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).

A potpourri of purchases

I was going to start today's post by talking about the fact that my buying of stuff has been down this year, at least through the first five months. This has been due to many things, namely a much tighter budget, throw in some depression, add a pinch of just a lack of interest in general, cover in foil, place in oven for two hours at 350 degrees, remove from the oven and let stand for 10 minutes, and you've got yourself a perfect cheapskate loaf.

Now I say "was" because I just had to go and make my most expensive purchase of the year on eBay last night, which means that today I will have to list a couple of items for sale - items that I know will sell quickly - that way I will be able to pay for said expensive item when the credit card bill comes. It'll probably be a while before this item makes it into a blog post, but in the meantime I'm sure that there will be few people out there who are curious to know about what was gotten, so without spoiling too much, I will just say that it's from an Age when things were Golden :)

So anyways, expensive item aside, I haven't been buying very much this year, especially from eBay. But not "buying very much" isn't "haven't bought anything", so, minus the Goodwill purchases, I thought I'd do a little catching up and just toss everything from the last five months into a single post!   

About a month ago there was a card on eBay that I kind of wanted quite a bit. As is the case with most sellers that have an auction item that I'm interested in, I went ahead and looked at the rest of their items to see if the shipping could be reduced by buying more, this lot of Ichiro 2012 Chrome orange refractors sort of caught my eye, the only bad thing was that it was ending three minutes before the thing I really wanted. In general, I prefer it when secondary items are ending after the main item, just in case I don't get that main item. Even though I don't like to do so, I bid on, and won, this lot, the bad news... I didn't win the much desired card! Had these been ending after the loss, I probably wouldn't have bid on them (even though I'm now sort of hoarding cards with this image on them), but that's not how things worked out, and I got them. At $3.25 for the pair, I guess it didn't turn out that bad, as I would've got them on COMC if I had seen them at around $1.60 apiece -- if I'm sounding negative at all, it's probably just because I'm still slightly bummed about not getting that main card.

My mom and I have been ordering from the Edward R. Hamilton catalog for over, geez, twenty years now (how has it been that long?). In the days before they had a website, we would do a couple of orders per year, now it seems like it's just one, or maybe two a year. Usually it's just one of us finding a few things and then asking the other if they want to get in on the order, and so it was last month when my mom let me know that she was going to be getting a few things, and was I interested in anything. I used to buy a ton of books from the catalogs, but I don't know if it's just that their selection isn't as good as it used to be, or if the amount of good books being published has gone down in the last twenty years, but either way, I just don't get very many books from them anymore -- mostly just DVD's these days. So, with this order of hers, I only ended up getting a CD this time, albeit a pretty awesome 3-disc compilation. This is a pretty solid album for just $5.95, I mean there is a few songs that you'll find on just about any 80's compilation, but for the most part, it's stuff that you don't usually see on these kinds of albums, definitely some deeper cuts on this one, a few of which were new to me.

It wasn't my intention to do so, but I ended up selling a few cards on the Twitter, the money from that sale was then used to get this 2018 Classics Eric Dickerson orange Optichrome (#'d 14/15). Not a bad trade in my book, sell four cards that I don't want, and get one that I do.

As some of you undoubtedly know, eBay just recently had another one of those get $3 off when you spend more than $3.01 coupons, and I used mine to finally see/get Be Kind Rewind. I feel like I've been trying to see this movie for years now, I have found used copies at various places during that time, but there's always something wrong with the disc (scratches, food residue, etc.), so I decided to take advantage of the coupon and finally get it, which I did for exactly $0.61 after the discount. As for the film itself, I knew going in that it had some flaws, but overall it was still a solid movie, there were plenty of laughs to be had, heck, the "remaking" of Ghostbusters was worth the 61 cents alone.

While I was looking to use that $3 off coupon, I came across this TV Guide from October of 1960. The price with shipping was $3.28, so I could've used the coupon it, but the DVD would garner more savings so I used it on that, and then just went ahead bought this separately. This issue is probably going to get it's own post at some point, so I'm not discuss it too much today, but the one thing that I wanted to point out...

... is that it was a Portland copy, meaning it's got local listings, which is what I always look for when buying older TV Guide's/TV Host's. Kind of interesting too that this came from a seller in MA, Arthur was a long way from home!

I forgot to add this purchase to last weeks Progressions post. I make no claims as to being a Derrick rose fan, but I still couldn't pass up half a rainbow for $4.

Another movie that I've sort of been wanting to see for awhile now, so being able to find it one of the $3.79 bins at Walmart wasn't too shabby. I still haven't watched it, so I can't yea or nay it yet.

I just recently talked about going for a full page of Robert Parish Super Star's, and this just another cheap addition for that pursuit.

Yours truly makes a slightly distorted first appearance on the blog, and in a shark's mouth no less :)

Back to Walmart for this one, this time from the $5 DVD bin. The jury's still out as to whether or not this was a good buy or not, as I've only watched two of the movies so far, Malibu Shark Attack (bad, but had it's moments, and was still watchable), and Shark in Venice (terrible, couldn't even make it halfway through, somehow Stephen Baldwin's acting is getting even worse with age). I'd say that if two of the remaining six are watchable, then it won't have been a bad get.

