Breaking up is hard to do

For a short time I wondered which vintage set I would complete first: 1956 Topps, or 1961 Golden Press. 

This set was never a priority, just something I've been plugging away at, bit by bit, because I thought the cards were very appealing and undervalued. There was a chance I would complete this set first without trying too hard, because it's only 33 cards. Basically, Golden Press selected the 32 greatest players of the first half of the 20th century*, plus Manager John McGraw. 

*Ted Williams was not included, presumably because he'd just retired - or perhaps it was a licensing issue. 

Here's what I have as of today:

One more card would put me at exactly 2/3 completion. These are the cards I need:

Ruth, Gehrig, and DiMaggio??? Uggghhh. The only low-hanging fruit left is Baker. Or maybe Dean. 

As much as I love this set, priorities have shifted and collecting focus has narrowed as a result. 

I still plan to finish the 1956 Topps set. I'm about 40 cards away and a good chunk of those are team cards, league presidents, and the two checklists. All of the non-players (and most of the remaining players) are much more expensive that I realized, even in low grade. I could understand the checklist - most kids wrote on them or threw them out. I could understand Will Harridge, he's card #1. 

But why is the White Sox team card $50+, graded or ungraded?!?!

My collection is just about where I want it, in that I've sold or traded nearly everything that had more financial value than sentimental value. If I'm going to tackle those pesky team cards and miscellany, '61 Golden Press will have to go. 

I can put together another consignment order, ship it out to 4 Sharp corners, and have my money in time for Black Friday if I send them out this week. But which ones do I part with?

"Jimmy" Foxx is the only Red Sox single, so that's an easy choice for the 'keeper' pile. 

I've got a lot of Giants and Athletics, (obviously from before their Bay Area era.) Definitely want to keep one from each team. Carl Hubbell and Lefty Grove are Mint 9s, so they'll stay. Then it's a tough call between Nap Lajoie, Mickey Cochrane, and Al Simmons. 

The rest of the 9's - George Sisler, Charlie Gehringer, and Pie Traynor - should probably go in the 'sell' pile, since they're the best chance I have to make any decent money. But I might keep one of them. 

Rogers Hornsby and Walter Johnson are arguably the biggest names in my set build. If they were a grade higher I'd have to consider selling them, but I'll hold onto them for now. 

The catcher cards are nice, and I'm tempted to hold on to either Cochrane or Gabby Hartnett. Still haven't completely committed to collecting catchers though. 

After looking over the entire collection I've decided to sell 2/3 of my 2/3, which means these seven will stay:

 

Once the other fourteen sell, I'll split the funds evenly between Christmas gifts and '56 singles. 

There might be another surprise or two on the way before then ;)

Thanks for reading!



~

Lowering My Standards

For much of my collecting life I've been a stickler for condition. When I was younger, it didn't matter to me if cards had frayed corners, scratches, or poor centering - I was happy to get my hands on anything. As an adult I'm much more discerning. It's one reason why I gravitated toward graded cards.

While it is exciting to have a high-grade copy of a card, especially a superstar's RC or a vintage Hall of Famer, it's more about the eye appeal for me than the prestige or resale value. The same reason I'm finicky about corners and centering is likely the same reason I replace my used 9-pocket pages and penny sleeves every three years or so.

In the post-pandemic landscape of higher prices and lesser quantities, having such collecting OCD can be costly. In addition to replacing supplies, I've attempted to replace off-condition singles from completed sets such as 1986 Topps football and 1989-90 Fleer basketball. At least a half-dozen times I've completed trades on TCDB for cards I already had, hoping for an upgrade, only to receive a worse copy. What a waste of stamps, cards, and time.

This past week, two users were nice enough to describe their cards as "well-loved" before accepting the trade. I told them that I appreciate the honest description of the cards, but that I was looking to upgrade a completed set. 

