Dirty tease

I went on a bit of a spending spree at the end of last week.  I decided to hit up Sportlots to try and knock a couple of want lists down.  Mission succeeded.

In what might be a record shipping time, I received the first of my 2 orders yesterday.  The 2013 A&G want list is all but dead.  Just 2 cards remaining now, the Manny Machado RC and the Pele correct version (yes, I do want the writing on the back).

42 cards were in the lot, 20 of them were very affordable short prints (either 27 or 37 cents).

I took a quick look through the 42 cards while writing the post.  Not one non-ball player in the group.  Plus a lot of them were legends, Clemente, Gehrig, Rickey Henderson, Jeter, Mays, Whitey Ford, etc.

Great group of cards for under $20 to nearly finish this set.  I don't know if the seller was wanting to give me a bit of a heart attack, but this a picture of the snap case he sent the cards with...

Now, I would have been very happy had the case been full of 1961 Topps cards, but I'll settle for what I have now.  Wonder what the other group of cards that I bought from the Sportlots site will arrive in?

Robert

righting a wrong, and nearly finished righting a wrong

Yep, almost two months again between posts.  Been a lot happening, including a two-week illness, and the stress of wondering if I'm going to have a job next week after more than two decades with the same company.  

So a lot of time has been spent away from the hobby again.  Who knows?  Maybe in a few days I'll have more time to spend on cards, but we'll see.

While thumbing my way through twitter earlier this morning, I found a tweet from the Night Owl giving us a quick glance at the nice haul of cards he picked up at the card show recently.  It was a great group of cards, and I made a quick comment/question about the '79 Football binder he displayed.

It reminded me of the fact that it's been a while since I posted, so I needed to sit at the computer and start writing a little.  I recently received a box shipment from Sportlots, and there were 4 cards in there that were from a set that I had put together, sold many years ago, and now I'm working on putting it together again.

4 more cards off the 84-85 OPC want list, bringing the want list down to 20.  If you're curious about the want list, here it is:

5, 17, 18, 67, 121, 208, 213, 239, 241, 243, 249, 254, 255, 327, 339, 357, 373, 380, 383, 385

Not much, except a few Gretzky cards and Rookie cards of the big names in the set.  One day I'll have this set put together, again, and I'll have righted a wrong that happened a long time ago.

Hopefully.

Robert

10 out of 10 -- finally

 318 days into calendar 2020 (seems like more, doesn't it?), I've finally broken through and finished all 10 sets that I set out at the beginning of the year to complete.

The final 8 cards of the 1974 Topps set arrived yesterday in mail from Sportlots.  To give credit where its due after all my USPS adventures this year, my box arrived a day early yesterday.

It's funny as you'd think I'd end up with a bunch of star cards to finish off the set, similar to many other collectors.  I actually started putting together this Sportlots box order back at the end of September, so there were a couple of other cards of a higher profile that arrived in the 6 weeks between the start of the order and now.

The Bob Robertson card is actually an upgrade, as the one I received in a trade on TCDB was quite the disappointment (off center and creased).  

Willie Crawford's card reminds me of the Steve Garvey psychedelic card I showed a few weeks ago, albeit to a lesser extent.  Not quite the haze of Garvey's card, but its a little similar.

Looking at Roy Fosse's card reminds me of how antiquated the catcher's mask and helmet combos of the 70's are now.  I remember the catchers using the turned around batters helmet under the mask back then.  Seeing Fosse with the helmet without the bill reminded me how unique that look was.

I'm very glad that this set is done and I'm going to be posting right away on the Next 10 sets  that I posted back in the middle of September.  The Sportlots order actually finished off 2 of the 10 and nearly knocked off a third, so we're off to a great start on getting more sets complete.

Enjoy the hobby!

Robert

The first of the last

 I finally ordered my Sportlots box over the weekend, and it had all but one of the cards I needed to finish off the '74 Topps set.  Card #126, the 1st series checklist.

