I was born on the 11th of September and those two numbers correspond with my current favorite players on the Celtics: Glen “Big Baby” Davis and Rajon Rondo.
I’ve been collecting Big Baby since his rookie season. I was still bumming over the departure of “Big Al” Jefferson and Davis seemed like a fun rookie to root for. He’s exactly the type of player that I love. He’s got a natural instinct to be around the ball, battles hard on the offensive boards and is always hustling. The biggest hole in his game is his lack of any vertical leap to speak of, but hopefully as he slims down and continues to work that will improve a little.
Rondo has improved dramatically by leaps and bounds every year in the league. This was a guy who “Boston Sports Guy” Bill Simmons crapped all over when the Celtics acquired him, jumped on the bandwagon after the Summer League and then resumed pooping for most of his rookie season. To be fair, Rondo couldn’t shoot coming into the league. Once he learned how to use his superior speed to get to the basket almost at will, it caused defenders to respect his speed and opened up room for his jumper which started going in more frequently.
Where Rondo has really shined is in the playoffs. People were afraid that he might be a liability when the Celtics won it all in 2007-08, but that wasn’t the case. Rondo really shined last season in the playoffs, but the Celtics couldn’t overcome the loss of Kevin Garnett on the defensive end of the floor even with Big Baby stepping up offensively in Garnett’s place. This year, Rondo has been phenomenal. Forget the new “Big Three,” right now in Boston there’s just a “Big One.” Rondo’s triple-double today against the Cavaliers will go down as one of the all-time great Celtics playoff performances and that’s saying a lot when you’re wearing the jersey of a team that has won 17 Championships and could have their own wing of the Basketball Hall of Fame.
I already had a connection with Buchholz due to being at his no-hitter. My Buchholz collection started with all of the cards that mentioned the no-hitter and then grew from there. I now have a couple of autographs and relic cards. I’ve been eyeing an autographed rookie, but the majority that I see are slabbed and I’m not too big on that. The prices on those cards always seem to be through the roof. I will make sure that I track down all of Buchholz’s cards once they start depicting him with his new jersey number.
It’s tough not to like Ortiz. He’s got an infectious smile, seemed to be well-liked by his teammates and under the tutelage of hitting coach Papa Jack became one of the most fearsome hitters in all of baseball. He cemented his place in Boston Sports History with his clutch hitting during the 2004 championship run. He struggled at the beginning of last season before leading the league in home runs from the middle of June to the end of the season. It looks like he’s struggling again at the start of this season, but a platoon with Mike Lowell at DH will hopefully rejuvenate him like the platoon at catcher has done to Jason Varitek. If not, it just means that Ortiz cards might be cheaper for me to acquire for my collection.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to buy a lottery ticket.
Monday, May 10, 2010
11 and 34
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Mail Day: Digging out
I forgot to include this card when I posted about my Jorge Garcia through the mail autograph success. I also included a card to be signed which came out nicely as well.
Now that I’ve seen them, I’m wishing that I had one of the Rittenhouse cards signed and I may still try to get one signed, but I don’t want to be greedy. Also, things are ramping up with the filming of the Lost finale supposedly and Mr. Garcia may be busy with other things after that and not have time to spend answering fan mail.
Big Baby seems to be the only guy on the Celtics who grabs any offensive rebounds at times. The one thing that does seem to hold him back is his maturity level. He earned a spot in Doc Rivers’ doghouse a few games ago after committing a stupid flagrant foul. Hopefully he can overcome these maturity issues by the time Boston is looking for him to step into a starting role or it may never happen.
I think that I’ve been having the most fun with my Glen Davis collection because I’m able to pick up some cool cards at great prices. That’s not the case with Paul Pierce, Mike Piazza or David Ortiz. Piazza cards especially climb way out of my price range quickly. I don’t have any Piazza autos while I have multiple autos of Davis and Pierce and now one autograph of Ortiz.
In typical eBay ridiculousness, I ended up paying less for the black refractor than I did the green and this one is rarer.
Brown is now coaching the NBA D-League team in Springfield. I don’t know if the team was on the road, but it would have been cool for Panini to get this Celtics fan favorite to be a part of their Adrenalyn promotion in Springfield.
