Lost In The Closet

I go through sorting lulls at times where I just end up stacking cards on the shelves of my baseball card closet.  Giving my work schedule I know that I am never far away from a two to three week down period away from it all.  Generally I work nine weeks and then have three weeks off.  A few more during the summer and around December and January.  In my mind it can be a great excuse to procrastinate on certain chores and activities around the house.  Card sorting is not immune.

I have actually improved a lot over the last year or two.  There used to be a table in my card room that was buried with all sorts of commons, doubles, and the whatnot.....

While the situation has improved, I am a little ashamed at the state of my card closet at the moment, so I will say that it looks better than the picture above.  At the same time it's not like every card is in a box, not really even close.

A few days back I decided to tackle a stack or two of the cards in the closet that were not sorted into boxes.  Loads of commons, doubles, a few odds and ends.  Welp, I also found a few really nice cards hanging out in there too.  Most notably were two Carlos Martinez cards that I got from?  Your guess is as good as mine.

One of the cards was a C-Mart autograph from last year's Topps Museum Collection.

Martinez's autograph always seems to change every year for the good.  This is an on-card autograph too.  I like the black and grey design on this card with the red highlights.  Seems to fit well on a Cardinals card.  Nice picture of C-Mart pitching too.  

The other Martinez autograph was a jersey relic from last year's Tribute set.....

Same picture as the Museum autograph above, but there are some things that I like about this card.  First, I have been really down on materials cards the last few years.  I went through some of my posts from the last year a few weeks ago and there are almost zero, not quite, posts that deal with just relic cards.  It still is a larger swatch and it has one of those cool stickers on it.  That always means that I get to take a field trip over to the MLB Authentics website and figure out whether I should be excited or disappointed....

The jersey is from a Cardinals vs Royals game in July of 2015.  The question is always whether or not the game involved the player.  The answer is........

what does Carlos do when he sits on the bench?  He builds cup pyramids and throws water on players when they hit home runs.  Carlos was doing something with cups the day he wore the jersey on the front of this card.  Randal Grichuk and Matt Carpenter also hit home runs that game so maybe a little bit of this too...

Anyway, the prospects of finding two really nice Carlos Martinez cards in the random stacks of the card closet has made me feel a slight push to sort through some more of the cards just sitting around.  Maybe there is something else really nice in there, maybe it's just a bunch of 1991 Fleer cards.  Either way, I am excited to find out.