You never know what you'll run across on Twitter

So on the weekend I was on twitter when I came across a thread that advertised cards for $5 or less.   A pretty good idea I thought, so I started scrolling down all the tweets.  I figured that I was going to find mostly newer cards on the thread, but I put on the "you never know" hat and kept on scrolling.

Then remarkably, I found this card.

 I like a good deal like everyone else, but seeing this come across at just $4(!) was astounding.  I had to do 2 things first.

1. Check and see if I needed the card for the set.  I did
2. Take a closer look, at least as close as I could online.

I thought it was decent enough even with the tape marks top and bottom on the front, so I sat there for a few minutes deciding whether I wanted the card.   

Then I thought to myself, when am I going to find another Billy Martin '59 Topps for $4.  I told the seller Joe (@joewilk) that I'd take it.  Today it arrived.   One closer to the set, and I'm quite happy.  68 to go.

Enjoy the hobby!

Robert

Looking forward to the National, but not going (again)

For the 7th year in a row, I will not be going to the National.  2014 was the last time I went (Cleveland) and I remember quite vividly how much fun I had for the 2 days that I was there.

• I remember being only a 90 minute drive from the show and not having to stay overnight at a hotel like I did in Baltimore two years prior.  That was a big plus as there's nothing better than sleeping in your own bed.   
• Just seeing the mass of humanity and chatting up a lot of dealers and fellow collectors while sifting through boxes was the most fun; I'm looking forward to doing that again someday at the National (2022 I hope)

This show I'm sure is going to be crazy, with the hobby in such a state of hysteria I'm sure that a lot of money will be changing hands.  Sadly, or possibly a good thing, none of the money will be mine.  I'm hoping to see a lot of pictures though of what's going on there for the next several days so I can live vicariously through the amusement of others.

For now, I'll be happy hitting more shows here in South Florida.  There's one each of the next 3 weekends and if I feel like driving 2-3 hours there's a show every weekend for me through Labor Day weekend if I'm in the spending spirit.

Hopefully I can find more additions to my collection such as the 2020 Gold Foil Andrew McCutchen I found in a 3/$1 box last weekend in WPB.  The photo isn't too bad considering I have to use my camera now as my scanner will not scan at all.  

To those of you that are going to Rosemont, have a great time!!  Send lots of pics!! 

Most of all, enjoy the hobby.

Robert

501 502 & 503

I think I can say that I'm getting serious now about getting the '59 set done.  Of course it is going to take some doing with some very expensive cards in the final run that I need, but like always I'm confident that I'll figure something out.

This trio of cards is one that I picked up on eBay from a seller that was doing a set break.  My scanner decided that it was taking Saturday night off as well, so my ancient iPhone was called into service.

 

Now that I look at it, not a bad photo if I do say so myself.  Not great, but not bad.

The Bamberger is one of the SPs that I needed and both the White and Taylor cards were something that I should have had in hand a long time ago, but now they are home.

This leaves me with 69 to go, I have 2 on the way from eBay, along with another that I purchased just a few minutes ago on twitter.

Quick COMC update for those that are following along at home:

Just over 170K cards shipped since my original order date 3 weeks ago.  Really rough math says that my order will ship in 18 weeks at the current pace.  18 Weeks from today is November the 27th.  The date is improving.  We'll see how that goes.

Enjoy the hobby!

Robert

10 years, holy cow

It's been a decade now.   I "posted" this trade that I received from Kerry at the Cards on Cards blog (who has been at this blogging thing a lot longer than I have) and this blog was born.

While the desire to write now isn't as strong as it once was, the desire to collect is still there and is just as strong as it was on 7/23/11.

Something I thought about when starting to write this post was that just before I started the blog, I had also recently joined a website devoted to cards. Unfortunately it took me several years to really get going on the site and figure out how to use it.  I joined the trading card database site on 7/18/11, 5 days before my first post.  Just imagine how many trades I would have completed if I had the knowledge then that I have now.   I'm at 445 transactions completed and hopefully sometime this week I'll hit the 450 mark.  

My tastes have evolved a bit, but I'm still the serial numbered, parallel card collecting crazy man I've always been on this blog.  Yes, the werewolf above doesn't fit into those categories, but the evolution includes appreciating more cards such as this from time to time.  

But the biggest thing I've learned over the past decade as part of the card collecting hobby is everyone has different tastes.