There’s no way that I could pass up this lot for a dollar. I’ve been coveting the Larry Bird from this set ever since I bought one for my wife at a card show last year and this lot contains the refractor. I would have paid a dollar just for that card, but I also got the regular Pierce and Parish cards from that set, a Pierce Finest rookie, a Garnett Finest card and three other Pierce cards.
I know many collectors hate manufactured patches on principle. These are great looking cards though. I don’t mind at all that the B in this card wasn’t ever touched by David Ortiz. Somewhere down the line, nice looking cards started taking a backseat to ugly cards with bits of crap in them or a random serial number printed on them. These are great looking cards. ‘Nuff said.
The Lumberjacks card is numbered to 5000 and the Great American Heroes card is numbered to 2500. Big deal back when they were released, high print run by today’s standards.
The good thing about that is that I can now pick up insert cards that sold for $20 back when they were first released for a fraction of the cost. There were a lot of cool Donruss/Leaf and Fleer Ultra inserts that I couldn’t pick up then that I can now add to my collection.
Last, but not least, another Jeremy Piven letter. I only grab these when they’re listed cheaply so I may never finish off this phrase. Many people don’t want to list these cheaply after getting one of these as a hit in their Icons box, but they don’t really sell for more than $3 or $4. On the letter front, just the second H from Kent Hrbek that I’ve ever seen showed up on eBay and went for a ton of money just like the first. That’s another word that I may never complete.
That’s all for now. Time to get the room together and things put away before I starting bringing in a bunch of new singles.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Mailday: Dude, where’s my cards?
Dude, Lost is back on the air and I couldn’t be happier. I’m a full fledged Lost fanatic and really get into all of the mythology and details of the show. My favorite character on the show is Hurley. So, when I saw that Rittenhouse Achieves was offering this Hurley promo for free with SASE, I had to have it. Their recently released Lost Seasons 1 – 5 set looks pretty good. I definitely think that I’ll be busting open a box of that in the near future, but first I’m going to get myself a box of 2010 Topps Jumbos.
This was a great lot that I won on eBay. The cards themselves only cost .99¢ and shipping was the usual $3. Now I’ve got a Pierce for the set and will need to pick up another one for my player collection. I’ll keep plugging away on this set as I find cards that I need at great prices.
This is another sweet lot that I picked up on eBay. I picked up the base, refractor and Xfractor cards from 2005-06 Finest. I like the design of this set and all three of these cards are sharp looking. The refractor is numbered to 349 and the Xfractor is numbered to 139.
I also added another Big Baby autograph to the collection. As long as he’s coming off of the bench, his cards will probably be available cheaply, but I think that’ll change in a couple of years when there’s no longer a Big Three in Boston.
Davis was a big factor in the Celtics’ last win over the Nets. There’s no way that the game should have been as close as it was, but the Celtics were without Paul Pierce and still don’t have Garnett at 100%. The game finally turned around in the 4th quarter with the bench players in the game. Davis played some tough defense on Brook Lopez and had some huge offensive rebounds that allowed the Celtics to pull away behind the hot shooting of Eddie House. Oh yeah, he also scored in double digits off of the bench.
Here’s a jumbo swatch from a Mike Piazza Padres jersey. I didn’t have any Padres relics of Piazza so I figured that I would pick this one up. Since this isn’t a sick mojo patch, I think that I’m safe in trusting Upper Deck when they say that this is accurate. Pot shots at Upper Deck aside, this is a nice looking card with a fairly low serial number.
I wouldn’t have known that this card existed if I didn’t have an eBay search set up for Fenway Stamp. There were some items made with this stamp’s image on it that I was interested in as well as the Dwight Evans Leaf Century Collection autographed card with the Fenway Stamp.
This is a nice looking card featuring an actual stamp and not something manufactured on Stamps.com. The low numbering and high number of Red Sox fans made this cost a little more than I would have liked, but at least I didn’t pay the price that the first 2 or 3 of these sold for.
