I haven't posted on APTBNL since my post in July about Allen & Ginter. I'm surprised Matt hadn't revoked my posting privileges due to gross inactivity. Anyway, it turns out that '09 A Piece of History had never been written about on the site, so I wrote about it.
Check it out here. I'll be back on RGB Cards tomorrow with a post on Fernandomania (seriously!)
I picked up this box mostly out of obligation and the need to buy something at my "local" card shop (which is about to get even less local next year). After months (not an exaggeration) of waiting for him to get some baseball boxes, he finally got some in last week. The good news - he got the Updates and Highlights. The bad news - I already ordered it online and couldn't justify buying another box.
So that led me to this, almost by default as it was the cheapest box he had available. But four packs in, I'm glad I got it. It's another fun little set and chock full of bonuses. I've already got two Griffey cards from the 20th anniversary set and a new card for the White Sox Project. I also got an autograph card, with the Piece of Hollywood card and possibly a relic card still to come.
I'll post a wrap-up piece later this week, when all the packs have been busted. And I hope that in a couple of months, when I get back to my "L"CS, there will be at least one more box available. I'm definitely down for another go.
I planned to start this post by congratulating King Felix on his well-deserved Cy Young award, then showing off the cards of his that I bought on my trip to Al's Card Shop today. Small problem - they didn't have any Felix cards. Well, that's not strictly true; there was one, but I already owned it.
So what to write about? I was stumped. I bought some cards, to be sure. A few Griffeys, Ichiros, Lincecums and even a Matt Wieters. A couple of team bags full of commons from the 2009 American Heritage set that I haven't decided will be a new Good Little Set for me to collect or not (it probably will, because I've reached The Tipping Point - expect a post on that soon). And some other stuff.
The big news is that Len finally got some new baseball stock, including 2010 Topps Update. Of course, I had just ordered a box of that earlier this week. But hey, this is a rare opportunity to pick up a couple of packs of the most current release, just like everyone else in the blogosphere does. So I got two packs from a freshly opened hobby box. Len even gave me the rookie chrome refractor, which was nice. Turned out to be Sam Demel, which wasn't great, but I took it as a sign that I had arrived as a Valued Customer.
As far as the two backs, I can't complain. No ZOMGSTEPHENSTRASBURG!!! cards, but from what others have written, I'm not too worried, my turn will come, probably in the jumbo box that's currently sitting in Singapore. I did get a Legendary Lineage, a Card Your Mom Threw Out and a Turkey Red card - which happens to be the only insert sets I care about. And I got an MCG redemption card.
Because I'm up in Perth, I decided to redeem the code straight away because I don't trust myself not to lose it. Looking at the "recently unlocked cards" I wasn't holding up much hope - there was even a 2010 Strasburg amongst the last ten. I typed in RwsxKDF4L (what do I care - it's already redeemed), hit click, and up popped:
Okay, remember what I said about patience in my last post? Well, forget it. I am now the proud owner of a sealed 1989 Upper Deck factory set.
A few months ago, Thorzul had a series of posts about this great haul of cards he bought online for a stupid-low price. The gist of it was that if you find a seller on eBay who doesn't know what they have, then you can make it work for you. In this case, I dutifully typed in "1989 Upper Deck set" just like many times before, once again to find the usual assortment of crumb-bums ranging in price from $50 up to $150. They have THE GRIFFEY CARD in the set, you know.
Well, practicing the patience that I preach, I opted not to go for any of these deals, tantalising though they may be. Instead, I decided to look at the listings for "1989 Upper Deck box". I know that sets contain one of all the cards in a particular issue, while boxes are just full of unopened packs of cards with no guarantee of the contents therein. But just because I knew the difference, and you know the difference, doesn't mean everybody knows the difference.
Of course, there were a bunch of listings for hobby boxes, most sealed, some unsealed, all at inflated prices. But there was a listing buried pretty much smack in the middle, that expired in two days. It was for a sealed factory set. The description said a factory set. The pictures seemed to confirm it was a factory set. Yet the seller had listed the product under the "box" category. What's more, the starting bid was $25 and there were no bidders.
This was exactly what I was hoping for! The speculators and horders interested in purchasing boxes because they might get multiple Griffeys had no interest in a factory set with merely one Griffey. And the people chasing sets wouldn't think to look in the "box" category, so nobody was bidding on it. I saved the listing in my watch list. Now all I needed was for two simple things to happen:
a) Nobody else found the listing, or put a bid on it
b) I remembered to bid on it myself (don't laugh, it's happened before)
I should mention that all this happened the day before I wrote my last post, so I knew that getting this set was a distinct possibility at the time I wrote this post. Sorry for the slight deception. But at the same time, if the listing had be found by other people, and the bidding rocketed, I would have just bowed out and wait for the next opportunity. Thankfully, that never happened. Both (a) and (b) occurred, and I won the auction at the minimum bid. Now I just need to get the thing over to Australia.
