Listing Badly: Big Scores on eBay and the start of a 1971 Project

Even though my posts do not reflect it, I have been a pretty busy collector as of late. I’m in the midst of a pretty significant re-org of my stuff and, having joined a team collectors trading group, I am shipping much of the “dead” parts of my collection to those who will enjoy it more. I’m getting streamlined and more focused. It’s a hell of a nice feeling.

My Topps sets, for example, have received a significant boost lately, thanks to a go-to seller of mine on the blowout forums. I recently purchased over 3,000 1998-2009 Topps flagship cards for the incredibly reasonable price of 1.5 cents per. He turned a few mediocre piles of mine into nearly-completed sets. Just take a look at my wantlists… look how damn neat and tidy those last entries are! Sometimes I just look at my wantlists, just to see how far they’ve come.

But I’ve also had an inkling lately to start a BIG project. A challenge I can really focus on. And, thanks to Gavin’s recent trade, I’ve finally found one: the iconic 1971 Topps baseball set.

Hot damn, those are gorgeous cards! Gavin’s package contained about 200, which got a good ways into starting the set. But I felt like I need another big bundle before I could really start into this thing. I had been watching a few lots on eBay and managed to scoop up a 380-some card lot for just under a hundred bucks. Like most lots, they had a picture of the stack and of a few key cards, with no complete list of what was included. Even with most of the cards coming blind, I felt like it was a pretty good deal. Here is what was showing:

Reggie! A beautiful card and one of the key early cards in the set… just two years removed from his 1969 RC.

Hit king! Always a pricey guy to find for these vintage sets.

Pops! The Pirates in this set look great with that black border.

Johnny Bench. Another top name in 1970s cardboard.

Joe Morgan’s final card as a ‘Stro. I already had this one in my collection, but it’s such a pretty damn thing, I’ll find use for another.

And Hammerin’ Henry! This came in an unfortunate run of less-than-stellar cards of the homer king. Remember his 1970 Topps card? What a woofer. And that came after two years in a row using the same picture. There’s nothing wrong with it, I guess, it’s just kind of bland.

Anyway, this is what I had bid on. A big chunk of the set, with a few key players included. But when I actually got the cards in the mail, I realized that the seller had left a number of really great cards in the stack when listing this lot.

McCovey and Maz! I definitely would have mentioned these if I had listed this item. HOFers are always a draw.

And as it would have been with these two. What a great-looking card of Lefty, too.

And another pair of mystery HOFers! And man, dig Santo’s arms. No wonder dude could mash the ball in a pitcher’s era.

And more Hall of Famers! The odd thing is, the listing came with lots of photos of the more mediocre cards. Why not snap a pic of these guys?

Or these guys?

OR OF THE ONLY HOF ROOKIE CARD IN THE SET??? This card has more value than anything included in the images but for Reggie and Aaron. Why keep it a secret?

Or this guy? The other big RC in the set.

Man, I hate to knock someone’s eBay technique when it works out in my favor, but damn, dude, get it together.

And if this wasn’t enough, check out what I picked up just a few days ago for the price of blaster at Target…

Not a bad deal at all for the priciest single card in the set. And it’s in passable condition, too. But this was also a weird listing, definitely from someone who didn’t really know cards. It was listed as “1971 Topps Nolan Ryan plus another 70s Nolan.” Hmmmm. What I paid overall was about what I wanted to spend for the ’71, so what is this other “70s Nolan?”

Oh.

Yeah, that’ll do.

So I’m on my way with 1971. If anyone else is doing this, please let me know. I’ve got a stack of 150 or so dupes that I’d gladly deal for my needs. Head back to my wantlist tab to check them out.

Trades-A-Poppin'!

I’ve been a card-mailing fiend these past few weeks. I guess the holiday season has me in a giving mood. It certainly has me in a thankful mood. Take a look at this…

When I started this blog, I had a partial set of 2010 Topps and a stack of rando base cards in an old air filter box. Now, I’ve got 23 (!!!) sets each within a few dozen cards of completion. And a stack of Update sets in binders. Some of these cards I bought in bulk, or in full sets, but a crazy amount of these cards were mailed to me by the good folks of the card blogosphere. I can say without question that the past year has been the most fun – and the most productive – that I’ve ever had collecting.

It seems I am not the only one in a giving mood. I’ve had a few nice trades returns come in this past week. Let’s take a look.

First up is Gavin from Baseball Card Breakdown. This is in return for a Warren Spahn autograph that eventually found its way to his collection. It was a big ol’ stack of Brewers cards with a few customs tossed in for good measure.

I’ve gotten a few of these Fire cards in trades. They look… ok. I can’t really get into anything that cuts the background out of the photos, but I’ll admit that this is among the better-looking sets of that type.

But, holy Hell, this Villar foil-shiny thing is pretty cool looking. Hopefully, he can regain this stroke in 2018.

More shiny! Gavin included a number of, well, numbered cards. This is from Topps Tribute, numbered out of 99. It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten a new Prince Fielder card.

This one was numbered out of 25… perhaps the lowest-population Brewers card in my collection. This one looks very nice in person.

Burnitz! This guy was my favorite when he was in his Brewers prime. He had a ferocious uppercut swing and was – for a year or two – one of the best power hitting OFs in the league. You don’t see that distressed image gimmick on too many cards anymore, thank God.

Another Braunie, this one a Heritage refractor. These were, if I remember right, a numbered parallel at one time. This one isn’t. Ah well.

Now you really gotta dig deep to find a card of a Brewers I’ve never heard of, but Gavin did it. Derek Miller pitched four pro seasons in the Brewers org, never rising above AA. According the back of the card, he was 23-0 with a 0.39 ERA in high school.