A bit of obsessiveness kicked in and I wound up trying to chase down the card, first on ebay where I couldn't find a copy less than $13.  To me, that wasn't going to fly.  So I hit Sportlots.

Struggled with cutting the tops of cards off on the scans today

I found the copy you see on the right for $3, much more acceptable.  It does have a bit of a border on the top, despite the scan you see above.  The seller graded the card as good, likely because of the boxes that were colored in on both sides of the card.  One of these days I will get into a full on discussion about how I feel checklists should be graded, especially those with the boxes checked/colored in.  For me, what you see above really didn't wouldn't have kept me from buying the card as I think that older checklists should be colored or marked.  That's what kids did back then.

I added the '79 Topps FB checklist on the left for 18 cents.  Clean on both sides.  Couldn't leave it there at that price.

I've been chipping away at some older sets lately, and this purchase was no exception.  Again, disregard the poor scanning job you see (it might be time to replace my scanner), as these 4 cards from the 69 Topps set were the first I've purchased in a while.  They all came at a reasonable price as well, just 35 cents apiece leaves me thinking while I write this that I probably could have hunted for some more.  

Not my day for scanning

This is another set that I've begun to try and pare down the want list some more lately.  These 4 combined cost me $6.50, but that includes the high number Art Fowler in the lower right corner, which is in nice shape.  The want list is finally below the 80 card mark with 79 to go, however I'm going to guess that about half of them are going to be quite expensive, so the extended time building this set is going to continue.  (rough count while writing shows about 30 big$ cards)

Later this week I should receive my Sportlots box that I had shipped and hopefully the final 7 cards will be scattered inside the many envelopes inside, which should finish off the '74 Topps set.  If/when that happens, that will be the last of the 10 sets that I wanted to finish at the beginning of 2020.  

Only 352,647 sets to go.   Or so it seems.....

Enjoy the hobby!

Robert

Hey '74 Topps, I haven't forgotten about you

I've just been dragging my feet. 

I nabbed 4 cards on the Sportlots order for the '74 set, bringing that want list below 30 cards.  While writing this post I'm thinking it is time to get the set done, and will likely spend the weekend chasing the remainder on various websites.

Surprising as the want list has shrunk that I'm still finding common cards that I need.  Even more surprising is that I found these all for less than a quarter apiece on Sportlots. 

I paid 90 cents for the Ron Santo card you see here, not bad, but a little bit rough edged on the right hand side, and it almost looks as if he's got a piece of gum or something on the one side of his mouth.  There's also a crease on the right hand side as well, but for under a buck I think I'm happy enough with this copy of Santo.  It does show the risk you take with some sellers and vintage on Sportlots. 

Now, it's off to find Rose, Garvey, McCovey, Munson, Bench, Robinson and a couple of Aaron cards in order to get this one in the books.  $50-60 I'm thinking (read hoping) to finish this up...

Enjoy the hobby!!

Robert

These 5 sets aren't next

It's nice that I made some progress on the sets that I'm going to show, but it's also a bit sad to know that I have a ton of sets that I'd like to finish.  The sets below range in completion from around 35% to in the 60's, but they're not on the set completion radar yet.

My introduction to the modern OPC sets was the 2007-08 OPC set that I found fat packs of in a Wal Mart one day.  I've now the mindset that OPC sets from the past that I'm going to finish are going to be started SPs first, thus making the pain of the final few cards hopefully a lot lighter.  These 9 cards ranged in the 30 to 50 cent range, just perfect for me and I'm sure that sellers priced them that way in order to move them from their inventory.  That and outside of PA Parenteau in the top center, there aren't any players that had a decent career in the NHL on this page.

I have another envelope coming from Sportlots as they notified me the day after they sent my box that they forgot one envelope of 20 cards.  These two sets will be a good chunk of those cards, as I found a seller that's selling commons at anywhere from 18-25 cents, which works for me.   I was a bit off on my opening paragraph, the 85-86 OPC set is nowhere near 1/3 complete, it's actually 1/6 done so there's a long way to go. 

