The Best Ways to Organize Your Sports Card Collection (Without Spending a Fortune!) - Ep. 3.29

Organizing your sports cards probably wasn't the first thing you thought about when you got back into card collecting. I get it, it's not cool, but we're about to make it fun. Happy hobby. I'm David Gonz. Build a better sports card collection with a real world budget. Listen, we'd all rather be ripping packs and chasing rookie cards and finding bargains and check tracking down awesome cards. We'd all rather be doing that. But sometimes you got to organize your card collection. If you ever spent 15 minutes looking for a card you know you own, then you already know that a good organization, a good system can make the hobby a whole lot more enjoyable. So today we're going to talk about the best ways, the best ways you can organize your sports car collection based on how you collect, what type of collector you are, whether you're a budget collector, investor, a flipper, or someone who's building sets. Or maybe it's a combination of all of those things. Your ideal organization system is probably different than everyone else's. And before we're done, I'm going to show you a card sorting trick based on a computer science algorithm that sounds impossible, but once you see it in action, you will never sort cards the same way again. It's going to blow your mind. Listen, am I, am I over promising? Maybe a little bit. But it's a really cool card sorting trick that you might not know about that's going to change your organizing going forward. Today we're going to, we're tackling something that every card collector eventually faces. It doesn't matter if you've been collecting them for six months or for six decades. At some point your collection reaches critical mass. You start with a few boxes, then a few more. Before you know it, there's cards in big old cardboard boxes and small boxes and long boxes. And in little tiny boxes, you got cards and binders, you got cards and drawers, cards in your desk drawers, cards on top of your desk, cards and displays, cards set. You've got cards everywhere, every place, all over your closet, stacks and stacks, boxes on top of boxes. It gets out of hand. Then all of a sudden, a prospect gets called up and he has a great debut, a great debut to his MLB career. What an opportunity for you to sell that autograph card that you pulled two years ago out of Bowman. You're like, now, now's my chance. I need to get that on ebay. Let's do, let's make some money. Let's do it. But you're like, I know, I got it. Somewhere I just gotta track. I'm pretty sure. I think I. This is your chance. Sell it, sleeve it, grade it, trade it, whatever it is. Now is your chance. But you gotta find it first. Today's episode. It's all about organizing your sports car collection. But here's the thing. I don't think there's one perfect system for everyone. I think the best organization system depends entirely on what you collect and why you collect. Are you a budget collector trying to build sets? Or are you a budget collector trying to put together an awesome comeback collection without spending a fortune? Are you an investor who's treating cards like an investment portfolio? Maybe? Or are you a card flipper and you want to try to move inventory as efficiently as possible? Each one of those Topps of card collectors has different goals, which means each one deserves a different organizational system. And so why does having a good organization matter? Well, there's. There's plenty of reasons. But good organization, the main reason, it saves you time. Time equals money. Money equals cards you could have bought with that money. So it makes sense. It keeps you a good organization. Card organization keeps you from buying duplicates because you forgot you already own a card. That'll save you some money. It helps you finish sets faster because you can immediately see what's missing. That'll save you time. It protects your best cards from unnecessary handling because you're trying to. You put in here, and then you put in here, and then you gotta. And you put it over in this box, and then you change your mind, you go put it in this Pandora then you change your mind again. It saves all of that. If you ever decide to sell part of your collection, you'll already know exactly where everything is because you have a good card organization system. The alternative is what I jokingly refer to as the treasure hunt method. Now, we all know what that is. Every box is a mystery. You've got cards jammed in there from four or five years ago from a random blaster you bought and a random mega box and maybe a hobby box. Some in here and some in this one. That's not good. Every stack of cards on your desk, it might contain what you're looking for. Or it might just be it's another pile of 1990 Donruss baseball. We've all been there. It's not uncommon. As a matter of fact, back in 2021, I was buying too many cards in too short of a time period. And I wasn't really worrying about my organization. I just wanted more cards. Give them to me. I want them. I want them. So because of that, I ended up buying two Shay Gilgis Alexander rookie cards. And you know, for me, I'm a one and done type collector, they call it. I buy one card, my the best card, I want the best card I can get of that player and then I'm good. So usually the best rookie card of that player, maybe the best grade, whatever, just the best one and that's all I want. And then I move on to another player or another sport, another player in a different sport. So to me, to have two Shea Gilgis Alexander rookie cards, that was like wasted money. Now granted, sga, that's a bad example because that second card that I had, it turned into a a nice profit because I sold it in 2025 and was able to buy something else with that money. So it worked out. It worked out in the end. But this has happened plenty of other times with far lesser players on far lesser cards. But you get the point. Bad