I'm still trying to upgrade 17 cards from 1986 and 1987 Topps football, including rookie cards of Karl Mecklenburg, Anthony Carter, Bruce Smith, and Charles Haley. Carter and Al Toon in particular have been very tough to find with acceptable centering. 

I also need to upgrade newer cards, as a pair of COMC purchases for my 2014 set build - Mike Trout and Marcus Semien - arrived with dinged corners. I learned to live with such flaws after attempting (twice) to upgrade the Logan Morrison base card. Not sure I can accept having a dinged Trout and/or Semien RC in my set.

Upgrading cards already in my collection is a luxury not unlike paying $35 for a PSA 9 Pie Traynor card for my 1961 Golden Press set build. All of my Golden Press singles are graded EX-MT 6 or better, and $35 is a fair price for a Mint 9 considering the market. However, I'm two cards shy of completing half of that set, and legendary names like Ruth, Gehrig, Cobb, Speaker, Wagner, and Cy Young are missing from my set build. If I'm going to complete this 33-card set I might need to lower the bar to include lower graded singles or ::gasp:: ungraded copies.

Which brings me to my 1956 Topps set build.

I'm considering this set my magnum opus, my lifetime achievement award. An heirloom to leave to my childrens' childrens' children (unless I have to sell it for my kids' college fund first.)  I've sacrificed several high-value rookie cards to fund this project. Sidney Crosby Upper Deck RC? Gone. Connor McDavid Upper Deck RC? Gone. Stephen Curry Upper Deck RC? Gone.

Mid-grade second-year Roberto Clemente cards don't grow on trees, you know.

I'm at 57% completion of the '56 set, with several big names behind me. I'm not giving up on the set build.. but I am lowering the bar.

This Walt Dropo single cost me $20 on COMC:

Dropo was a legend in my home state, excelling at baseball and basketball at the University of Connecticut. I sort-of saw him signing autographs at a card shop upstate when I was a kid. I spotted the store from the road, decided to stop in for a few packs, and saw that he was sitting at a table up front. I didn't know who he was at the time :/

This Jim Wilson single was part of the same COMC order, setting me back $3.19:

Spending $15+ on PSA graded singles of the Jim Wilsons and Ray Moores of the set doesn't make much financial sense when Willie, Whitey, Pee Wee, and other HOFers are still needed. 

I do have some ungraded 1956 singles, but I try to select the best possible examples. Even after examining scans of the front and back there's always a chance that a card will have a hidden flaw.

Like a scratch mark across Wilson's cap. 

If I want to complete the '56 set by the time I turn 56 I'll need to average just over 10 new additions per year..  or add one new card per month for the next twelve years. 

Guess I'll have to resist the urge to upgrade every flawed single in my connection, vintage or modern.

Thanks for reading!



~

The first $50

I'm ten days out from my 15th anniversary with the Mrs. and nearly all of the "play money" I set aside from the sale of my Mike Trout RC has been emptied out of my PayPal account. It did not go the way I expected at all. Shoebox Shane advised me to focus on one or two high-value cards and I really did try...but I ended up with a lot more than two cards.

Most of my purchases will arrive at the end of this week, and I'll likely recap them all sometime around the 17th. However I decided to spend $50 (plus tax) at COMC, knocking a few cards off of my watch list. I don't plan to request shipping until I've got 200 cards in my inventory (I'm at about 150 now) and I don't want to wait that long to discuss these cards. 

Initially I'd planned to pick up an Immaculate on-card auto of a Hall of Famer for $24.99. One of the 49 copies sold on eBay for over $32 and I was afraid that the COMC copy would have sold out as a result. It hasn't, but I got my Panini Immaculate Collection fix in other places (or tried to, anyway - that's a story for another post.)

Instead I spent my COMC cash on PC and set needs. A quick search for graded 1960s cards turned up this Al Simmons for my mid-grade 1961 Golden Press set build:

$8 down, $42 to go. Once this is in hand I'll have 12 of the 33 cards in the set. I'm still missing all of the big names (Cobb, DiMaggio, Gehrig) and there's a slight chance I'll add a couple more high-grade HOFers to my collection by the end of the week.

