins) to his super collecting. He was attracted to Ryan while watching him take a no-hitter in the 8th inning. It helped that he has always been a casual Twins fan, being from Minnesota and from listening to games on the radio with his grandfather. In collecting Ryan, he appreciates that his cards are available at local shows and are affordable. His Joe Ryan collection has now reached 500 cards and includes over 100 autographs.
Journey of Two Juniors
1993 in Reno, Nevada, an 11-year-old kid did not have a lot of access to baseball. Arizona Diamondbacks Triple-A affiliate the Reno Aces did not begin playing until 2009 and the closest Major League team, the Oakland Athletics are a three-and-a-half-hour drive.
What Marco Bisio Jr. did have was a local card shop only a five-minute walk from his home. That card shop, Advantage Collectibles, was one of his favorite places and that is where he saw his first Beckett Magazine. The person on the cover of that magazine has led to a massive collection of over 15,000 unique cards of that one player, Ken Griffey, Junior.
“After reading about Griffey and his dad, asking everything I could about him and how he played the game, I wanted to be just like him. I am a Jr. I played Center Field… I wanted to hit just like him. I wanted to wear my hat backwards, just like him. I wanted to play just like him!” stated Bisio.
While in high school Bisio worked at that same card shop and through that job he met other collectors and many of the older collectors would help him by offering him the Griffey cards first. He would ask for cards as birthday and Christmas gifts.
After graduation from high school Bisio took a couple year hiatus to work and go to college but found his way back to the hobby in 2002. Over the next few years, he was able to obtain a sizable portion of his collection. He stated that it was a good time to collect 1990s cards since many people were into the game-used relics craze.
Bisio would like to give back to the Hobby and help new collectors learn what it was like before the internet and social media. “These cards are not just pieces of cardboard to me… They are 31 years of memories - Good, Bad, and Ugly. They are my life's work and the things that I will leave for my family when I'm gone. They represent all that was and has been good in my life and something that I want very much to share with my children someday,” said Bisio.
Venturing Into the Past
A super collecting origin story of my own begins with a desire to venture into the past. I was already a collector of my favorite team (Oakland Athletics) and player (Mark McGwire), but as my collecting matured, I wanted to expand into vintage card collecting. I needed more than just a player that had a few cards between 1948 and 1980, but they had to have a story that spoke to me. They also had to have at least one card from my favorite team.
As someone that tries to find humor in everyday life and has often seen the eye roll of those around him with his bad jokes and inappropriate comments, there needed to be a humorous angle, and I had already excluded Bob Uecker. There is one player that may have more name recognition than most Hall of Famers, having never received more than 32 percent towards his own HoF bid and has not played Major League Baseball for 35 years.
With a career starting in 1963 for the Cleveland Indians and ended with the New York Yankees, I had found my man, Tommy John. With his 288 wins and career 3.34 ERA, Tommy John is most well known for being the first player to successfully have Ulnar collateral ligament Surgery, which has since been named after him.
My collection has grown to include over fifty percent of all unique Tommy John cards according to Trading Card Database.
A little Extra
If you are interested in becoming a part of a Super Collector group, reach out to Super Collectors Unite! On Facebook. The only requirement they have is that you have 250 unique cards of an individual player.
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