Close and Closer

It finally happened.  I got stiffed on a Sportlots order.  It kind of surprised me that the order never came, as I had used that particular seller a few times in the past.

What bothered me the most is that the seller lied.   Don't mark an order as shipped when you haven't shipped the cards.  2 weeks later nothing had arrived so I filed a non-receipt complaint (for lack of a better word).   The shipper asks for 5 more days, which really just delayed the inevitable fact that they weren't going to fulfill the order.

So, I used that money and added a bit more this past week to chop down 2 1980's Topps want lists down to pretty low numbers.

First off, I knocked 30 cards off of the 1980 list....

Not a lot of huge names, but some of them you'll recognize, such as Lou Piniella and Ron Guidry of the Yankees, along with co-rookie of the year John Castino of the Twins.  I remembered that Matt Keough had some rough years at the beginning of his career with the A's, so I turned the card over and learned that he was originally an infielder in the minors, hitting over .300 in 1975 before being converted to a pitcher.  His '79 season was a forgettable one, with an ERA just over 5.00 and a 2-17 W/L record.

These 18, plus 12 other cards brought the 1980 want list down to just 22 cards.  Number 482 is on that list, which means I still need the Rickey Henderson RC.  Once I have that in hand it'll all be down hill from there.

That set is close to being complete.   The 1985 Topps set is even closer.

For me, it was disappointing that I had to buy 3 Blue Jay cards from the set.  With the seemingly half million Blue Jays dupes I have hanging around, Fernandez, Bell and Stieb were all part of this purchase.  As you can see as well, there were some more notable names in this group.

I didn't bother scanning all 47 cards, but among the 29 you don't see here are names such as Garvey, Strawberry, Molitor, Gibson and Schmidt.  That want list is now down to 13 cards.  Maybe this coming weekend I'll just hop onto COMC and finish that set off.

I don't know if I should be as surprised as I am that I'm this close to finishing these sets already.  The cards seem to be quite easy to come by in large lots, so I guess I really shouldn't be.

It'll be nice to finish these 2 sets, and hopefully knock off a couple of more late 70's/early 80's sets by the end of the year.   We'll see how that goes....

Thanks for reading, Robert