What eBay Hath Wrought 45: Final Card in 2013 Archives Gold

This was the last card I needed to complete my Gold parallel set of 2013 Topps Archives. It is numbered # 059 / 199. This set was a pain in the butt to complete. I don't know if the set was worth the cost it took to put it together, but it sure does look good in the binder pages. I wonder how many of the 199 potential complete sets have been put together? I saw a pretty big lot on eBay a while back, but I can't imagine the number of sets out there that have been put together is higher than 5 or 10. I guess Griffey is a pretty good card to finish the set out with.

At the Trade Deadline 17: A Touch of Gold from Play at the Plate

A padded mailer showed up in the mail the other day, from Play at the Plate. We had discussed trading a couple of times over the last couple of months, but from my recollection we had never quite reached an agreement. I have sent a package back now with a couple of the cards we had talked about, so I hope that will make things even.

Here's what I got:

A few stickers from 2012 (I had to look up the year). I am always amazed by people who can call up from memory any number of sets from multiple brands and decades.

Jeff Bagwell gets his own scan because he has the only horizontal card in the batch. I have a hat that looks very similar to the one he is wearing. That pretty much makes us best friends. I don't have any eye black, though. Maybe I should consider getting some for those days when the sunset coincides with my drive home.

Hunter Pence's card looks much better in the scan than it does in real life. It's like Topps took a picture of him from 400 miles away, then blew it up in an attempt to get the worst resolution possible on a trading card. Luckily Topps stuck with conventional photography for the rest of these cards, featuring a number of different Astros. Most of the dudes in this scan are of the prospect variety.

This scan is where the famous guys show up. There are some Bagwells, some Biggios, some Berkmans, and a Caminiti here. And some guy named Scott, who is obviously riding on their coattails. These are some pretty nice cards.

And here is the star of the lot, a Gold Ryne Sandberg numbered # 021 / 199, which is the next-to-last card needed for my set. It will be quite a relief for it to be finished.

Thanks for the trade!

What eBay Hath Wrought 40: So Very Close - Robin Yount and Manny Machado 2013 Topps Archives Gold

I picked up two of the last four cards I needed for the 2013 Topps Archives Gold parallel set. I thought that I had also purchased one of the final cards, Ken Griffey Jr., but the seller on Sportlots refunded my money a few days after I placed the order because he didn't have the card anymore. There was one on eBay last week, but I didn't want to pay the price the seller wanted for it. Now there are none on the market in the usual card collector haunts. I will keep searching.

First up is this Robin Yount numbered # 023 / 199. I guess that since 23 is Michael Jordan's jersey number, I could probably sell this at a premium as a L@@K eBay 1 / 1!!!!! Sick Gold REFRACTOR!!!

"What does Michael Jordan have to do with anything?" you might ask. He is the G.O.A.T. (Greatest of all Time) and being associated with him in any way automatically adds value to something. Isn't that how eBay 1 / 1 cards work?

And next I have Manny Machado, looking like he wants to get out of there. Maybe the other baseball players are all eating Push-Up Pops and drinking Capri Suns while he was stuck at the end of the picture line because he was a rookie. His card is numbered # 69

   

/ 199. 

So, as of this writing I sit at 198 / 200 cards in the Gold parallel set, with Griffey and Sandberg still to track down. I don't know if I will want to do that kind of project again for a while. Who am I kidding? I already have a similar project going. I am a few cards short of finishing the 2013 Topps Opening Day Blue parallel set. I did have a lot of cards left to go and I originally typed out a long rant about how expensive they were on COMC, especially when compared to the Gold Archives parallels. Some of the cards in the Opening Day Blue set, which are numbered out of # / 2013, run parallel in price to the equivalent Archives Gold cards, which are presumably ten times more rare. The prices were pretty good on most of them on Sportlots, especially with some manipulation of shipping costs. Assuming all of those cards come through, I will have 4 cards left in that set.

I need to avoid starting any more parallel sets in the immediate future. I guess we'll see how much I like the Gold cards in 2014 Archives. I'm not nearly crazy enough to chase the new Silver parallels from that set, which are numbered out of # / 99.

