Rainbow in the Dark 37: A Real eBay 1/1, Part 1 (of 2)

I kind of disappeared there for a few days. I flew home from Ohio late last week, and at some point my wife informed me that the air conditioning in the house had gone out. Our neighbor knew a guy, and the guy came and looked at it, and he said something along the lines of, "Well, you're $%*^ed!" The good news is that it's under warranty. The bad news is that the replacement parts are taking their time to get here, so the house is hot. Luckily we had a camping trip scheduled for the weekend, so we were up in the mountains with some relatively nice weather for a couple of days. But we eventually had to come home, and it's pretty warm here. The heat makes it difficult to want to do much, so I haven't done much scanning or post-writing. It's getting close to end-of-year where I work, too, and I am expecting to be at work just about every day between now and the end of September. So posts are probably going to be intermittent for the next few weeks.

I had pretty much put the 2014 Topps High Tek Jon Singleton rainbow to bed last December when I acquired the last non-1/1 card I needed, and I didn't really expect to find the various 1/1 variations this long after the product's release. Well, one of the 1/1 cards popped up on eBay and I hit the Buy It Now about as fast as I could once I spotted it. But that's not even the coolest part of this story. I'll get to the cool part later. First, the card I purchased.

This is the Black Printing Proof, which is one of the four Printing Plate equivalents in the set. There is also a Charcoal Diffractor 1/1 parallel out there somewhere. I think I remember seeing it on eBay at some point and missing out on it, though. Anyway, I was pretty happy to finally land a 1/1 for this particular rainbow. Getting the black plate/proof is usually pretty good, as it tends to have the clearest picture on it.

A little after I made my payment I got an eBay message from the seller. He asked me if I was the writer of The Raz Card Blog, as he recognized my name and location from reading some blog posts of mine about a player collection we have in common. He mentioned that if he had guessed correctly, he had some cards of that player he'd like to pass along. After a couple of messages back and forth he mentioned that he's also added a couple of Astros to the package. Unfortunately he doesn't have a blog that I can direct you to, but he said he has traded with a few bloggers who have me in their blogrolls. I'll revisit the cards he sent for our player collection in common later, but here are the Astros he added to the package. Remember, the only card I actually bought was the one at the top of the post. The rest of this stuff is pure generosity.

First up is this Clouds Diffractor parallel of Singleton's 2014 Topps High Tek card. This is a card I already had a copy of, but how can you dislike a shiny rare acetate baseball card of a player you collect? This one is numbered # 14 / 25.

This is a Black Mini parallel of Jason Castro, who is still on the team. I keep thinking that he is going to be replaced someday, but the other people Houston brings in as competition for the spot always seem to be even worse. He does enough with his defense to make up for some pretty streaky offense. This card is numbered # 170 / 199.

This is a Camo parallel of Chris Carter from 2013 Topps Series 2. These are pretty cool, although the camo colors clash horribly with the rest of the card. Carter has a lot of power in his bat, but he also has a lot of whiff in it. He is currently leading the NL in strikeouts while in a tie for 3rd in home runs for his new team, the Milwaukee Brewers. This parallel is numbered # 10 / 99.

This card of Lucas Harrell shares the same design as the Chris Carter, but it's a little smaller in size, being a Gold parallel from the 2014 Topps Mini release. It's numbered # 27 / 62. He's been bouncing around a bit over the last couple of years, spending time in the minors and majors with Arizona, Detroit, Atlanta, and Texas, where he is currently playing on the big league roster.

Coming back to 2014 Topps High Tek, here is the base version of George Springer's card. Springer is one of the Astros' young stars, putting up decent numbers over the last couple of years. The team as a whole has been struggling lately. A couple of weeks ago they were right in the thick of the Wild Card race and had a higher Postseason Probability than even the Division-leading Rangers. Now they have fallen behind the Mariners and have a Postseason Probability of 14%. There is still a fair amount of season left, but they need to be winning more games.

Last up for this portion of the package is this 2014 Bowman Chrome Green Refractor, also featuring George Springer. This one is numbered # 64 / 75 and features a nice shiny border.