One of my favorite sets of the 80's and one that I'll be glad to have completed again, the 84-85 set took a nice jump with these 13 cards.  As I'm going through my next 10 sets, I'll probably end up continuing to pick off commons as cheaply as I can, avoiding finding the Steve Yzerman RC for as long as possible.   Took a quick look on eBay for the Yzerman RC while writing this, and the cheapest copy is just over $40, and you can clearly see a corner that is nowhere near sharp.

Moving on from mid 80's OPC we come to more modern shiny cards with the 2013-14 Prizm set.  I remember seeing these in Wal Mart a few years ago and loving the look of them.  Had I known then what I know now, I wouldn't have kept on buying them as the last 100 cards of the set are all rookies, and there were some good names among the final 3rd of the set so it'll likely be a while before I start chasing this one more vigorously. 

Going through the Sportlots box has been a blast because I knocked about 200 cards off of my massive want lists, but seeing just how much I still want makes me think sometimes if I've taken on way too much and get myself overwhelmed.

Enjoy the hobby!!

Robert

How retro

The big Sportlots box order came in today (at least 16 out of 17 of the orders did), and of course I had a lot of fun going through the decent sized box of envelopes and digging through buried treasure.

Once I got the roughly 180 cards organized and removed them from 14 different want lists on the TCDB (more on that in another upcoming post), I figured I should at least start writing a bit about the haul.

One of the sets that I pulled a few cards from is the 18-19 OPC retro parallel set.  Well off the beaten path of sets that I'm trying to complete, this build is only in its infancy at 38 cards out of the 600. 

For some reason during all my ordering decided to grab a total of 8 cards of varying star quality.  Nobody in particular was in mind when I started grabbing these, I'm sure it was just a matter of picking up some more cards from sellers that I already had in the cart.

When looking at the cards, I noticed the background color patterns.  The 4 in the first scan with the blue background/green name bars.  The 2nd scan featuring green background with orange name bar and the orange background with a purple name bar.  I tried to decipher if there was any rhyme or reason to the color scheme, maybe they were separated by division?  that was quickly shot down as hockey fans will know that the Rangers and the Kings/Coyotes aren't in the same conference, let alone division.  Some more thought will have to be done on this.

This set is probably going to take years to build, and I can see my future with this set clearly now.  I'll be wandering around the International Center in Toronto at the Hockey Expo in 2030 and seeing a dealer with a box full of these trying to get rid of them for cheap. 

That's the norm for me....

Enjoy the hobby!!

Robert

No Gum stains on these cards

So I'm hunting around on Sportlots about 10 days ago for some cards to fill some set holes, and I decide I want to see if I can knock down the 2017 A&G want list that I have.

I'm looking at the list of sellers for the first card I pull up on the list, and I see a name I recognize but hadn't thought about in quite some time. 

Many will be familiar with Jon from the Community Gum blog, long one of the staples in the card blogging community.  Sadly, Jon hasn't posted for almost a year now (he's 11 days shy of that mark), but still is a recognizable name for me. 

Once, I saw his name, I knew I was going to pick up a few cards off of him.  It turned out to be 24 in total; there were no worries when it came to shipping because like the rest of us, Jon's a collector and knows what it's like to receive an envelope, let alone send one. 

Great care was taken in shipping the cards, each one of them individually sleeved, top loaders at both ends of 2 bricks of 12 cards, and both bricks inside team bags.  Fantastic!!  I can only remember one opportunity to trade with Jon previously, but I remember him to be a great trader and very friendly in emails.

These 24 cards dropped the list down to an even 60 cards, 18 of them SPs.  This set will be one of my "next 10" sets to fall under the completed category.   Not bad for a set that a couple of years ago had no thoughts or desires to finish...

Enjoy the hobby!

Robert

Going my own way

If there's been one good thing that has happened during the COVID-19 pandemic/lockdown/work from home period that has been the last 2 months is that my card collecting process has finally evolved to what it probably should have been a couple of years ago.