I've had my eye on these Conlon Collection color masters for quite a while. One COMC seller has a bunch and I finally made an offer on Frank "Home Run" Baker here. I added it to my inventory for $8.20, about 10% off the asking price of $9.

This Dustin Pedroia manupatch wasn't on my watch list for 100 years but it sure felt that way at times. I've kept an eye on it since 2018 and it just wouldn't budge below $5 - until last week when I snagged it for $4.65.

Thanks to CrazieJoe (and an assist from baseballcardstore.ca) I finished the 2003-04 Topps Pristine base set. I'm not bold enough to tackle the serial-numbered rookie portion, but I didn't hesitate to add a Devil #d/699 to my collection for $1.11. 

My Brett Favre box is running out of room and I planned to prioritize other player collections - until I came across this 2002 Topps Pristine refractor #d/349. The seller was asking $9.99 and I might have picked it up at that price. When it went on sale for $6.10 I threw it in my cart faster than one of Brett's bullet passes to Antonio Freeman. 

This Tremont Waters Panini Prizm green parallel was a bit of an impulse buy at $1.19. The G-League Rookie of the Year went to high school in my home town and, tragically, his father was found dead in a hotel that's about 20 feet from my mom's house (we used to play Wiffle Ball in this parking lot.) I was actually browsing Tacko Fall cards when I saw this color-matching gem pop up. If both Fall and Waters make the Celtics rotation I might have to switch allegiances from the Bucks, lol.

Here's a pair of on-card autos from 2018-19 Upper Deck Chronology. I've glanced at the $5 and under offerings from this set and Brian Bellows was one of the biggest stars (no pun intended) available. The green North Stars jersey featuring the 1991 Stanley Cup final patch caught my eye and led me to spend $3.80 in credit. I nearly got both Bellows and Nelson Emerson for $5 total; Emerson's messy signature set me back just $1.31. 

More Whalers here with a Ray Ferraro Canvas insert. I have no idea when Upper Deck started sneaking retired players into what I thought was a parallel set, or why they picked "Chicken Parm". Regardless, as soon as I saw it I added it to my watch list.. and then someone bought it an instant later. So I quickly snatched up the next-cheapest copy for $2.80.

Ferraro was the Whalers' #2 center for many years, behind this Hall of Famer:

Until now I did not have a rookie card of "Ronnie Franchise" and one of my goals with this windfall was to fill that hole in my collection. I had always hoped to pick up a graded copy but I just couldn't justify spending triple-digits on a slabbed single. And so I examined my options on COMC, picked out the best-looking copy in my price range and made an offer. It's a bit of a gamble at $12.75, and I won't know if it paid off for a few months, but at least I can cross this off my shopping list.

If my math is correct that's a total of $49.91. Can't exactly call this a COMC Blaster.. a COMC Megabox maybe?  

This is the last time I'll be spending money at COMC until at least Black Friday, and I'll be happy to bring home some longtime residents of my watch list.. eventually.


Are you still shopping on COMC? Has your opinion of the site changed due to their indefinite shipping delays?



Thanks for reading!



~


 

Venting

I started writing a statistical analysis post about a flagship franchise's lack of all-time greats, but I scrapped it because a) this post could lead to a series of similar posts and I'm not sure I would have the time to complete such a project, and b) I can't focus on it because I'm too frustrated to write something that would only interest two or three people. (Not that this post would generate more interest than a series on all-time teams but at least it would be a lot less work?)

Before I make a list of minor annoyances I should note that they are all completely insignificant compared to the state of the world (I spent hours yesterday reading updates about a city I've never been to just to make sure nothing terrible happened) or a serious illness (click on the custom card for updates on Taryn's fight to save second base) They're just little things that have been piling up lately and I thought it would be cathartic to address them here.

