Sportlots Stack

I've had the urge to post something here for a while, but I was waiting for the first of three sports card purchases to arrive. (I'll post at least one "sports talk" post on The 1993 in the near future.)

As you probably know, I've been on a mission to complete as many card sets as I can. The set I was closest to completing was 2019 Score Football, as I needed just 2 of the 440 cards. A TCDB user I'd traded with in the past had both the cards and I made an offer at the end of October. No reply. I waited nearly three weeks before finally withdrawing the offer and shopping for the elusive pair on Sportlots.

That's where I found a seller with both the cards in his inventory - and a fantastic deal on shipping. 

Sheff573 will ship two cards for $0.68 - a very fair price, and one of the lowest I've seen on the site. But! He will ship 5-10 cards to you for $0.90. It gets better. If you order up to 25 cards the shipping charge increases to just $1.45. Double that order - 50 cards - and he charges you another 30 cents. 

$1.75 shipping for 50 cards? You can't beat that! At 18 cents a card I paid a mere $10.75 for this stack:

After procuring the two cards that completed my 2019 Score set I searched for more cards that fit my collection. Sheff's inventory isn't super expansive - which is good. It helps me narrow my focus. I didn't find any more set needs but I did boost a few player and team PCs - especially football:

No big deal, just a rookie card of the NFL's leading receiver this year. For 20 cents or so.

You heard it here first: the Packers will finish the year 13-4, earn home-field advantage in the playoffs, and lose the NFC championship to MFing TB again.

Or maybe they'll lose to Kyler Murray and the Cardinals this year. Two Kyler cards for two dimes apiece was an exciting find, doubling my Murray collection to four cards including his 2019 Score RC.

I would have been okay with the Cardinals winning the Super Bowl this year - if J.J. Watt were playing (and if Larry Fitzgerald hadn't retired.) All three of these guys are out for the year with injuries. Football is a brutal game.

Here are some more players I collect. Tough to pass up cards of these guys for a quarter or less:

I'm not a fan of the 2020 Illusions design but these three stars are underrepresented in my collection:

Finishing off the football portion with these:

I've been scooping up cards of quarterbacks from the late 1970s-1980s including Ken Anderson. The Pro Football Hall of Fame recently released a list of semi-finalists for induction in 2022 and no quarterbacks were listed. Which leads me to this question: which retired (and eligible) signal-caller do you think deserves a bust in Canton? I've got a feeling that the next QB enshrined will be Eli Manning but maybe Anderson deserves another look? (fwiw, his "Hall Monitor" rating is just below Eli's.)

Hoops and hockey here. The Barkley is from the Winter edition. Affordable Anfrenee cards are always nice, and I didn't have a Zach LaVine card outside of the 2015-16 Donruss set. Sheff573 didn't have much hockey to choose from, mostly 2020-21 Upper Deck base cards. I'm thrilled this Ovi was available. Career goal #750 is imminent.

I also grabbed a handful of baseball singles from Sheff:

No big deal, just a card with Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani on it. For 20 cents or so. (I know it's not a rare card, but try finding either one of those studs in a quarter box.)

Let's wrap up this 50-card order with some more 2020 Topps Archives and some Red Sox, including a pair of David Ortiz singles. I might have to write a post about Papi when the Baseball Hall of Fame vote is nigh.

I'll have a couple more "show and tell" posts once my orders from COMC and baseballcardstore.ca arrive. I wonder which one will get here first? (probably not COMC.)

Thanks for reading!

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What kind of collector are you?

I think I've asked this before. There are certain bloggers who are definitely one type of collector. Collecting Cutch, The Lost Collector, and Nachos Grande have impressive single-player collections. Night Owl, Too Many Verlanders, and Cards on Cards concentrate on one or two teams. Of course player collectors can be team collectors and team collectors can be set collectors, and so on. 

 

I've never been able to narrow my focus. By now you probably know what teams and players I collect. I've got an entire 3-row shoebox for my Brett Favre collection, another for Peter Worrell, and another row or two for other favorite players. My Ikea bookshelf holds five full binders of Boston Red Sox base cards, three full binders of Green Bay Packers (plus the start of a fourth), and five binders of New Jersey Devils. 

The rest of the binders on my bookshelf are for complete sets. Not all of them, of course. According to TCDB I have 196 complete sets. Adding factory sets to the total pushes me over 200. Some of these are very small, five-card insert sets. Heck, TCDB counts this as a set - and I have all one of the cards. 

Over the past few months I've realized that certain parts of the hobby are no longer enjoyable for me. I doubt I'll ever buy another hobby box of.. anything. I'll never have a PSA membership again. COMC and the Beckett Marketplace have annoyed me (and I might be adding Sportlots to that list.. we'll see.) Investing in the latest prospects and budding superstars has been an absolute disaster. 

I can count on one hand the number of  high-value rookie cards I don't own that I truly, legitimately would like to buy before I die. I'm not even counting legends like Ted Williams or Wayne Gretzky, who are well out of my price range. And I'm not counting players like David Ortiz or Barry Sanders, who have affordable - but bland - rookie cards.