What eBay Hath Wrought 31: Shelby Miller and Dylan Bundy

It feels like forever since these arrived in the mail, so it has probably been a month at least. A couple of sellers put up a bunch of auctions for 2013 Topps Archives Gold parallels all at once, and for whatever reason the auctions featured most of the cards I still needed for my set, maybe 5 or 6 of them. I put in bids for all of them up to the going rate on sites like Sportlots and COMC. Several of the cards went above those prices, so I didn't win them. The Dylan Bundy card stayed pretty low, so I got it for about half the price you usually see on it.

Shelby Miller went right up to my limit, and I found myself kind of hoping someone would come in at the last minute and bump it over the top so that I could wait and look for a better deal. It didn't happen, so I wound up buying it for something like 95% of the going asking price for it. I am now down to 4 remaining cards on my want list. I kind of wish I could go back to the days when I had 15% of the set complete, and I could knock off huge chunks of the checklist for a couple of dollars per card.

What eBay Hath Wrought 29, Rainbow in the Dark 5: Addition to the R.A. Dickey Bowman Rainbow and Some Other eBay Stuff

Over the last couple of weeks I have added a few cards to my collection and instead of giving them individual posts of their own I thought I would just shotgun them all into this one post. The common thread among these cards is that they all came from eBay. First up is another addition to my R.A. Dickey 2013 Bowman rainbow. This is the Bowman Chrome Black Refractor, numbered # 05 / 15. I am running out of cards in this rainbow that are feasible for me to acquire, but I will be keeping an eye out for others just in case.

It is hard to nail down an 'expected' price for any given card, as it seems like the range can be quite large depending on how many copies of it have popped up recently, what new sets have come out, when the auction ends, and any number of other factors. I think I paid more for this than I did for the Topps Chrome Atomic Refractor that was numbered out of # / 10. Josh Reddick has two Atomic Refractors on eBay at the moment, but both of them are priced exorbitantly. One is over double what I paid for the Atomic Dickey, and one is about quadruple. I want the card, but not for that price.

Some Reddick cards that I was able to add to my Reddick Topps Super-Rainbow hail from the Topps Mini set. I wasn't able to pull any of his colored parallels from the boxes I opened, but I was able to get the Gold and Pink parallels from eBay, numbered out of # / 62 and # / 25, respectively. I usually don't type these posts up at home, so I don't know the actual numbers on these cards. That pink and green is pretty garish. I love it.

I also added a couple more of the 2013 Topps Archives Gold cards to my set. With a couple more that are pending shipping, I am just four away from having the whole set. I don't really know what to say about these cards anymore. I think Musial completed the 50-card subset in the 1990 Topps design. The other three designs still have at least one card that I'm missing.

Joey Votto is pretty happy on this card. The Archives set seems to have a lot of happy dudes in it, so that's pretty cool. I've still got to get Manny Machado, Ken Griffey Jr., Robin Yount, and Ryne Sandberg to complete my set. Someone commented on here a while back offering the Sandberg for trade, and I will need to get back to them on that. I have been buried under a mountain of schoolwork and life stuff lately, so I have not made the time to stay up on blog comments and e-mails like I should.

What eBay Hath Wrought 27: Homer and the Heavy Hitters

It's been a long time since these arrived, but I was able to get a few more of the cards I needed for the 2013 Topps Archives Gold parallel set. Homer Bailey was one of them; but he isn't one of the key big-money cards in the set. Mike Trout I got a pretty good deal on if I recall correctly, and I am pretty sure I also got Jeter and Rivera at well below the going rate for their cards.

I am now at a bit of a sticking point, with 8 cards left to finish the set. Manny Machado, Shelby Miller, and Dylan Bundy are all priced around the internet at ridiculous levels. Ryne Sandberg, Ken Griffey Jr., Joey Votto, Robin Yount, and Stan Musial are all out there too, but I just can't stomach the going rate for them, either. They aren't quite as bad, though. I could probably bag all five of them for the price of one Machado.

Check Out My Cards 1: First Order from COMC

I made an order with COMC after going back and forth on it for a couple of months. The flat-rate shipping is nice, but it seems like the commission and fee structure of the site inflates prices. There are still deals to be had, though, and there is plenty of selection. The first block of cards in my order were some of the cards I need to finish my 2013 Archives Gold parallel set. I am down to needing just 9 cards to complete the 200-card set, but the ones that are left can be pretty pricey on the secondary market.

