Monday, February 10, 2014

Latin Launch!


I have determined how I want to do this year's project, the Latin Project. And I'm ready to start collecting!

Originally, I considered collecting only a small number of select players from select countries.  Say 20 from Venezuela and Peurto Rico, 5 from Cuba and 10 from Dominican republic.  Determining who to include and who to exclude got thorny on a few fronts.  Would I include those who came to the states as children?  What about when they were in High School?  Which 20 from Puerto Rico deserved a spot?  And on and on.

In the end, I decided to go another route.  One that will make the project more straightforward, and considerably larger.

I will use the birthplace data from Baseball Almanac.  I will keep it simple.  I will try to collect one card from every MLB player that was born in Aruba, Bahamas, Brazil, British Honduras, Colombia, Cuba, Curaco, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Panama Canal Zone, Puerto Rico and Venezuela.  Whew!  According to Baseball Almanac, that is a total of 1540 players!!  I am sure that a decent number of them do not have cards made, but I will do my best!

Here is a Google Docs page with all of the players I need.  I will mark them off as I get them in, along with the year of the card I have of them.  The year is so that if there is an earlier card of that player, I can go for that one.  I'd kind of like to get as close to a rookie card  as I can for each player.  But I'll take anything if it gets me closer to completion!  Year is not a huge consideration in most cases, so long as the card is from the players active playing days.

I made a sweep through the cards I have on hand at home and out of the 1540 players, I have 145 so far! Almost 10%!

If you've got anything I need, shoot me a line and I'll see if I have anything you want.



3 comments:

  1. Impressive list, any way to add teams to it easily? I want to search through but if I don't recognize the name I'll have issues finding it (if I have one)

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  2. Brad,

    Not really, the site I got the info from doesn't have team info. Plus most of these guys have played for multiple teams.

    It is a huge list! What I have been doing is opening the 'Still Need' tab at the bottom of the spreadsheet, hitting ctrl-F to open the find dialogue and then typing the player name in there. If it finds more than one (like Chico Fernandez) then I look at the First Year and Final MLB Year columns to figure out which one it is.

    Really manual, but I haven't found a better way yet. But as I will need a lot of help to get anywhere with this, I will put some time into trying to find an easier way.

    Thanks for the constructive comment!

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  3. Glad to see you decided on what to collect here. I'll dig through and see what I've got. I love the 2009 Ginter National Pride set, so those might be some cool ones to use.

    ReplyDelete