More Ichiro! And another Trading Card History refractor to boot! This is my third one now, I kind of like to get a page of these as well. I absolutely love these, but it does bug the crap out of me that no matter how hard I try, I cannot seem to capture the rainbow effect via camera or scanner.

I went from January to the middle of March (roughly) without buying anything on eBay, apparently this was too much for eBay to handle, because I got an email from them saying that they missed me, and was given a coupon for $5 off if I spent $10.01 or more, which was nice, but it really did read like "we miss your money and here's something to encourage you to give us some of that missed money". I guess it worked though, because I obliged and bought a couple of TV Host's from the 90's, Portland editions again.

For me, depression and nostalgia go hand-in-hand, I am unable to experience one without the other, so I've been plagued by both for pretty much all of this year. One of the things that I'm almost always nostalgic for is Cable television from the 80's and 90's, especially since cable and satellite suck so much now, and don't even get me started on that streaming nonsense. If you lived an area that had Paragon cable (oh Paragon, why did you have to go away?), than you most likely had TV Host's as well, and boy do I miss those weekly listings. I couldn't get the whole page, but you can see how great these were from the above photo. This partial 3 1/2 hour window from 1996 (in the first photo it's from the issue that features the premiere of Millennium!!!!!) has more to offer than a day's worth of cable/satellite programming now. These too will eventually be getting their own post, so I'll just say that before last night's item, these had been my most expensive purchase of the year, and at $15 that isn't saying much -- like I said, I just haven't been interested in too much as of late.


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.

My first Twitter trade

Twitter... it's a thing. Some people love it, some people hate it, some people love and hate it. Some people can't live without it, some people live just fine without it. Love it or hate it though, it's not going away anytime soon.

Personally speaking, I'm not very good at the social media, and it often makes me feel considerably older than I actually am, which isn't a good thing. Twitter has been good for the blog, and it's allowed me to get to know a few fellow bloggers a little better (in one particular case, a lot better), both of which have been good things. On the flip side though, there's a lot of rabble rousing going on, arguments over extremely trivial things, plenty of name calling, and lots of politics -- and all of the propaganda and misinformation that goes hand-in-hand with politics on social media as well.

Another popular thing on the Twitter, at least amongst card collector's, is trading. There seems to be a lot of good and bad with that as well, more good than bad though (at least from what I've been able to gather). I think I've been using the site for about a year and a half now, and up until two weeks ago, had never used it for trading before. This is mostly because a) formal trading isn't something that I enjoy doing a lot of, and b) most of the stuff I see people wanting to trade away tends to be of the higher end variety, which is something that I don't collect -- and even if I was interested in any of it, I wouldn't have anything to trade for it, as usually folks are looking for other high end stuff in return, which is the kind of stuff that I don't have for trade.

A few weeks ago though, Adam, who goes by the handle Alindz99, tweeted out that he had gotten a binder of 90's basketball cards, all (or least the majority of them) of which were going to be available for trade... 90's?.. Basketball?... My interest was officially piqued!

I don't collect a lot of base cards anymore, even stuff from the 90's, I've already seen it all way too many times, or I already have what I want (for the most part) -- but I do love me some 90's inserts and parallels, so I went ahead and asked if this binder contained any such things.

The binder did contain such things, I have pictures to prove it, speaking of pictures, Adam really went above and beyond by sending me literally dozens of binder page pictures via DM, it seemed like an awful lot of effort considering how small the trade ended up being, but it was an effort that I very much appreciated nonetheless.

Anyways, I got lots of pictures sent to me, most of the inserts were one's that I already had, and didn't really need any duplicates of, but there were two that stood out -- and not because they're crazy rare and valuable or anything, no, in fact they're both cards that can routinely be found in dime boxes. Instead they stood out because I didn't already have one of them, and the other is a card that I'm trying to get an entire pages worth of.

First up is the "new to me" card:



1994-95 Fleer 1st Year Phenom #8

It seems like it's been a lifetime since Big Dog's rookie season! Drafted in the #1 spot, Glenn had a ton of hype coming into the NBA, which I think he did a pretty good of living up to, or at least as good as anyone could playing for Milwaukee at that time.

1994-95 Fleer Super Star #4

Did anyone have more inserts than Fleer during the mid 90's? I don't think so! I have found four copies of this card in dime boxes during the last year or so, which is fine by me, because I absolutely love this card, enough so to chase an entire page's worth. With this latest acquisition, I am now more than halfway towards completing this goal. I feel the need to note too, that the card isn't miscut or anything, it was just a really bad picture by me, the cracked screen on my phone is really making the act of taking well centered pictures quite difficult (I know, first world problem).

So that's it, a two-card trade, certainly not the biggest Twitter trade ever, nothing like the one's that Matt routinely pulls off, but I'm still pretty happy with it, I might even have to try it again sometime.

I only spend about ten minutes a day on the site (there just isn't that much for me), so I'm glad that I saw this trade opportunity during one of those short stints, kind of makes me want to spend a little more time on there, just in case something else similar ever arises (kind of).

Thanks again for the trade, Adam! And to everybody else, go give him a follow, you certainly could do worse :)


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.