These were two separate lots from the same seller, but the discount on shipping made it worthwhile. I’ve always liked the oversized Donruss Action All-Stars sets and I thought it would be cool to have unopened packs with Dewey showing on the top. This set is so small that it is probably easy to find any card in the set showing on top and I’m glad that someone had done so and was now selling those packs. I’ll keep these sealed in my collection because I already have both of these cards loose. I may upgrade them if I ever find them in better shape since these are still the original card that I had from when I was younger and these was nothing good for storing cards these size in back then.
This is a card that I had been chasing for a little while now and when you look at it you can see why. This is a great looking card that leaves plenty of room for Evans’ beautiful signature. I have a lot of Dewey autographs including two that I’ve gotten in person and this one is my favorite that I didn’t obtain in person. I could do without the silver TeamTopps Legends stamp, but that’s about the only downside to this card.
I couple of these cards sold for more than what I wanted to pay. The strange thing was that I was willing to go a little higher on this card when it was listed, but I ended up not having to. Sometimes being patient can pay off. That’s important when you’re collecting on a budget. If this card never came down to a price that I was comfortable paying, then I just wouldn’t have the card in my collection, but I’m glad that it did.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Mail Day: Check My Cards Out
This post might be a doozy. I’ve been letting cards pile up in the CheckOutMyCards warehouse for a few months now. I finally decided that it was time to have them come home and now that they’ve arrived I’m going to show them to all of you. There’s a nice mix here of random cards, cards for my various player collections and cards to finish off sets. Finishing off a set is always a good thing.
Leading things off is an Adrian Gonzalez 2001 Bowman RC. I tossed this card into my cart when the rumor mill had Gonzalez on his way to Boston. Jed Hoyer ended up getting cold feet and decided that he couldn’t trade his biggest star as his first major act as GM and the trade never happened. There’s a chance that Gonzalez might still be traded once the trade deadline comes around, but the Red Sox may just stick with what they’ve got and then take their chances with a much better free agent class next year.
While I admire the fact that Topps remained true to the original ‘48 Bowman set by including cards with diagrams of plays on them, it sucks having to track these things down to complete a set. The play cards are numbered to 1948, but I don’t even think that the fact there can only be 1948 possible complete sets of this will boost the value of the set. People aren’t really interested in complete sets anymore since rookies, relics and autos are all the rage. I couldn’t pass this up for a quarter and now I’m one card closer to the set.
It’s been a while since I’ve added any new Dee Brown cards to my collection. I wasn’t actively collecting towards the end of his career. This card is from 95-96 Upper Deck SP and it’s a great looking card. I always looked forward to SP sets when I was collecting in the 90s and have all of the SP sets from the first two years of release in Baseball, Basketball and Football. I ever tried putting together the hockey set that was a one-per-pack insert in that year’s Upper Deck Hockey. Some day I may finish the set, but it is tough to justify spending money on any hockey cards at the moment. Once I get everything out of storage, I’ve got to post all of my hockey stuff on here for trade.
It wouldn’t be a mail day post without some Big Baby cards. I’ve been picking up a lot of his cards because his rookie and autographs are still very affordable and became even more so while he was injured. I should pick them up now because once the New Big Three rides off into the sunset (and this might be the last season for both Ray Allen and Garnett), Davis looks to get a lot more playing time and if he can step up, his card prices could jump.
This 2007-08 Elevation RC is numbered 14/99. I couldn’t let this one get away with a one dollar price tag on it. I’m not huge on getting every single numbered parallel of a card, but when they’re affordable, I’ll pick them up.
Speaking of numbered parallels. Here’s a numbered parallel from a set that is itself a parallel. The Chrome cards inserted into regular Topps packs have a Bowman Chrome feel to it and have proven to be very popular. This is the refractor here and it is numbered 082/500. The picture of Davis leveling Brad Miller rules even more when it is presented in shiny chrome format.
This is a set that I’m putting together slowly but surely. The problem is that most times people are pricing these cards way too high. I love the whole “Cards That May Have Been” thing that Topps has done with various players. I was a huge fan of the Topps Basketball Archives set that was produced in the 90s and also have the Bill Russell cards that were inserted in 2007-08 Basketball.
I’m not sure what it says about me as a collector that cards such as this one appeal to me a heck of a lot more than boring jersey swatch after boring jersey swatch. That was such a cool idea when it started, but card companies have run it into the ground. It’s cool when you can pick them up cheaply for your collection, but for popular players it quickly starts looking like the same thing over and over again. I’ve stopped chasing most jersey cards for Piazza and Pierce because I have too many as it is. Why pay a couple of bucks for another version of the same thing when I can add something a little more original to the collection.
