Blogger friends come first

Over the past month or so, I've had small trades and purchases arrive from eBay, Sportlots, and TCDB. Logic would indicate that the orders coming from the east coast would arrive first, followed by central/midwest, then west coast, and Canada would take the longest. 

Personal assumption here but I'd expect that eBay shipments would be most reliable, then Sportlots, then TCDB - just based on the visibility and feedback structue, selling cards vs. trading cards, and moderation of each website. 

Naturally, the post office has laughed at this assumption. I've had issues with receiving cards from all three websites, regardless of location. And while the sellers/trading partners have varied in their responses and the sources, locations, and volume of cards in the incomplete transactions have varied, there is one constant.

Blogger friends have come through every time. 

Here's a care package from Night Owl. He offered to help me complete a couple sets and asked for nothing in return. (don't worry, I'll hit him back for the anniversary giveaway) 

This stack of cards took 3-4 days to travel from NY to NJ, as it should. Meanwhile, I made a trade with a TCDB user in Staten Island more than two weeks ago. I sent my cards two Saturdays ago. Did he receive them? I don't know, he hasn't logged in since the 19th. And I still don't have my cards. 

Bookending with another New York-based blogger, Bo sent me a very generous trade offer on the 15th. That trade took about a week to complete. I filed those cards away already but here's a scan of one of them. 

That's just one TCDB user though. Sometimes trade partners disappear, it happens. What about eBay? There's far more mechanisms in place to prevent sellers from ghosting. 

Ah, but those standard envelopes for single card purchases under $20 are always risky. 

I paid under $2 shipped for this Junior which arrived in four days from Las Vegas. It should have completed my 2024 Topps set, but a three-card trade with a west coast TCDB user has not arrived. This trade partner (I'm not going to name names) logs in every day and has been responsive. They sent my three cards on June 2. That small envelope has apparently been lost in the mail. 

While eBay sellers do have more incentive to complete transactions than TCDB traders, this still seems random to me. Not only because the west coast 3-card trade was with a more active trader(with 100% feedback) while the NY trader has far more feedback (but a negative or two). But because an eBay purchase I made two weeks ago was also lost in the mail. And this seller deserves to be mentioned by name.

Another $2 purchase shipped in a standard envelope. Should have arrived roughly the same time as the Caminero - maybe a day earlier since this seller is in the Boston area. But it didn't. The eBay tracking wasn't helpful as it hadn't even been marked as shipped after 11 days. So I sent The Card Pagoda a quick message just to confirm the card was shipped, and he ... immediately apologized, refunded my $2, and offered to send a replacement. 

The replacement has already arrived. 

More value that I had intially expected, plus two Whalers (based on my screen name) and a refund?!? For a two dollar card? The only reason I even thought to ask Gus to confirm the card shipped was because of a Sportlots order I still have not received.

I wanted my 100th Sportlots purchase to be significant. I also wanted to complete some hockey card sets and that is very tough to do on TCDB. So I saved my pennies and purchased large chunks of cards from three different sellers. 

All three were tracked. Two have arrived. Guess which one didn't? That's right, the one with free shipping. I specifically loaded up at TNT because of the $0 shipping for 101+ cards. They are a preferred seller with 100% feedback. So what happened? 

Sorry, I was away for a week helping my mother and had not dropped off the packages to the post office. I will get your order dropped off at the post office today.

Hey, I get it. Moms always come first. I was anxious about this one because I'm going away to see my mom soon, and I didn't want the package sitting on the porch for five days.

Even after this message it still sat in limbo all week with no status update, though TNT was responsive and offered a refund if the cards didn't arrive soon. As I began writing this I checked USPS to screenshot the lack of status and.. apparently it is moving and expected to arrive tomorrow. So that's a relief. If and when it does, I'll need just 15 cards to complete a run of Upper Deck hockey base sets.

