Swapping out my Willie / Tapping into the Reserve

You may recall back in February I showed off the new "best card of my collection", that being a gorgeous Willie Mays 2003 Retired auto refractor #'d 24(jersey number eBay 1/1!) out of 25. Well, there's a guy out there trying to complete the 03 Retired refractor auto set, just as I am for 2004. He made his intentions known for working out a deal for the Willie. I politely declined his advances for a while, but he eventually made me an offer I couldn't refuse (no, nothing mafia related, just a bunch of money).

And so it is with a heavy heart (and wallet) that I announce the Willie is mine no more. While it was a lovely card, it wasn't exactly a perfect fit for my collection. I'm not really working on completing that set (though I keep my eyes open for killer deals), and Mays isn't even a "guy I collect"! So given the opportunity to sell it for twice what I paid just a couple months prior.. well, I just couldn't pass that up. (Anybody out there with 2003 Retired refractors to sell, let me know and I'll get you in touch with my guy.)

Anyways, with the ample proceeds funding my cardboard habit, I've brought in a few nice cards to my collection (see my prior post with recent 2004 Retired pickups). Another favorite set of mine is 2001+2002 Topps Archives Reserve ("Reserve" means it's basically an all chrome refractor set; a smaller, fancier version of Archives). I've put together both base sets and shown them off here and here.

I won't focus on it till I put my 2004 Retired Refractors set to bed, but I can see myself having a long-term goal to own every Archives Reserve card.. like, a Reserve Master Set.. including all the autos, relics, and even the football set and its hits. It's a daunting chase, to be sure, but I just love those cards, so I'm sure it would be satisfying for me.

Sometimes I take a curious look on eBay for deals toward this goal. And well, who should I find but a Willie Mays auto from 2001 Reserve. Seemed to be a reasonable price (less than a third of what I sold my previous Mays auto for). Helps make up for that loss and knocks a big card off my long-term Reserve Master Set, making it a good fit for me.

So yeah, I bought it and gave it a Glamour Shots photoshoot, so let's get on with it!

Great looking reprint of Willie's iconic 1952 Topps card. Maybe not as staggering as my last Mays auto, but definitely satisfactory for my needs. I don't care much about grading, so it doesn't bug me that it only got an 8 (which is "bad" as far as grading modern cards goes. 8=bad, 9=good, 10=great). Reserve is known for often being off-center, though this Willie seems fine to me. The signature could be a bit bigger and bolder, but it's not too bad. I'll keep it slabbed for storage/protection reasons, but but again, whatever. Very happy with this card!

As far as other progress on my Reserve Master Set, I also tracked down a very elusive Gwynn.

This is from the "red-headed stepchild" of the Reserve family: 2001 Topps Archives Reserve Future Rookie Reprints. It's a 20-card set only available inserted as bonus cards in factory Limited Edition set ("Fancy Pants version of flagship"); the auction was a 2-card lot that also included the Limited Edition base Gwynn. I've got 4 of the 20 Reserve Future Rookie cards now. They aren't numbered, but I'd put the run around just 200-300 each (just a guess). They would have looked a lot better were these refractors, not just drab grey chrome cards, but hey, they've got the "Archives Reserve" logo on them, so gotta count them as part of the master set. The Jeter will be the priciest outta this little set. But the Gwynn is hands down my favorite from it, so I'm glad to pick this one up. (Gwynn was still active in 2001, his final year, so that's why he didn't get included in the regular version of Archives/Reserve along with rookie peers Boggs and Sandberg. Too bad.. I'd really like a refractor reprint of his '83 Topps card.. Do any exist? I haven't come across one. Tons of other reprints of that card out there, but none with a nice rainbow shine to it.)

And hey, look at this! I even picked up a Reserve football card recently.

full disclosure: this card isn't in-hand yet. This is the eBay picture.

This might be my best football card now. Beautiful auto of the late William "Refrigerator" Perry (I could have sworn I heard about him passing away a couple years ago, but happy to learn I'm wrong. He's still around but doesn't sign much these days). I've mentioned before that I loved The Fridge when I was a little kid.. not because I gave a crap about sports back then, but because he was a G.I. Joe guy (action figure available by special send-away offer) and I was nuts for G.I. Joes as a tyke. Great looking card and a strong first step with the football line of Reserve. Between the sickening end to this past Super Bowl, all the Deflategate bullshit, and the increasing likelihood of the Chargers moving out of San Diego, my interest in/opinion of the NFL is at an all-time low. I've even fleetingly considered dumping my entire football card collection. But nah, I'd miss it too much, particularly the old school guys and awesome cards like this one.

Thanks for stopping by. Have a great holiday weekend, everybody!

Triumphant cards of transcendence

My 2004 Topps Retired Signature Edition Autograph Refractor setbuild project has made some solid progress lately with 5 new shiny additions!

It feels like this collecting goal is coming of age!