This was something else that Topps did in the 2006-07 Basketball set. They produced 33 different versions of card number 33, Larry Bird. I think that I’ve got about half of the set at this point. CheckOutMyCards has been great for putting this set together since you see an actual scan of the card that you’re getting. I could never put this set together though Sportlots and on eBay I’d either pay a ton for shipping on individual cards or would have to wait for the perfect lot to show up. Luckily, these don’t go for as much as the Griffeys from 2009 Upper Deck Baseball. I’ve got two of those sitting around and while I originally wanted to put that set together, there’s no way I can afford that so I have to figure out whether to hold on to those or toss them up on eBay.
Here’s some more retro basketball goodness. These 1958-59 variations were included in 2008-09 Topps Basketball packs. These were the four cards that I still needed after busting open a jumbo box last year. I’m not a huge fan of this set, but when you’re only 4 cards short and can finish the set for a dollar, you’ve got to do it. The set does have a nice mix of current players, legends and rookies, but I prefer the set from 2007-08 to this one.
Even though Upper Deck made the bad decision to cancel the Masterpieces brand before a basketball set was produced, they gave a little tease of what it may have looked like it 2009-10 Basketball. This is one set that I’m definitely chasing because of the beautiful cards and set content. I’ll have to pick up a few duplicates from this set since there are some great Celtics cards in here. Check out that sweet Larry Legend. I’ve also seen great cards of Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett from this set.
Speaking of 2009-10 Upper Deck Basketball, one of the other inserts sets were these Now Appearing cards. They look like movie posters and some of them feature great graphic design work. Garnett looks like he’s about to dunk on Neo and Pierce is set to star in a gritty film about the tough life of a basketball player (yeah right).
This card is yet another insert from 2009-10 Upper Deck Basketball. As a fan of Sportflics, these 3D Stars cards were right up my alley. This card switches from an image of Paul Pierce to one of Kevin Garnett.
One of my favorite things to do on CheckOutMyCards is to pick up the inserts from the sets that I like which I wasn’t lucky enough to pull from my box. The two Now Appearing cards and the 3D Stars card cost me less than a single pack even when you factor in shipping costs. I don’t need any more of the base cards so this is definitely the way to go. Between picking up the inserts on COMC and the base cards on Sportlots, it lets me cheaply add a ton of cards to my player collections.
I picked up this 2006-07 Upper Deck Ovation Leading Performers insert card after seeing one of the other cards from this set posted in a blog. You could always count on Upper Deck for designing some beautiful cards even if they always charged way too much for them. I got used to waiting for the boxes and singles to drop in price while I opened Topps products in the meantime. I’m not thrilled with anything that I’ve seen from Panini yet so I might take this time to fill in holes in my basketball collection. There are plenty of older basketball boxes out there just begging to be opened. It might be time to open some older Finest and stuff like that where the prices have plummeted due to the expired redemption cards. As long as it isn’t a product where the autographs were replaced with redemption cards.
Here’s something else that I don’t understand. Why didn’t Topps end up putting Turkey Red inserts into its basketball packs? Was the response to this product really that bad? I was able to pick up a white border (1:4 packs) and black border (1:24 packs) Paul Pierce for $1.50 total. These cards would probably sell a lot better if they were serial numbered, but this set came out a little before the serial numbering crazy really went overboard.
Here’s a 2009-10 Topps All-Star Relics Quad of Paul Pierce numbered 36/100. Some of you might remember me already posting this card on the blog, but that card was either sold to me on eBay damaged or got damaged in shipment. I didn’t pay enough to go through the hassle especially if the seller was going to require I ship the card back so I just went out and got another one. It’s nice to have the All-Star jersey relics show up in cards designed for that purpose. I’ve got Paul Pierce jersey cards with random blue swatches in them that make no mention of the All-Star Game.
