Jay Grossman
Jay Grossman
Published on:

Looking back on my 2023

Looking back on my 2023

I try to write post around the new year every year on the SportsCollectors.net blog reviewing what happened during the year for the community. I figured it may be fun to do soemething on this blog to talk about things that went on in my life during the year across 4 areas:

Tech and Professional Things

My Day Jobs

I started the year running the data team for a fintech startup, Luma Financial Technologies. The core of their business was running a 2 sided marketplace where financial advisors could use their platform to buy structured products via reverse auction format. I got to choose the data platform, learn a very interesting + complex business, hire + manage an awesome team and build some really interesting projects that delivered value.

Over the summer, a former colleague from my WeightWatchers days (2007-2014) told me about his company in the auto insurance space - Quanata (formerly Blue Owl). I met some nice + smart folks during the interview process and joined to manage their data warehouse fun in August. I have been a big Snowflake fan and we're migrating lots of interesting data/processes onto it. So far I am very happy with the decision to join.

My Projects / Side Hustles

SportsCollectors.net

Big news came in November with a huge milestone - 2 Million Successes on SportsCollectors.net. SCN is the coolest project I have gotten to work on and I am so grateful for the incredible community that continues to support it.


Functionality that allows collectors to track autograph requests

Collectz.com

I have been running a fun data engineering and data sceince project for about 10 years looking at arbitrage for collectibles - Collectz.com. I've noticed that finding arbitrage opportunities for physical goods (specifically sports cards) has become so much more challenging since 2021 for several reasons:

  • The pandemic brought many more buyers.
  • Inflation.
  • Markets (such as eBay) have become more efficient.
  • There is significant volume of sales on social media (especially Facebook Groups) where the non structured data is messy and there is huge price variance.

So having better data and better tools is more important than ever. I have been working on a new version of Collectz that is a lot more powerful and looks for signal in new/more features.


Some fun I had exploring Collectz data in Metabase

Playtime and Learning

I spent some time this year playing with some open source data tech that I had wanted to try out. I wrote about some of it on this blog:

Family Fun


The wonderful (and sometimes crazy) Grossman family in downtown NYC.


We were at Fenway to see the Red Sox beat the Tigers.


My kiddos and I getting ready to rock to the Rockettes in 3D.

Jack

My son Jack recently turned 12 and is now in 6th grade. He loves playing video games with friends (he's gotten into Fortnite), building things, cooking and playing sports.


5th grade graduation styling the Batman themed button down.

Ever since he was 8 years old, he has been playing on our local travel baseball team (Ridgewood Raiders). He also played on a Rec Majors (5th and 6th graders) baseball team during the spring that I help coach - we were the Texas Rangers but I am clearly not quite Bruce Bochy. It's been so much fun getting to coach and play with him - I throw a lot of batting practice and we have some epic wiffleball games.


Jack throwing a curveball in Little League tourney game in June - 5 innings, 0 earned runs.


Very fun Rec Majors All Star game went extra innings. I coached the gray team and Jack ripped a double.


Raiders won the 2023 NJSBL summer championship.

Jenna

My daughter in now 15 and is a sophomore at Bergen Technical High School. Her "major" is fashion, so she has sewing skills and can make things (I am jealous).

For the past 8 years, she has been studying and training in Tae Kwon Do. I am very proud that she attained her second degree black belt in April. She teaches classes and worked as a conuselor at her center's summer camp.


Breaking a stack of boards at an exhibition.


Award ceremony with masters after second degree black belt promotion.

She began bowling this year and made her school's JV bowling team. Even though I know very little about bowling and I know am not good, I have enjoyed watching her progression and learning more about the sport. I've taken her to a local bowling alley several times for some late night bowling and it is a lot of fun, even though she regularly beats me pretty badly and makes fun of my form.


Jenna bowling a strike in her first match.

A few years ago Jenna dressed up as Gene Simmons for Halloween and began liking KISS. My wonderful wife suggested that I get tickets and take Jenna to see them live before they stop touring. So we went in December and it was an absolutely amazing show. I still can't believe Paul Stanley (71) and Gene Simmons (74) could rock out like that for 3 hours.


Jenna's first concert - awesome KISS farewell show at Madison Square Garden.

Cindy and me


Sometimes being a parent requires you to close your eyes and smile.


If you can dodge a wrench... amazed she went along with this for Halloween.


After the Barbie movie, Cindy decided I would make a good Ken doll.


She got me tickets (and risked her ear drums) to see my favorite band - Parliment Funkadelic. George Clinton is 82 and was barely part of the show, but I'm still happy we went.

My Collecting Adventures

Getting Organized

I finally spent many hours getting organized and listed over 60K unsigned cards on buysportscards (my seller name is sportscollectors):
https://www.buysportscards.com/search?sellerId=354fc7bb8e&sellerName=sportscollectors

I accumulated a lot of stuff in the past 40+ years and I only had a very vague idea of what cards I had that were mixed up in many random boxes. After watching some videos of how Burbank Cards sets up their warehouse, I got inspired to organize my stuff by sport, year, and set in 5000 count monster boxes. It has been a lot of fun for me to "shop" in my own store for cards, so no more needing to buy cards I already have.

My favorite baseball card set

The 1911 T201 Mecca Double Folders baseball card set consists of 50 cards that measure 2-3/16" by 4¾" when unfolded. The T201 baseball cards have two players printed on each card and can be folded to create a complete image of each. These cards were inserted into packages of Mecca cigarettes. The set features many of the greatest players of the era including Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Tris Speaker, Napoleon Lajoie, Ed Walsh, Chief Bender, Zack Wheat and Three Finger Brown.

