Giving BSC a go

I can't remember who it was at this point, but a fellow blogger mentioned BuySportsCards.com (or as the kids call it, BSC) sometime in the last six months or so. I had been unaware of the site prior to his posting about it, but like most collectors, I'm always on the lookout for new places to buy things, so I didn't waste any time checking it out. 

I found the search function to be quite clunky, and not very enjoyable to try and use. And I guess because of that, and the fact that I didn't buy anything right away, my brain did what it's so prone to doing with new things; which is to completely forget about them. And so it went for many months, until just recently when I was typing in a website and the autofill gave me BSC.com. I guess there's something to be said for not ever clearing ones search history.

After re-finding about the site, I decided to give it another go. It was still clunky, well, at least until I figured out that you can use the main search bar when you're on a particular seller to look through their inventory. This improved the sites usability (for me) ten-fold, as I had been trying to search via the crappy filters that are on the side of the screen.

Now that I knew what was what, I promptly found seller, The Set Builder, who had a couple things that I wanted, which were also very reasonably priced, so, I figured I might as well put in a small order and see how things went. I'm pleased to say that they went quite well, and that this was the first of what I'm sure will be many future orders.
 

The site seems to be similar to Sportlots, in that a lot of the items don't have photos (they have stock photos instead), though certain sellers have actual photos for their listings. The guy that I bought from was one of those. 

My order consisted of just six cards (I figured a smaller order would be best to test the waters with), which can be easily be broken down into a pair of trios. First up is three from the '69 Topps football set, highlighted by a new to me Papa Nerf. I could've swore that I had that particular card already, but apparently I didn't. Now I do.

Unlike Fred, my knowledge of Johnny Robinson and Tom Sestak is quite limited, but, and no offense to either, they were gotten strictly for what was printed on the backside of their cards...

Not the most exciting pieces of Fran Tarkenton's puzzle, but I believe that these two bring me to now having 6 of the 10 pieces. That's 60% completed for all of the mathologists out there. It's worth noting too that these two pieces combined for less than 90¢. They would've been over $4 had I purchased them from COMC.

My other trio was made up of three more copies of Carlos Brown/Alan Autry/Bubba's lone football card. These three cards are why I ended up choosing this seller. Given their price (less than $2 for a NM and two VG's), I would've bought these alone had there not been anything else of interest to me; so the 69's were just an extra added bonus. I haven't looked yet, but I'm pretty sure that I'm up to 8 copies of this card now. My original goal was to fill a page, but at this point I don't think that I'm gonna be able to stop with just one more copy. I wish I knew why older me enjoys seeing multiple pages of the same card so much, as it's the polar opposite of how my younger self collected.

The total for my order was five-something, $1.35 of which was for shipping. Not bad for six vintage cards in relatively decent shape.

I couldn't stop with just one

I didn't start out life as someone who enjoyed collecting duplicates, in fact as a young collector  (a young set collector to be more precise), who rarely had anyone to trade with, duplicates were the bane of my existence. There was nothing worse than buying a pack of cards, only to find that you already had 90%, or more, of the cards in said pack. Sometimes I would try to circumvent this problem by starting multiple sets of the same thing, but more often than not, my duplicates would just end up in a box in my closet. It wasn't the ideal way to deal with them, but it was the only way I knew. Eventually I stopped collecting cards, and then a few years later, donated the bulk of my collection, including all of those duplicates, to a charity auction.

Fast forward a decade, and I unexpectedly started collecting cards again. And of course I just had to resume with my set collecting ways again, which meant more duplicates! A curious thing started to happen with some of those duplicates this time though, this being that I wasn't getting as perturbed as I used to be by all of the extras. Some were starting to become welcome. I wasn't full on collecting them, yet, but I was intentionally keeping them together in my keeper boxes (or as I was calling them, my "I'll do something with them later" boxes). I also wasn't going out of my way to seek out duplicates, yet, but was quietly grabbing extras of guys that I liked from dime and quarter boxes, especially those guys who appeared on cards of the vintage variety (Snapper Jones is the first example that comes to mind).

