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.

Here’s a Big Baby rookie green refractor.  If you’re going to get any Celtics refractors from this set, why wouldn’t you go with the green parallels?  They’re a perfect match for the Celtics uniforms and are numbered to 149 which is rare, but not too rare.

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.

The black parallel is sharp as well and is numbered to just 75 copies.  The white outline around the player gives this card a little bit of a different look.

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.

I’ve got a couple of Dee Brown cards that I got signed in person as well as an NBA Jam strategy guide that he was promoting.  So, why would I pick up a sticker autograph card?  Well, winning it for a dollar may have had something to do with it.  I also don’t really have many pack inserted autographs for the former Slam Dunk Champ so I figured that I would pick this up.

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.

The first thing that I did after trading away my Babe Ruth Yankees hat logo card was to start searching eBay for Red Sox players that I could add to my collection.  I got this Ortiz for a great price.  My auction closed at $5.50 when most others were ending in the $10 - $15 price range.

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.

I picked up one Clay Buchholz autographed card for my collection prior to this just to have one.  I was at the no-hitter and have a mini collection of Buchholz cards.  Buchholz has a terrible autograph and I never saw myself picking up another one of his scribbles.  Seeing this card changed my mind.  First off, this is signed on-card while my other autograph was on a sticker.  Second, Allen & Ginter autograph cards are beautiful.  Third, Buchholz’s autograph doesn’t look quite as bad on the little mini card.  Next up, for the Buchholz collection: one or two of his 2005 rookies.  From there, I’d love to get something nice framed with the ticket stub and a signed photo.  Maybe not something this elaborate, but I would love that as a gift some day.

I’ve picked up these cards before, but I haven’t had the best of luck getting these cards in good condition.  I win the auctions cheaply and always seem to find people that think shipping cards wrapped in paper towels actually does something to protect them.  These cards aren’t necessarily damaged, but they don’t look at that great either.  One day I’ll just buy one of each of the stamped factory sets from my Rockies and Marlins inaugural year collections.

I love the Lumberjacks inserts and was holding on to the one that I pulled from a box back when these first came out even thought it wasn’t of a player that I collected.  Now that I have this Piazza in my collection, I can trade away that other card.

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.

I never would have known about the Topps Tek set if it weren’t for card blogs.  Now it is safe to say that I’m officially hooked on this set.  I’ve picked up a few Piazza lots here and there and am slowly growing my collection.  Some of the designs are ugly, but the majority of them look nice.  The backgrounds with the various team logos in them especially look good.

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.

Technorati Tags: Mike Piazza,Glen Davis,Paul Pierce,Jeremy Piven,Clay Buchholz,Dee Brown,Larry Bird,Jorge Garcia

Topps redemptions are a fucking joke

From this point on, I’m selling each and every Topps redemption card that I get my hands on.  The ridiculousness that I’ve endured regarding 2009 Finest redemptions is beyond asinine.

I purchased my box of 2009 Finest 2 addresses ago which is very relevant to this story.  That was the address that I entered when I redeemed these cards.  I waited and waited and waited and nothing arrived.

Eventually, two of the six total redemptions that I was waiting for from Topps arrived.  One was a Finest redemption and one was a 2009 Red Hot Rookie.  Why would just one Finest card show up when all but the Hanson auto were sent out at the same time?  I’ve got no clue so I went back to waiting and waiting.

Getting sick of waiting, I contacted Topps Customer Support who I normally have good luck with.  They researched and found out that the other cards were shipped to a different address.  Why would some of the cards be sent to one address and others to a different address?  Again, I’ve got no clue.

So, one card trickled in with one of those “Please notify sender of your new address” stickers on it and another was re-sent from Topps.  I was still one card short and am still trying to have Topps send that card to me again.  That card is not the reason why I am writing this post though.

I’ve been obsessively following the progress of my Tommy Hanson autographed redemption ever since Topps tweeted about Hanson coming in to sign stuff.  It was marked shipped with a tracking number and so I checked it on an almost daily basis and waited and waited and waited.  Three weeks later, some tracking information finally arrived and… the card was sent to the wrong address.  Are you kidding me?  At this point my new address has been on file with Topps/Tristar Fulfillment for 6 months.  There’s no excuse for this.

Since the cards are now out in the wild, I decide to take a quick look on eBay so I’ll at least have an idea of what might someday magically appear in my mailbox.  So, I stumbled across this eBay auction.  A sticker auto!  A STICKER AUTO!  Are you fucking kidding me?  I’ve been waiting close to a year for this card and it’s a sticker auto.  What a joke that is.  There’s on-card autos in 2009 Topps Chrome, but this redemption card that was produced after that card is a sticker.

Not only is it a sticker, but it is a sticker stuck on an ugly card.  The area on the card is too small for the sticker and it ends up looking horrible.  Take a look at the completed auctions for this card and you’ll see some piss poor sticker placement.  There are crooked stickers.  Stickers that are partially covering the Finest logo on the card.  Stickers with off-center stickers.  I think I would have gotten better results if I had my four year old daughter put the stickers on these things.  So disappointed.

The only saving grace of this whole thing is that the card is selling for a decent price on eBay.  So, once the card comes in it is going to go right up on eBay and get the heck out of my collection.  I’ve got no tolerance for abominations such as this.  I’m also open to trade offers.  Anyone out there have a 1992 Fleer Update set or a really nice card of someone that I collect that you’d like to transform into this card?  Drop me a line and let me know.  I’d love to salvage something out of this fiasco.