That was a lot of cool cardboard (and acetate), but that's not even close to half of it. There is still the matter of the player collection cards for the as-yet-unrevealed athlete. This part of the package was pretty darn exciting, but that part of the package absolutely blew me away. I wasn't sure what to expect when the seller mentioned that he wanted to send me some PC cards, but I simply wasn't prepared for the card bomb he dropped on me. It may be a few days and a few posts before I get to Part 2 of this post, but I'll get to it. I still have a lot of research to do, as many of the cards he sent are from a time when I was out of collecting and/or still really focused on basketball cardboard. I am super-grateful for all of thise cards, though. That eBay seller really knocked me down with his kindness and generosity, just because he recognized my name and location from my Blogger profile.

Rainbow in the Dark 32: Revisiting 2014 Topps High Tek

It's been a little while since I acquired any new Jon Singleton cards from 2014 Topps High Tek. The cards I'm missing from the rainbow simply don't come up very often. This is one of the flashier variations, being the Blue Dots Diffractor. It looks like there is glitter embedded in the card, and it is extremely sparkly in the light. It's pretty rare, too, with this being copy # 4 / 5. Now I am just missing the various 1 / 1 variations. I think I've seen a couple of the 1 / 1 cards on eBay over the last year or so, but I didn't win any of them. I probably overpaid for this one, but the listing was set up as a Buy It Now with Best Offer and I saw that there was a competing offer, so my offer wasn't as low as it normally would have been. The seller accepted my offer pretty quickly, which I guess means my offer was too high. I'm not going to flip out over a couple of dollars. It is enough for me that I didn't pay the full asking price AND that I am the one who got the card.

We had a pretty good Christmas. Our kids mostly got LEGO kits. I watch the sales pretty hard all year, so I had piled up a fair number of Marvel, DC, and Ninjago kits in the closet. When we sat down to wrap the gifts we had a couple of kits for each of our boys, and then I remembered a LEGO stash that I'd forgotten about. That probably doubled the number of kits each boy had in his pile. One of the twins also got a drag race track for his Hot Wheels cars that announces the winning lane at the end of the race. That's been pretty good for conflict avoidance. You can't argue with the scoreboard. Toys'R'Us had a flash sale on it a couple of weeks ago, or we wouldn't have been able to sneak it into his pile.

My wife and I didn't get much as far as gifts. We got gift cards from my dad and a couple of things from my mom. I used my gift card to pay for some eBay stuff I bought. I have a hard time with holiday gifts. I get the stuff I want when it happens to pop up for sale. I never really saw the point in waiting for a certain day to get it. I guess some unopened wax would be nice to have under the tree, but that would require me to make a list and probably go out and buy it myself to make sure it's the right thing. I probably should have made a little more effort to get something for my wife, but she is a hobbyist in her own right and thus wants very specific things. And she will rarely tell me what those things are. And also I am lazy as heck and the holidays kind of sneak up on me. Mostly I'm just terrible at being a husband. We did get tickets to go see The Force Awakens on Tuesday, so that's good. I'll have to take an afternoon off from work, but as far as I know that isn't usually a bad thing.

I got to have my fun on Christmas Eve. I made up a bunch of elaborate plans to capture Santa and his reindeer and described each one to my kids. They were all dismayed by my intentions, and my eldest child was especially worried. Then I pretended that I had chased an old man out of our living room, leading the kids to believe that I had run Santa off before he could leave his presents. Luckily Santa came back after I fell asleep and remains uncaptured.

My wife made a delicious prime rib dinner with the fixings. I have been watching my calories since October and I've lost 16 pounds so far, but meals like that usually set my progress back by a few days. I am at least now down to a weight where I can comfortably pass my Army weigh-in without resorting to losing weight overnight like a wrestler trying to make weight for a meet. There are rumors that she still has pies and rolls in her plans, so I will be fighting to keep my love handles in check as we roll into the New Year.

