It's done this time!

I don't know how long ago it was now, but some years ago I got the last card I needed, John Havlicek, to complete the 1976-77 Topps basketball set, did a blog post to proclaim it's completion, and if I recall correctly, received a collective yawn. 

I know that blog folks don't care about basketball cards, so the crickets were no surprise, but as it would turn out, those chirps were premature. 

At the time of it's completion, I had the set in a binder, but in an effort to free up some space, I moved to a box (one of those graded card boxes that COMC always sends my stuff in) shortly thereafter. Fast forward a handful of years, and I decided that I wanted to put it back in a binder, which I did, only to find that something was eschew; namely that I was missing a card, #21 Steve Mix. At first I thought maybe I had just put the cards away originally slightly out of order, but a couple of passes through my "completed" set told me that that wasn't the case. As big as these cards are, there's no way I could've misplaced one, so it was obvious that an oversight had occurred and I was still one card away from completing the set.

I have a decent amount of duplicates from the set, but as you can probably imagine, no Steve Mix. The only thing left to do was to hit the interwebs in search of my needed card. And boy was that fun. Given their size, and the fact that they're "vintage" basketball, which apparently has become considerably more desirable since the boom started, not to mention increased postage costs in recent years, and you get a perfect recipe for a lot of overpriced singles. After halfheartedly looking off and on for a few months, I finally settled on the above copy from COMC for $2.48, which just recently arrived along with 36 other cards that I had shipped for just a couple of bucks thanks to the $5 shipping coupon that they gave me after taking a ridiculous amount of time to send the previous order (this one took "only" six weeks). 

Considering that this set is loaded with HOFers (some of whom have two cards), Steve Mix was an unlikely fellow to need last (Hondo made a lot more sense), but oh well, it's done. And this time I'm sure!

But wait, there's more...

I have a number of other vintage basketball sets in progress, or at least I do now, again. I hadn't added any cards to these builds for a few years, probably since before the boom started. In fact, prior to just a couple of months ago, most of them had been long since been cannibalized for player collections. But, as I mentioned in the previous post, I've started rethinking a lot of my player collections, which has led me to put all of my old basketball set builds back together (minus the couple of cards that I gave to someone else so that they could finish two of their sets -- those I'll have to re-buy).

Now that all of these sets are back on, I'd very much like to be done with them; just one thing less to have to look for. A lot of the prices on COMC have gone up considerably since the last time I looked to add any cards to my sets, but even so, I've been able to find a few cards in recent months whose prices were more akin to what they used to be. 19 of the 37 cards in my most recent shipment ended up being of the vintage basketball variety.

The oldest basketball set that I'm working on is the '69-70 set. Finding four that I need for less than $2 apiece seemed like a pretty good deal in today's market. Bob Boozer, who was just coming off his best season (21.7 PPG with Chicago), is the highlight here.

Number of cards now needed to complete: 32

This is probably the cheapest of the league leader cards from the '70-71 set. And poor Darrall Imhoff, he was given one of the all-time worst photos on this card (Jerry Sloan's card in this set is even worse).

He's not talked about much anymore, if at all, but Jeff Mullins had a really solid stretch of about 5-6 years there with the Warriors. 

I thought for sure that I'd be able to add a few more needs from this set, but alas, two was all that I was able to manage.

Number of cards now needed to complete: 40

Having been so many years since I last worked on it, I was a bit surprised to find that I still needed so many from the '72-73 set. Thankfully, I was able to get all of the most expensive cards long before they jumped in price. Some big names here up on that first row. At around $2.50, Mel Daniels was the most expensive one from this group. Merv Jackson was a much needed upgrade.

Like the year before, the '72-73 set has separate checklists for the NBA and ABA, and for reasons unknown to me, the NBA checklist from the '72-73 set has gotten quite expensive. This one showed up on the site for like $17, which there was no way I was gonna pay that much for a checklist, but a few weeks later it went on sale for $5, and while that seemed like an awful lot, compared to sold prices on the eBay, it was actually quite reasonable. Obviously I ponied up the five bucks for it. I believe that this was the most expensive card left that I need.