Work life is shifting in a way that I'm not really ready to handle. One of our two receptionist ladies quit. She was the one who contacted me to interview for this job and she has a 12-year old autistic son who has been in the office and is very difficult to handle. I guess I like her more than most people in the office, everyone seemed to have issues with her both before and after she left.

I don't know if she had to quit or if she'd just had enough of the place and the people, but my manager hasn't been able to find anyone outside the company to replace her - so the girl in my department has to stay up front indefinitely. No one is happy about this, least of all M. It's a lot quieter in our office now, and I have to deal with the nasty customers that M would have handled. I'm starting to dread going to work, like I did at the law firm.

My house is a complete disaster because we live in a tiny Cape Cod and we're converting my bedroom into a bedroom for both my daughters. That means all of our stuff is spread out into all the other rooms while we paint and clean the bedroom. This has to be done by Aug. 30 because we're going to visit my brother-in-law in DC the weekend before school starts. I'm secretly hoping it won't be done in time, so I can stay home and finish the fucker myself. 

One bit of potentially good news: the in-laws just got back from San Diego where they attended a Padres game - even though they don't like baseball. So there's no excuse for them to not go to a Nationals game while I'm in DC, right? Assuming the Nats are home that weekend. 

Oh, they're home that weekend.

Ugh, should I even bother?

Most of my TCDB trades are complete, but I'm still waiting for the last two packages. One of them is slowing down a potential trade with Bo, because I might be sending some vintage his way. There's another pending deal that's annoyed me. I didn't expect all 70 transactions to go smoothly, of course. One guy sent me the wrong Brett Favre card and it had a dinged corner to boot, but I let it go because it wasn't worth the trouble.

I made some offers a couple days before closing trades. Some replied right away, others said they wouldn't be able to get back to me in time. One guy told me to wait, so I did. I told him if he's going to counter to please let me know before I turn off offers. He didn't.

Then he said he couldn't find the one card I really wanted, and doesn't know why his counter offer is stuck. I told him to scrap the trade completely. Yes, that might make me sound like a jerk but I seriously doubt my wife is going to have any time to go to the post office this week considering the state of our house. 


All of these are temporary inconveniences, and they will pass. There's one sports-card related worry that could linger indefinitely, and it's starting to freak me out.

 

4 Sharp Corners has had a "customer appreciation sale" for the past few weeks, and I picked up a few slabbed singles for various set builds. I had all but written them off because the selection dried up. There aren't many affordable 1956 Topps singles left, but I found this Eddie Miksis for $16.79 and that's a decent deal for an NM 7 common.

This Miksis brings me to a not-insignificant milestone in my set build:

I should feel good about this, but I don't. I can't. This set is either going to be the crown jewel of my collection or an investment in my daughter's future. And all 154 cards are graded.

That used to mean something. After all of these card-trimming scandals that have cast doubt on the authenticity of hundreds of graded cards...who knows? 

Of course I'm the sucker with hundreds of graded cards in my collection. 

I'm not worried about these two being trimmed. Even if they weren't clearly perforated I only spent $7.99 on Mathewson and $6.39 on Vance. That said, I probably could have purchased an intact album of these cards for the amount of money I've paid for my ten graded singles.

And then there's this friggin' set. I once bought a complete set of 1984-85 O-Pee-Chee, ungraded, for under $150. I spent more than $150 on a PSA 9 example of the Steve Yzerman RC alone. Why? Because ten years ago I spent over $160 on a starter set of PSA-graded singles and I just kept chipping away at the set, for some reason.

These two cards would cost about a buck ungraded. Total. I won't tell you exactly what I paid for my high-grade examples but they were more than a blaster. Each.

I'm now 71 singles shy of the set. If money were no object (and with this set I've got to wonder) I could acquire 15-20 of them right now. Roughly 50 of the cards in the set never even surface in PSA 9 or 10. All this time and money spent on a set I'll probably never finish. Aaugh! indeed.

Which brings me to my final complaint for the day...

