The plan for 2026

An unprecedented trading card gambit

With a new year coming up in just a few hours, I’m making a resolution about what to do with this writing project of mine. Resolutions haven’t always been a good thing for me, but a public declaration of what I intend to do will hopefully be the best way to make this one stick.

I started this Substack in early September of 2025, and since that time I’ve created roughly two dozen posts, each with a baseball card from the 1975 Topps set at the top of the post. It occurred to me that as long as I wait for players to either die or have their 75th or 80th birthdays before writing about them and showing their cards, I’ll either die or lose interest without doing much more than scratching the surface of what’s available. And I want to be more proactive than that, so beginning at midnight tonight, I’m going to start dropping all of the cards from this set here. The front side of all 660 cards will be displayed in 2026, with minimal commentary on my part.

For each of the 617 active players in the set—including the rookie players—I will post their card on either the day of their birth if they are still here on this earth, or the date that they passed away if they are not. If a player is one of the 408 who is still living, I will point out how old they are. The ages will range from 71 on the low end all the way up to (hopefully) 93 on top. And for each of the 209 players who have already passed away, I will indicate the year and the age of the player at their passing. Those ages currently range from 29 on the low end to a current high of 87 years.

I’m also reserving the right to break in with any ruminations on a player or an idea that relates to the 1975 Topps Baseball set, as conditions may warrant. But I’m imagining this as a sort of digital desk calendar, where every day yields something new to look at and consider.

I bought my first pack of baseball cards in 1975, which is now over a half century ago. Then, as now, I had neither the money nor the inclination to build myself a complete set of these cards. All cards were numbered for that purpose, and to this day grown men with the money and inclination to do so accomplish this feat, and are justifiably satisfied with their accomplishments.

But I’m doing this in a different way. Rather than paying attention to the physical condition of any card—including any imperfections which bring down their ascribed values—I’m going to copy the images online and then collate them not alphabetically (which means that Hank Aaron’s card would come first) or numerically (where Aaron’s card would come last) but in a way that makes sense to me. On January 1, I will show who was born on that day, as well as who died on that day. And the process will continue until all cards have been displayed, and the year has ended.

Has anyone ever done something like this before? I honestly have no idea. But rather than chasing down these physical cards online, and then putting them behind plastic slabs or into pages inside of a binder, where they will lose their meaning on the day that I go to meet my maker, I’ve decided to keep my money and direct my efforts toward sharing all of these funky scraps of cardboard with whoever might want to take in their kaleidoscopic charms. So I do all the work, and whoever happens to come along can enjoy it all, for free. Consider it to be my 250th birthday present to the U.S.A.

Don’t sweat the cards’ imperfections, but embrace them and enjoy the ride along with me. We’ll be taking off any moment now. Happy 2026!