Looks like I'm going to need some more patience.
Now that the season is over, I find myself looking for (and thinking about acquiring) the sets of my youth. I noticed this happen last year, too, when I bought a bunch of old wax from the late 80s to replace or supplant some of the cards I collected as a kid. Now, I'm looking at two sets that are taught of as the "Cadillacs" of junk wax (mostly due to the players contained) - 1985 Topps (the first cards that I actively purchased with my own money and traded with friends) and 1989 Upper Deck
'89 Upper Deck of course has THE GRIFFEY CARD and is the set that I always considered out of my reach as a child because I was too damn cheap to spend a buck on a pack of cards. I mean, come on - that same dollar could buy me two packs of Topps cards. I was always think of quantity over quality back then.
Of course, now that I'm older, I can easily afford to spend some of the prices I see for these sets. But I'm not pulling the trigger for some reason. Maybe it's because I've just placed an order for modern cards (that reminds me, I need to check the tracking on that package) and I don't want to annoy the missus when the bank statement comes. But honestly, I think I'm still just too cheap. The prices of '89 Upper Deck have risen with inflation, almost entirely on the strength of Ken Griffey's sterling reputation as a ballplayer. Who would have thought of Junior as an inflationary safeguard? But at the same time, even though I can pay these prices, I don't want to. I still think a lot of people on eBay have no idea how little their cards are actually worth and I don't want to play into their fallacy.
So I'll just continue to wait for that bargain to show up. After all, I was looking at '85 Topps and '89 Upper Deck last year, too. It's been a year and I have neither. I ended up getting my second and third favorite sets from the era, adding a 1986 Topps set and replacing the 1987 Topps set that I scarred with rubber band marks because I just didn't know any better when I was 11.
In the meantime, you can find me on eBay. I'll be patiently waiting.
Hello everybody, I'm back. I apologise for the long absence, but things happened that either kept me away from the computer or my collection, and when I was with either one, I didn't feel the inspiration to write. In fact, I make no promises with how good this post will be, since I'm a fair bit rusty.
However, RGB Cards hasn't been far from my mind, and I've been kicking around a lot of ideas for recurring segments, interesting posts, and the like. And I've been spending a lot of time organising my collection, just in time to move yet again (something I'll get to later, probably in another post).
When I last wrote, I created a borderline rude post about the superiority of Tim Lincecum over Roy Halladay. Well, I got the last laugh because Timmy now has two World Series wins to go with his two Cy Young Awards, and he got the best of Doc in the NLCS. Lincecum is the best pitcher in the National League, regardless of who wins the Cy later on this week. And it's his bobblehead that will be holding a tiny World Series trophy next year, not Halladay's.
Speaking of the World Series, an interesting fact that I discovered when organising my collection. Bruce Bochy's card in the 1985 Topps set is #324. A mere five cards away, at #329? Ron Washington. Twenty-five years later, and they face each other in the World Series. Too bad the managerial careers of John Denny, Kevin Bass, Brook Jacoby and Bob Shirley (325, 326, 327 and 328, respectively) never got off the ground.
Something else that happened while I was "gone"...I opened my second box of 2009 Obak and completed the base set. That got me to thinking - Obak is a "good little set": 100 base cards (not counting short-prints), interesting subjects, historically based, and fits easily in a binder with a couple of other sets. From that realisation, I came up with the idea of the Good Little Set, or GLS. I bought a binder at K-Mart, and started to fill it with the Obak and two other GLSes that I started on. One is 2008 Upper Deck Heroes. While it's far from little when you think of all the parallels, it is just 200 cards for the base set, and those beige cards are in plentiful supply. I currently have 99 of them.
The other GLS in the binder is another 2008 Upper Deck product, Masterpieces. Beautiful to look at, this set is going to look great in my binder when I'm finished with it. The base set is 90 cards (just ten sheets!) but I'm going to have to try for all the short prints, too, because they're so beautiful, and many of them are players or teams I want to have anyway. I've got a box of Masterpieces heading my way in an order from Dave & Adam's. Can't wait to see how many cards I can tick off the list!
That's it for now, but I promise I won't wait five weeks until my next post. Even though things are about to get hectic around here (again)!
Dear Doc,
Just remember, until there's an announcement otherwise, I'm still the NL Cy Young Award winner.
Message received and responded to, bitch!
Sincerely yours,
The Freak
