Sunday, March 14, 2021

Sunday 15: Card #1 and 3 others

To go along with working on my "Next 10" set completions, I've recently decided that I need to start getting a little more serious with my 68-72 Topps baseball set builds, along with the early 70's OPC hockey sets.  I can only go for so long with purchasing commons for a buck or 2 to whittle away at the sets.

I need to start getting a little more into the meat of the sets.  Cards that are in the $5-15 range.  Cards that have some star power.  In some cases, certain high numbers for sets that are a little more pricey than your average commons.

So I decided to give it a go.  My first purchase on ebay to get the Sunday 15 in flight was never shipped.  OK, so I got that money back and found another seller to get this started.  I honed in this week on the '68 set and started with card #1



I thought that this card was somewhat underpriced at only $9.25, so I jumped on it right away.  We all know Mr. Clemente and most of us are familiar with the Alou brothers.  Personally, I don't know Tony Gonzalez very well, so I decided to look him up on the baseball reference website.

Tony had a 12 year career in the majors with 5 teams, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Atlanta, San Diego and the Angels.  Tony had a career .286 average, with 1967 being the big season of his career, hitting .339 with 172 hits and an OPS of .869 which was 9th in the NL.  Defensively he was solid, fielding pct. of .987 for his career with twice as many assists as errors during his 12 season run.

Clemente would finish 18 points ahead of Gonzalez in the batting race, Alou was 3rd at .338.  


These three cards brought the total to $14.  All of them are in pretty nice shape and bring me just 20 cards shy of the halfway point for this set.  I'd really like to be halfway or better on all of the 68-72 sets, but there's work to be done to get there.  

I'm sure thought that finding deals like the one I found on the Clements will make the task of finishing these sets a little easier.   I'm going to try and keep documenting these purchases on the Sunday 15 series, which I hope to keep going for a while.

Enjoy the hobby!

Robert

4 comments:

  1. Smart purchases - and yeah - at some point you run out of the 25-50 cent commons, don't you? I'm starting to figure out that my 60s sets won't truly be complete without Mantle, Clemente, Mays, Aaron etc. That's a tough pill to swallow.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I found that out when I finished '64. Took me a long time, but I was able to finish it off. Patience helped when searching for decent bargains on the big names.

      Delete
  2. Makes sense. I just wonder how many of those $5-15 cards have been inflated into the $10-30 range during our current "boom".

    ReplyDelete