Unopened Wax, Cellos, and Racks Drive His Collection
When Mike Cirincione takes on a project — through a hobby or otherwise — he’s laser focused on his goal. That’s what happened when he started collecting unopened boxes and packs of baseball cards. Cirincione’s inner child took over from his early collecting days in the mid-1970s. He started his sealed product collection in 1995 after reentering the hobby in his late 20s.
“I decided to start collecting unopened, because I just thought it was so cool that there were packs that were not opened,” Cirincione said. “Somebody had set these packs aside and never opened it after all these years.”
Assembling Sealed Product
Cirincione’s first mini project was collecting unopened product from 1980-87. He decided to start collecting sealed Topps baseball, because that’s what he primarily collected as a kid of the 1970s and ’80s. Cirincione picked up two boxes — one for each of his sons, if something were to ever happen to him and they had to split the inheritance — of every single year of wax, cello, and rack packs.
“It’s still kind of a niche in the hobby, but it was really a niche back then,” Cirincione said. “PSA had just started grading packs and GAI used to grade the packs. There were those floating around out there.” Cirincione accomplished his goal, and by 2004, he was onto his next collecting mission: expanding on his run of unopened material, this time adding 1967-79 to the mix.
“I just wanted to see how far back I can go,” Cirincione said. “The earliest I have a full box of is 1974 Topps Baseball. I have a wax box I purchased in 2012 at The National. Back then, I think I bought it for $3,500, which, obviously, was a lot of money. But now, they regularly sell for $10-$12K.”
Cirincione hasn’t been able to find full unopened wax boxes earlier than 1974 — at least at a reasonable price. He has a complete run of wax boxes from 1974 to 1987, but he’s missing 1975, which are hard to find. Cirincione has wax dating back to 1969, but ’68 and ’67 products can be elusive and expensive.
“I’m not in a rush to do it,” Cirincione said. “I find that if you kind of rush things, you end up overpaying for stuff. I’ll be patient and wait for it to hit where I’m comfortable with what the price is.” To help fill in the void left by some of his missing products, Cirincione is compensating by other means.
“What I started to do was collect empty boxes and then get a rack pack, a graded wax pack, and a graded cello pack from each of the years, going back to my birth year, 1967,” Cirincione said. “That’s an ongoing project I have going now.”
As far as cello boxes, Cirincione has a complete run from 1975-87. He owns 10 cell packs from 1974, needing 14 more packs to finish off a box. Cirincione’s rack pack collection goes all the way back to 1967. The prized possession in his collection is actually a specific rack pack.
“If I was going to have something buried with me when I pass away, this is the one that’s going to come with me,” he said. “It’s a 1974 rack pack with Tom Seaver on top. That’s my favorite card of his, and he was my favorite player growing up. I grew up, and still am, a big Mets fan.”
Not for Faint of Heart
The 57-year-old loves collecting unopened products in large part due to the idea of what could be hiding inside. His rack pack from 1967 is a prime example.
“It was a find, and I believe it was eight rack packs they found, and they had auctioned them off at Heritage Auctions,” Cirincione said. “I just kept thinking, those are as old as I am. All these years, somebody put aside those eight rack packs and forgot about them.”
Collecting unopened items is not for the faint of heart. It can require a massive amount of restraint to keep product sealed. What gives Cirincione the willpower to keep from ripping it?
“That’s a great question. And I have a great answer for it, because I get asked that all the time,” Cirincione said. “That’s the one thing they say, ‘How can you not open these?’ But I have complete Topps sets going back from ’69 through the mid-’80s in binders. So, I have the whole ’75 set raw, so I can flip it open and look at it. I can see my George Brett rookie; I can see my Robin Yount rookie. I don’t need to open the unopened, because I already have all the cards in sets.”
For Cirincione, it’s a best of both worlds scenario.
“Why do I need to open it to have more of the cards? I like the idea of it being unopened and the mystique of what could possibly be in there.”