I hope all of my readers have had a good holiday season. My mood has been up and down, but overall we're in a good place. I've spent time in other parts of the world where the things we take for granted aren't available to most folks, and it helps to have that perspective. I have shelter from the elements, (fairly) reliable transportation, steady employment, food, clean water, plumbing, garbage collection services, time and income to pursue hobbies, and a host of other benefits that have come to me mostly just because of the time and place I was born into. I've been pretty lucky overall, and I feel bad that not everyone is. There are plenty of resources to meet the basic needs of shelter, food, and water for the world, but politics and power struggles make it difficult to actually get things to people who need them. I'm not advocating Socialism or anything like that. I just think we as a human race could stand to take care of each other a little better and worry a little less about having more than the next guy.

A Small Stack of Singletons

I decided to put a few of my recent Jon Singleton pickups into one post, as usually my one-card / one-player posts aren't very popular. This one has been sitting in my Draft queue in one form or another for a couple of months now, waiting for the right time to write words to go with the pictures. This seemed like as good a time as any, since this is a fairly easy post and my wife and I are headed out for a weekend away to attend a workshop put on by the National Guard Chaplains. I was in Arkansas on our 11th anniversary last week, so this trip will serve as a belated celebration of our mutual toleration of each other over an extended period of time.

This first card comes from 2015 Panini Elite Baseball, and is a Members Only memorabilia card, not to be confused with the Members Only parallel from Topps Stadium Club. It features a nice colorful swatch of fabric and is numbered # 16 / 25. I haven't heard much about Singleton lately. Most of the press surrounding the Astros over the last day has been about Colby Rasmus becoming the first player ever to accept a Qualifying Offer, and how that puts the Astros in the difficult place of having to actually pay that offer. Colby is a gnarly-looking dude, but his last name is made up of the first part of my last name and he certainly seemed to be an integral part of the positive chemistry the Astros had going on this year. It will be interesting to see how the offseason plays out after Rasmus' big bombshell.

I already had one of these Stripe parallels from 2014 Topps High Tek, but when this one popped up at a reasonable price I decided to get it, too. There are rumored to be only 5-10 copies of each Striped parallel, so I've now got 20-40% of the print run on this Singleton card.

This card is a little more common, with an announced print run of 201 copies. It's the Black Foil parallel from 2015 Topps Stadium Club. The photo isn't exactly exciting compared to what you find on many other Stadium Club cards, as Singleton appears to be watching another pop-out coming off his bat. I still really want to pick up a full base set of Stadium Club from this year, but that just hasn't materialized yet. There aren't as many of them listed as there were when the product was fresh. I might have missed the best price window.

I'll close things up with this die-cut Status autograph from 2014 Panini Elite. I believe this is the Gold parallel. It's a pretty typical sticker auto. I am not sure why, but Singleton always seems to sign with a really thick marker. Maybe the markers start out pointy, but he applies so much pressure when he writes that the tip of the marker gets blunted. I don't know. Anyway, this one is numbered # 30 / 49.

That does it for this batch of cards. There's not a lot else to say about them. If Singleton doesn't pick things up a bit next year I can't see him getting a lot of love from the card companies like he has the last few years. The Astros have plenty of other young talent to take his spot in checklists. Hopefully he will at least have a few base cards and their associated parallels so I'll have something Singleton-centered to chase in 2016.

Rainbow in the Dark 30: Jon Singleton 2014 Topps High Tek Circuit Board

I had planned on processing some more cards and getting some additional scans into my Draft queue, but I didn't ever really get around to it. Part of it was laziness, and part of it was venturing into the deep recesses of my crawlspace to troubleshoot our air conditioner. Turns out there was an earwig...

...stuck in the condensate overflow shut-off switch, and after I removed the earwig the unit kicked back on and it's been working ever since. I am glad that with the help of Youtube I was able to check the problem myself and save the cost of a service call / potential oversell of part I don't actually need. I did also manage to catch part of the Home Run Derby. I was hoping for Josh Donaldson to win, but the next-best thing happened with Todd Frazier winning in front of the home crowd.

This is the last of the cards in the Draft queue that I built up during my break between the Fall and Spring semesters a few months ago. I had been working on a Jon Singleton rainbow from 2014 Topps High Tek, and this is one of the background variations in the set. Each player had 6 different background variations of differing rarity, and this is the 4th of 6 patterns for AL players. Cardboard Connection calls it the Circuit Board pattern.