organization means bad time management. So let's, let's talk about the different Topps of collectors. What are some things that different Topps of collectors, how they can help with their card organization? Let's first talk about the group I know best, the budget collector. That's what I am. It's the way I've collected for years. When you're watching every hobby$, the goal isn't to create a museum. It's to build a system that's inexpensive, easy to maintain, and simple enough that you'll actually keep wanting to use it. Right. My recommendation is to first organize your cards by sporting baseball, football, basketball, hockey, wwe, whatever it is, organize them all by sport. And you kind of understand where I'm going with this. Once you've done that though, sort each sport by the year and then once you've sorted them all by year, then sort them by the set. So for example, all your 2025 baseball products, they stay together inside that year. You might have Top Series one, top Series two, Topps Update, maybe Topps Archives, Topps Heritage Tops, Allen Ginter all together but separate in that 2025 box or two boxes, whatever it is. Now, once you know where each set lives, finding a specific card becomes much easier and incredibly easier than your stack them and just shove them anywhere. It's. It's a much better system that alone inside each set, I like to separate the stars and the rookies from the commons. Now I'll say this, the stars and the rookie stars, the best cards I completely pull and I make a whole separate stack for them all together and a Whole nother box. Those are like my superstars cards. Like those are the best cards of that year that I got. Maybe those are top loaded and, and they're all set in a whole separate system altogether. In the box though are maybe prospects, good rookies, maybe decent, or maybe up guys with upside. That's a whole separate area. Those are kind of like my commons in the other box as opposed to my big superstars box which you could have multiple superstars boxes. Have one for football, baseball, basketball. For me I mostly baseball. But then I have another box, it's my football and basketball and hockey stars in that one because I buy less product of theirs. So you can kind of, you know, do what you, what works for you best. Now the better cards get penny sleeves and top loaders while the commons, they just stay in the big boxes with simple dividers. Another step you are welcome to take, which is a decent idea is within each box in, in each set you could separate those by team if you want to go further down into it. Or you can separate them in or you could sort them in or card number order. One mistake I see new collectors make is they spend a ton of money protecting their commons. More money than the commons are actually worth. If you've got a quarter card sitting inside a top loader that costs almost as much as the card itself cost, then you're probably overdoing it. Save the premium protection for the cards that deserve it. Now with that said, when I say let's we do a TOPS flagship or let's say Topps Chrome, if I open a Topps Chrome box and I get a bunch of cards and I sleeve up the great ones and yada yada. But the rookie cards, I'll put those in sleeves and penny sleeves, those are usually going penny sleeves because sometimes you don't know. Look at Cal Rally. Look at what he. And he's not having a great year this year, but look what he ended up doing last year. Because in that 2022, I think when he came up, he was kind of a common rookie. He was, you know, had good upside. But I don't think anybody was going out of their way to make sure that they sleeved and toploaded everything that came out with Cal R's name on it. But I did put it in sleeves and, and you protect them a little bit in case they do develop into something awesome. Hey, I thought I'd jump in here real quick. I wanted to remind you, make sure you go download your free happy hobby collection checklist, which you can find at ghana stock substack.com it's the happy Hobby Sports Card Collection Checklist. What is that you say? Well, this is the ultimate tool for sports car collectors and you get it free when you subscribe to the Happy Hobby Sports Card Newsletter. By the way, it's a free newsletter. You can subscribe for free. Are you ready to take control of your collection collection? Elevate it to that next level? Don't miss your chance on getting this exclusive checklist, a powerful digital spreadsheet designed by collectors for collectors. Claim yours instantly. Whenever you sign up for the Happy Hobby Sports Card Newsletter, you can easily track your sports cards on the go. With our user friendly Google Sheet. Your entire collection is always at your fingertips. This is whether you're at a local card shop, trade night, major card show. You can organize your best cards with the have tab. Like got it, have it, need it, all that stuff. This is your have tab. This is where you put all your best cards, the grades, all that good stuff. Any notes? You can build your dream want list here. What cards are you wanting? Put them in here. Stop wondering, do I already own this card? What I look for at the next show? What do I want to get? So make sure you check it out. Go to ghanis.substack.com and subscribe and you'll get an email where you can download the free Happy Hobby Collection Checklist. Okay, now we're moving on to the set builder. If you're a set builder, things become even more straightforward than what I was just talking about. Sort by sport, sort by year, sort by set, and then finally you will sort by card number. There's something incredibly satisfying about flipping through a complete set and immediately spotting that 1, 2, 3, 4 cards that you're missing from this set. And you know the numbers. It's boom. It's right there. It's easy to find. It turns finishing a set into a scavenger hunt instead of kind of a guessing game like I think I got, I think I need this one. I don't know. And