At the Trade Deadline 30: A Huge Mail Day from Commishbob

About a month ago Commishbob from The Five Tool Collector posted about a card on his Need List that had proven difficult to track down. He is trying to collect a card for each player he has every had on his fantasy football team, and had learned about the existence of a card for a player he previously had overlooked. The card was hard enough to find that other bloggers had posted about their search for it.

I took it as a challenge to my internetting skills to find this card if it was available. I am pretty good with the Google, and at work I've built a reputation as the go-to guy for finding information and answers to questions because of that skill. I checked the usual places first, like COMC, eBay, and Sportlots, but found nothing. I checked Amazon to no avail. Then I started digging into some of the deeper search engine results, looking at websites for individual card stores, online flea markets, and aggregate marketplace sites.

There were a couple of false leads and out-of-stock notices, but I eventually came up with one hit, a listing for $0.50 plus shipping on a marketplace site called eCRATER. I considered just sending him a note with a link to the page, but worried that because this appeared to be the only copy for sale on the entire internet someone else might come in and buy it out from under him. I created an account, added it to my cart, and checked out. The next day I got a shipping notification and after a little while it arrived in a top loader sealed with a giant piece of packing tape, which thankfully hadn't damaged the card inside. Then I packaged it up and sent it off to Commishbob for his collection.

A few days ago I got a package from him, and what a package it was! Commishbob went way above and beyond on this one. I was just happy that I was able to help him out, and I was able to pass on the card-finding karma as someone had recently helped me find one of my own grail cards. Here are the cards he sent:

First up are a few Mother's Cookies cards from 1984 and 1996. I've always had an affinity for the Mother's Cookies sets as one of my great-uncles gave me a Mariners team set when I was young. They weren't like any other card set I'd seen, and I thought they were pretty special. Nolan Ryan looks like he's done having his picture taken, and Biggio is probably questioning the decision to shove a bat knob into his armpit.

And here are the backs, just because I kind of like them. Maybe it's all the purple and red that I enjoy. Maybe I just like to think about cookies.

He also hit on my Hakeem Olajuwon PC and added a nice Ken Griffey Jr. MTV Rock n' Jock Softball Challenge oddball, too. Look at that zany border! I like the Nick van Exel and Shaquille O'Neal cameos in the background of that Dream card, and the Griffey is basically a distillation of the early 90's in cardboard form.

The most significant stat on the back of Olajuwon's card for me is that he moved into 8th place on the career steals list. That's pretty solid thievery for a big man. And only 20,000 copies of that Griffey were made, so I hope you got your copy before they ran out.

Here's another food issue from Donruss and Coca-Cola featuring Nolan Ryan with a popped collar, again looking overjoyed to have his picture taken. I like the write-up on the back of the card which is pretty darn honest. It's like, "Nolan Ryan was the best pitcher in the NL this season, but his teammates' historically lousy run support cost him the Cy Young Award." Card write-ups on current sets are a lot more politically correct these days, and really go out of their way to gloss over stuff like that. You'd be hard-pressed to find a write-up this honest on a modern release.

And here's the big hit of the package. I haven't posted a lot of the cards I've nabbed so far from the Jon Singleton 2014 Topps High Tek rainbow, but I've picked up all of the pattern variations and serially-numbered issues # / 25 and higher. Commishbob took things a step further and located this Black & White Image parallel, numbered to a microscopic # 15 / 15. I was absolutely floored when I saw this in the middle of the stack of cards in the mailer. These are hard to find and I had pretty much resigned myself to stopping at the # / 25 mark until I got this package and found one other low-numbered card on eBay recently. I can't possibly thank Commishbob enough for this mailer full of awesomeness that went way above what I sent to him.