Straight Outta P-Town: An Overview

When P-Town Tom offered some free cards so he could purge his collection, I jumped on the chance to pick up some Cubs.  What I did not expect was the volume of cards coming my way.  The packaged I received looked something like this:

That's an 800-count box full of all unique Cubs cards.  Actually, I think there might have been one card duplicated in there.  What was Tom thinking?

He was even kind enough to have all the cards sorted by year and brand, which made things much easier for me.  I decided to look at a timeline to see where the majority of cards were coming from.

Here we have the 70's (a few) and the 80s (which only went until 1987).  Each stack represents one year of cards.

After a 1987-1991 hiatus, the cards pick up again for the rest of the 90s.  1993 and 1994 were hit hardest in this box.

Here are the 2000s.  There should be some goodies in here, since I collected exactly zero cards that decade and am still catching up.

And here are the 2010's.  The biggest takeaway for me from this picture is how close this decade is to ending already.  Seriously, 2012 cards still feel like yesterday to me.

So, for all of those cards, I had to have a bunch of them already, right?  Well, let's take a look at the numbers.  I don't have them all organized my way and put away yet, but since they were organized by year and set, it made it easy for me to put them into TCDB.  Here is my collection before:

On the right, you can see that I had 1764 unique Cubbies when this package arrived.  After a few days of entering cards into the collection, this is what it looked like:

I'm now at 2340.  That means that from that big old box Tom sent me, there were 576 cards I didn't have already.  Wow!  I didn't expect a number nearly that big.  Using TCDB, learned that Tom sent me .05% of all known Cubs cards.  That is really above and beyond in his generosity.

I'm still scanning, sorting, and storing all of these cards.  There were so many that it made me rethink my sorting of my Cubs collection anyway.  I'll be posting more from this package as I work my way through the cards.  Thanks a million, Tom!