Gene Conley is the perfect player to make the transition from basketball to baseball. I had no clue who Conley was until I met him at a baseball card show at my high school in the early 90s, but now I’m a big fan. Conley is the only player to win a championship in two of the four major sports doing so with the Boston Celtics and Milwaukee Braves. What made me become a fan was that he was incredibly nice to talk to that day and that he played for both the Celtics and Red Sox. Eat your heart out Bo Jackson.
Those of you who traded with me right before I moved may have gotten some of these cards in your package. I’m pretty sure that I opened two boxes of these Bookmarkers when they came out thinking they’d end up pretty popular with collectors. They were licensed so there wasn’t any need to airbrush what for the most part are beautiful pictures which pop off of these larger cards. If you collect someone who played in 1993 or want the players from your favorite team, drop me a line and we’ll work out a deal.
Having missed the opportunity to get a Junichi Tazawa autograph on a card, I figured that I may as well pick up a card and send it to Spring Training and see if it comes back signed. I’ve been trying to track down a card of Casey Kelly to do the same, but so far all that I’ve found online are autographed inserts.
One more positive thing about these Obak cards is that they’re perfect for getting autographed. I’ve never seen the need for super glossy minor league cards for that very reason. Now that Topps is involved MiLB Tribute can’t be very far off.
I don’t chase Kent Hrbek cards that often anymore. I end up spending money on more recent players before I search him out, but when I see a card from a parallel that once went for huge bucks then I’ve got to grab it. When these were new even the minor stars went for big bucks, but I was able to pick this up for a single buck. While not as flashy as Pinnacle’s Museum Collection, these were just as, if not more, popular.
It figures that when Hrbek is included in a current set that they decide to make him a short print. I still love the look of the Goodwin Champions set, but the price and how they packed it out still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Even now that the price has dropped, I’m still hesitant to pull the trigger on a box because I know that it’ll just tick me off. All of those 20th Anniversary cards and the packs with two minis just spoil the fun. With my luck I’d also beat the odds and pull one of those etymology redemption cards which will probably never see the light of day. Why am I picturing Upper Deck freaking out about a bunch of cards with nothing but bug fragments inside of them? I digress. This is a beautiful card and if it wasn’t short printed, I’d try to get the other versions of it.
The things that I miss out on the most when away from the hobby are things like this. I haven’t participated in any of the National Trading Card Day events. When it first started it was due to not collecting and now it is due to the fact that I don’t know of any participating card shops near me.
So, I had to buy a card that was given away for free, but that’s alright since it only cost a dime. The shipping cost more than that.
This is the type of thing that the hobby needs. Free Comic Book day seems to have become really successful, but that might be a side effect of all of the comic book movies that are coming out at the moment. The average person only thinks of “what is it worth” when it comes to trading cards.
This is the set that never ends, it just goes on and on my friend. Topps Tek has to be one of the crazier ideas to come from Topps, but there are a lot of people chasing the singles these days. Unopened boxes can be tough to find and aren’t cheap when you do.
I’ve been chasing these cards because they register high on my oddball radar. Some of the backgrounds on the cards are great while others are forgettable. This here is one of the ArchiTEKs insert cards. You’d get a few of these per box and these things are probably more common than each of the base cards.
Here’s another card that has been seen on this blog previously. This card was available cheaply so I decided to get one to put into my Piazza collection as well as having one in the set. That’s something that I’ve always struggled with. If you have a complete set of something that contains a card of a player that you collect, do you count that card in your collection? For example, I’ve got a 1992 Bowman Piazza in my set and another in my PC. It helps that I pulled one out of my box and picked up the other for $3 when the set was new, but I wanted one in each collection. How do those of you reading this feel? I usually end up getting the second card if it is affordable.
I felt that a post this long required an Epic ending and here it is. Oops, make that an EpiX ending. These cards were the best part of a fun 1998 Pinnacle Zenith box break and I had to grab what was available for Piazza. These cards look nice in the scan, but they’re spectacular in person. I have a new appreciation for cards that do something when you move them because my daughter loves them. She’s a big fan of lenticular and refractor cards.
The EpiX cards were kind of complicated. Play cards were the most common followed by Game, Season and Moment which were the toughest to pull. There were three color variations of each one with orange being the most common followed by purple and then emerald which was the toughest. Is a purple Play tougher to pull than an orange Moment? I’ve got no clue. Even though the Moment is listed with a higher book value, I actually paid more for the Play. Go figure.
