O-Pee-Chee Wrap-Up

Some quick updates:

I'm getting my second Covid shot this afternoon, right after I get out of work. I plan to take tomorrow off, even if I don't have any side effects. I should be able to catch up with all of you if I do stay home. 

Thank you all for the support on my last post. I'm feeling much better now. Hope is a powerful thing.

John from Johnny's Trading Spot sent me a huge box of cards. I'm still sifting through them all. I'm gonna need another Red Sox binder. And a thousand penny sleeves. Are they still 'penny' sleeves, or should we call them 'nickel' sleeves now?

My best friend from high school called me last week. We hadn't talked since before the pandemic. Guess what we discussed? Sports cards. He's one of the crowd who returned to the hobby last year and started investing in high-grade rookie cards. It was great to catch up with him and speculate on which players might be worth investing in now, and sharing our buying/selling successes.

I've actually cashed out a lot of my graded cards. My 9th-ranked 1984 O-Pee-Chee hockey set has been dissolved.

Those last 56 cards were mostly commons. 40 of them never surface, and even if each card were readily available they would be well over $10 each at this point. I figured it would be easier to sell off what I have than to complete a slabbed set.

Surprisingly, it was. I received $3,000 (pre-fee) for three boxes of 100+ cards graded PSA 9 & 10.

Then I sold a lot of nine Wayne Gretzky cards for $611, PSA 10 singles of Paul Coffey ($63) and Dale Hawerchuk ($31), a PSA 9 Dave Andreychuk RC ($53), four PSA 10 Maple Leafs ($61) and three PSA 9 Canadiens ($21). I'm not sure how much the set build cost me over the years but after these sales I had more than $3,500 and I kept thirteen cards as a memento of my second most ambitious collecting project:

Keeper #1 is card #1. This Ray Bourque single is very tough to find centered, and I had to cough up $27.99 for this copy. That was actually a good deal; I've seen PSA 9 Bourques sell for up to $50. 

Here's the star of the set, or so I thought. I bought this Stevie Y rookie card $170.99 five years ago. It sells for close to $800 now despite being fairly abundant in this grade. 

By the way, most of these cards were scanned on my old scanner which is why they look a little grainy. 

This is the only Gem Mint 10 single I saved. Bought this Chico Resch for $20.50 in 2009, the year I officially started this set. I'm tempted to start a Chico PC someday.
 

Pat Verbeek played for two of my favorite teams - the Devils and the Whalers - so I'm definitely saving his RC. I think I have a raw copy in my Devils binder, but it never hurts to have an extra.

Hall of Famer Pat LaFontaine's RC is another top tier card in this set. I'd had my eye on this one since the early 1990s and brought it home five years ago for just $22.50 shipped.
 

Another Hall of Famer rookie card, this Doug Gilmour is a little extra special to me. I bought an ungraded set (for $140) in 2009 and selected a few singles to submit to PSA. This "Killer" RC was the best of the bunch; a PSA 9 copy sells for about $300 today.

This second year Scott Stevens pairs nicely with my PSA 9 rookie card from 1983-84 O-Pee-Chee. I might even decide to do a full run of OPC Stevens cards some day.

I've always considered the rookie cards of Hall of Famers to be the big draw of this set. However, when it comes to high-grade singles the Great One appears to have passed Yzerman in resale value. I sold my 1983-84 PSA 9 Gretzky but I don't plan to part with this card.

Jari Kurri's card is a keeper, too. I've always been a fan of Wayne Gretzky's wingman. 

Chris Chelios is my least favorite of the "big five" rookie cards in this set. I didn't necessarily need to keep it but I like having all of the key cards in my collection. 

To be honest I have no real reason for adding this Thomas Gradin to my 'keeper' pile. I just felt like keeping a Canucks card.

 

 

...aside from this Cam Neely rookie card, of course. This is the sixth rookie card of a Hall of Famer in the '84-85 set; the only one I sold was Dave Andreychuk. 

 

The last one of my keepers is this Tim Kerr team card. I considered saving the Sylvain Turgeon Whalers team leaders, which was a PSA 10. However this was the one subset single I wanted to keep because it was the last team leader card I needed - and it took me over a decade to track it down. 

I do have a few ungraded cards from this set but I have no plans to add any more at the moment. While it is one of my all-time favorites I've seen enough of it for a while. 


The Stanley Cup Playoffs are underway, and I'm not sure which team to root for this summer. I was happy with two of the past three Cup winners (Washington and Tampa) and it would be nice to see a second Caps cup. Other than that I'd be fine with the Islanders, Bruins, Knights, Panthers, or Oilers skating with Lord Stanley. 