I've kind of gotten sick of pack ripping.  Sick of hunting for packs on big box store shelves, only to find them picked over and searched by assholes (yea, I used that word...apologies to those who are offended).

I went to Target Saturday morning, first time in almost a month.   Nothing has changed when it comes to visiting the store; I go and find the items I need, and then hit the card aisle last before checking out.  What I saw was kind of pitiful.

• All the clamor that has been Bowman over the past couple of weeks, no sign of it at all.
• It barely looked touched/restocked.  If it had been restocked, all there was for jumbo packs was Heritage, MVP hockey, and a bit of GQ
• Blasters were minimal as well; the only one that I touched was 18-19 OPC hockey, and I put it down right away because I thought I could do better with that $20

It also made me think.  I'm really happy with how my collection is progressing.  I've been completing sets at a good rate so far in 2020, and I'm hoping to have 3 more completed in June when some orders arrive.  I've also revisited a couple of sites that I slowed down on using for card shopping, one of them being Sportlots.

I hit up a reliable seller that I've used many times in the past for hockey card needs and decided to start picking up some OPC short prints for a pair of sets I'm working on.

Clint (Sportlots ID: ctcdork) has a great selection of cards at reasonable prices.  I decided to grab a bunch of SPs, starting with the 8 above from the 2009-10 OPC set.  My thought process has changed a bit on building these "older" OPC sets, I'm actually going after chunks of the SPs first before finishing up with the base cards.  I still need 313 cards for this set, but only 37 of them are SPs, and I'll probably keep buying them up before chasing more trades to finish up the set.

Because when I do it the other way, like I did with 2013-14 OPC...

I end up having to buy a bunch of SPs at the end, usually leaving me frustrated (or pissed, you choose the word you prefer) when I need a bunch of them and hate having to pay prices I don't want to pay.

It may sound like a backward way of thinking, but I kind of wish I had started with the more expensive cards from a vintage baseball set such as '59 Topps, because I spent a lot of time building up "numbers" of cards, and now have hit pretty much a screeching halt because I have nothing but high dollar cards left to go.

But that's all water under the bridge.  Saving money on packs right now is helping me focus more on trying to complete a boatload of sets I've been working on, and I go back to the immense joy I had when I finished my '64 Topps set, and I'm looking to get more of that in the coming weeks and months.

Venting over.  I'm going my own way...come along if you wish.

Enjoy the hobby and stay safe!!

Robert

Attack Mode

Apparently attack mode is what I'm in right now, as I've done nothing but focus on my set building the past few weeks.

Even my big box weakness, Target, has been out of my radar the past 2 weeks.   Maybe working from home has some advantages, as the only place I've gone in my car is to the grocery store.  Saved a lot of money during the week too, as I've not had to stop on the way to work to grab something to eat (a bad vice) or fill the car with gas, which I would have had to do twice so far this month.

That money has been put to cardboard pursuits, including a small order from a couple of sellers on Sportlots this week.

This small 4 card purchase is from seller 1stGOAL1, who helped me knock down my want list for 2013-14 OPC hockey.

Interesting little side bit, my wife comes in and asks me while I'm writing this post what I received today.  I show her the 4 cards and her first comment is "I've never heard of any of them".  The next couple of minutes we have a brief discussion how card companies can produce a card of a player as long as he's played at least one game in the NHL, and how David Ayres (EBUG for the Hurricanes this year) will likely have a popular RC in next year's OPC set.

I decided after that discussion to look up how many games each of these 4 played in the league.

Damien Brunner 132 games
Nicklas Jensen 31 games
Victor Bartley 121 games
Sean Collins 31 games

More than I thought, especially for Brunner and Bartley, but still nothing really earth shattering career wise.  All 4 have been out of the NHL for better than 4 years.

This set is down to 24 cards on the want list, with a few more on their way from another Sportlots seller.

It appears that the virus has changed my card collecting focus, probably for the good as I can honestly say I've never been this focused on putting sets to bed in all the time that I've been a blogger.