Fast forwarding a few more years, and I was finally able to break free from the shackles brought on by set collecting (that's just how it felt to me, I'm not knocking set collecting, or set collectors). Ever since then, I've been all over the place collecting-wise, which I think of as just trying to find my way. I was treading in completely new territory after all. Things are a lot more settled as of late. I'm pretty sure that I know now how I'll be collecting, and what I'll be collecting going forward. One thing that has emerged from all of this, that I shouldn't be surprised by, but still kind of am, is that I now enjoy collecting multiple copies of certain cards, and will actually go out of my way to seek them out.

I'm sure that no one remembers, but I did post last year after I had found out that not only had Alan Autry (aka Bubba), played football prior to going into acting, but that he also had exactly one card out there (well, technically he has two, but the short printed Topps Mexican is way out of my price range). At the time, I had just gotten a copy of that card from Sportlots, and even though I didn't mention it in the post, I kind of already knew that it wasn't gonna be the last copy that I'd be purchasing. I tried to fool myself a bit initially, by thinking that I'd get just one more, and send it off to see if I could get him to sign it. Well, I got that second copy, then found out that he's apparently not too keen on signing TTM requests. Not willing to risk the loss, I just held onto that second copy.

The trouble was, just two of the same card doesn't look very good on a page, so I bought a third from Sportlots to complete the row. The page did look better after that, but then the problem of what to fill out those other six slots with arose. He only has one card, and putting cards of someone else in that page wouldn't look very good either. Have you figured out where this is going yet? There really was only one option, for me, and that's to get six more copies to fill out the rest of the page. I was able to get two of those six just last week, from Sportlots again.

Although my goal is to complete this page, I already know that I'm not gonna stop with just four more. I'm sure that if I wanted to delve into it a little more, I could probably figure out why certain cards are appealing to me so much, I mean I have at least one row of duplicates in most of my paged player collections, and for a lot of them I don't need any more than that (unless I find some more in dime boxes), but there's just certain cards that I now want as many copies of as I can get. And honestly, I don't even care why this is, as flipping through these pages just makes me happy. That is what collecting is supposed to be about, isn't it?

I don't know if the Bubba pages will ever reach...

... 1990-91 Fleer Shawn Kemp (14 pages and counting) or...

... 1961 Topps Billy Muffett (3½ pages and counting) status, but that's okay, I've got a number of just single full page duplicate collections as well, and those are fun to flip through too.

Moving on...

The seller that I got these last two Bubba's from, twinrick, has a really good combined shipping rate for 4 cards (90¢), so I picked myself out two more cards to round out the order, neither of which were duplicates.

People still get all excited over rookie cards, right? I'm guessing that Bob Golic's Topps rookie probably won't move any needles, even for those who answered yes. Apparently this is one of those cards that has those silly C*, D*, and C* D* variations on the back. I don't think you can choose which one you get when buying on Sportlots. Mine is the C* D* version, and for the moment, that's good enough for me. Maybe I'll get the other two at some point, but it's no rush.

Please excuse the dust bits on the scan.

Three-Mile Lyle's got old Joe Theismann marked for death, and it's doesn't look like Washington's O-Line is gonna be able to prevent this murder from happening. 

Lyle is one of those guys that I'm gonna start pushing a little more to try and complete the rest of their playing days stuff. His cards are very cheap (Late edit: I forgot that he has a Topps Mexican too!), so there really isn't much of an excuse I can put forth for having not finished his catalog already.

With shipping, these four cards came to $1.62 total. Since I wasn't looking to spend much, I was rather pleased to get all of these for roughly 40¢ apiece. I'm sure I could've found Bob and Lyle for a less at a show, but I didn't have to get up at 3am, travel a couple of hundred miles to Nashville and back, or spend $30 in gas to do so. Sometimes it's worth paying a few cents more to get cards like these online, at least for me.

Sick mail

I realize that I'm starting off today's post with a statement that everyone knows to be true, one that doesn't need to be uttered by another living being, ever, but I'm gonna do so anyway... being sick really sucks!

Though finally on the road to recovery as of this writing, I've had a cold for the last week and change. I felt something coming on two weeks ago, and after a couple of days of minor symptoms, thought that I had successfully fought it off, but if I did, it didn't stay gone for very long, because it, or another virus, came on strong shortly thereafter -- and decided to stay for the week.