And then there's this guy. 

If the Leafs emerge from the Canadian division I might have to cheer hard for them. I know Toronto fans would be insufferable if their team won the Stanley Cup but they've waited long enough. And I haven't wanted a Joe to win this much since November.

 


Who are you cheering for this postseason?

Thanks for reading!



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What's Next?

I helped myself to some hockey cards as a reward for finishing the All-Time Teams series. These are the first cards I scanned with the scanner I got for Christmas:

I'd found a seller with two 1984-85 O-Pee-Chee cards I needed and a ton of older hockey cards in high grade. The only one that fit my collection was this Serge Savard single from 1970-71 OPC:

After some back-and-forth negotiating through eBay Best Offers I added this to my 1970s Canadiens collection for $34.20. More than I wanted to spend, but at least the shipping was free.

If this sounds like a lot to spend on such a card (especially in NM 7) it probably is. I'm still having trouble grappling with the sale prices of high-grade singles these days; I knew they'd appreciate in value but it's happened a decade ahead of schedule. For instance, here is the oldest Wayne Gretzky card I own:

This was scanned on my old machine. Can you see the difference?

I spotted this Gretzky at a card shop/batting cage nearby that I used to frequent before my girls were born. It was ungraded, in a top loader, displayed in a showcase with a handful of other hockey cards. I asked the shopkeep how much he wanted for the card and I think he said $20. I examined it in my hand, noted the tiny imperfection on the left edge.. and bought it anyway. Then I sent it to PSA in my next submission, where it returned a Mint 9 as you can see. For years I had a nice $30-50 card on my hands.

Look at what this single sells for now. Whoaaa baby!


Here are a couple cards from my first 4 Sharp Corners order in November 2013:

 

I was on a bit of a mission to collect great players' rookie cards in high grade - and 4 Sharp Corners had loads of 'em at the time. This Greg Maddux Fleer Glossy XRC cost $41.27 then. It sells for $200-300 today.

As for the Jagr.. I purchased that card mainly because he was playing for the Devils in 2013. It was a card that I'd seen quite a few times ungraded, despite it being less common than his Score or Upper Deck RCs. This one set me back $34.39. Fuji clued me in to what these sell for now. Good lord, that's just mind-boggling! 

I never bought these cards to flip for a profit - at least not this quickly - but I'm sitting on enough cards that are suddenly selling for triple digits (or more) that I am seriously considering a Shoebox Legends-style sell-off.

There are so many important things I could do with a sudden influx of cash - invest it, save it for home repairs, or a new house, or the girls' college fund. Or I could finish my 1956 Topps set and then sell that in a few years (or not.)  

 

One more on the way..

My latest purchases are not going to appreciate in value. The 1984-85 O-Pee-Chee set is a money pit, something I'm working on bit by bit just as a challenge. Savard and the Habs project are one of a handful of half-finished mini-sets I'm chipping at slowly, like the 1961 Golden Press set or 1964 Topps Giants. 

The hobby is getting harder to enjoy. Sports in general are harder to enjoy, and after last year I've learned to live without them. Too many ads in NHL games. Too many super-teams in the NBA. Too many rule changes in the MLB. And until Tom Brady retires or dies (whichever comes first) I won't be able to truly enjoy the NFL again. 

New cards don't excite me anymore. The prices have skyrocketed, the flippers hoard everything that was previously affordable, and the monopolies have produced more cards with far less effort and attention to detail. I don't see myself collecting future releases much, if at all. Instead, I'm going back.

Aside from the vintage/graded projects previously mentioned I plan to complete the run of 2010s Topps baseball sets. I've got a factory set of 2011, and hand-collated sets of 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. That leaves 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2014. None of these are particularly exciting- though I kinda like '13. But it gives me something to trade for since I've still got hundreds of 2017, 2018, and 2019 Topps dupes.

 

If anyone has piles of these cards taking up space let me know and I'll be happy to make a deal.

As for what's next here.. I'm not sure. I have an order on the way from baseballcardstore.ca that I'll discuss when it arrives - though that might not be until March considering the weather and the post office. I do have an idea for The 1993 though. It's not in my nature to fish for followers, but.. if I can get 25 readers over there, I will reward you with a list of my 93 favorite cards of 1993 - across all sports.

It won't be as insightful as Night Owl's Countdown of 1980s cards but I think it will be fun. Until then...

Thanks for reading!



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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!


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COMC summer haul and an eBay trade

I had 35 cards sitting in my COMC inventory and decided to bring them home rather than leave them in Redmond until December. Two of them are for a possible Blogger trade (remember those?) while others will be featured in an upcoming blog post/tab.