Hopefully I will be able to complete those sets through TCDB trades. And that means sending envelopes across the border to Canada, which is tough for several reasons. The envelopes can't have too much weight to them or customs flags them down and charges $500. As noted above, small envelopes within the US get lost all the time, so adding another country to the mix only increases the diffculty. And some TCDB users north of the 49th won't even trade with Americans (can't say I blame them)

But you know who does? Crazie Joe. 

Joe had a mix of everything for me - Devils, Whalers, an Ovi, and a pair of set fillers. These arrived from Ontario in a week. I was blown away. If I can complete a small PWE trade with someone in Canada this fast, there's no reason for any trade or purchase from anywhere in the lower 48 to take longer. 

It seems so random, right? Some trades arrive fast, others don't. Some small purchases arrive fast, others are lost. Some tracked orders arrive fast, others don't. But Joe here proves that there is a commonality among all the transactions I've completed on time. 

He has a blog. 

So, whether you're buying on eBay or Sportlots, trading on TCDB or elsewhere, don't check a person's feedback rating for peace of mind. Check to see if they have a sports card blog 😁

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Topps Holiday Advent Calendar - Day 22 (+ bonus)

We’re back for the final three days of the Topps Holiday Advent Calendar. It's day number 22 - shoutout to Jordin Tootoo who wore number two-two .. but unforunately retired long before 2022. 

It's another five-card pack, but this one is above standard:

Another Aaron Judge Nice List insert, and a Plaid Parallel of the James Wood RC. Not bad at all!

I got cards in the mail again today, though I was expecting these. One of my three Sportlots orders arrived and, well, ..  I really wish I didn't have to buy singles on Sportlots anymore. 

I'm still trying to fill out my Red Sox binders. 1980s team sets aren't quite complete, so I paid $1.60 for these eight cards:

And my 1970s Sox singles are really sparse, so I spent another $1.60 on two that were listed as "NM"

Ugh... nope. Not NM, not even close. I can accept vintage cards that aren't 50/50, but anything over 80/20 messes with my OCD. The '77 Doyle is centered well enough on the back but the front is no bueno. Koonce is 100/0 on both sides - and that one was $1.40. 

One of my New Year's resolutions will be to trade on TCDB again - so that I don't pay actual money for poorly centered '70s-'80s singles - since vintage cards are rarely sold at card shows anymore :/

Two more doors to go. 

Thanks for reading!




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Sportlots and The Summer of Slabs

As I type this, I've got no sports card orders currently en route to Collector HQ, which is fairly rare for me as of late. I've had a steady stream of small orders - usually from Sportlots - at frequent enough intervals that I almost always have a couple cards to look forward to. But not today. They've all arrived, and I haven't yet placed a new order. 

Here's my entire shopping list. This is all I have room for after attacking the team binder bookshelves all year:

Packers cards

1995-1998 -- room for 5

2003-2013 -- room for 1

2014-2024 -- room for 6

misc./draft -- room for 3

Devils cards

1983-1993 -- room for 2

2014-2025 -- room for 26

misc./draft -- room for 6

These arrived earlier this week during an oppressive heat wave that knocked out our power at home and at my office (I couldn't work Tuesday.) The only way it could have been more apt is if I'd ordered Heat or Suns cards. 

Whalers cards

misc.*/draft -- room for 7

*includes Whalers cards issued after 1998

I had two pockets left to fill in my third Whalers binder - comprising 1995-96, 1996-97, and 1997-98 cards - and a miscellaneous section of oddballs, draft picks, and retro-base cards featuring Legends or Whalers Night photos. Thanks to Andrew Cassels and Keith Primeau here, the Whalers Era pages are now full... but I've still got room for a lot more cards. Kind of. 

