A few months back, I received a free hobby box of Bowman. This was back when it had just been released, and none of the Stephen Strasburg 1/1 cards had yet to be discovered. The only trouble with this prize was that it was sent to my parents' house, not mine. In the end, however, this turned out to be a good thing, as you'll see.

Of course, we know what happened next. The Superfractor was found fairly quickly and the red parallel followed soon after. But I held on to the hope that the 1/1 red autograph was waiting for me somewhere in that box sitting at my parents house. Like Willy Wonka's last Golden Ticket, the red auto card caused hordes to swarm any and all Bowman products.

Until mid-June, when the card was pulled. Oh well.

Somewhere between when I got the box and when that last card was found, I realised that I didn't really like the Bowman set. Maybe it was my thoroughly uninspiring 2009 Bowman box that caused it. But the truth is, I didn't want the box once I found it there was not chance at the Golden Ticket.

For some reason, the price of Bowman boxes remained pretty crazy, even after all the 1/1 cards had been found. It wasn't as inflated as before, but still pretty high. So I decided to sell my box. Since I got it for free, my profit margin was, well, infinite.

By mid-July, a month after the last Golden Ticket was found, I managed to find someone on eBay who took the box off of my hands for nearly 160 bucks. But what to do with the money?

I thought about getting a box of Ginter, or maybe some Obak, or both. But instead, I decided to use the money to buy some singles. Cards that I need for collections and sets, or just plain cards I want to own. This was a chance to put a dent in the Griffey Project, and get some cards for my other PCs as well.

Over the coming weeks, or months, however long it takes for my funds to run out, I'll be posting the cards I buy as they arrive in the mail. I'm calling the $160 my "Strasburg Money" because, let's face it, if it weren't for the hype surrounding Stephen the Great, I never would have gotten that much for that Bowman box. So thanks, Stephen - you've helped me grow my collection.

I'm writing all this because the first card showed up at my house today. It's a 2009 Upper Deck Spectrum Swatches card of Ken Griffey with a nice pinstripe. Pay no attention to the jersey on the front - the logo on the back means it's part of the Griffey project:

There's a few more cards somewhere between America and my mailbox, so look for more Strasburg Money posts soon.

Well, I started opening my box of Tristar Obak yesterday. No, not the 2010 version, but the 2009 box. We're a bit behind here in Australia.

I like the release, I like all the "hits" (even if some of them are stretching the definition of hit), and I like the first that the set is fairly small (around 120 cards). I'm trying to decide if I should get a couple more boxes when I order my Ginter box. I guess it all depends on how many cards I still need when I finish this box off.

By the way, I'm waiting until the price of Ginter drops to the point where buying a box and having it shipped here is cheaper than it would have been to by a box when I was in the States in July. It's almost at that point, so I should be ordering it soon. We're getting our taxes done in a couple of weeks (everything is upside down here in Australia, even the tax year) and I hope to go on a buying spree with our big-ass refund. My wife keeps talking about buying stuff like grass for the backyard with the money. Where are her priorities?

I feel as though I should post at least one card. Digging through the archives, I found this Jay Bruce card, in honor of his 4-for-5 performance in the Reds' 11-7 win over the Diamondbacks yesterday. That's a three-game lead now, in case you're scoring at home.

I spent the past two days up in Perth at a conference (yes, teachers can go on business trips, too) and still managed to find the time to squeeze in a trip to Al's Card Shop. I was glad, when I walked in the door, to see Dave behind the counter. Dave is the brother-in-law of the store's owner, and not only is he a friendly guy, but he also always gives me a better deal on the cards I buy.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much in terms of boxes available. The promised shipments have been delayed, and I could probably get a better deal buying and shipping them over myself. So I decided to go through the binders and see what I could find for my PCs. Turns out, there was quite a bit:

I found two base cards that I needed for the 2009 Topps base set; #377 (Trevor Crowe) and #353 (Derek Jeter). But that wasn't the only #353 I found in the binder...

As soon as I saw this short-print of Cal Ripken, it went into the stack. This is now my second 2009 Topps short print, and infinitely more exciting than the first, a "CC Sabathia as a Yankee" card. Couldn't you have waited for Updates & Highlights to have made that one, Topps?

I also got the Lincecum and King Felix base cards from the 2009 Upper Deck A Piece of History set. I had the Reds in the group break that Thorzul did a few months back, and was able to get a Ken Griffey relic card for my troubles. But these two cards represent my first APOH base cards for my PCs.


I like the look of this set. Once again, it reminds me of how Upper Deck could do some really good stuff if they wanted to, and I for one miss their involvement in baseball. But plenty of words have been written on the subject, so let's move on. At least, we could if the next card wasn't another 2009 Upper Deck product...