That’s the end. Thanks to those of you who read through all of that. I think next time I’ll be better off breaking it up into pieces.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Mail Day: The pile was getting out of control
I haven’t posted one of these in forever. For now, I’m sticking to mostly to cards that I’ve picked up through eBay. I’ve also done a couple of trades and want to get those posted as well, but the upcoming move might throw a monkey wrench into those plans. At the very least, I’ll make sure to get a post out there about who I traded with along with a summary of the trades.
This first card here isn’t an eBay purchase at all. This is the card that Upper Deck sent me along with the damaged Timelines cards that they replaced. They didn’t have a replacement for the Chris Smith card that I sent and the letter that came back with my cards stated that they sent a replacement of equal value in its place. How this Albert Pujols card is of the same value as that card I don’t know, but I’m not complaining. It’s a shame that Upper Deck Customer Service never came through on the 40 cards that I was shorted from my 2009 Baseball Series 1 box because they’re done well when they actually decide to follow through. The company also has a bit of an attitude problem and has no qualms about deleting comments from both their blog and Facebook pages that don’t leave the poster with a brown nose.
Next up is another Pujols card. This was thrown in as an extra card by an eBay seller. I’m pretty sure that I posted the card that this came with already, but I never got around to posting this bonus card.
You can’t complain about a bonus Pujols card. What he’s done at the plate so far in his career is ridiculous. If he stays healthy, he should rewrite all kinds of records. I don’t go out of my way to acquire new Pujols cards, but when I pull his cards they go right into my collection.
This card here was a redemption that I pulled out of the box of Bowman Sterling which I got when I sent in my damaged Dwayne Wade mini that I pulled out of a rip card from a 2008-09 Topps Basketball jumbo box. This card is numbered to 218. One of the cooler cards that I pulled out of the box just so happened to be another Dwayne Wade card. It’s a mini in the style of 80-81 Topps that comes in a folder that seals magnetically. Both the folder and the card are numbered to 999. I’ll have to post pictures of that card on here because I’ve searched and searched ever since pulling the card and haven’t been able to find another one online.
Speaking of redemption cards, this card was a replacement for a Murad redemption that got the shaft once Topps knew that they weren’t going to have an NBA license in 2009-10. I responded to the e-mail that they sent asking if I could get a Celtic in return and not another Spud Webb since it looks like those were held out of the packs specifically to send out in place of Murad redemptions. This card is certainly of a Celtic, but they got the names reversed (and spelled slightly wrong). This card will go into my collection unlike the card that I would have gotten if the redemption had been processed so I guess that’s a plus. Another case of Topps Customer Service coming though. At the very least they listen and try to make an effort unlike Upper Deck who sometimes don’t even reply to e-mails sent to customer service.
Gimme an H!
It’s funny how I couldn’t stand pulling these darn things in 2009 Topps and couldn’t wait to sell them off, but jumped at them on eBay once it was a player that I liked. I’m not going after the entire player name and so far have only seen one “H” on eBay that went for some ridiculous amount of money.
You might wonder how a kid in the 80s who spent his entire life in Massachusetts ended up a fan of Kent Hrbek. One day, I decided that I wanted to collect a player who wasn’t on the Red Sox. I went through the cards that I had and I had a few of Hrbek and decided to start collecting him. It was a good choice because he was good enough to be included in a lot of the oddball sets that I loved in the 80s. Now that card companies are including Hrbek in sets again, I’ve resumed collecting him.
Back then I collected Dwight Evans and Kent Hrbek. There are a lot of similarities between the two players. They were never amongst the biggest stars in the game, but they were faces of their franchises for long times. Both players have very devout fan followings and played the game the way it was meant to be played.
Gimme a ?!
Hopefully this will someday spell out “Hug it out,” but I’ve kind of stalled out at the moment. When Icons came out, I picked up a couple of these right away for a price that I was comfortable paying. Since then, the price has steadily increased as more people have started chasing them. That’s good news if I wanted to sell these, but bad news for ever collecting the whole phrase. If you ever want a good laugh, check out one of these that Piven has autographed. He printed his name vertically down the letter and it looks like something his niece "Pearl the Landlord" would have written. Huge fan of Piven, but I wouldn’t even be excited if I pulled one of those out of a pack.