Number of cards now needed to complete: 11

Similar to the '72-73 set, I thought I only needed 2-3 from the '75-76 set, but that number turned out to be 10; half of which I was able mark off with this order.

The Bulls had an awful lot of talent on their roster during the mid 70's, unfortunately for them, a number of teams had more.

Number of cards now needed to complete: 5

But wait... there's even more!

The '77-78 offering is my least favorite vintage basketball set, and as such, I've never put a lot of effort into completing it (either in white or grey back form). That being said, I couldn't pass on this very reasonably priced Robert Parish rookie (white back) that I saw on Sportlots. Cards from this set always scan poorly, so you'll have to take my word for it when I say that it's even nicer than I thought it would be. Despite my not being a huge fan of it, I am now making a bit of a push to complete the set, if only so that I can say at some point that I've got a complete run of 70's basketball sets. This was by far the most expensive card left for this set that I needed.

Number of cards now needed to complete: 45

It's a lofty goal, but I'm hoping by year's end that I'll be able to complete at least one of the sets seen in this post, or one of the two that wasn't, those being '71-72 (14 needed) and '74-75 (4 needed).

Bo, Joe, and more Bo

I've been rethinking my player collections in recent months, namely whether or not I really need so many different ones? And also, if a few choice cards for certain players might work better than just trying to accumulate as many of said players as possible?

I've come to the conclusion the answer to the first question is, no, I don't think I need to be collecting so many different guys at this point. I'm slowly finding that I've lost complete interest in collecting some of the people that I have been, and have started removing their cards from binders. It's been nice in that, not only is freeing up binder space, but also is helping reduce my overall collection; which I had started to think was getting near unmanageable (for me).

As for the latter question, I believe that for certain people, going forward, a few choice cards will be sufficient enough to represent my fandom and/or appreciation of what they've accomplished. The more I think about it, the more I like this idea. To some degree, I already started doing this last year, namely for Ichiro and Mike Alstott; though, that was primarily because I realized that I really don't like the look of most of their cards. I don't know what it is about those two, but they both seem to have an awful lot of cards from sets whose designs I find to be atrocious. After whittling out all of the ugly cards, I was left with like three for Mike, and maybe 15 or so for Ichiro. A more recent example would be, Bill Walton. I can't remember why I was doing so exactly, but less than a week before his passing I found myself going through my collection of his. My favorite cards of his are from his playing days, and those are all in either, completed sets, or set-builds. Not counting those, my collection of his, such as it was, consisted of just a couple of autographs, and some, to be frank, rather ugly modern Panini cards. It took just a few seconds for me to decided that I just wanted to keep the autographs, and ditch all of the other shiny shit. It's funny too, because I got to thinking how neat it would be to have a whole page of autographs from him, and then what happens, he goes and leaves us just a few days later. I don't know if that page idea will still be doable, if it is, I'll probably have to wait awhile before the prices come back down.

With a lot of my player collections now in flux, I decided to take down that page from the blog until I get everything sorted out (it wasn't getting much traction anyway). As it stands, I can think of about a dozen players that will be safe from the coming purge, two of whom just so happen to be featured in today's post.

I was fortunate enough to get a few cards from, Jim, he from the now daily, cards as i see them, earlier this year. The envelope consisted of four cards, two of which were the post playing days Bo's that have been seen thus far. As I told Jim before he sent these, I rarely by modern Bo's (as there's still more than enough from his playing days that I don't have), but I'll gladly accept them if they're being sent to me. Both of these were new to me.

The Bo's were nice enough, but they can't compete with this pair of Joe Rudi's. It looks so strange to see him as a Red Sock. It was probably even weirder for fans at the time. I've mentioned before how neat I think it was that all three of the card companies gave him a final card in 1983, but Topps did him pretty good the year before as well, giving him a card in the base set as a Sock, and another in the Traded set as an Athletic. I already had the base card, so it was to get the Traded one to go with it.

Many thanks to Jim for the cards!

There was a seller on eBay earlier this year that did a "set break" of MSA Holiday Inn discs. The bidding on all of them started at 99¢ with free shipping, and from what I saw, most of them ended at that same price; including Joe.

I probably should've gotten a few other players, but my heart wasn't really in it at the time.