Topps, if by any chance you end up reading this.  Please, for the love of god, cut way down on the number of redemption cards that you use.  The rookie redemptions rarely add any value to a set because by the time the cards are redeemed these rookies have a bunch of other cards that people are looking for instead.  I can see issuing a redemption card if it is for something like a dual signed card that you got signed by one player, but couldn’t hook up with the second player in time for the release, but issuing redemption cards for cards you don’t know if you’ll be able to get signed or for cards that you don’t plan on producing for another 6 months isn’t any good.  Just focus on giving those players great cards in an upcoming card instead.  Most importantly, redemption cards lead to frustration and wasted space in packs when you go and open older boxes.  It’s not the fault of the purchaser that you couldn’t get your cards done in time, but they have to suffer by getting useless, expired redemption cards in their boxes.  Hopefully you can keep redemptions out of Chicle and Ginter or else I think I’m done with Topps products for the year.

On a related note, these same Finest cards led to a terrible eBay experience as well.  Since these cards sell for next to nothing these days, I decided that I’d try and put together the set.  So, I found one sell on eBay that had three of the cards listed.  I asked if he combined shipping and he replied that he did.  I won three of the cards for .99¢ and one other card for $1.29.  The seller didn’t seem happy about that since no matter how many times I contacted him, he wouldn’t send me an invoice with the combined shipping.  I waited two weeks before leaving him negative feedback as directed by eBay.  I find it strange that they have non-paying bidder strikes, but not non-selling strikes.  That’s eBay for you.  I’ll end this tangent before it takes on a life of its own.

Sorry for the bitch session.  I plan to follow this up tonight with some much better content.  Who knows, maybe someone will benefit from this by adding a Tommy Hanson card to their collection.

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.

  Sticking to the non-sports department, here’s another Jeremy Piven letter to the phrase “Hug It Out.”  It doesn’t look like many people are breaking Icons anymore since I don’t see many of the Hrbek or Piven cards that I’m looking for.  Looks like I should have jumped on that one H from the Hrbek set that showed up on eBay, but it went for about four times what all of the other letters were going for.

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.

Technorati Tags: Dwight Evans,Mike Piazza,Paul Pierce,Big Baby

Tek-ticular Fortitude

Taking a little break from packing to sort through some cards that came in the mail the other day and get everything ready to transported.  The great thing about all of the card blogs out there is that I’m constantly learning about new products that I never knew existed, especially from years that I didn’t collect outside of buying blasters here and there at K-Mart.  One of the sets that I was introduced to was Topps Tek.

I love oddball sets and this is definitely an oddball set.  Topps Tek took parallels to a whole new level.  Each player had multiple cards with different patterns in the background.  When Tek started off in 1998, there were 90 different designs of 90 players.  That’s a little much.  The backgrounds were just a bunch of random designs, but that would change with future designs.  1999 Tek had backgrounds that had something to do with the player and multiple pictures were used.  That continued with the 2000 Tek set.  2000 Tek had 20 variations for each player using four different pictures on five cards each.  The last five cards of each player were color variations that are numbered to 2000 and there are also gold parallels numbered to 10.

I recently came across a lot of 9 Piazza 2000 Tek cards on eBay and had to make them mine.  The auction closed at $5.50 and with shipping I ended up paying around eighty cents a card.  Not bad, but also not great for a Piazza base card.  It was worth it to pick up nine different variations at once though.  I also picked up some Piazza Tek cards from various years on CheckOutMyCards.com.  Here’s a sampling of the 2000 Tek cards that I have.  The team logo backgrounds are by far the best.  The stats, position and what hand they bat/throw with backgrounds are some of the worst.

Technorati Tags: Topps Tek,Mike Piazza

Serial number = jersey number

People are always looking for reasons for cards to be worth something.  One idea that seems to have stuck is putting a premium on cards that have a serial number that matches the player’s jersey number.  I’ve picked up a couple of cards here and there that were numbered with the player’s jersey number, but I never really had to pay a premium for them.

Back when I first opened my box of Topps Tip Off, I was so disappointed by the condition of the cards that I didn’t really look them over all that carefully.  I just boxed them up and sent them to Topps.  Topps was nice enough to replace the whole box card for card and once I had those back I started looking at what I had pulled in more detail.

I noticed that I had pulled both LeBron and Kobe in the red parallels numbered to 2008.  When I went to list them on eBay, I noticed that the Kobe was number 24/2008.  I figured that might cause the card to sell for $5 instead of $1, but I had no clue that the auction would close at just over $18.  That blows me away since that’s about half of what I paid for the whole box of cards.  If only it worked that way every time you bought a box of cards.  I’d love pulling most of the set and one card worth half of what I paid for the box out of anything these days.  Most of the time you’re lucky if you got half of the set and a card that you can sell for $5.

So, what do all of you think.  If you had the choice of two cards for the same price and one of them had the jersey serial number, would you prefer that one?  How much more would you be willing to pay for that type of card?  Does it matter more for high end cards than it does for parallels?  I’d love to hear what all of you think about this topic.

Technorati Tags: Kobe Bryant,Topps Tip Off