Before I explain, let me mention that Upper Deck did not include any Whalers Night photos in their flagship 2024-25 set, and I haven't seen one in any other set this year. I'm really hoping someone at UD finds a way to memorialize Mikko Rantanen's 13-game stint in Carolina with a photo like this:

This would be perfect for a UD Canvas insert

Okay, so.. my Whalers binders are currently full. However, I have one small binder that can hold about 20-25 9-pocket pages. That's completely empty, waiting for me to bulk acquire about 100+ Whalers cards so I can move out the miscellaneous and make room for what's left on my wantlist. 

I also moved some things around in my Connecticut Cards binder, which was shared with Whalers extras until recently. 

Connecticut cards

minor league baseball -- room for 1

UConn men/women -- room for 2

minor league hockey -- room for 4

CT hockey isn't necessarily AHL only. If I can find new-to-me NHL cards of players who played in or hailed from my hometown, I'll count those. 

CT baseball is actually two binders - I've got a mini-binder full of New Haven/West Haven teams, and a second binder with some pages for New Britain Rock Cats, Norwich Navigators, Hartford Yard Goats, and a team set of Connecticut Tigers (I don't have any Waterbury Reds 😒)

However, that one isn't exclusively Connecticut cards. I needed to make room in my (non-PC) baseball card boxes for all the 2025 Topps Heritage I bought (couldn't resist) and realized that the best way to clear out cards without throwing them in the trash or messing with my sorting system was to make some new player PCs. 

The problem with that? I have every single player PC card (base, inserts, parallels, anything) in a top loader. I have 12 player PCs - not including Pedro Martinez Dodgers/Expos/Mets/Phillies cards and David Ortiz Twins cards, because I didn't have room in the PC box or the baseball-only boxes. So now I have those cards in the baseball mini-binder, along with Kris Bryant cards and my now-official Terry Francona PC.

I'd been passively picking up playing-era Francona cards at Cardbarrel and baseballcardstore if I saw any unique issues or anything under 15 cents. Now I've got enough to try and fill in Francona's entire playing career (unless there are some unexpected rarities that cost more than a couple dollars.)

The binder bookshelf is basically my penultimate project. It's a fun and affordable warm-up to the grand finale, which is definitely not happening any time soon. 

My eBay buddy Baseball Brittie had been holding some sales credit for me and I cashed it in. This Joe Adcock gets me to less than 56 cards away from completing the 1956 Topps baseball set. {side note: he just informed me that he sold a card of an MLB batting champion to the mother of said batting champion}

I've considered buying more ungraded singles to get closer to completion, but I just cant. There's an auction up on eBay for three cards. I need all three, and two are Red Sox. The seller wants $53 + tax and shipping. And there's a print line through one of them. Ugghhh...

I spent much of Spring shopping on Sportlots and Beckett Marketplace. But I'm going big-game hunting this summer, Because Mrs. Collector is expecting to have surgery right around Labor Day. They might extract all of the cancer, they might not. She might be back to 100% in fall.. or life as I know it may get much, much harder. 

BGS is currently working on grading some of my cards. Once those arrive, I'll add some from that batch to a stack of my own and send some slabbed singles to 4 Sharp Corners for consignment. Some of that cash will be set aside for home repairs (hopefully).. and some will be set aside for cards that I've wanted since I was a teenager...

Thanks for reading!



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Packin' 'em in

Welp, the Red Sox are definitely done now. Rafael Devers is a Giant, and Boston didn't even get Yastrzemski in the deal 😉 So many Sox fans renounced their fandom when the team traded Mookie Betts - but this one might be worse. Raffy was already signed long-term (unlike Mookie) and they depreciated their own asset by jerking him around about his role with the team until he didn't want to be in Boston anymore. Also, most fans forget that the Sox convinced the Dodgers to take on David Price's albatross contract in the Betts trade. 

The players coming back from the NL West team based in California this time are... slightly better. But they gave up many more years of a superstar under contract and sent the wrong message to the three blue chip prospects who just arrived. Ugh...I'm not just done with this team, I'm done with this sport. 

So let's look ahead to football. 

My Green Bay Packers collection is close to complete, thanks to an order from Sportlots and an order from the Beckett Marketplace. 