Enjoy the hobby and stay safe!!

Robert

With 2 small orders, #1 is done

Last Sunday, I tabled a post with 9 sets that I'm hoping to finish by the end of 2019.   It actually has helped me a little bit, as I now will try and focus on working these more intently than everything else.  Save for the $20 I spent at the card show, which was spent on set building (yay!), the 2 orders I placed online last week knocked off the 1st set on that want list.

The 1995-96 Collectors Choice Players Club parallel set is now in the books.

Here's the 2 small orders I made to finish this off.

First, a 2 card ebay purchase...

I could only imagine the guy at Burbank Sportscards (one of my fave ebay sellers btw), when he saw this order.   "What the hell is this guy high on?"  They only had the one players club card of Bruins legend Ray Bourque, and I didn't want to just buy one card, so I looked around and found Terry Francona's dad from the '69 T set for just over a buck, so I added him in.

Just 2 to go.  So, the same day I hit Sportlots and found a seller that had both the remaining cards I needed.  18 cents apiece, a steal for these cards (in my opinion). 

Now the funny part of the story is my negativity when it comes to online ordering sometimes.  I placed both of the orders the same day.  I received the Burbank order in 3 days (CA to FL, wow!).  I waited, and I waited for the 2nd order to come.  10 more days to be exact.  

I had started thinking that the required time was going to elapse and nothing was going to come, because I was sure that the seller wasn't going to bother sending a 2 card order.  

Stupid me, hadn't checked close enough on the shipping rates, and if I had, I would have realized that the cards were coming from Canada.  2 week minimum. 

Needless to say they are in hand.  A big thanks to seller ID CentrIce for finishing my set(Cheers Jim!).

8 more sets on the list, just over 5 months to go.  Let's see what happens....

Thanks for reading!

Robert

and then there were three

The past 2 months have been quite interesting for me as my wife and I had something happen that we were hoping wouldn't happen for another year.

She lost her job.  Totally out of the blue, they called her into HR at the beginning of April and gave her the heave ho. 

We were truly hoping to get her through that job until 2020, which would have seen us have a few bills/loans paid off, and allowed her to go off into retirement without a lot of stress.

Well, life as many of you know will throw you many curveballs.  The big thing for me in this?  I've really had to cut way back on my card spending.   I hadn't bought anything on Sportlots for a couple of months until this past weekend, and even then I only spent just over $5 including shipping on 9 cards.

I'd looked for these 95-96 Collectors Choice Players Club parallels on COMC for a while, but the prices were a little ridiculous.  Pricing 7 of the 9 cards out just now would have cost me almost $8 (no copies of the Friesen and Zhamnov on the site currently), and that's before shipping.  So getting these for less than $6 was a great deal for me.

I'm finally down to just a trio of cards to finish this set, after a quarter of a century.  I'll probably end up going back to Sportlots to finish this off, since I just checked COMC and only two of the 3 cards are available.  I've found a lot of good deals over the past few years on COMC, but for this set, it's been a real strikeout to say the least.

It will be great to finish this set off finally after all these years.  It never should have taken this long to begin with....

Thanks for reading!

Robert

Random thoughts for a bunch of 79's

I've been fortunate over the past several weeks to be able to remove big parts of my want lists.  Part of the recent Sportlots order that helped me finish the 83-84 OPC set that I showed off last night is this group of 30 1979 Topps cards.

Some great looking cards here, including Fred Norman who sort of looks like he didn't want his picture taken.   Eric Rasmussen looks like he's trying to hide something in his glove.

I count 7 players in pinstripes.  I don't know if I ever remember seeing J.R. Richard, or any other Houston Astro in the dark blue warmup jacket with the rainbow stripes.

It also seems to me that I've obtained every Rick Burleson card for a six year run (78-84) recently.  Aside of Larry Hisle (maybe), I don't see one extra ounce of fat on any of the midsections of these players.  Why are the White Sox wearing all black uniforms?

Kurt Bevacqua doesn't appear to be chewing gum at all.  John Lowenstein will always be an Oriole to me.