In addition to the six different background variations, there are a number of colored parallels of the most common background variation. I have six of the variations, thanks in part to a huge addition sent to me by Commishbob, but I lack the rarest ones which are numbered either # / 5 or # 1 / 1. I've seen a couple of the # 1 / 1 's pop up over the last few months, but I wasn't able to land any of them. I don't recall seeing any of the Blue Cloud Diffractors, which are the # / 5 variation, at any point. It is entirely possible that I missed out on one or more of them, though. Anyway, for all practical purposes the rainbow is complete to me unless one of those really rare ones pop up. I wonder how much of the print run is already busted? It seems like it was a pretty good seller, so there might not be whole lot of cards left that aren't tucked away in a collection somewhere.

Rainbow in the Dark 28: Jon Singleton 2014 Topps High Tek Red Storm Diffractor

I picked up this wild-looking card some time ago, but have never got around to posting about it. It's a Red Storm Diffractor of Jon Singleton from the 2014 Topps High Tek release. This example is numbered # 10 / 10, making it possibly the rarest card in my Singleton High Tek rainbow. The Stripes parallel was not serially numbered, and some estimates say that only 5-10 copies of those were made, so in real life that one might actually have a lower print run than this one. One of the # 1 / 1 cards popped up on eBay a week or so ago, but the price went past my comfort zone and I let it go. 

The Astros went on a big tear recently, winning 10 games in a row before the streak was broken with two losses in a row to the Rangers. Interestingly, they are 8-7 at home and 10-2 on the road. They currently lead the Angels by six games for the division lead, but there is still a lot of baseball to be played.

Last week was my last week of school, so this week is graduation. That's a pretty big deal, although I mostly feel like this is something I should have finished a decade ago. I'm still waiting on one grade to come in but I am told that I will probably pass the class, as I completed all the work and scored in the 97th percentile on my exit exams. So sometime next week I will be an official graduate of Northwest Nazarene University with a dual B.S. in Accounting / Business Administration.

Jon Singleton Wave, Spirals, Laser Ice (Again)

I am still clearing out posts that I added to my Draft folder in January, although I am down to just a few of those. I picked up these pattern variations of Jon Singleton's 2014 Topps High Tek card shortly after the product released. I think I got them all from one seller, saving a little bit by combining shipping. I somehow ended up getting a couple copies of the pattern on the right, though, so that probably negated most of the shipping savings. Oh well.

These are the three most common patterns for AL teams. Cardboard Connection calls them Wave, Spirals, and Laser Ice. Although Singleton is not currently contributing to the team in any way, the Astros find themselves at the top of their division with a 6-6 record. I guess there are worse places you could be with a .500 record. 

I thought this was a pretty nifty play, worthy of filling out some space at the end of a low-content blog post:

Apologies if the video doesn't look formatted correctly. I am having a hard time getting it to cooperate with Blogger.

Rainbow in the Dark 26: Jon Singleton 2014 Topps High Tek Stripe and Cracked Ice Diffractor

In my previous post I showed off the big 2014 Topps High Tek Jon Singleton Black & White parallel that Commishbob sent to me. I thought I would post a couple of other cards I acquired for that rainbow in this post. I got these a while ago, but I've got a huge backlog in my post queue and scan folder. A lot of these card acquisitions date back to December and maybe even November in some cases. First up is this Stripes variation card. The Stripes were the rarest of the background variations for American League teams. I don't think print runs were announced for these, but the consensus on the forums was that only 5-10 of each were made. I consider myself lucky that I was able to track one down, and it didn't cost me nearly as much as a comparable serially-numbered card would have. 

This is the Cracked Ice Diffractor, which is numbered # 29 / 75. It looks better in-hand than it does in the scan. That's true for most of these cards. Maybe they'd look better with some back-lighting or something. The LCS has a few boxes of High Tek on the shelf for less than the internet sellers' prices. I am considering trying another box, just to see what I get. My last box wasn't extremely exciting, but there are some potentially exciting things out there.

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.

Jon Singleton Gold Diffractor

I don't have time for a giant post, so this is going to be a relatively quick one-card post. I have been working on gathering Jon Singleton variants from the 2014 Topps High Tek release, and this is one of them. Sources tell me that this is the Gold Diffractor, distinguished by the gold color of the background pattern and serially numbered # 02 / 99. I wish I had a little more to say about it, but I am pretty well burnt out on this week already, and I've still got the bulk of my schoolwork to finish by Saturday night.