...in this case, SP Authentic. This is a "Faces of the Game" card of King Felix showing what is suspiciously like a zoomed-in version of the same picture they used in the Piece of History set. This card is numbered 35 of 59. Why 59? Did they forget that it was Topps celebrating 59 years of collecting?

Speaking of which, I can't wait to see what crazy stuff Topps comes up with for their 60th anniversary. Maybe a Stephen Strasburg Cards Your Mom Threw Out contest. Oh, wait.

I got some Ichiro cards, too. Although, I think I'm pushing the limits of what I can remember, because I picked up a couple of cards I already have. Guess they'll go in the Mariners binder, now. I also got the Ichiro and Griffey '09 SP Authentic base cards. I knew I had Lincecum and Felix already, but I wasn't sure about the other two. Turns out I did have Junior, but not Ichiro, so I'm glad I got them.


The other card there is the red parallel of 09 Spectrum, to help me with my Ichiro rainbow. I also recently acquired two more cards for that, which takes me to four. The Ichiro rainbow is the furthest along of the four. This card is numbered 126/250.

The final Ichiro card I purchased was one of three cards from the Upper Deck 20th Anniversary set. I basically bought all the cards in the binder from this set that featured one of my four players. Turns out, there were three of them, an Ichiro and two Griffeys:


The Ichiro commemorates the magical 2001 season, when the Mariners won 116 games, hosted the All-Star game, and some rookie from Japan won the Rookie of the Year and the MVP award. When I think of the Mariners of my youth, it still amazes me that they're the franchise that holds the single-season wins record. But I guess I shouldn't be that surprised because the previous record holder was the Cleveland Indians!

The two Junior cards are 533, telling us that Griffey wasted no time showing his "powerful form" by hitting 22 homers in each of his first two seasons. How quaint! As we can see from the next card, he picked things up a few years later, hitting 45 home runs in his fourth season (1993). Save the PED talk - Junior is beyond reproach, and this was before the steroid era. Heck, Barry Bonds had just joined the Giants in '93, and his head was still normal-sized.


A couple more Griffey cards - first, the 2007 SP Authentic base (which I didn't have) and a card commemorating his All-Star appearance at Safeco in 2001. Only one problem - he didn't make the NL All-Star team in 2001. It's safe to say that Junior also didn't "take a run at the home run crown" as the text on the back predicted. Ah, the pitfalls of insert sets printed before the season begins. Nice one, Upper Deck.


Finally, a self-indulgent purchase. This is a sketch card that appeared in the 2000 Upper Deck MVP set. It's another Griffey, and it was drawn by a 14-year-old named Brendon Murphy. While the back of the card said young Brendon was a Yankees fan, he at least had the good taste to admire Junior "because of his excellence on the field." But the reason I bought this card is because Brendon is from Four Oaks, N.C., about an hour away from where I grew up. I never would have thought of Four Oaks as "nearby" (it's in the country whereas I grew up smack dab in the middle of suburbia), but when you're half a world away, any place close feels like home.

One of the things I was most looking forward to on my trip back home was being able to go to a Target and buy baseball cards. Our Targets here in Australia don't sell baseball cards, obviously. Heck, they don't even sell cricket cards, Aussie Rules Football cards, rugby cards, or even Twilight cards. They are, to paraphrase Monty Python, "bereft of cards."

So not only was I looking forward to seeing displays overflowing with cards, but I was also excited about searching through these mythical "bargain bins" where old packs go to be bought, or at least just sit around for a while until they get put on a garbage skow and dumped in New York Harbor. Oh wait, that only happens to 1952 Topps cards...

I've been jealous when I read stories about people who grab a couple of packs from the bargain bin and find a relic or autograph that some douchebag pack searcher somehow missed when he was molesting all the cards the year before. Not only do these bloggers get pick up packs of cards on the cheap, but they're pulling patch cards for pennies on the dollar. It seems to happen all the time. Then again, people only post to their blog when it does happen to them, as "Went to Target. Got ten packs of 2007 Upper Deck Series 2 for 89 cents each. Didn't get anything other than base cards I already have." doesn't really make for an exciting blog post.

The first Target I went to in Raleigh didn't even have a bargain bin. I bought two pack of National Chicle (the second-most regretted purchase on my trip, and it confirmed for me I have absolutely no interest in Chicle) and felt cheated. Thankfully, when I went to another Target the next day, they did have a bargain bin. I had to wade through all the Toy Story 2 and 2009 Mayo packs, but I found some packs of 2007 Upper Deck Series 2. I grabbed a couple, opened them up, and wouldn't you know it...

