Adding A Minute Manute

One thing that crossed my mind today was the idea that many of the people who work at card companies might not be card collectors at all. They are probably like graphic design folks who wanted to work for Pixar or something, but wound up at Panini editing baseball logos out of pictures instead. Or they work in some non-design capacity, working with clients on licensing decisions or distributors. Or something like that. I'm sure that there are plenty of collectors working at Topps and Panini, but there are probably plenty of employees who don't collect and maybe don't fully understand what the fuss is all about. It would be interesting to see how the reality of the daily business of card companies compares to what collectors imagine. It would also be neat to know how many card company employees are collectors.

What really drove that home for me was a box break video done by Cryptozoic employees. I forget what product it was, maybe one of their DC comic book sets or some TV show or movie set. Anyway, the guy opened up the box, then held it upside down a couple of feet above the table and shook the packs out onto the tabletop. Maybe the percentage wasn't that high, but all the collector in me could see was half the packs tumbling out and landing right on the corners, ruining the pristine cards packed inside. That guy was 100% not a collector. He was a marketing guy doing a marketing video for some product that his company makes.

None of that has anything to do with today's card. I try to pick up Manute Bol cards when I can, and a couple months ago this 2015-16 Totally Certified Materials card popped up on eBay at a reasonable price. I added it to my collection. As far as I can tell, this is the Red version of the card, which serves as the base card for this relic set. There's a spreadsheet for the print runs, as different players have different print runs at different parallel levels. This card is numbered # 65 / 99. Manute Bol died tragically a few years ago, which is a real shame. By all accounts he was a great humanitarian and a good person, devoting much of the fortune he made playing ball to help the people of his home country, Sudan.

Back to Houston's Glory Days with an eBay Addition

I picked up this 2015-16 Panini Totally Certified Champions card of Hakeem Olajuwon from an eBay seller as part of a combined shipping deal. Sometimes if I notice a seller offers combined shipping or a discount for multiple purchases I will search their inventory for a few of my favorite players to see if anything comes up that I can add on to an order. In this case the order was mostly UFC cards, but I was also able to grab a recent card of my all-time favorite basketball player. This one is serially-numbered # 068 / 199, but more importantly, it talks about the two Championships Olajuwon won with Houston and the two Finals MVP awards he picked up in the process.

Unfortunately, the Houston Rockets haven't been back to the Finals since then. This past year was disappointing. The Rockets barely made the playoffs after a long year of ineffectiveness and infighting, and they were quickly dismissed in the first round by the Golden State Warriors. I don't really see a way forward for this team with James Harden and Dwight Howard as their main players, so maybe it's time to blow up the roster and look for a different answer. That kind of rebuild will probably result in several years of painfully bad records, but I don't know if that's any worse than the good-not-great team Houston is rolling out now. I guess it's disappointing not to see any progress from year to year.

With the Rockets bounced out of the playoffs early, I was hoping that the Spurs would have a strong run left in them, but they got ousted by the Thunder in a rather surprising turn of events, and then the Thunder went out and beat the Warriors on the road in Game 1 of their Western Conference Finals match-up. I don't really want any of the teams that are left to win the title so I guess I am rooting for the Raptors now, although they are currently down by 15 points to Cleveland in the 3rd quarter of their Game 1 meeting. I imagine that by the time this posts they will be down 0-1 in that series.

I don't see much good coming out of Houston basketball in the near future, but at least I can relive their glory days by reading the backs of my Olajuwon cards.

Splitsville: Lose-Lose on eBay

I absolutely love eBay. I've had thousands of transactions on the platform over the last 15+ years, and for the most part it's been a pretty good experience. But sometimes things go wrong, and when they do it often feels like both parties come out losing. That was the case with this card, which on the surface is a beautiful 2015-16 Panini Totally Certified Materials Camo parallel of late NBA player and humanitarian Manute Bol. It's got a nice three-color relic piece and is serially-numbered # 07 / 25. It took a little while to arrive because it shipped out of Hong Kong, and I was pretty happy after I opened the package. Upon further inspection I found this:

The patch piece is so thick that the card bulges in the middle and it has actually begun to peel the layers of the card apart. The first thing I did was go back and review the auction listing to make sure I hadn't missed anything in the description or the pictures. There has been a time or two where I got a little too hasty with my bidding and went back to find that the faults were clearly listed in the item description or one of the photos. In those cases I just ate the loss. But this auction featured just one photo that didn't reveal the damage and the description said that the card was Near Mint to Mint in condition.

I spent enough on the card that I didn't really want to just drop things, so I took a picture of the damage and opened an Item Not as Described case on eBay. I always feel like kind of a douche when I open a case, but I also don't want to pay for something that isn't what was listed. I uploaded the picture and wrote a message describing the problem.

The seller refunded the money pretty quickly and eBay sent me a message saying that there was no need to send the item back. I was kind of relieved that I didn't have to ship it back as shipping it to Hong Kong was going to be a hassle, with customs paperwork to fill out and probably more cost than the card was worth. But I also felt bad because now I had a damaged card and my money back, and the seller was out the money I'd sent plus the money it took to ship the card. It was kind of his fault to begin with for not inspecting what he was selling but it still sucks for everyone involved.

I left positive feedback for the seller because he made things right. I'm not out to rip anyone off or blast someone who has done the best they can to make things right. A little while later I got kind of a passive-aggressive e-mail from the seller saying that the card had come out of the pack like that and that now that I had my money back maybe I could find another copy of the card, but that even if I found another three-color patch card from someone else it would probably have the same issue as the one I'd purchased from him. I understand that he is frustrated at the situation because he's now out the money and the card. In my mind we both lost on the deal. I didn't get the product I wanted and he lost money on the transaction.

I also sent a message out on Twitter directed at Panini with a picture of the damage and a complaint about their quality control. I am pretty sure that exactly 0 people saw that Tweet. It was worth a shot, I guess.

The card looks good from some angles, but in addition to the damage on the bottom edge it also now has negative feelings associated with the eBay experience I had. There are items in my collection that would otherwise be okay, but because of the way they came to me I have these bad feelings associated with them and I keep them tucked away so I don't get all fired up again. This will be one of those items. Whenever I stumble across it in the card boxes I will be reminded of the bad side of eBay, where everybody loses.

edit: I went back and sent the seller the amount that was charged as a shipping and handling fee. It felt like the right thing to do. It's only a few bucks.