2019-20 Upper Deck MVP is now in stores. I haven't bought this stuff in a very long time, and I'm not going to buy any of this year's. But this release annoys me because I still haven't found a card from last year's set. The '18-19 edition had 20th Anniversary parallels and stamped buybacks, which were #d/20. I've been trying to track down a Peter Worrell buyback for a whole year. Can't find one anywhere. 

I've seen pretty much every other Panthers player in the set. Mark Parrish, Jaroslav Spacek, Pavel Bure. Rob Niedermayer. No Worrell. I was certain that one of the 20 copies would have surfaced by the end of 2018, and I would have gladly paid at least $10 for one - even though I have several unstamped originals. Where the hell are they hiding?


This hobby can be frustrating sometimes. It can also be a source of generosity and joy. 

Perhaps I should tackle that All-Time Team project after all. Perhaps it will breathe some new life into this stagnating blog and help me enjoy the hobby again :-)


Thanks for reading. Hope you're having a great weekend!


~

COMC Spring Cleaning Haul

If you haven't signed up for my Sports Card Tour Giveaway Contest check it out here! I'll be promoting this throughout May, but you can sign up anytime from now till the end of the tour. 

As you probably know, COMC is having their Spring Cleaning sale this week. I've had a lot of expenses lately so I was only able to add $50 credit - the minimum amount to qualify for a free shipping voucher. Since COMC isn't going to issue said vouchers until June (and I've already spent my $50) I might as well show off my small haul of Spring Cleaning purchases.

My goal was to finish at least one set, but with almost no warning and limited funds I couldn't put any sets to bed. However I made some decent progress on my OPC Platinum Franken-set:

In my Edmonton post I mentioned that this Connor McDavid rainbow parallel was probably out of my price range. Thanks to the Spring sale I was able to grab one for $23.65.

I had no idea if Nikolay Goldobin was still in the NHL or if he'd gone to the KHL (he's in the Canucks organ-eye-zation), but it's a card I needed - and a gold rainbow numbered to 149. I'll buy that for a dollar.

I actually didn't need a Claude Giroux Retro but I'd seen this orange rainbow #d/49 before on the site and I liked the idea of upgrading to a color matching card. This example is clearly off-center, but for $1.50 on sale I couldn't pass it up - especially after the season he just had for Philly.

I also picked up an Espo rainbow for $0.50. I probably could have waited to buy this one - but the cheapest copies on the site are $0.93 on sale. 

Though I spent more than half my credit on only three cards-and an upgrade to a fourth-I'm happy that I was able to make significant progress on my Franken-set. I'm now at 89% completion (89 of 100.)

With the remainder of my COMC cash I wanted to to put a dent in another one of my projects - 1956 Topps. There were a few mid-grade singles I needed (and one that would have been an upgrade) nothing spectacular though. And then I found this one:

This Jim Delsing becomes the highest number in my set build, #338 in the 340-card set. I'm not sure if there's a premium on high numbers in '56; that seems to be the case. Either way I'm happy to add it to my set for only $4.25. 


There was (and probably still is) a 1964 Topps Giants Roberto Clemente card on sale which I might have been able to squeeze into my budget - had I not seen and purchased this card first:

This Sid Luckman Throwback Threads relic was on sale for $9.25. Cool..but why would it appeal to a Packers fan?

Because another Hall of Famer is on the front side..

Ken Strong is from my hometown; our high school football stadium is named after him. 

I might have grabbed another '56 Topps card (or some random inserts and autographs) with my last ten dollars..until I spied this vintage gem:

I've picked up a few Golden Press singles over the years. Can't say I'm actively trying to complete the set but it might be a project I tackle in a year or two. This Mickey Cochrane cost $9.00. I feel a bit better about missing out on the Clemente after finding this.

That left me with just enough credit for one more minor purchase:

ePack or not, there's no way this Nico Hischier rainbow parallel should be 60 cents. 

Those eight cards totalled $49.75. 


How did you do during the COMC spring sale? Find any great deals? 


~