Enjoy these different tastes, don't hate on them.  We're all different.  Embrace it.

On to the 2nd decade.   Thanks for sticking around through the first one.  

Enjoy the hobby!!

Robert

Let's be Frank, 500 feels good

 I teased the other day that I had hit the 500 card mark for the '59 Topps set build.  I have as the card came this past Friday in the mail, very quickly I might add.

Not in great shape, but still decent enough in both condition and price for me to add it to the set build.

I found it a week ago Friday on ebay listed at 19.99.  I had other cards from the '59 set in the cart already to purchase and I wasn't sold on this one quite yet.  I put it on my watch list.

The next morning I woke up to an email from the seller with a 10% discount.  Someone I guess was trying to tell me something.  I snapped up the card and within 4 business days the card was in my mailbox!

72 cards to go to finish the set.  3 of them are on their way.  The light at the end of the proverbial tunnel is starting to get a little brighter.

Enjoy the hobby!!

Robert

Card shows now equal normalcy

I hit the West Palm Beach card show for the second consecutive month today.   Last month I spent just $20 and bought a bunch of dime cards.   It was good, yes, but with the mask on it still didn't feel quite the same.

Today my buddy Chris and I went; this was the first time that I'd been to WPB with him and the biggest highlight for us was finding one of the dealers that we frequented at the Ft. Lauderdale shows before the pandemic hit.

We were both very happy to see Joe as he was us (we are good customers after all) and he shook both of our hands.   

This months show also turned out to be mask optional.   A sigh of relief for me as I'm fully vaccinated (I have no fear of the gov't tracking me, that'll end when I'm dead and gone) and go a lot of places now without a mask.  

But I digress....

Before we hit Joe's table, I found a table that was selling some vintage for reasonable prices and managed to bring home some cards that I needed for various sets.

This '81 Topps Art Monk RC is in really nice shape and only cost me $5.  I'm just starting out on the '81 set, so to get one of the other RC's that isn't named after a state is a nice start.  I also grabbed four cards from the '79 set, which I failed to scan, but all 4 are star cards (Payton, Dorsett, Staubach and Lofton) and were just $2 apiece, so I was happy with the football portion.

The Hunter was $3, and I believe the HR leaders card was $5 so I was quite happy coming home with 2 fewer cards on my '72 Topps want list.  That set is almost 65% done but there's still no imminent timeline with this one as I have the mountain of high numbers to tackle some day.

For $5 combined, I knocked these 2 off the long neglected '71 Topps want list.  This might be the last of the 68-72 Topps run that I complete as I'm barely past the 1/3 mark, but again like the '72 set, there's no hurry on this one either.

Lastly, the vintage table had a few '68s that I picked up at a nice price.  Especially the Bird Belters card, which I believe is only the 2nd card I own from this set that is numbered above 500.  That one cost me $5, which I really didn't think was that bad.  The 3 commons on the left were $1 apiece and the RBI leaders was $4.

These 5 cards knocked off two milestones for the '68 set.  I was at 298/598 before these came in, so not only did I pass the 300 card mark in hand, I also passed the 50% mark.   Nice.

The key monetary takeaway for me from the show is that I had a lot less of a problem chasing the $1-$5 cards than I've had in the past.  I've come to terms with the fact that if I'm going to get anywhere with the 68-72 Topps run, I'm going to have to open the wallet.   That is even more evident with the '59 set, of which I received card #500 in the mail on Friday and will share that some time this week.

For the longest time, I'd only been buying cards online.  Ebay, Sportlots, a bit here and there on twitter.  All have been a good source of cards coming in, but no matter the enthusiasm I showed when they came in, it just wasn't the same as getting out and hitting a card show.

I've been to 3 in the past month and I'm starting to feel normal again (well at least as normal as this knucklehead can be).  Interacting with people and collectors, that's what really helps with making this hobby special.

Normalcy feels good.

Enjoy the hobby!

Robert

A bit of a '59 kick

After finding lots of little cards over the past few weeks at card shows, I decided last weekend to start knocking on the door of the '59 Topps set which I've neglected for a while.

I did a bit of ebay hunting and found 8 cards to knock off the want list, some high numbers and a few cards that cost me $10-20.  This is fine because I know if I'm ever going to put this set to bed that I'm going to have to spend some money.

This post features the first 2 cards I received today, both of them falling in the aforementioned $10-20 range. 

