Summer of Slabs 01 - Color matching

Welp, now that everyone has noticed I've returned to blogging... I will have to go on another hiatus. 

Two weeks from today Mrs. Collector will go under the knife for a 6-hour procedure involving three different surgeons to (hopefully) remove her liver and colon tumors. If all goes well, her recovery will take about a month. But that's strict rest; she will still have to take it easy for a few months after that. 

So.. no East Coast National, no birthday visit to Connecticut, and no card show at the mall the following weekend. I'm still consigning cards with 4 Sharp Corners(might need the money more than I care to imagine), and I'm going ahead with my planned series of Summer of Slabs posts. Some of these might have to be scheduled, but we're not there yet. 

In this series I'll scan up a couple of BGS or PSA-graded cards in my collection. Some of these just arrived from Beckett, some are on their way to 4SC, and some have permanent residence in my hallowed Graded Card Chest -- which the Mrs bought me at least 15 years ago. 

The manufacturer went out of business a decade ago

There's room for 144 PSA-graded cards in this bad boy, and my initial purpose for these posts (before the surgery was moved up a month) was to determine which cards to keep, which to sell, and which cards to acquire. 

We'll get back to this soon enough. Today I want to kick off this series by showing off some color matching parallels fresh from BGS:

This Matt Chapman green refractor is numbered to 75. Someone on eBay offered me $20 for it after he'd just been traded to the Giants. I decided to hold on to it for a while, but decided to submit it for grading while he's still a top-tier third baseman. It's going in the shipment to 4 Sharp Corners. 

I picked up this Tony Parker Bowman '48 tribute for $5.25 on COMC way back in 2015(have I really been back into basketball card collecting that long?!?) The black parallels are numbered to 48 and I wanted to grade it specifically so 4SC would consign it. There is a white corner (back bottom left) that I was aware of before submitting it to BGS, but I took the gamble anyway. No idea what to expect for this one; Carmelo Anthony and Vince Carter cards sold for about $20 raw, while a PSA-authenticated (not graded) Kobe Bryant sold for $330. 

I love this Steve Nash orange refractor. The only reason I considered selling it was because these sell for a lot more than I realized; a PSA 9 Nash just sold for about $130. The centering was an obvious issue on my copy, but BGS saw more of an issue with the edges. Either way, a Mint 9 was best-case scenario for this card. A sale price ceiling of over $100 is tempting, but I'm gonna hold on to this for another year or so.

Sorry about the iffy pictures, btw. My scanner won't work with thick BGS holders so I had to use my phone. 

Finally tonight, here's the one card that I knew I wanted to get a Gem Mint grade on, the one that would look the coolest in my color match collection, even if it's not as valuable as the others... 

Wooo this is the best grade yet! Filip Forsberg isn't Connor McDavid or anything, but he's one of the top rookies in the 2013-14 Panini Prizm set. This was the only stand alone Panini Prizm puck product and since a Red Sasha Barkov is out of my budget, this was the best color match I could acquire. There's one on eBay (with a better pic) listed at $129. I don't think it would sell for half that in auction. 

This weekend I'll discuss some more from the 'consign' pile, and maybe another keeper or two.

Thanks for reading!



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