While I was doing my sports card soul-searching I thought about how I would answer the question What kind of collector are you? If you'd asked me a year or two ago I'd say that I'm now a low-end collector, like Dime Box Nick. Once I started going to card shows again I rediscovered the joy in pouring through dime and quarter boxes. One time I picked up nearly 200 dime cards. But then the dealers' inventory shrank, the pandemic hit, and my space dried up. Storage boxes and penny sleeves have doubled in price - and I'm almost out of both.

Within these dime boxes (both in person and online) I found the seeds of some set builds. Once I accumulated enough singles I augmented my purchases by trading on TCDB for more set fillers. Trading my duplicate cards from completed set builds to fill in other set builds sparked even more joy. 

As of this year if you asked me What kind of collector are you? I think I'd say I'm a set builder.

But here's the problem. I've got over two dozen incomplete sets in the works. Some are five-card insert sets. Others are suddenly a lot more expensive to complete than they were when I started them just a couple years ago. And as I approach my 500th post dedicated to sports cards I'm also approaching a crossroad: should I break up my great big set builds? If so, which ones?

Thankfully, not every set build is as daunting as the 1956 Topps set.

These 1989-90 Fleer basketball singles arrived in a trade with TCDB user Tigerfan22. I'm now just six cards away from completing the set - though three cards from previous trades need to be upgraded.

I made a trade with user Driver8k for four of these and he threw in three more - the team action and Record Breaker cards were a nice bonus. Holmoe was part of the trade with Tigerfan, while Walker was a replacement for a 1986 Topps football card he couldn't find (which I was only trying to upgrade anyhow.)

There are always more set builds to focus on further down the line. These five Prizm cards bring me to one-third of the 2015 set (100/300). 2019 Score isn't an official set build yet but thanks to Driver8k I'm at 27% completion (119/440).

I've got more set fillers on the way from TCDB and Sportlots - and I just made a fairly major purchase on eBay. Over the next few posts I will have more to share about the joys and challenges of trying to complete all these sets, culminating in my 500th post celebration later this spring.

Thanks for reading!


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Target Break (and a contest!)

I finally made it to my local Target earlier this week, for the first time in about three months. Motivated by reading blog posts about new products like Topps Archives and Heritage High Numbers, I headed straight for the sports card section and found...

..not a lot. Neither new product was in stock (wth, Target?) but there was a good variety of intriguing options. Prizm baseball? Unlicensed. Pass. Diamond Kings? Unlicensed..but I could use them for my All-Time Teams. Opening Day? I'd actually prefer flagship since the surplus box I bought on eBay had most of series 1.

As is my habit when shopping, I put together a "maybe" pile, walked around with it, and considered my options. I knew I wanted some Score Football, so I picked out two fat packs.

The Diamond Kings 'fat pack' of 20 cards was priced at $10. Hard pass. I grabbed a basketball repack - which ended up being a wise choice. Still, I was unsatisfied.

I met up with my girls in the toy aisle. Not sure why the Mrs. took them there when we were only supposed to get milk, but it was a good news/bad news situation.

The good news was .. my daughters directed me to the stash of Topps series 2 on the end cap of the toy aisle. The bad news? One of them bought a toy with her own money and the other one was not happy she couldn't get a toy, too. This is why I never get to Target anymore.

Anyway, here are the Score packs. You can't beat the value of 80 cards for $10, especially when they look like this:

The abundance of "tribute to older design because we can't think of a new design" sets has annoyed me for a while now. Not here though. This 1989 Score reboot is fantastic! The AFC cards have a red border and the NFC cards have a blue border. Nice touch.

Each pack yielded 19 base cards, 2 red parallels, 13 inserts, and 6 rookies. That's..a lot of non-base cards! Good thing I'm not building the set (I am tempted to build this set though.)

Pack in my pack! Cobb is a Cowboy now. The one problem with an early release is the rosters aren't updated. Heck, the rookie cards don't even mention which team drafted the player:

Kyler Murray! Score! The Nick Bosa is an insert, I think that's the 1998 Score design IIRC.

Here's the rest of the rookies.

The shiny inserts from pack one, including a Patrick Mahomes parallel. These are so much nicer than the 2017 Score cards. I have way too many of those, thanks to repack boxes.

Pack 2 inserts. Too many to fit in one scan. I had to omit an Antonio Brown Throwbacks and a Drew Brees fantasy stars. i thought Mahomes was a dupe at first. 

I'll recap the rest of my Target run in another post. I've also got a Stranger Things break to blog about, and my All-Time Teams celebration starts in September. 

In October, Collecting Cutch is bringing back his Save Second Base event. This year has a little more significance to yours truly, as has been mentioned here before. Brian is really grabbing

our attention with contests and giveaways. Visit Collecting Cutch for a chance to win a Troy Tulowitzki Prizm BCA Autograph or a stack of Topps Chrome pink parallels.


Thanks for reading!




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