Joe Morgan is one of my favorite card out of this bunch, probably because he looks happy in his picture. The cards came well-packed with penny sleeves, some toploaders (you have to pay 20 cents per toploader and you can select whether or not to use a toploader for each individual card), and neatly placed in team bags. 

I don't know if there was a glitch or if I ordered while half asleep, but a couple of cards I was certain I had ordered weren't on the final invoice and a couple of cards I am pretty sure I didn't order wound up on my order. One of the ones I am sure I didn't order because I already had a copy was Brian McCann. Boo!

Paul Molitor is another favorite from this batch. He was one of the first TTM autographs I got when I was a kid, signing his 1990 Topps card for me. I also like that Brewers cap he's wearing.

It's strange which cards from a set seem impossible to find. The only card I haven't seen up for sale anywhere so far is Ryan Zimmerman. Why would that be the one card that is impossible to find? There are other cards in the set that I haven't picked up because of the ludicrous asking prices, but Ryan Zimmerman seems to be hiding out.

I also picked up some inserts that I needed from the 2013 Archives set. I got a couple of Yankee All-Stars, a 4-in-1 sticker featuring famous catchers, and a 1972 Basketball of Reggie Jackson that is nice and colorful.

I also picked up a couple of White Sox Triumvirate cards that fit together and some of the final Mini Tall Boys I didn't have yet. I love the colored backgrounds on those things.

I've been working on a couple of rainbow projects, and these Josh Reddick cards are going toward that goal. I don't know that I will heavily pursue some of the rarer cards in the rainbows, like Superfractors, but anything I can get for a couple of dollars will definitely fit in. I've been making some good progress and the projects should be ready to post at some point in the relatively near future.

And finally I picked up a few more of the Opening Day parallels for that set. There are still plenty more to go in this set, but I picked up whatever was on my want list that was listed on COMC for under a dollar. There isn't much else to say about them. They are sparkly and blue, and they look pretty good in a binder.

In all I think I did all right with this order. The prices tend to be higher on COMC than on other sites, but if you shop around and have some patience you can get some decent deals. They do a good job of packaging their cards. I keep a spreadsheet of some of the key cards I need, and I go to the different sites (eBay, Sportlots, COMC, Just Commons) and compare prices every so often because things fluctuate so much that it can be useful to recognize when a card goes up on a site at a reduced price relative to other sites.

Just the Commons, Ma'am 1: First Order from Justcommons

I recently made my first trip to Just Commons, an e-tailer of baseball trading cards. The emphasis seems to be on providing the collector with a wide selection of base cards for filling out sets, but there are plenty of inserts available, too. The prices are very good for the most part, without the hassle of sorting through eBay listings and managing bids or the inflated commission surcharges and shipping costs of ordering through COMC or from multiple sellers through Sportlots. I got these seven cards for about half of the going rate on eBay for just the Cal Ripken Jr. card. Some prices on the site approach the higher prices of other sites, but there are a lot of steals to be had, with free shipping on orders over $10 and a 10% discount on orders over $50.

I actually ordered a few more cards than what I got. When I sent my order I had double-clicked a couple of the cards and ordered two copies of them, so I sent a message on the site to have them removed from my shipment. I got an e-mail back stating that they had been notified that I had ordered more stock than they had on-hand of those cards and that another card or two from my order were missing from their physical inventory. They issued a refund for the missing cards. There were also a couple of cards from my second order that wound up not being in their physical inventory, so that is something to look out for. Don't mark a card off of your checklists until they process and ship the cards.

When the cards arrived they were in a stack of penny sleeves wrapped in bubble wrap inside of a padded envelope. There weren't any toploaders or cardboard spacers in place to keep the cards safe. Eddie Mathew, Eddie Murray, and Ted Williams were on the front of the stack and all had touches of foil chipped off of their bottom right corners. Ripken, Skaggs, and Darvish were next in the stack and all arrived unscathed, but tail-end Charlie, Marco Scutaro had rather large patches of foil rubbed off on three out of his four corners. I will probably have to seek out a replacement for him in my binder, as the card is pretty ugly. So that was a little disappointing. I can understand not putting every card in a toploader, especially when many of the prices on base cards and common inserts are between $0.10 and $0.50, but I would expect some kind of cardboard or filler cards to stiffen the packaging and protect the order. When my next order comes in I will have something to compare this package against and see if I get more damaged cards.