Filling in the 1980s requires doubling up on '86-88 cards (I've already completed these sets.) The Tim Hauck Pro Set fills the last spot in my early 1990s binder. You don't see '93 Pro Set singles nearly as often as their first three sets; Hauck and Brett Favre are the only two Packers I have from that set. 

I though I had most of the basic Sterling Sharpe cards but Playoff snuck this one by me - until now. These were 20c each on SportLots. Hold that thought. 

Really wish I could expand the selection of Packer players but Robert Brooks and Edgar Bennett were in just about every mid-'90s set. (Now you see why I picked the Tim Hauck card from '93 Pro Set.)

More Brooks cards, but at least there's some new faces here. I'm not seeking out Mark Chmura cards but I wanted the Action Packed single because I had that hat back in the day. Still do somewhere in my hat bag.

John Michels was the Packers' 1st round pick in 1996 and I'm just now adding him to my collection. Offensive linemen (who washed out of the league within two years) didn't get many cards back then. 

I picked out exactly enough cards to fill my 2000s Packers binder, but the seller couldn't find an Ahman Green card and issued a refund. 

Sportlots still has Beckett beat, especially on price. Regardless, I had to fill a cart with 50 cent commons for one specific single that no Sportlots seller had in stock...

More mid '90s here. If I'm going to pay half a buck for commons they'd better be HOFers like Sharpe and Butler.. but the 1994 Ultra and UD singles are now duplicates because I didn't check them off after buying them 30c cheaper at Sportlots. Oh well, wasted 90 cents there. 

But it came out in the wash when the Eddie Lacy Finest RC I purchased (for 62c) along with another Ahman Green single were out of stock and I was refunded $1.12. where are these Ahman Green collectors coming from?

Here's the 2010s Packers single that prompted my return to Becket marketplace after nearly three years. Can you guess which of these basic looking base cards has finally been crossed off my want list?

That's right, it's the Scott Tolzien Prizm base card. This is one of very few Tolzien singles that depict him as a Packer; he started two games in place of an injured Aaron Rodgers during the 2013 season and was ...not good. And yet - none other than the Dallas Cowboys hired him to be their quarterbacks coach for two seasons!

We'll wrap this up with the newest Pack singles, including a trio of Davante Adams cards.
 

So.. how much room do I have left for more Packer cards?

• 5 more cards from the mid-late 1990s
• 1 more card from the 2010s
• 6 more cards from the 2020s
• 1 miscellaneous card 

Overall, I'm about 60 cards away from filling all my team PC binders. I'll have one more inventory update by the end of June, and then -- assuming my wife's health holds up -- it's the Summer of Slabs.

Thanks for reading!

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Taking Inventory

My card collection is once again organized, and due to time and space restrictions I will probably call it complete once these spaces are filled. I can't plan a whole lot beyond the next month or so, and I can't keep making $10-20 sports card purchases every few days. But I can keep detailed records of what I have room for, so I don't add anything I can't squeeze into a box or binder.

This Kevin Dineen Topps RC arrived Saturday along with some other Whalers and Devils from two of my Sportlots orders. It was one of the last significant base cards I needed to cross off the Whaler list.

Ray Ferraro's Topps RC was the other one. I now have every Hartford Whalers base card (Topps and OPC) from 1982-83 to 1990-91. 

I'm seven cards away from completing 1990-91 Whalers in all mainstream sets (need one Score Canadian and six more Upper Deck French/Canadian.) Unfortunately I only have room for one Whalers card from 1979-80 to 1991-92, and my 1992-93 to 1994-95 Whalers binder is completely full. 

I do have room for 17 Whalers cards from 1995-96 to 1997-98, including Carolina cards where the player is still pictured in green and blue. My original plan was to try to accumulate every Whalers base card from 1979-80 to 1997-98; if I had the time and money to see that through I'd need another binder. 