speaking of sorting your cards by card number, let me share one of my favorite tricks. This is when I was eluding alluding to earlier. A few years ago I made a YouTube video showing how I sort large stacks of cards. And it's still one of the most popular videos I've ever posted on YouTube. I say large stacks. Like if you're talking about you just bought a hobby box or a jumbo box and you want to sort that that box by card number. So the first of All, I didn't invent this. It's. I would love the state claim to it. I don't even remember who showed me it. I think I was at a card store and someone showed me. Or I read it in a Beckett. Maybe that might. That might have been an accident. Now I think about it, or talking like 1990, maybe it's actually. This is based on a computer science algorithm and it's called the Radix sort. Sounds pretty cool. Sounds like a name of a droid on the next Star wars movie or whatever. Specifically, this is the least significant digit version of the Radix. Sort of sounds very intimidating. I know, don't get me wrong. I sounds already way over my head. But I promise, you don't need to know any computer science to use this. Instead of sorting cards by the hundreds, first think of when you get a stack of cards. Let's say you got 150 cards. Normally you'd flip them over and you'd be like, all right, these are the hundreds, These are the 200s. These are 300, these are 400. And you'd sort them like that. And then you take each stack and you'd just go through them and put the tens in front of the twenties, in front of the thirties, in front of the forties. And then in each ten, you'd put the one in front of the two in front. It's a lot of touching. You're really. You're really manhandling your cards that way. So here's how it works. Instead of setting sorting cards by the hundreds first, like most of us naturally do, you sort by the ones digit on that card. Then. So you sort all of the cards that stack of cards by the ones. And you do it in order. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Then you pick them up in a very specific order. You'll see it in the video. I'll put the video here. You'll see there will be a link in the description. Same in the podcast. It'll be in the description. It's very easy. You pick it up in a specific order. I think the first order is you pick up 9, 8, 7, 6, something like that. Then the second round, then you take it off, stack again. And now you sort by the tens number. So you put all those in the zeros. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. You sort all those out. Now you pick it up in the opposite order that you did after the first round. And now you have another stack again. And now you sort by the hundreds by that third digit. So it's actually the opposite of the way you did it. And again, it's the least significant digit version. That's the LSD version. I promise you're gonna be tripping after you do this. It's like that kind of version because it's pretty amazing. Once you sort out the hundreds version, you pick those up. You'll know how to pick those up because it'll be in order and everything's in order. Your whole stack is in card order. You only touched it three times because when you stacked when you did the sort for each card, that's. It's pretty good. It's pretty easy. First time I tried it though, I said there's no way this works. Then I tried it with 100 cars and a few hundred. Now it's my go to method whenever I open up a flagship set it. So if you haven't seen the video before, again, I'll put it in the description. You want to check it out because it's, it's pretty awesome. That's if you're sorting as a budget collector, that's your card organization there. Now if you're organizing as an investor, we're going to switch gears a little bit. Investors, they're not building collections the same way that most of us are. They're thinking about value grading, market timing, protecting assets. So if that's your approach, I still recommend starting with sports sorting sort. Sports, baseball, football, basketball, hockey should each have their own sections. From there I would organize by investment tier instead of by set. So one section for graded cards, another for raw rookie cards, another section for numbered parallels, autographs and short prints. Each of them having their own section, another for submission candidates, and then another section for just your bulk commons, your inventory. Basically, this lets you review your highest value cards in minutes instead of digging through thousands of commons to find them. I'd also recommend having a dedicated ready to grade box every time you pull a clean rookie or a really nice parallel or a cool autograph sleeve top load, get it in there. And then when you're ready to do a grading submission, if you ever decided if you're an investor, you're probably doing some grading, when submission time comes, you'll be all organized and ready. Now let's talk about organizing as a card flipper. There's a lot of those out there, a lot of those flip cards so that they can then fund their regular personal collection, which is cool. Flippers though, they have an entirely different challenge. See, time equals money for them. So if you're constantly buying collections and breaking products. And maybe you're selling on ebay a lot. Your organization system should answer three questions almost instantly. Those questions are what is it? What is it worth? And is it ready to sell? I like separating active inventory from everything else. Cards that are already priced and ready to list stay together. Cards waiting for better comps, they stay together. Cards headed for grading. They have their own section. Cards you're intentionally holding because you think they'll increase in value. They go in another section. Those are like your prospects. The less time you spend searching through inventory, the more time you spend actually selling it. I also, I even have what I'm ready to list. I