Speaking of lame autographs, here’s exhibit B. RR? Are the 10 letters in Rajon Rondo really too much to write out? I stumbled into this card as an additional bid from the same seller. I missed out on the first card, but I got this one cheaply and now have Rondo’s initials in my collection.
I’ve yet to buy a pack of 2009-10 Topps because I’m waiting until I can afford a jumbo box. I’ve had great luck with them in the past two years and want to see what I can pull this year. I have picked up some singles though; most of them for less than what you’d pay for a pack. Here’s a gold version of Big Baby tossing Brad Miller to the floor. Most likely this is Miller flopping like he did all through last year’s playoffs.
I love that I can still pick up unnumbered Big Baby autographs for about a buck a piece. I’m excited that he’ll be back with the Celtics this season. He was supposedly going to get an offer from another team that the Celtics couldn’t match, but the outrageous offer sheet to Gortat which the Magic matched ended those plans. Davis will now be a part of the best bench in the NBA and since they just might be backing up the best starting 5 in the league, the Celtics are a good bet to bring another NBA Championship to the rafters of The TD Bank (fake) Garden. Davis showed that he can play at a high level when Kevin Garnett was injured last season. He and Rasheed Wallace will let Doc Rivers give plenty of rest to Kevin Garnett and Kendrick Perkins to save them for the playoffs.
What can I say, I’ve got a problem. It’s tough to pass up any Davis autos when they are this cheap. I think he signed this one with his foot. This one has Kevin McHale’s number on it so if Davis wins the Sixth Man Award I can sell it on eBay as a 1/1 Super Mojo Hit.
Whenever I scan a card with a piece of Celtics jersey in it, I wonder if a brown jersey swatch will show up green. Hmmmmmmm.
Here’s another card from 2009-10 Topps. While the basketball die cut gives the card an interesting look, I wish that they had just cut out the whole circle for the swatch to show through. These things are small enough to begin with and now you barely see any of it.
It looks even worse when there’s a patch involved. I just want to tear off that piece of cardboard going over the middle of the patch.
This card is numbered to 50 and super thick. I’m surprised there isn’t a sticker auto on it. If they had put autos along the bottom and put the name elsewhere, they could have had a nice looking set. On card would have been beautiful.
I really like that Topps put Chrome cards into the base Topps set since they weren’t going to have time to do a stand alone set. This here is a shiny refractor of Paul Pierce.
The refractors from this set are numbered to 500 which could make for a challenging set to put together.
Here’s a different type of relic card from 2009-10 Topps. Although the set is called Championship Materials, it doesn’t say anything about this swatch being from a jersey worn in the NBA Championships. In fact, it’s probably from a jersey worn years ago.
Topps kept the die cut basketball thing in this set as well. According to some clueless eBay sellers, the die cuts would make this a dual swatch card. Heck, I’ve seen some cards labeled as quad cards from the manufacturer that have four windows showing the same swatch.
Got this Pierce Bowman Sterling jersey card for a buck plus shipping. I like the designs used in some of the Bowman Sterling sets, but it’s a shame that the value that you get out of the packs usually doesn’t come anywhere near what you paid. It’s worse in basketball due to all of the top names being exclusive to Upper Deck.
The one exception to the value that I’ve seen is 2007 Bowman Best baseball. The value has even gotten better as more and more names from that set have emerged.
It’s no secret that I absolutely loved the Murad basketball set. It took a while, but I finally tracked down a Pierce auto from this set at a reasonable price. It’s not one of the numbered versions, but that’s fine by me.
The sticker detracts from the look of the card a little, but it is still a beautiful card. This is right up there with UD Glass as my favorite Pierce autographed cards.
More Murad Madness. I also had to track down the Pierce silk card from the set. When I first saw this auction, I expected some ridiculous selling price because it was #1, but that wasn’t the case at all. It’s a good thing too because if that had been the case then this card wouldn’t be in my collection.
I’m going to end with some of the blue parallel Celtics that I pulled out of Bowman ‘48 basketball. The rest of the cards will be another post.