My last COMC shipment had a few Rudi's in there as well. Both of these were got during the Black Friday sale. My interest in autographs has been waning pretty hard, but for five bucks I couldn't pass on this particular one. I think this was either my fourth or fifth autograph of Joe. The buyback was a cheap last minute purchase. It wasn't needed, but obviously I got it anyway. This was my second buyback of his.

This card represents the first Fleer Sticker that I've ever owned. I really like this look of this set and could see myself collecting it someday. I think it's safe to say that this is one set that will never be affected by the boom, so I will not be looking to add anymore stickers to my collection until I'm ready to start working on it. 

I noticed a few months ago that a seller on Sportlots had three copies of Bo's Cyberstats for 20¢ each. As you can tell, I bought all three. The Joe Rudi Sticker came from this seller as well. Knowing how poorly these scan, I tried to get the effect to pop more via a photograph; which didn't really turn out all that well either. I had zero copies of this card prior to the purchase, and now that I have three, I'd kind of like go for a full page's worth.

Artist and custom card maker extraordinaire, Gavin, who of course, also helms Baseball Card Breakdown, sent out some of his creations to a few folks earlier this year, ostensibly in thanks for supporting his MusiCards blog. I was fortunate enough to have been included. I don't really like the idea of getting things just for commenting on a blog, as I'm of the opinion that folks should be doing that whenever they can anyway (if you can spend your whole day commenting on every single thing that comes across your Twitter feed, I see no reason why you can't do the same for a few blogs here and there), so instead, I prefer to think that these two cards were sent to me for no other reason other than that Gavin thought I would enjoy them. And he was right, I did.

It took me longer than it should've to realize that the Bowman Bo had been arted up. The background looked so natural that I didn't even notice it right away. I initially thought that I had been sent just a regular Bowman to keep the other custom company. Obviously that wasn't the case. It's artiness is more subdued than a lot of Gavin's other cards, but I think it works really well on this card.

The Score (blue superfractor?) appeared in one of Gavin's posts quite awhile ago, and was much coveted by me. At the time, I thought about inquiring as to it's price, but figured he'd be able to get more for it on the eBay than he would from me, so I held off on sending the inquiry. Fast forward a bunch of months and look what showed up in the mail, my much coveted Bo! I really appreciate Gavin sending this one, not only because of how cool it looks, but also because I know that he could've easily sold this one for a decent sum.

Being a pretend artist myself, I can really appreciate how much effort that Gavin puts into his customs, and am always grateful for the opportunity to add a few more to my collection.

Poor to fair

Normally when you come across something on COMC that's listed as 'poor to fair', it's not hard to see why. Whether it's the rounded corners, noticeable creases, paper loss, etc., you're not usually gonna be left wondering why it's earned this particular distinction -- but sometimes, and it doesn't happen very often, you are. Such was the case back in November during the Black Friday sale when I found two 1975 Hostess panels from the same seller, both being listed as poor to fair, with neither having any obvious flaws.

When it comes to questionable items, I rarely take chances on that site anymore (they're missing a lot more creases than they used to), but again, these two panels looked fine to me, and nobody else was buying them, so I figured I'd give them a go.

I haven't really talked about it much, if at all, but I am collecting the Hostess sets in single and panel form. I don't actually believe that I'll ever complete any of the sets in panel form, but I like the way that they present, and am always curious to see who was paired with who. The above Carlton/Cey panel is my first one that still has a bunch of the box attached, which I do really like, but those seem to usually carry a bit more of a premium.

It took a bit of searching once they arrived, but I did find a small wrinkle (that doesn't go through to the back) on the upper right part of Steve Carlton's card. And while I'd prefer that it wasn't there, it's not egregious, and I don't think that that alone should've knocked it down to the lowly poor to fair category.

I've checked this one multiple times, and can't seem to find any issues whatsoever. I can't help but think that maybe it was accidently labeled as poor to fair. Of course, if it that was indeed the case, I can't help but wonder why the seller didn't protest the label? I guess it doesn't really matter anymore though, as it's now mine; and I've labeled it as 'neat to pretty cool'.

From what I've been able to gather, both of these panels are two of the more common ones from the '75 set, but at $2.80 apiece, I'm awfully glad I decided to take that chance.