$15 shipped brought the high numbered all star card of Moose Skowron home.  The all star cards look great, possibly better than any other all star cards from later Topps issues.  I still have 13 more of these to find for the set, including all the big names so that challenge is yet to come.

Not the greatest copy of the Willie Mays Baseball Thrills card, but for $21 shipped, I'm very happy to have it in my possession.  I only need 3 more of these for the set, naturally it's Mantle, Kaline and Aaron.  

I have 3 more high series cards plus one big name on the way, hopefully they'll all be here by the weekend so I can show them off as well.  Once those come in, I'll be over the 500 card mark, as well as dipping below 70 cards needed to finish the set.  

Quick COMC update:

Order placed 7/3 -- 1,234,761 cards ahead of my order

it's now 7/13 -- 1,172,490  (pace of 6227 cards per day).  

188 days to go at the current pace.  That's Monday, January 17th, 2022.  Not October 25th, 2021.  

Enjoy the hobby!

Robert

1,234,761

I've really taken a step back from posting the past 3 months because the desire to write has really dropped off, along with a lot of household issues that have distracted me and taken a lot of my time away from the keyboard.

I think this is the first time that I've written 2 posts in the same week since March, which is OK.   My interest in cards hasn't waned in the mean time as I'm still working on my favorite passion in collecting which is knocking down want lists.

The one set that I have finished in the past 3 months is the 2008 Allen & Ginter set, the 6th of the A&G run that I've completed.  Trades and small purchases off of Sportlots really knocked this set down quick to the point where I needed just 2 cards.

Glavine and Pierzynski were both quite cheap for SP cards, which is something that I've found a lot more in the past several months, cheap short prints from all along the A&G run.  I'm closing in on a couple other A&G sets and still really just getting going on years such as '06, '07, '13 and '14.  

You might be wondering what the title # of this post is all about.  It's a little humor (OK, very little) on my part to have some fun with the amount of cards that is ahead of my order on COMC.  This # is up to date as of 6:45 this evening, or just before writing this post.

Now the # of "items ahead of my order" is kind of a new thing on the site. I'm sure that some collectors will find the number depressing, intimidating or just plain crazy.  But for me, I'm going to have fun with it.  Numbers have always been my thing and now I have some easy title fodder for the blog, when I do decide to write posts.  

Let's see if the estimated ship/pick date of October 25th comes true.  That date is 2 days before my birthday, but I'm not holding my breath just yet.

Enjoy the hobby!

Robert 

No delay

A couple weeks back I mentioned the West Palm Beach card show and that was another show closer to my house the next weekend (which was last week).   

I asked my good friend Chris if he'd like to make the trek to Pompano Beach (30 minutes) and have a look around.  Off we went.

It was almost the same M.O. as the previous week.  I hit one table, stayed there for about an hour and a half, and spent $20.

This time, the table was nothing but football, and the boxes I hit were 25c boxes.   Still did quite well though!

Sometimes, you just got to dig for stuff....

Amazing I found 3 Larry Fitzgerald cards in the quarter box, all of them jersey cards.   The Classics and the Prestige cards are both numbered as well, so this was quite the score.

I also found a dozen other base and parallel cards of Fitz that I needed.  

This next pair of scans is what really got me though.  I found 16 cards, in a quarter box, all serial #'d to 99!

These aren't your rookie flops or guys that you have never heard of, I found quite a few decent names in here, past and present.  This find takes me well over the 100 card mark for the serial #'d/99 collection and I'm still blown away about how many of these kinds of cards I've found for cheap.

I started finding trade bait, along with cards that I put in the pile just because I liked the look of them.

I thought that these would scan better, because I really like the look of these Panini Unparalleled cards.  The Tyler Lockett card on the left is #'d out of 49 and these just look great in general.

The Chronicles are either green or purple parallels

All kinds of parallels and #'d cards were in these boxes.  I did grab a few from a dollar and 2 dollar box, but when I went to pay thinking I had about $30 worth of cards in the pile, I was told just $20.

Honestly, I don't remember the last time I did card shows in 2 straight weekends.  

Getting out 2 weekends in a row felt really good though after being away and cooped up for 15-16 months.  I'm going to take a couple of weekends off and wait for the next show on the 18th in West Palm Beach.  Maybe make it 3 straight shows where I only spend 20 bucks.

Enjoy the hobby!!

Robert

2nd straight week of winning at a card show