A couple of nice things about this card:

• It's nice to see that the low-life scum pack searchers don't find everything in retail packs
• A purple swatch - you don't see that every day. And it looks pretty damn nice
• I've always kinda liked Todd Helton

Regardless, this card is available for trade, so if you're interested, or you know someone who is, drop me a line and maybe we can work something out. By the way, the corners on the card are just fine - it's my scanner that's wrecked.

Okay, technically, it's my second, but it was much better than my first. I staked my claim to the pack over on A Pack to Be Named Later nearly a month ago, and I finally was able to scan in the cards. So the post is now up over there.

2010 Allen & Ginter Hobby Pack

I don't know if it was the Collective Troll who coined the term "blogger kindness" in reference to this community, but he popularised it and it is certainly true. Here are two tales from my experiences that I wanted to share with you, and now that I have found the box with my scanner, and hooked it up to my computer, I can do just that.

A couple of months ago, I put out the call for help. You see, I had this idea to take the plain single-color binders I bought for my team collections and put logo stickers all over them to decorate their plainness. I put out a call on my blog for anyone who had some stickers they could spare (with the full knowledge that they would be peeled and stuck) to send them to me. Captain Canuck from the Waxaholic blog responded with a "I'll see what I can find" message - and when I got to my parents' house, I found that the good captain had sent a team bag filled to bursting with Reds, Mariners, Orioles, White Sox and Athletics stickers.

I love having both the old-school and the current White Sox logo in that package! There were also some Upper Deck hologram stickers in the bag, but I didn't scan those because I wasn't sure how well they'd show up. The Ken Griffey is actually a sticker - one of the Fleer Star player stickers from 1981. I've already started to put them on my binders, and they look much better! So thank you, Captain Canuck, for your generosity. I'll even forgive the rude things you said about Tim Lincecum in your last post! ;)

I knew those stickers were waiting for me, but I didn't know quite how many there would be. But I didn't expect the e-mail I would get the day after I got back in the States, from Larry (Mariner1) at Emerald City Diamond Gems. Here's the important part:

I have an extra copy of a 12 page commemorative section from the Seattle Times Sunday paper from a couple weeks ago. It is all Griffey. I know how big of a Griffey fan you are, and if you weren't here in Seattle, you probably wouldn't know about it. I would like to send you a copy as a Mariners fan to a Griffey fan.

What a nice gesture! I'm happy to report that I got the paper before I left, and it made it back safely to Australia. I need to figure out a permanent home for it, but right now it's tucked safely in my Griffey PC folder. Here is the scan of the front (or at least as much of the front as my scanner will allow)


Again, it's another super-nice, out-of-the-blue offer from a fellow blogger, and typical of the type of people in the baseball card blogosphere. Thanks to everyone who I have dealt with, am currently dealing with, or will do so in the future. The Troll keeps talking about how you all are so nice, and he's absolutely right. The spirit of camaraderie and togetherness, what we in Australia call "mateship," is what keeps me involved, I hope, for many years to come.

Life is slowly but surely getting back to normal here. We moved the bookshelves into the office, which means I have a more permanent (and better) place for my cards than the top of the computer desk. Still no scanner, though, so I have to write about some of my recent online purchases.

Such as this one, for the Ken Griffey White Sox Project. Looks like a normal 2009 StarQuest card. Possibly common silver, although it's hard to tell from the scan. In fact, that's what it was listed as on the Check Out My Cards website, with a price of 99 cents. Then, I decided to look at the back of the card, and here's what I found:

According to the back, it's not a Silver Common at all, but a Blue Uncommon. I didn't hesistate, I just paid the 99 cents. No point in haggling over a few cents and having the guy realise what happened.

The way I figure it, one of three things is true:

1) COMC stuffed up, that's not the scan that goes with the card I bought, and I bought a Silver Common for 99 cents. I can live with that. No big deal.

2) The front of the card is silver (again, it's hard to tell by the scan, as both the silver and blues seem to look similar) and the back says it's blue. That, my friends is an error card. And worth more than 99 cents

3) It really is a Blue Uncommon, and I just got it for the price of a common card. Bargain.

Do I feel bad about taking advantage of the situation? Not at all. You can best believe that if I wasn't collecting Griffeys in general and '09 Griffeys in particular, I would have flipped that bad boy. If you're selling a card, it's your responsibility to make sure everything is correct in your listing. Whether it was mis-labelled, mis-priced, or both, that's none of my concern. For me, it's a bargain, plain and simple.