Here's my Whalers wantlist on an Excel spreadsheet if anyone reading this is interested. (note: this includes cards I have in my collection as part of completed sets only.)

As for my favorite hockey team that still exists, I haven't made a detailed Devils wantlst but I'm pretty close to completing the first nine New Jersey seasons. 1982-83 through 1987-88 are complete, and I need just two O-Pee-Chee cards to complete 1988-89. 1990-91 is a bit tougher, I need 14 cards to finish the year - mostly Score Rookie/Traded and Upper Deck Canadian. 

These cards and others were purchased from Sportlots seller barriere, who issued me a partial refund. Not because anything was out of stock, which was my initial thought. He simply gave me 50% cash back perhaps he felt bad taking two dimes for overproduced Kevin Todd commons lol. That $2.67 refund covered the cost of the Kevin Dineen at the top of this post - which was $2.65 from davekas4. Sportlots is so addicting!!

Out of all my various card collecting project the one that I have the most available space for new additions is/are New Jersey Devils cards. My inserts/parallels/relics boxes for Red Sox, Packers, and Whalers are full -- but I have room for 12-15 more Devils hits.

I have room for 20 Packers base cards - mostly in the 2010s-2020s binders. 
I have room for 20 Whalers cards across all three binders.

Devils 1 (1982-83 to 1992-93) has room for 10 cards.
Devils 4 (2004-05 to 2013-14) has room for 6 cards.
Devils 5 (2014-15 to present) has room for 35 cards. Maybe more if I insert additional 9-pocket pages. 

You'd think that it would be easy for me to acquire cards of Jersey's team since I live in Jersey. But my LCS doesn't sell singles, Target rarely has hockey packs/boxes, and the card shows in town always seem to be on a weekend when Mrs. Collector's health is at her lowest. Probably for the best since I'm guessing those shows are 70% Pokemon and overpriced Yankees stuff anyway.

Very few card bloggers collect hockey and I don't have any connection to a Canadian trader who can get their hands on low-mid end Devils inserts and relics like I can with Red Sox cards. So it's all online ordering for me, which is a total drag. I used to fill my boxes with 30-cent ePack crap from COMC -- but they've completely jacked up the shipping charges, discarding their flat $5.99 rate (which was $4.99 not that long ago) in favor of a per-card charge. I'm probably never ordering from them again. 😢

Next week, I'll update my NFL inventory. I should have the rest of my Packers purchases in hand by then.

Thanks for reading!

 

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Everything Everywhere All At Once

Today is my wedding anniversary with Mrs. Collector. We have nothing planned, because:

• My mother in law might also have cancer and had to go to the hospital for tests today. No one else is around to take her and stay with her, so my wife did. And now she's tired.
  
• The relentless, oppressive "heat dome" was supposed to subside today. It has not. I saw the forecast and told my daughters that I would take them to the park and Friendly's after I got home from work today. LOL. LMAO, even.
• My wife had stomach issues this morning when I left for work, and she's having trouble keeping down most of her food, so an anniversary dinner would be a bad idea even if we could afford it. Which we can't because we just bought a couch to replace the one we bought 12 years ago and give her a comfortable place to rest. It's not here yet.
• I'm in a mood anyway because the only other person in my department has been out on vacation all month (she returns tomorrow -- I think?) and the customers have been especially annoying and dumb lately. I would really like to tell these idiots to pay electronically or kick rocks, but I can't get fired. Need the insurance because I'm giving myself diabetes and high blood pressure.
• Oh, and my wife asked my daughters which aunt/uncle they would stay with if something happened to both her and me... and they separately gave her the same answer. Awww hell no. I'm living forever ... was my response. But, given the rapidly declining health of my family, the planet, our country's politics, etc... it's a struggle.

And so, I take refuge in my own personal oasis. The thing that has acted as my safe space since my alcoholic father terrorized my mother 37 years ago. Cards. And that part of my life has gone fairly well.