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.

Sender Unknown

Back in 2020 I received my first ever envelope from a person, or persons, unknown. Now, a little over four years later, I've received my second. 

I've recently decided, mostly because I never finished it as a kid, to start working on the 1989-90 Fleer basketball set again. I'm not starting with much, but I did take my Terry Porter out of his collection to add it to the set, so this Terry will now replace that one in his collection. Detlef is a nice addition to the set build as well. And this is two posts in a row with Otis Thorpe sighting; I could get used to that. As for the card itself, I never noticed the precarious placement of that unknown Buck's hand 🙈.

A few of the cards in this envelope are as mysterious as the sender himself. It's still nice to be thought of though.

My first three 2023 football cards. For a modern set, the design of this Legends subset isn't that bad. I like the the bright blue and green elements. And of course, the Prizm looks much better in person than it does here. 

My favorite card of the envelope is the one I led off the post with. Normally, I probably wouldn't like this sort of card, but for some reason it just works for me. Plus too, I so rarely get any Dickerson's anymore, so I really appreciate being able to add something new to his collection.

Many thanks to the mystery sender, whoever they may be. If you were going for the element of surprise, you've certainly achieved it!

And as for who may've sent this envelope, I only have two clues...

I guess it's a good thing that this envelope was deliverable, because that's all there was for a return address. Seems like this would narrow down a bit, but I don't have my address visible to everyone on the site, just friends, I think, but I don't think any of those people are in Hartford...

The only person that I know of who has ties to CT is Chris, but this doesn't feel like a Chris sort of mailing. Well, that, and in all of our years of sending things back and forth, Chris has never gone the mystery route, and I don't think he would start doing so now.

[Fun fact: A grandpa of mine, with many greats in front of that title, was one of Hartford's founding fathers]

Not a lot to go on, but more than there was last time. Though, I'm guessing that these mystery envelopes came from two different people, as the contents of said envelopes were polar opposites of each other. Thanks again to whoever went through the trouble to send this!

And on a completely unrelated note...

After over a year in the making, and many months of delayed shipping, my latest COMC shipment has finally arrived! Happy day!

An act of generosity leads to a trade

I woke up one morning a few months back to find a transaction proposal, of the TCDB variety, in my email. Not currently having anything listed on there for trade, I must admit that my curiosity was piqued. At best, it would be a fellow blogger looking to send me something, official like; and at worst, it would be some rando trying to sell me something. Turns out that it was neither.

The message was from a fellow called, Marc, or as the cool kids call him, iusedtohavethatcard (an odd nickname for sure, but I'm not one to judge), and he had a card that he wanted to send me; with no desire to get anything in return. That was certainly different.

The card in question was a 1994-95 Majeur Magazine Otis Thorpe (it's a French magazine). Marc had an extra copy that he was looking to giveaway, and apparently I was the only one who had it on my wantlist (how is that possible!). He did mention that one of the corners was a bit chewy, but since this one of those sets that I never expected to even own a single card from, I wasn't about to turn it down over a condition issue.

As you can see above, the corner in question isn't that bad, especially considering that these were magazine issued cards. I was expecting much worse.

The magazine sure didn't skimp on the backs. For this sort of thing, you really couldn't ask for a better write-up. 

Having never seen one of these cards in person, I always assumed that they were similar in size to the SI for Kids issues. That assumption was just a tad off...

Here's Otis next to a regular sized 1990-91 Fleer Shawn Kemp, which also came from Marc (more on that in a second though). As you can see, these Majeur cards are rather large. Given their size, I'm even more forgiving of any condition issues than I would've been previously. I can imagine how difficult it would've been to store these for European collector during the mid 90's. 

Before accepting Marc's offer, I took at his want lists, ostensibly to try and find something that I could send in return (despite his assurances that nothing was needed, I was still gonna try). I noticed a few things on them that I had, which then got me to thinking about a possible trade. A quick glance at his trade list made up my mind, and thankfully Marc was open to the idea.