It's always great looking at these older cards, as it brings so many memories and random thoughts to mind.  My 79 Topps build is just over 2/3 done now, hopefully I can put another dent into it this weekend at the card show.   We shall see...

thanks for reading!

Robert

I hear you Fuji, I hear you

This past Thursday one of my favorite bloggers, Mark (aka Fuji) from the Chronicles of Fuji blog wrote about the bane of his blogging existence.  Turns out the bane of scanning cards was not unique to Fuji if you read the comments on that post.

Scanning is a necessary evil in the card blogging world.  For some bloggers, it paints a picture of what's to come in the post, much like brushstrokes on an artist's canvas.

For me, especially over the past 18 months, scanning is just showing off.  But it's still a necessary evil.  Especially for this kind of post, which I don't get to do very often.  

Showing off complete sets is something that I pride myself on doing.  But I only will show those that end up in binders; not the more recent sets that end up in 300-800 count boxes depending on their size.

Complete set #3 in 2019 is a set that I've wanted to finish for quite a while now, but again, cheapness kind of stood in the way.  Similar to a lot of sets I've put together, I'll find that one card that I remain stubborn about how much I'll pay for it (see my Saturday's post about Lee Tunnell). 

The 83-84 OPC hockey set I just completed on the weekend had it's own stubborn card.

Tony Esposito, card #99.

The Ron Francis and Wayne Gretzky cards were bought on COMC for just under $5 combined.  Again, I got stubborn, and refused to pay $4 for the Esposito card, which I knew wasn't worth near that much.

So, I hunted around on Sportlots, and wound up buying it from one of my favorite sellers for $1.50.  This is the same seller that offers free shipping if you buy 100+ cards, so I turned it into a big order and knocked a bunch of cards off of various want lists, including '79 Topps which you'll see tomorrow on the blog.

Without further adieu, I present all 396 cards of the '83-84 OPC set. 

I believe the 83-84 OPC set was the only one to start the set by using the 2 teams that appeared in the previous year's Stanley Cup final, and then moving on to the remainder of the teams in alphabetical order.  Each team's players were also listed in alphabetical order by last name, which made it easy for me to determine who I was missing.

As you'll see as we go along, a lot of players were airbrushed into new uniforms as they were traded or signed as a free agent, but OPC still didn't move them out of the place they were originally slated to be in the set.

One of the poorest attempts ever at airbrushing was the artist trying to do Ron Duguay's card.  Yikes.

I also love that each team was started off with the scoring leaders card, and then a highlight card right after that.  That also made things a bit easier when it came to figuring out what was missing from time to time.

6 Gretzky cards of the Award Winner/Record Breaker variety can put a bit of a dent into the wallet unless you shop around.  My final Gretzky card cost me just $1 which is a steal in my book.

One of most famous masks for not having any kind of paint job was Pelle Lindbergh.  It's too bad he died so young, it would have been interesting to see if he ever changed the mask or added any paint to it as time went on.

I've mentioned this on the blog a few times before, but if you want a chuckle, have a listen to Randy Moller's goal calls as the radio man for the Florida Panthers.  Or, if you'd rather see how tough Randy was as a player, watch him go after Chris Nilan in the Good Friday massacre in the playoffs against Montreal.   Forehead covered in blood?  He didn't care, he wanted Nilan and it was one of the most entertaining parts of that 15 minute video.

I used to own the gold version of the Canucks "V" jersey.  I loved it then, and I'd love to have another one to wear now.  I'd get the black version this time around. 
There aren't too many goalies as well who had better designs on their mask than John Garrett did.  Do a Google search of John Garrett masks for further proof.

The Scott Stevens RC was one of the last 10 cards I needed to finish the set, and thanks to Dave who runs the Wax Stain Rookie blog, I was able to get it at a good price.

There you have it, 44 pages worth of scans for those who enjoy looking at a boatload of cards in one sitting.   Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did writing about it.

Thanks for reading!!

Robert