the Replacements, pt. 1

I've had the idea for this post in my head for quite some time now.  But I wanted more than one card to show off before putting my fingers to the keyboard and spelling out the details.

Many of you have been following faithfully the travails of my serial numbered insanity set.  There are some out there such as Pat from Hot Corner Cards who take every opportunity to hook me up with the latest and greatest that they pull (Pat, I received your latest PWE, thank you again!!!!). 

With a recent trade completed with faithful blog reader Steve D., I now have a 2nd card to use as a replacement to start evening out the distribution of cards between teams.  If you're not sure what I'm talking about, let me explain.

I keep a huge spreadsheet with the details of each card that comes in for the SNI set.  I document the set name, player name, team name and the name of the blogger/other source that sent me the particular card.   I also have a 2nd sheet on that same file that looks like this....

American League
East
Baltimore Orioles:		20
Boston Red Sox:		34
New York Yankees:		45
Tampa Bay Rays:		39
Toronto Blue Jays:		42
Central
Chicago White Sox:		30
Cleveland Indians:		38
Detroit Tigers:		27
Kansas City Royals:		31
Minnesota Twins:		30
West
Houston Astros		25
Los Angeles Angels:		44
Oakland A's:		43
Seattle Mariners:		28
Texas Rangers:		44
National League
East
Atlanta Braves:		37
Miami Marlins:		30
New York Mets:		45
Philadelphia Phillies:		31
Washington Nationals:		43
Central
Chicago Cubs:		33
Cincinnati Reds:		35
Milwaukee Brewers:		30
Pittsburgh Pirates:		34
St. Louis Cardinals:		41
West
Arizona Diamondbacks:		32
Colorado Rockies:		25
Los Angeles Dodgers:		30
San Diego Padres:		40
San Francisco Giants:		29

As you can see, the distribution of the cards among the 30 MLB clubs is quite skewed, with teams such as the Orioles, Rockies and Astros being in the lower half of the 20's, while several teams are well into the 40's.   (these totals are current as of this post BTW). 

Posts like this one will help to smooth out the "injustice", and start to balance the teams a bit.  Now I don't expect anyone out there to go rushing to their card boxes and hunt for cards to help me out with this, because it's kind of hit and miss for everyone to go and look at a particular serial number that I already have (1106 for example) and find out that they have a card of one of the teams that is lower on the totem pole (Giants possibly) to replace the card #1106 that I have (the Mets Bobby Parnell is in this spot).

Hopefully my long winded explanation was readable...

Now, here's the two examples that I do have...the first was a card that I showed off a few weeks ago, a great "donation" from Brian at the Play at the Plate blog.

The A Gone yellow printing, naturally serial numbered 1.  What is this replacing?

A 2007 Bowman Chrome Gold refractor of Javier Vazquez (man that name is tough to type), #'d 1 out of 50.  Now the Padres really didn't need any boosting of their numbers, because the Gonzalez card is now the 40th out of 50, and removing the Vazquez drops the White Sox to 30 out of 50.  But in this case, the switch just had to be made, you know what I mean??  Maybe Jedi Jeff could use the Vazquez...

Now, the 2nd "replacement" card comes courtesy of the trade I made this week with reader Steve D.  He proposed this card below as part of a bigger trade...

David Carpenter of the Astros, serial numbered 1010.  I was definitely interested because the Astros were so short on cards, but I didn't want to take away from another team with a lower number of cards.  So I looked up 1010 on the spreadsheet and voila!!

Mike Adams of the Texas Rangers was already in that slot.  With the Rangers having 45 cards already, I was happy to make that swap, so now they are down to 44, and the Astros have hit the halfway mark of 25.  Maybe Brian at PATP would be in need of the Adams card....

Give yourself a gold star if you've read this far in the post, because this was a very long winded attempt at explaining the "replacement" card idea. 

Thanks to both Brian and Steve for the replacement cards, and possibly the start of an idea to create a little more balance to the SNI set.

Thanks for reading, Robert