Even though I don't do a lot of trading on the site, this was the card that made me want to try and put something together with Marc. The 1999-00 Metal Emerald parallels were one of three parallel sets that I was actively working on when I walked away from collecting back in 2000. I can't tell you why exactly, but in the last couple of months, for reasons unknown to me, trying to go back and finish those three sets has felt like something that I have to do. In the case of the Emerald's, I only had a few from my original attempt, so for the most part I've had to start from scratch. Vince Carter is card #1 in the set, which, given the hype around him the year before, wasn't that much of a surprise. 

My scanner completely washes out the green on these, hence the photo; which still didn't capture this particular shade of green very well.

I'm now sort of working on the 1997-98 Ultra Gold Medallion set as well. A couple of decent names here. I always liked the photo that Fleer used for Rodman's card. 

I'm sort of working on the '98-99 Gold Medallions too. 

I forgot to scan my copy of this blue Starquest that came in the trade, so I had to "borrow" this image from the TCDB. If I remember correctly, one of the teams that Marc is a fan of is the Rockets (or possibly just the 90's Houston teams), so he had a number Hakeem duplicates. 

I've mentioned before that during my early years of collecting I was pretty much only interested in building base sets. Inserts and parallels meant very little to me, and when pulled from a pack, were just stuck in the back of the sets binder. Often times I wouldn't even give them a second glance. One of the few exceptions to that was the Pan for Gold inserts that came from the 1995-96 Topps set. For whatever reason, these really caught my attention at the time. Not enough to try and complete the set mind you, but I did spend a bit more time looking at them than usual. I don't know if I'm even trying to complete the set now, but I have been picking up a few cheap copies (thankfully no one cares about this set anymore) here and there, even if I already have a copy of said cheap copy. This was my second Rodman.

These were all freebies from my want list that Marc was kind enough to surprise me with. Much like the Pan for Gold's, the '92-93 Upper Deck Team MVP insert set was another rare one that stuck out to me way back when. I can remember trading one of the MJ's from the set (the one where he's holding the trophy) to fly by night card shop (in Gresham, OR) for five packs of 1998-99 Topps basketball series 2 in 1999. I can't remember if the packs yielded anything of note, but it felt like a good trade at the time. And even though I never collected it, I've always like the 1997-98 Hoops design. I noticed last year that I had a few of the "key" cards from it, and decided what the heck, I might as well give it a go too. I haven't gotten very far with it yet though.

Also included in the trade was the Fleer Shawn Kemp up top. A few of you know how fond I am of that particular card, and that I kind of hoard it. It's been a while since I got a copy, and I've lost count of how many I have, but I think it's somewhere between 150-200 now.

Many thanks to fellow Otis Thorpe fan, Marc, for offering me the awesome Majeur card free of charge. It's been a few months, and I still have it displayed on one of my bookshelves. I'm also very grateful for the trade, as I was able to add some pretty neat cards to multiple set builds.

Celebrating Opening Day with a scan dump (Part 2)

Given how things have gone in recent years, it's hard to believe that there was a time when I was able to post once every 2-3 days on here. These days, I feel like it's a win if I can finish 2-3 posts a month. I still haven't fully adjusted to this new normal though, and often end up scanning more stuff than I'll ever be able to get to. I need to learn how to start picking my spots a bit better. In the meantime though, I've got scan folders galore. 

I know now that I won't ever be able to get all of the themed posts that I had planned on doing, done, but do still want to show the majority of the cards in said scan folders, if only so I don't feel like I wasted my time doing all of that scanning. The easiest (for me) way that I've been able to think of to get all of these scans out there is to do a series of scan-dump posts, which is why you've already seen a couple this year, and by my calculations, will likely see four or five more by year's end. Today's edition will cover the last of the old baseball scans. All but the last card came from COMC, and all have been sitting in folders for between 2-4 years now.

I can remember thinking at the time that I probably shouldn't have gotten Bobby Shantz (despite his cheapness) because this card is in every single '61 Post lot that you find on eBay, and since I still need a bunch of cards from the set, I figured that it wouldn't be long before I got one of said lots which would've included the Shantz. Fast forward a bit, and I still haven't gotten one of those lots, so Bobby's purchase doesn't look so bad at this point.

Everything I said about the Shantz card applies to Elston here, too. I wrote 95¢ under this scan, so I guess looking back that wasn't too bad of a price.

