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.