have listing, I have photos. Like I need to take photos of these cards. And then I have cards that are listed have those separated as well. So that's for your card flipper. Now, my collection, it kind of uses all three systems, which is good. Use what you want from each of them. I don't actually use just one specific one. My flagship sets, they're all organized by year and card number. Because I'm. I often build sets. Now I'm talking about within the sport. My personal collection is organized by player because those are my PC guys, man. I enjoy flipping through my cards of my favorite athletes, my favorite teams, my favorite players on those favorite teams. Those are basically I sleeve them, top load them. Now, these are ones that aren't ones that I've graded, and I put them in a top loader Pandora which are just absolutely phenomenal if you haven't had ever used a top loader Pandora And then I can flip through the Pandora I have one for. I have two for baseball, vintage and modern. I have one for football, one for basketball, and one for hockey. It's very. It's much easier that way. It's very nice. The point is, your card collection doesn't have to fit in one neat little box. You can mix and match systems depending on what makes your collecting life easier. Think back to what you used to use to. To organize your cards. I had a huge cardboard box. We're talking like 70s and like the 80s. Basically. I had a big cardboard box. It held all of my cards from the 70s and 80s, all sports, all together, but they were separated by teams. I'm not a maniac. I mean, come on. I had little cardboard dividers that I cut up. Like, you know, took a box and cut it into strips. Those were the rows that separated the cards from each other. And I kept the teams separate with little dividers. Cardboard dividers as well. Eventually got some binders. Yikes. Not the binders like now the top loader binders. I got the regular binders. They just jam a card in there. Raw card naked, just shoving it into a Pandora Whatever you got. The three ring knuckle is just leaning on every. All three cards that are closest to the Pandora Just the worst six cards because you got three on the other side too. I ruined so many cards pulling them in and out of the binders. Just. Just bad news. And I came up with different ways to or oh I want to. This time I'm gonna do it by team, maybe by division. Just stupid. Ruined a bunch of them. Remember the screw down holders whole another whole nother thing. All bad. All bad stuff. But now we're all about top loader binders. We're all about graded cards. Graded card displays. Nice 3200 card count boxes. Remember the big 5000 count boxes? Little too unwieldy for me. A little too little much. I also would like to recommend check out these sorting trays. A lot of the stuff you can get on ebay by the way. These boxes, the top loader binders, the sorting trays on ebay. This is awesome because if you're sorting by team it's got 30 slots. Put all your each play you know each card and its teams slot. Pretty awesome. Hey, remember what, what did you. I want to know. You drop me in a. Drop something in the comments. What did you call a league leader card or a flashback card or some other kind of, you know, record breaker card. Remember when you get these in checklist, A checklist card. What did you call those like what I mean by that is we separate everything by teams. Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers, Giants, whatever. But then you get these weird cards. What did you do with them? What did you call them for me? I don't know why. As a kid, maybe my brother's. I don't know why I called them specials. They were just special cards. They were the specials. So they were in the specials team. Basically. I don't know. What do you do? What do you call them Anyways, Just keep things simple. Simple. One last piece of advice I want to give. Don't let social media convince you that you need an entire wall of expensive storage products before your collection is organized. Get it organized. Get a system going. Most collectors can build an excellent system using cardboard monster boxes. Just big cardboard boxes, index cards. Get some dividers, penny sleeves, top loaders. You can even get a label maker. Maybe you already have one that's a great way to really make it like, tight, neat. When you open up the box, your brain doesn't explode. Organization isn't about impressing visitors, it's about reducing friction. When you know exactly where every card belongs, collecting becomes much more enjoyable. You spend less time digging through boxes and more time appreciating the history, the artwork, the players, and the memories that you made when you fell in love with this hobby in the first place. That's what it's all about. That's what this is all about. Good memories, good feelings when you touch your cards. I'd love to hear how you organize your card collection. Are you a set builder? Do you collect players specifically? What about, are you an investor? Are you a card flipper? Maybe you're a little bit of all of those like I am. Leave a comment in the comments section in the YouTube shoot me an email if you listen to the podcast@ghaniscards gmail.com Share your system I want to hear about if you've tried the Radix sort, I want to know, what'd you think? Did it blow your mind? I think it's gonna blow your mind a little bit. You might just give another collector an idea that makes their hobby a little more enjoyable. So if you enjoyed today's episode, hey, I'd appreciate it. If you liked it and subscribe to the channel, drop a comment in here. Check out the free newsletter, the Happy Hobby Sports Cards Newsletter, or over@ghanis substack.com check out my website david ghanis.com for more articles that are help to they're set up to help you build a better sports car collection without breaking the bank. So whatever you do, however you organize, however you sort your sports makes you have a happy hobby.