I'm no longer actively collecting Larry Doby, but am still keeping what I have, and wouldn't hesitate to add to his inactive collection were I to come across any more cheap cards of his. And in case anyone's wondering, the only reason I stopped looking for his stuff is simply because it's gone up so much in price since the boom started.

Because of how much time has passed since purchasing most of them, I don't recall too many details about most of the cards in this post. This Kenny Holtzman (and the next card) is the exception though. This was the first card I bought during 2022 Black Friday sale. It set me back a whopping 47¢. And despite not being the biggest fan of the Kellogg's 3-D's, I couldn't pass up this uncracked copy for that price.

Kenny was the first card that I bought during the 2022 Black Friday sale, and here was the last. I don't remember why I did it, but right before requesting my shipment Monday night (the last night that one could qualify for free shipping), I decided to look and see what the cheapest Red Man (w/ tab) on the site was. Low and behold, it was somebody that I actually collect! At around $7.50 this was also the most expensive card that I had gotten that weekend. No regrets. If I wasn't already now working on half a gillion different sets again, I'd strongly consider going after all of the Red Men. And speaking of collecting Red Men, if you feel like following someone's progress on the '52 set, go check out Eric's.

Despite my interest in collecting real stamps, I don't have a lot of desire to do so with those of the Topps variety. I've never taken the time to see who's on the checklist for these various sets, but I don't see myself ever getting too many more of them.

I know that when I got this card that it was for a very specific reason, but this was during the delayed shipments era (aka the 'Rona), and by the time I finally got it in hand, I could no longer remember why I had wanted it so much. I'm hoping that it'll come back to me someday. In the meantime, it was added to my pseudo set-build.

This is just nice looking card, isn't it? The blue sleeves of Luis' warm-up jacket blend in well with the background color.

It's subtle, but I'm thinking that this card was meant to be used in some sort of promotionial capacity. 

I know why Upper Deck wouldn't have done so, but this card would've been so much more interesting if they had swapped the pictures. The Jay Buhner Fan Club T-shirt reveal is considerably better than a headshot.

I don't go out of my way to seek out Junior cards anymore, in fact these last two are probably amongst the last 3-4 that I've gotten since the Boom got going. This one was actually from one of their eBay auctions, and while the background does pop a bit more in person, overall, the card was a bit underwhelming. As an aside, I won a few more of their auctions last month (not an easy thing to do anymore) for cards from a considerably older, and more interesting, set. It'll be awhile before you, or I, see them though, as they're currently sitting in my account waiting to be shipped.

This was a bit of an impulse purchase. I saw it for the first time while looking through someone's sale, thought it was very neat looking, so I bought it. Five dollars (and some change) seems like a lot to spend on something "just because", but in this instance I think it was worth it.

Vic Raschi is a guy I collect solely because of his being a Portland Beaver. I don't add to his collection very often, but when I do...

To my knowledge, there aren't a lot of locker room shots in the '54 Bowman set, or very many other sets from this era, so in my mind it makes this particular image stand out a bit more.

That's it for the COMC portion of the post, but before I call it a wrap, I'm gonna squeeze in an eBay purchase from either last year, or the year before. I just don't know, it got scanned right away, stuck in a folder, and then forgotten (the scan, not the card -- I've seen the card in it's binder many times since).

I know that a lot of collector's aren't too keen on mis-registered cards, and I'm not either when it's just a slight blur, but I absolutely love them when they're this off. This is my second 1970 Topps that's this wonked, and unlike the Tony Perez, which is even better, this one fit into a player collection; that being Mike Cuellar. Since these are listed under so many different descriptions, they're not always easy to find. In fact, I only came across this one while doing a general search for Mike Cuellar. I think it was just described as an error. At around $5, I know that I overpaid for it, but I really wanted, and had been prepared to go higher if need be. As much as I love the individual card, I can't help but wonder how awesome this whole sheet would've been to see (and potentially own).

There's a part of me that would like to just get the rest of scan dump posts done (so that I no longer have to see my folders of shame), but I have a couple of thank you posts that I really should get to, so those'll probably be what's on tap for the coming month.