One Million Cubs Project Is Getting Organized

Since I began the endeavor to collect one million Cubs baseball cards, organization was an afterthought.

Initially, I was entering each card from the collection into a spreadsheet. After one month and only 10,000 cards entered I felt it was not something to focus on.

Over the next couple months I had no idea how I even wanted to sort the collection. Players? Team sets? I didn't know. Eventually, I decided I at least wanted to do some player binders of my favorites: Javier Baez, Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, Ryne Sandberg, Dylan Cease, Kerry Wood, Mark Prior, etc.

Then began the process of choosing which binder. The binder idea was born from a trip to my local card shop when another customer came in and bought six binders. These are the brown or blue binders that say "baseball card album." That's the route I wanted to go.

I have a few of these binders in my collection, so I did a test with my Dylan Cease collection (the only Cubs player collection currently in a binder). I didn't like the way it turned out.

I've seen several collectors use the white binders. I like this for a couple reasons, mainly because I can customize labels on the spine of the binder. Plus, I just didn't like the way the labels looked on the spine of the baseball card album. Costco had a 4-pack of 2" binders for $10. Eventually, I will test these out with a label on the spine, but believe this is the binder direction I'll go.

What about the rest? After the select player binders, I'll still have thousands...hundreds of thousands of Cubs cards. Even if I pull the team sets out, I'll have 700 of each 1989 Topps card. Player sort it is.

A trip to the Columbia Hobby website found the perfect answer. Card dividers. These are plastic and sturdy and look really nice. I used some Avery labels and found a perfect font to print on the dividers giving them a good look.

Now I have direction. It's just getting to the point of sorting everything. The mailbox was empty Monday, and I'm catching up on more packages to ship out and sorting some other lots.