What eBay Hath Wrought 35: An R.A. Dickey Autograph and Some Surprise Filler

I have a Base Crowd-Pleaser Autograph of R.A. Dickey sitting in my redemption account at Topps, but I saw this parallel # 17 / 50 on eBay. I threw in a bit of a low-ball offer on it and it fell to me for around $7 shipped. It's a pretty good-looking card, with the blue ink, blue border, and blue on the uniform all blending together. 

A lot of sellers pad single cards with handfuls of other cards, usually with something like Bowman commons of prospects that didn't pan out or '88 Donruss or something. This seller included a bunch of better filler, like vintage filler. None of it is in very good shape, but it is pretty fun to look at.

For the purposes of this discussion, vintage is defined as cards that were printed before I was born, so the cutoff is right at the end of 1981. Our lone Fleer representative, Jorge Orta, hails from 1981 Fleer. It is also probably the most boring card in this group. Nothing really stands out about Rick Monday's 1979 Topps card, but I like it. Maybe the pink used in the nameplate draws me in. Bump Wills gets his nickname on the front of his 1980 Topps card, while Picciolo's green and yellow uniform really stands out and also color-coordinates with the team and position streamers on his card and Von Joshua is rocking the double-brim look. Jim Umbarger is kind of creeping me out with his bedroom eyes. I can imagine that opposing batters found themselves striking out more than once after being confused by the mixed signals he was sending out from the mound.

In this batch we get a few more 1980 Topps, a couple of 1981 Topps, and a lone representative from 1975 Topps. The cards on the bottom aren't really that poorly cut, I just placed them too low on the scanner. It's good to see some representation of the Astros and their super-colorful uniforms. There is a Nolan Ryan rainbow Astros jersey on eBay that I've been watching for a few months now, but I have never followed through on purchasing it. I actually put in an offer on it back in probably Septemebr or October, but the guy rejected the offer. He then e-mailed me a few days later to say that if I put the same offer in again he would sell it to me at that price, but I had moved on by then. Extraneous clothing purchases are now out of my budget for the foreseeable future, but if it's still around next year around Christmastime I will be all-in on it. I can't even pick a favorite card out of this batch. McRae and Hall get points for fitting into the subset of cards with players smiling on them, Dixon has a nice action shot and a colorful uniform, Mike Squires looks like a mechanic, Jerry Koosman has another nice action photo, and LaCorte is very confused about having his picture taken. I was going to say that maybe they didn't have cameras where he came from, but he's from San Jose, California and not some backwater country town. His Wikipedia entry notes that after walking a batter with the bases loaded in a May 1982 game against the Expos he was so angry with himself that he burned his uniform.