The set has always been one of my favorites. I loved the old school drawings of the players and I thought it was cool that you could fold over the front of the card to line up the feet of the player on the back. I went to a card show in the 1980's with my dad and we bought the card featuring Hall of Famer Napoleon Lajoie and Fred Falkenberg for $50 - it is one of my favortie cards in my collection today.

Ever since then, I have wanted to get the 4 cards featuring 2 Hall of Famers. In September I placed bids and was pleasantly surpirsed when I won the following two graded cards in eBay auctions:


My favorite Autograph by mail

Since I run a sports autograph community, I get asked a lot about my favorite autograph I get each year. My favorite TTM autograph of the year was finding Michael Pittman Sr. and getting him to finish up this Bucs leaders card from the season after their championship team:

Collecting with Jack

Some of my most fun childhood memories were going to baseball card shows with my dad in the 1980's and early 1990's. Unlike most of my friends, I was more interested in older cards from his heroes from the 1950's and 1960's than the newer junk wax era stuff.

Jack has started to show interest in sports cards this year and we went to a local sports card show a couple of times. It's been interesting to see him ask for so many players he has never seen play (except on youtube) - Barry Bonds, Willie Mays, Randy Moss, Babe Ruth, Pedro Martinez. He also does like all the super shiny modern cards of today's stars, so we go for some of them too.

One day he decided he wanted to try to slab his own cards. Since we are Sox fans, I dug out a card from the 1959 Fleer Ted Williams set that I bought when I was his age. We spent a few hours on a rainy Sunday putting this together:

There was some trial and error, but we think it turned out pretty nicely. The big authenticators (PSA and SGC) have nothing to worry about, as I have NO plans to offer a sportscollectors.net grading service.

My 2023 Sports Fandom

Mixed feelings about my teams

I am a die hard fan of the pro sports teams from Boston. I have been very spoiled about how much my teams have won in the past 20 years, so I am not about to complain about a frustraing year for my teams.

  • Red Sox - I didn't have high expectations for this team and was pleasantly surprised by some of the guys (Bello, Yoshida, Duran, Casas, Turner). They contended for most of the season, but they had a terrible September and missed the playoffs. Seeing Tanner Houck take a line drive off the face was scary, thankfully he came back. Hopefully Craig Breslow will be a better GM than Chaim Bloom, but I am not convinced.
  • Patriots - This is the worst Patriots team since Dick MacPherson in 1992. The QB play has been awful, they don't have offensive playmakers, so many key injuries and they have not played disciplined. I miss the Brady, Gronk, Edelman days!!!
  • Celtics - The Celtics are a fun team and I like how Brad Stevens works to make the team better. Last season's loss to the Heat in game 7 was so tough when Jayson Tatum sprained his ankle in the first minutes. I like the Prozingis and Jrue Holiday additions to this year's team so far.
  • Bruins - They had the greatest regular season in NHL history last season. They had amazing offense to go with the best goalies in the league (Ullmark and Swayman). They were the prohibitive favorites to win the Stanley Cup. And then they blow a 3-1 lead to the Panthers in the first round of the playoffs. I think they will be solid this season, but they lost a lot with Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci retiring.

Sad news about some greats

Until Lebron James came along in 2003, we had never seen an athlete quite like George McGinnis. He was 6'8, 235, super strong, great jumper and ran the floor really well. He won ABA titles in his first 2 years with the Pacers and shared the 1975 MVP award with Julius Erving. His per game averages were impressive that season - 29.8 points (led league), 14.8 rebounds, 6.3 assists (3rd in league), and 2.6 steals (2nd in league). Then he went to the NBA and immediately turned around a historically terrible 76ers team. He was so generous to fans + collectors and is one of my favorite players to collect - as I have every one of his Topps cards signed.

Vida Blue was a huge personality and a GREAT lefty pitcher for the back to back to back World Series champion 1970's Oakland A's teams. His 1971 season may be one of the best in modern baseball history as he won the Cy Young Award and MVP -> 24-8, 1.82 ERA, 301 strikeouts.

The 2004 Red Sox were such a special team, as they finally beat the Yankees in the playoffs and won the World Series. The nasty knuckleball of Tim Wakefield drove hitters crazy for his 20 year run in the majors. I remember seeing a game in Minnesota were the hitters were literally shaking their heads after watching it move all over the strike zone. He finished up with most wins as a Red Sox - and that is saying a lot since the team has been around since 1869.

Dick Butkus was a badass middle linebacker. Even though his Bears teams were never great, he definitely was. The videos of him absolutely crushing guys over the middle are brutal but fun to watch.

The Iron Sheik was the wrestling's best bad guy in the 1980's during my childhood. He was universally disliked by most fans, but he was a legit tough guy and incredibly entertaining. My first live wrestling match was in 1983 at Madison Square Garden when he beat Bob Backlund to win the WWF heavyweight championship.

In 1970's, the WWWF champion was Superstar Billy Graham. He was a true trailblazer with huge muscles, the super colorful outfits, some really funky sideburns to go with his receding hairline and so many great promo interviews. While he wasn't the most graceful wrestler in the ring, his style and promos were clearly the inspriation for Hulk Hogan and Jesse "The Body" Ventura a decade later. I got to see him a bunch in the 1980's and 1990's when he fully shaved his head and was in the NWA + WWF as both a baby face and heel.