As a general rule, I don’t go after relic cards. I don’t put much faith in the little scraps of fabric they include. But, as cards, I’ll still collect them, regardless of whatever laundry bits are attached. These two are both pretty nice-looking to boot.

My favorites might be these customs, however. Here we see Ken Griffey Jr. in his classic Moeller High uni.

And here we have not just A dude, but THE Dude. So that’s what you call him. That, or his Dudeness, Duder... or El Duderino, if you’re not into that whole brevity thing. The Big Lebowski is one of my favorite movies of all-time and I swear it gets funnier every time I see it. I remember seeing it at the movie theatre in the UW-Milwaukee student union when I was an undergrad… probably about 2002. It was a midnight showing and the perfect type of audience for that picture. The entire house applauded when Donnie first appeared on screen… not cheered or whooped or anything like that… they applauded respectfully. It was beautiful.

I also got a nice package from EP at Old Red Sox Cards. EP knocked a few entries off my Topps set needs.

The fun stuff were the ’80 and ’81 Topps cards. Here are a quad of ’81 Hall of Famers. I especially like that Yaz card.

I also got a nice package from a new trader, Wesley Moore, who goes by @realwesmoore on twitter. He was doing an annual holiday trade offering and I snagged a pair of signed cards.

First was D-Back (currently Dodger) backstop Peter O’Brien. He’s shown a good deal of power in the minors, but hasn’t put it together at the Big League level just yet.

Then, I picked up this Sweet Spot sig of Chris Denorfia, who had some decent years with the Reds. This… was actually a mistake. I confused him with former Brewer Chris Demaria. Still, it’s a nice looking card. But if anyone really into Denorfia wanted it, I’d probably make a deal.

But probably the coolest stuff from the entire haul was the TCMA Hank Aaron story cards Wes included. These are very cool. I’d really like to get a TCMA collection going, even though it seems like they’ve became a little more sought-after in recent years.

My very favorite is this one…

That is Henry and Eddie Mathews walking up the tunnel after the last-ever Milwaukee Braves game in 1965. It’s long been an iconic image for me… Milwaukee would be without baseball for five years after this… and I had no idea it was used on a card.

And last, but not least, just today I got a nice stack of 2002 needs from Bo at Baseball Cards Come to Life. Bo has been responsible for a HUGE part of my Topps base sets thanks to the mega-trade we completed this summer with a signed Aaron Judge card as the centerpiece.

I’ll share just one of these, but it’s by far the coolest of the bunch. A second-year Ichiro with the rookie cup. A great card in a vastly underrated set.

Thanks again to all my trade pals! Take it easy.

A Swap with Infield Fly Adam

A few weeks back, I completed a swap with Adam from InfieldFly Rule… well, I kinda completed it – I mixed up stacks and sent him some Indians cards, while his Rockies made their way to Ohio (everyone is home safe and sound now, though). I was only mildly familiar with his blog before the trade, but it’s a very good read and has introduced me to cards I had no idea existed.

Adam had recently acquired a big ol’ box-o-Topps base and had some want list stuff for me, as well as some of my hometown nine. Let’s take a look…

The bundle started with a nice stack of Brewers from my youth.

Here is one that I didn’t have…

These conflicting logo-photo cards have always been a bit confounding to me. To me, this is a Rockies card. But, Dante is shown in his Brewers blue. Does this make it a bit of a hybrid? Would it be enough for an obsessive team collector to include in their binders? And what if it still had a Brewers logo, but just a notice about the trade? There are a number of cards like this in 1993 Fleer… Brewers by photo and in-design graphics, but with a plain text notice of a team change. And then there are those cards (1981 Donruss, for example), that note team changes in the biography on the back. There need to be some hard and fast rules for these, I think.

And here’s a Robin Yount from the Bunt series. Always good to get a new Robin.

A big part of the box was 1996 Topps. At 440 cards, it’s the smallest base set since 1953. The choice card of those Adam mailed me was this Todd Helton RC (a very generous throw-in from a Rockies fan).

There is a bit of a muff on the foil in his name… hard to tell in the image, but it looks like they stamped foil that had already been stamped (looks like ‘Davis’ or something). I guess this makes it an eBay 1 of 1. I’ll sell it for $800 firm, otherwise it’s going into the binder.

I actually kinda dig the 1996 set. It’s dated, sure, but the photography is crisp and the look is clean.

And you get entirely un-ironic write-ups like this one about Brewers could-have-been ace Cal Eldred.

Or this odd story about Reggie Sanders. “The only bad thing about his season was when he almost suffocated himself!”

There was also a decent stack of 2004 Topps.

I had always considered this to be an underwhelming set. I love the little figure and uniform number in the corner… but I hate the silver foil, the big team name at the top and the thick border on the photo. This could have been a set defined by that awesome corner graphic, but they tried to do too much and cluttered the very nice photography with all that extra garbage.

But MY GOD, they had unique designs for the subset cards. This is constantly my biggest complaint about new Topps sets. They dream up a million designs for insert sets that no one wants, but make EVERY card in the base look the same. Just look at what could be….

What a great-looking leaders card!

Sporting News All-Stars! With a cameo from Brewer Scott Podsednik!

FISH WIN WORLD SERIES! A beauty!

And more than just a line score and two sentences on the back! This is what happens when you don’t phone it in, Topps.

I also got some 2007s, a design I always thought was underrated.

And some ‘09s, which look like crap and waste a lot of cool photography with awful framing. Like this one of the most annoying person in baseball, Nick Swisher. How cool would this look as a horizontal card?

Anyway, thanks to Adam for the swap. I hope you enjoy the Rockies I sent you… it’ll give you something to sort through as you sweat out the end of the season with my Brewers nipping at the Rox’s heels:)