At one point I had about $38 in challenge credit and I'd missed out on a 1956 Topps team card (White Sox) hoping that it would still be around when the Spring Cleaning sale started. It wasn't, but this Charlie Neal was - and I snatched it up for $29.90:

That left me with just enough cash to grab this Hank Thompson from a different seller for $8.16:

I'm now at 45% of the 1956 Topps set, and there's a set break of high-grade singles up on eBay..but they're too high-grade. The cheapest singles are PSA 8 commons listed at $30 each.

My 1984-85 O-Pee-Chee set build got a big boost, thanks to an eBay "trade". I sold three items, including an Apollo 11 DVD my brother-in-law offloaded to me and a flat-rate box of over 600 used 9-pocket pages. Those two items alone brought in enough cash to purchase these:

Wayne was the most valuable card I needed; I've seen it sell for up to $75 in this condition but this one was only $41 (which is still a helluva markup just for a fancy holder. I know.)

This Mario Tremblay is the only non-HOFer (and non-Oiler) in the lot. Is it me, or does the close-up photo make him look like a star from the 1960s?

I now have all ten Wayne Gretzky cards in the 1984-85 O-Pee-Chee set. 

A couple years ago, Charles Barkley crashed a Stanley Cup press conference and asked Wayne "Who is your favorite black athlete of all time?"  Gretzky's response?

I wonder if Charles forgot that Fuhr won five Cups - four of them with the Great One.

Now that we've got the graded cards out of the way, let's get back to the COMC haul. Until recently my entire Exquisite base set build had come courtesy of COMC. The Taylor Hall was avaible for $6.25, but that was a little more than I wanted to spend. I added a Martin Brodeur relic to my offer..and got both of them for under $13 total.

The Hall base card still cost more than this triple relic from 2015-16 The Cup.

Not a lot of star power here, and only Schneider is still with the Devils. That might explain why I was able to grab it for just $3.25.

I'm a sucker for O-Pee-Chee Platinum cards (this year's batch just hit COMC/ePack) especially rainbow parallels. The Jesper Bratt auto cost $2.87; the Nico Hischiers were $0.37 and $0.44. I'm not usually one to hoard multiple copies of the same card, but I will buy a dozen of them at that ridiculously low price.

For comparison's sake, this Dominic Smith refractor was an impulse buy that doesn't fit my collection any more than he fits in the Mets' lienup...and I spent $0.85 on it.

I'd be open to trading this card if anyone is interested.

Most of the other cards in this batch are for various PCs and set collections, except this one:

I picked up this Big Z for $0.28 during the Stanley Cup Final. Really wanted to see him win another one after Brayden Schenn broke his effin jaw. The ovation he got during introductions before Game 5 still gives me the feels:

Brett Favre certainly knows about playing through pain. I added five more Favre cards to my collection of over 700:

The Franchise Leaders insert was the cheapest of these ($0.95) while the Sterling Sharpe red parallel was the most expensive Packer at $3.35.

If I had a choice I wouldn't have gone with the red, but I wanted a HOF contenders card of Sharpe and this was the lowest priced card on the site.

Another card I had to have was this Taylor Hall Game-Dated Moments card, one of only two "cards" that show him holding the Hart trophy (the other is a Panini sticker)

I don't mind telling you that I overpaid for this. Was it worth $7.08? Probably not. But sometimes you gotta swallow hard and fork over the cash (or credit).

Wrapping up the puck portion of the post with a pair of cards from this year's OPC set. Or what I wish the base set looked like. These are from the Canadian Tire Coast To Coast set. I don't know what that is, or how to get them, but the red-bordered parallels are especially appealing. (I got two others from a trade with TCDB member MasterOfPuppets.)

Some Prizm set fillers here. Kobe cost $0.50, the rookies were $1.11 total. I'm down to 27 needs for this set. One of them is the Joel Embiid RC. This might take a while.

The Red Sox are in London this weekend. I'm interested to see how the Brits take to baseball, but the last thing the Yankees need is a smaller park to launch bombs out of.

Craig Kimbrel won't have to worry about that. He was unemployed when I purchased this card for 50 cents, but now he's closing for the Cubs.

Why did I pick this pair of Pirates? Cause they only cost me three bucs. (Bucs, get it?) The Trevor Williams sapphire ($0.75) fits into my player PC, while the Harrison auto ($2.25) is a preview to my next post (and collection tab..)

 Here's a couple more cards from that collection. Details to follow.

And we'll close this post with Kristen Bell. I need to do a better job of tracking non-sports card with my favorite celebs; most of them only make their way into my collection because I stumble across them on COMC. This Elle Bishop foil (parallel?) cost two quarters.

Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend!


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