In spite of having varying amounts of damage to 4/7 cards in my order and the online inventory not being extremely accurate, I did fill in some key hole in my Topps Archives Gold parallel set at very good prices. I can overlook the chipped foil on three of the cards, but that Scutaro card is ugly. In person it looks much worse than it does in the scan.

I Got it at Sportlots 2: Ozzie Smith

I got this Ozzie Smith 2013 Topps Archives Gold parallel in the mail the other day, which was a card ordered from Sportlots. It is numbered #96/199. The card brings me up to 164/200 cards in-hand and 182/200 counting cards that are on their way to me. I am up over 90% done with the set, but all of the easy cards are out of the way and I've got some pretty expensive and hard-to-find cards left to get. The main offenders are Manny Machado, Ryne Sandberg, Shelby Miller, Ken Griffey Jr., Giancarlo Stanton, and Tony Gwynn. I was able to get Mike Trout for a relatively good price and Cal Ripken Jr. for about 15% of the going rate, but those are other posts for another time.

I like Sportlots fairly well, but it suffers from having to pay a lot of different sellers for shipping costs whenever you want to order a number of cards. And there isn't a really easy or intuitive way to track who you are paying shipping to and what your fianl cost will be without adding stuff to your cart and looking at what each seller is charging. Many of the prices seem to beat out COMC, though, which seems to have the highest prices in general when compared to Justcommons, Sportlots, and eBay. It does help to shop around, as prices can vary widely between the sites, even from day to day.

I Got it at Sportlots 1: Freddie Got Fingered

So I finally visited Sportlots and made an order for a few of the 2013 Archives Gold cards they had listed for less than eBay and COMC did. I have a spreadsheet that I use to track prices on the remaining cards I need, so I can get a feel for what the different cards market at. I ordered several cards. A few of them got lumped in with a recent eBay post, a couple are still outstanding, and these three came in the mail the other day.

It's too bad that the Braves and Dodgers couldn't meet in the playoffs this year. I wonder how Freeman and Brian McCann would have reacted to Yasiel Puig's celebration of his big triple the other day? Maybe I am not OG enough, but I happen to like a little bit of celebration in my sports. I am not a fan of mocking or trash talk all that much, but a TD or sack celebration aimed at the crowd, arms raised or a little flip of the bat after a big hit, or a swipe across the neck after a dagger three or a nasty dunk are all things that I like to see in my sports entertainment. It's a game. Thanks to Tenets of Wilson I know that the Dodgers are not extremely likely to get into and win the World Series, but that's who I am pulling for this year since all of my favorite teams are long gone. Thanks to the internet I know that the Dodgers got blown out in Game 6 and will not be advancing. If Boston and St. Louis make the World Series I will die from a bad case of meh.

But enough of that. My first experience with Sportlots was pretty good, so I will probably return there whenever the price is right.

What eBay Hath Wrought 17: More Gold Parallels

I started this post quite a while ago, but it just sat in my Drafts folder forever, accumulating pictures of 2013 Topps Archives Gold parallels. They've arrived in ones, twos, threes, and more-than-threes. Sometimes I kind of feel like:

I am not even sure what to say as far as commentary on most of the individual pictures goes. I like the way the A's uniforms pop on cards.



It's pretty nice to cross Encarnacion and Butler off of my need list. I never did like those chinstrap beards, though, Edwin. Of course I own three pairs of Zubaz pants, so who am I to be critiquing fashion choices? I have read that Zubaz are coming back in some circles, though, so maybe I'm more fashion-forward than I thought. 

Not much to say about this one except that it fills a hole in the binder.

Here are a quartet of cards in the 1990 Topps design. I happen to like the set, but I seem to be in the minority on that point among bloggers.

