Junk Hockey Comes to the Rescue, Unexpectedly

 

I stumbled across something interesting on Yahoo Japan Auctions a little while ago. There is a seller, not a guy who specializes in cards, who for some reason has an absolutely insane mountain of junk wax era (1990 to 1993 ish) hockey cards. It looks like a horde put together by some Canadian 30 years ago that somehow found its way to Japan.

Hockey isn’t big in Japan, so it kind of caught my eye. Why was this here? The cost of shipping tens of thousands of junk wax hockey cards to Japan is way more than the cards are worth, so you just don’t see stuff like this here. 

The seller had broken some of the bunch into lots of two to three thousand cards each. No thanks, I’m not a hockey collector. But there were also a couple dozen binders full of cards being sold one by one.

These binders were being sold for 1000 Yen ( about 7 bucks) each and caught my eye. Not for the cards, but for the binders themselves. They were all pretty good quality binders and each had about 60 to 70 ultra pro sheets in nice condition in them. Buying those on their own would cost several times more than that, and I realized what a bargain these were. And right now Ultra Pro sheets are somewhat hard to come by here in Japan. So I bought five of them.

I chose the binders not based on the cards, but by looking at the photos and judging which ones had the most Ultra Pro sheets in them. I now have several thousand cards from the 1990-91 Upper Deck and Bowman (ugly) sets and the 1991-92 Upper Deck, OPC and Pro Set sets. I am in the process of removing them from those pages. This is an annoying and time consuming task. But it is worth it, since this allows me to do some long overdue bindering of some of my vintage Menko and Calbee sets.

This is so great. In one fell swoop I have enabled myself to binder so many sets that until now have been scattered about in random boxes. Which was just wrong.

I only have two problems now. One is the massive pile of junk hockey cards that are now in my possession.  Space for cards is already at a premium in my house and these are simply going to have to go, but I have no idea where. These cards were available for sale on Yahoo Auctions in nice binders for almost nothing for months with no takers until I came along, so selling them or even giving them away is going to be a long shot. I have to give some thought to that. If I was these cards, I would be feeling very apprehensive each time cardboard recycling days in our neighborhood come along.

The other is that while all these binders and pages are top quality and in nice shape the binders all say “Hockey” on them. There is no rule that says you can’t put baseball cards in a hockey album of course, but  its one of those inconsistencies that is going to nag my brain every time I see them. I’m a bit of a cheapskate when it comes to supplies though so this is something I’m willing to live with.