The Baseball Card Cyber Museum

I don't plan on doing a lot of website promoting often on this humble little blog (aside from other sports card blogs, of course), but when I do find one that I think is worth bookmarking, I will do so. Here is one of them.


The Baseball Card Cyber Museum website (http://www.guitar9.com/bccm.html) was established in 2007 as an alternative to the huge Topps Baseball Card Books that were created in 1985 and revised in 1990. In those humongous books, you would see images of every Topps baseball card, but only the fronts of the cards, never the backs. The people behind this site not only have the fronts of every Topps baseball card scanned from 1960 onwards (they have 2008, but only series I so far), but the backs of every card as well. That's a lot of scanning.

Now, because of the number of images scanned, they use a ton of bandwidth, and there is an explanation as to how and why they are using the servers of a website called Guitar Nine Records. Because of this, they only allow 20 people at any given time to use the site, and the only way to enter the site and see all the cards is to register. And after doing that, once you are assigned your account name, you only have four days to peruse the site, with the option of renewing your "membership" upon expiration.

Once you have gained access to the site, you can either view the cards or play games (I highly recommend the Diamond Fantasy game where you create a team based on the cards that are drawn and the team with that is worth the most money wins). But the bread and butter of the site is definitely the viewing area.

You can view cards by player, by year, or by set. If viewing by year or by set, the cards are sorted in alphabetical order, and from what I have seen, there is no way to change the setting to sort by number. If you view cards by player, all you have to do is type the player's last name, and every card of that person that Topps created (from 1960 on) will appear. It's the fastest way to view every player's card, front and back, without having to search through boxes and binders.

For all the complications just to get into the "museum," it is well worth the effort. I am selfishly hoping that the people running the site will give me a lifetime pass just for talking them up, but I doubt that will happen. My pass expires on July 8. I hope to get it renewed quickly.

Sincerely,

JayBee Anama