Working on a Jon Singleton High Tek Rainbow

I've been working on picking up as many variations as I can of Jon Singleton's 2014 Topps High Tek card. Although I don't think I've posted any of them yet, I have pretty much everything now except for the cards numbered # / 15 or less. A couple of them have surfaced on eBay, but I am not willing to pay the asking prices for them. I got the two cards in this post from the same seller for a couple of dollars apiece. Shown above is the Clouds Diffractor, which is numbered # 11 / 25.

I also got the Disco Diffractor, which is numbered # 27 / 50. I like the High Tek set quite a bit, but I do have a couple of issues with it. I wish the team logos on the front were a little bit bigger. That's not a huge deal, though. The thing that really bothers me is that the stat lines on the back are completely unreadable. The font is tiny and a little out of focus. I guess buying High Tek for the stats on the back is kind of like buying Maxim for the articles, but why even put the stats there if no one can read them? There are many things I don't like about this release, but it was at least something different from Topps and the cards do look really cool. I hope they can release some more stuff in 2015 like High Tek and Stadium Club, two of the better Topps releases from this year.

Pack of the Day 82: 2014 Topps High Tek

A couple of posts ago I said something about not buying the recent Topps High Tek release as it is a pretty expensive product with only eight cards per box. RAZ from a month ago is a liar. Dave & Adam's Card World had it on sale along with a couple of other things I wanted, and I ordered a box of my own to see what I would get. The cards are printed on clear acetate and have various background patterns of varying rarity. There's a guide to the patterns on the Cardboard Connection site. AL players and NL players have their own different sets of patterns.

These three cards are from the most common background variations. Jose Abreu is a pretty good pull recently, although it seems like his card prices are down a bit now that we're in the winter lull. Prince Fielder isn't the greatest pull at the moment, but I like his cards well enough. Julio Teheran is the Braves' top pitcher, but I don't follow most of the NL all that closely and don't know much else about him.

Sandy Koufax and Edgar Martinez are from the 2nd tier of background patterns, referred to as Grid and Spirals on the Cardboard Connection guide. Koufax is a legendary Hall of Famer and Martinez is arguably a Hall of Famer, although he gets dinged by the voters for spending a large part of his career as a Designated Hitter.

This Julio Teheran card falls into the 3rd tier of patterns, which on NL cards is called Shatter. I said about all I had to say (not much) about Teheran up above. I didn't get any cards from the 4th, 5th, or 6th tiers of rarity in this box, so all that's left now is the hits. Each box promises a serially-numbered card and an autograph. Lets see what I got.

The numbered parallel for the box was this Clouds Diffractor of Omar Vizquel, numbered # 01 / 25. There are apparently a handful of Vizquel super collectors with deep pockets out there who fight over his really limited cards, making his 1 / 1 cards from this set some of the biggest hits in the product. Unfortunately, there are plenty of this particular version to go around, so it will not make me instantly wealthy. Maybe because this is the first card in the print run it would sell for a slight premium, but that is hit or miss at best. It's a pretty cool card, but it's not a guy I collect. Let's look at the autograph.

Oh, this guy looks familiar. Both of my hit cards feature Omar Vizquel. This is the base version of the autograph card, so again it is not rare enough to command a huge premium on the secondary market. If I went to the effort of selling the cards from this box I think I would probably get back half to two-thirds of what I paid for the box. I didn't pull any cards from any players or teams I focus on in my collection, so resale value is my only real benchmark for this box's success. There are definitely worse possible boxes out there, so this one probably falls just north of average because the parallel was a low-numbered card and Omar Vizquel's autograph sells fairly well compared to a lot of others in the set.

Would I buy another box? I don't think I would unless the prices came down quite a bit. It's a fun set and I like the acetate cards and on-card autographs, but opening one box is enough. Unless you PC some really high-end player you're probably better off buying singles from people who break this stuff. Even if you do collect a high-end player you might be better off just buying singles, because there's no guarantee you'll pull the card you want in a given case or group of cases.