Here are a few more cards. McCann was at the center of a disagreement between the Braves and Brewers this week after Carlos Gomez admired a home run longer than McCann felt was necessary. Watching the video, I think Gomez did stare a little too long because he was feeling vindicated after having been plunked a while ago by the pitcher, Paul Maholm. The way I saw it, McCann and Freddie Freeman yelled at him, so Gomez started talking back as he went around the bases, exchanging words with all of the Braves' infielders. As he came down the 3rd base line McCann blocked the path, got in his face, and started a shoving match that ended with the benches clearing, at least one elbow and maybe some punches thrown, and a number of ejections and a possible suspension at some point for Freddie Freeman, who was the guy with the errant elbow. The video appears to have been edited since the first time I watched it, as originally you could hear the initial stream of expletives that McCann yelled at Gomez as he started walking out of the batter's box. It was something like, "Fart and run, consarnit!"

I personally think that Gomez was a little bit wrong for gloating and taking off slowly, but McCann is more wrong for getting bitchy and yelling at Gomez to run and then blocking the basepath so he could get in Gomez' face and pitch a fit. If the Braves players didn't want Gomez to talk trash to them as he went around the bases, maybe they should have kept their mouths shut. I see a lot of commentary praising McCann and the Braves for enforcing the unwritten rules of baseball and standing up for the pitcher, but all I saw was a guy who couldn't control himself and a bunch of crybabies who felt sad that a guy homered on them in the 1st inning. I guess McCann went off on Jose Fernandez earlier this season for the same thing. What a douche-canoe. I used to have a minor positive opinion of the guy because of his production at the catcher slot in fantasy baseball, but not anymore.

I didn't grow up watching baseball, so there are probably nuances of conduct that I miss out on that explain why I feel one way and most of the sports columnists and commenters feel another.

This Derek Holland is probably my favorite card of the year. It's got that weird posed senior picture look to it, and that mustache and the creepy stare into the camera is just a bit off. It makes me laugh every time I see it. A guy with a mustache like that is either guilty of unspeakable acts or just someone with a good sense of humor. I hope Holland is the latter.

I'm running out of steam here. Look, pictures!

More pictures! Peavy has got the awkward pose down, but he doesn't have a mustache and he's looking away from the camera, so he doesn't get all the points that Holland got. We've got the bat on shoulder pose covered with this group, too.

I guess I wound up with more to say than I thought. I've stopped scanning all of the cards from this set that I get in, as there are just too many of them. But there will probably be plenty more shown on this blog. I'm only a little over halfway done.

At the Trade Deadline 3: Topps Archives from Cardboard Conundrum

A little while back Matt of Cardboard Conundrum posted some trade bait from 2013 Topps Archives, and there was quite a bit of stuff that I needed to fill holes in my set. In return, he asked that I surprise him with a card package. I hope that I sent him an adequate envelope for my part of the deal. His blog seems to feature some very nice cards, which overshadow the kind of stuff that I can offer at this point. My outgoing trade packages tend to be a kind of patchwork of whatever I can find by working through the other blogger's need list and player collections. Anyway, I am trying hard to be a good trader, and I hope I am sending out stuff that people actually want.

The cards from him arrived in my mailbox a couple of days ago, and my need list for this set got a lot smaller. First up is a Cliff Lee Triumvirate insert, which is one set that seems awfully hard to pull, almost tougher than the Gallery of Heroes or the 72 Basketball sets, which are also tough pulls.

My Gold parallel set is a very slow-going project, and this Prince Fielder card is much appreciated. I've got a great many empty pages left to fill, and every card helps when putting it together.

Another tough get is these two short prints from the Fan Favorites subset that fills out numbers 201-250 of the base set. I especially like the shot of Otis Nixon tossing his helmet in disgust.

No, Darryl Strawberry is not featured on a giant-sized card, he is just in the scan with a bunch of 4-in-1 stickers that I believe bring me pretty close to completing the sticker set. I love that colorful Mets uniform. In fact, I think the Strawberry is right up there with the Otis Nixon as one of my favorite cards from this package. I wonder how Matt Kemp feels about being featured right next to Ryan Braun on that sticker card?

And speaking of All-Star cards, here are a few more I needed for this set. None of them quite live up to the Strawberry card above, but Andre Dawson looks ready to do some damage with the bat he is holding just outside the picture frame.

And lastly, a quartet of Mini Tall Boys, which are just a fun design. I think I am almost done with this set, but the checklist on Cardboard Connection is not in touch with reality. I guess I need to find a better checklist.

I really appreciate all of these cards and the willingness of the other members of the blogging community to send cards back and forth with me. I've had a good time during my short time in the sports card blogging community.