My mom has been sick too, so I don't know who gave it who, for blog purposes though, I'm gonna say that she gave it to me. Her symptoms were worse than mine, but she too is starting to get better, thankfully! 

My memory is such that I can't really remember past colds, so every time I get one, which isn't often (this is only my second one in the last 10 years), it always seems/feels worse than it probably actually is. So feel free to take everything I'm saying with a grain (or two) of salt. I don't recall ever having a cold during the summer though, it's a weird juxtaposition. I'm not sure if it's necessarily a good thing or not, but even as un-fun as they can be, it's kind of comforting to know that the common cold hasn't been eradicated by the Rona. I mean, if you gotta catch one or the other...

We also had the hurricane/tropical storm remnants roll in late Monday, and not leave until early Wednesday. Much doom and gloom was predicted ahead of it's arrival, but most of it, at least around here, ended up being more hype than not. We did get a couple of inches of rain, but that could just as easily have happened on a random day in March, so it really wasn't worth getting worked up over.

Two pieces of fun mail arrived this week, the first coming courtesy of the King of Diamonds. Kevin recently had himself a show for the ages, and amongst his swag, was an extra copy of each of these two fellas. I inquired about them in the post, but didn't know they were coming, so it made for a nice surprise. I'll talk about it at some later date, but I recently started working on small card project, and need a couple of cards from both of these guys (and those of similar ilk). I've never had very many 1984 Topps, and have never owned any 1984 OPC, so these work well, as they're something "new" for me to look at. Thanks again, Kevin! 

Speaking of bloggers, I'm sure that everyone has seen by now that Chris is trying to leave us. This announcement wasn't unexpected, but is still the shits. I have exchanged more cards with Chris than anyone else over the last few years, and he's been one of my favorite people to interact with, so his absence will be felt. The good news is though, Chris is a blogger at heart, so I fully expect him to be back doing so in some form or another after his initial respite -- even if it does manifest itself into an emo music blog for current, and former, pre-teen girls 😂.

My other piece of mail this week comes from a small Sportlots purchase:

I can't remember exactly when it was, but some weeks ago I got to wondering what Alan Autry had been up to lately, so I did a quick Google search, which then directly led me to buying this card. You see, I didn't realize that Alan, who despite his numerous roles, will always be (to me) Bubba Skinner from the In the Heat of the Night television series, had played pro football. Once I found this out it was only natural to go see if he ever had any cards produced, and he did, there's his 1977 Topps rookie here, and then he's got an uber-difficult to find 1977 Topps Mexican rookie as well. The COMC and eBay asking prices for this card are stupid, seriously, don't even bother looking. Thankfully though, Sportlots came through, and I was able to get this one for less than a buck (which is still probably multiple times higher then it would sell for at a show).

A funny thing happened too while I was waiting for this to arrive, I happened upon a Twitter discussion from some people who had also just found out about the cards existence. I didn't participate in it myself, but did find the timing to be interesting. In typical me fashion, I already have another one on the way, but am thinking that that one might get used for a TTM attempt. I haven't done so yet, but I'll have to see if he signs stuff for folks.

Since I mentioned Twitter, I might as well mention that I happened upon a weekly vintage baseball open sales thread last week, and in a completely impromptu move, put something up, and sold it within minutes. This prompted me to try again a few nights ago with two small lots and one single. It took a little longer this time, but by the next morning all had sold. Normally I don't even bother looking at the myriad of sales threads on Twitter, mostly because of the obscene prices, but clicked on this one for some reason, and am now glad that I did. I don't have a lot more unwanted baseball items to sell, but it has been nice to move a few things and not have to pay eBay fees. It's not a paid endorsement, but if you have anything you want to sell, or even if you're looking to buy (there's lots of graded cards if you're into that sort of thing), this guy runs the thread every Wednesday night. I will say that there does seem to be a lot of expensive items being listed, but unlike most open sales threads, cards actually sell. In fact, most of them seem to sell. It's probably not for everyone, but I thought it was worth throwing out there for those that might be interested.