I requested shipping on my latest COMC order in early May.
I placed a small order at Sportlots in late June.
I placed two orders at Cardbarrel the second week of July.

All of these orders arrived at the same time. That happened to be the same day that my daughter helped me assemble my brand new bookshelf.

..which I'd bought with a gift card earned from finishing 2nd (out of about 115 entrants) in a company town hall trivia contest. I considered buying some baseball cards with the free cash but the two blasters in my cart (2023 Stadium Club and 2024 Topps Heritage) totaled the same price. I chose the bookshelf over roughly 100 new cards because organizing my card room has been a nice distraction from all the personal and general despair.

Plus, I already had plenty of new cards coming my way.

I'd like to show them off, but my old printer/scanner finally bit the dust. The printer didn't print and the scanner kept scanning fuzzy. So I bought a new printer/scanner with a prior gift card:

I followed the instructions to install the printer, and that's when I encountered a problem. The software requires a modern version of Windows - something from the past dozen years or so.

My computer, which was purchased before my daughters were born, still runs fine. It also runs Windows 7.

Did I ever mention I went to school with that girl? Anyway.. to illustrate how old Windows 7 is, I first saw this commercial during Brett Favre's return to Green Bay as the Vikings QB. In 2009.

All of this is to say I will be borrowing a lot of TCDB scans for the foreseeable future - which is fine for the Athletics series or another round of All-Time Teams. It's not so great for showing off new purchases.

Here's a look at the first Cardbarrel order. These pictures were taken with my phone, it's the best I could do:

I loaded up on Red Sox commons to fill out some of my binders (now that I have more shelf space..)

Of course I picked out some non-Sox as well:

I have a bit of a Terry Francona PC and I enjoy picking up Expos/Blue Jays cards in O-Pee-Chee and ('80s)Leaf sets.

Some substitutions at the top of this one. I did not order a '94 Bowman Kenny Rogers; that was an unannounced replacement for a '94 Donruss Red Sox card. Same for the 1993 Fleer Tim Salmon, which replaced a 1993 Finest Mike Greenwell. :/

This order pushed my reward points past 2,000 so I had a gift code coming. Since the big order was still 'processing' I decided to spend the free cash quickly, in hopes that both orders would arrive at once.

Indeed they did. I made a list of the 'free' cards - before remembering my gift code was for slightly more than $20.

The Sportlots order took a couple weeks to arrive from Saskatchewan. The two cards at the bottom left arrived damaged, but I left the seller positive feedback anyway because I'd fallen so far behind on Sportlots orders that I copy/pasted "A+++ thank you very much!" for every purchase I made this year.

And then there's COMC. A day after receiving yet another $5 apology coupon my order shipped. It arrived two months after I used my prior apology coupon and requested shipment.

On top of that, they mislabeled one of the cards I purchased.

Here's a couple '56 Topps cards from the order. You'll notice the Tommy Carroll is a PSA 8. I definitely didn't buy a PSA 8. No way is there room in the budget for a high-grade Yankee; I had to settle for a PSA 4 with HOFer Early Wynn. 

See? I sensibly ordered an EX-MT 6 and... wait... zoom in on that scan...

COMC sent the right card, they just listed it wrong. Which I guess the seller didn't notice either, or they would have asked for 3-4x more. I only have a handful of PSA 8s in my 1956 Topps set build, and none are Yankees or Dodgers. Until now.

My CA ebay seller friend is sitting on $80 for me to spend, and I asked him to grab a Young Guns RC of a top-ten goal scorer in the NHL. He made an offer that was declined, then the seller ended the listing and reopened it at a significant markup. (This move is also known as "The JoelshitShow".) But now he feels bad I missed out on the card and he's making it his mission to secure the star RC for me.

If and when that happens I'll be sure to show it off here. If not, I don't think I'll have anything new coming in for a while because... one month from now, right after my birthday... there's a bigass card show about an hour away.

Thanks for reading!

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