Over all (counting both base autos and refractors), I only need 8 more cards to complete the set. Only counting refractors, I've now hit the halfway point in the goal, with 38 out of the 76 cards. (My end goal is to have a full refractor set, and once I have a refractor of a particular card, I no longer need the base auto. I already had base autos of these 5 cards, so that means I've now got the base autos available for sale or trade.. so please get in touch if you're interested.)

Let's take a closer look at each of these beautiful new additions...

Ferguson Jenkins' base card is one of the most plentiful autos in the set. I have two of them, in fact! But the refractor is obviously more scare, at just 25 copies like the rest of the refractors. But still, there were a whopping three copies of it on eBay at the same time.. unprecedented since I've been working on this set. Obviously, I went with the cheapest of the three. Nice looking card with an early photo of the Hall of Famer.

Next up is Roy Face...

Now, Roy is thee most common base auto in the set, all alone in the "Group H" category, the final grouping and most plentiful in regards to odds of pulling. But again, all the refractors are #'d /25, so there are as many of it as any of the big shots in Group A. I don't recall ever seeing the refractor for sale before, so when it popped up for a decent price, I jumped on it even though I could have tried making a Best Offer. Probably cost myself a few bucks due to my impatience and paranoia, but I'm ok with it. Great looking card. To quote Wikipedia, "A pioneer of modern relief pitching, he was the archetype of what came to be known as the closer, and the National League's greatest reliever until the late 1960s, setting numerous league records during his career."

Next, someone call a Doctor!

The Dwight Gooden refractor first popped up a bit overpriced with no Best Offer option. I was tempted to overpay for it, but this time I exercised restraint and it ended with no bids. It was then relisted, still overpriced, but with a Best Offer option. I made an offer and ended up with it.

The seller surprised me with a bonus card..

Wow, I've gotten junk commons thrown in as surprise bonus filler before, but never a hit like this! (unless a seller was making up for something)! A free auto #'d 20/99! It's kinda of a random card.. nobody I had heard of. Kenjon hasn't done much in the NFL, but turns out this guy was a standout at University of Oregon a few years back, so maybe my Portland address was what inspired the choice. I don't care much about the Ducks, to be honest, but lots of people around here do, so the card might come in handy as a little gift one of these days. So big thanks to that seller! (More eBay seller generosity to follow.)

Now back to the black rainbowed cards.. Vida Blue and Ron Swoboda below came from the same seller.

I love Vida Blue. He was even a main PC guy of mine for a while. This is probably the strangest photo in the set. What the hell is he doing? My guess is he just snagged a chopper to the left side of the mound. Just a bizarre image.

In contrast to the Vida card, Ron Swoboda soothes us with a boring posed shot. No offense to Mets fans, but Swoboda might be the least-renowned guy in the whole set. His career wasn't all that long or notable, but his claim to fame is that he got hot down the stretch in '69 and was key to the Miracle Mets winning it all that year. Nice card.

Anyways, the seller has a pretty nice selection of 2004 Retired refractors, and I've bought from him at least a couple times before. I thought these two were both a little overpriced, and there wasn't a Best Offer option. But I've learned from eBay pros like Dodger Penguin that sometimes if you send the seller a message ("ask a question") you can occasionally get them to work with you on a deal. So I sent a message offering a deal if I agreed to buy both the refractors I was interested in. He quickly agreed and everyone was happy.

So, once in a while when I make an offer on eBay, if I include a message I'll say something like, "I'd really love this card for my collection, but $__ is the best I can do. Thanks for your consideration. Check out my blog Baseball Card Breakdown!" It's not just a cheap plug, but also a sly way to give the seller a way to contact me outside of eBay without breaking the eBay rule of giving out your email address. A seller will sometimes give you a better deal away from eBay (or as many dealers call it: feeBay! lol). It's a risk (not covered by eBay's buyer protection guarantee), but it's worked out fine the 2 or 3 times I've gone that route.

But yeah, even though we worked out our deal through eBay, the seller still took a few minutes to check out my blog and told me he liked it. And then a few days later when the Retired cards showed up, he knocked me out by basically cleaning out my Desperate junk-era Dozen wantlist on the sidebar!

These Gwynns filled some notable gaps in my PC. I'm especially happy about that Fleer Ultra insert, as it was the last one I needed to wrap up that nice tribute series.

A couple needed Robbies, too. Man, I'm just now realizing '90 Score is an underrated set. The Gwynn and Alomar are both great looking cards. I feel like Score would be held in much higher regard today if their first few sets weren't so damn overproduced.

And a Maddux and a Marquis! When I posted my 100 Greg Maddux cards and ceremoniously stuck a fork in that PC a month or so ago, everyone got all up in my face and said my Maddux collection ain't shit unless I got that 2005 Topps card commemorating his 300th win. So I put it on my wantlist and now I've got it and hopefully that'll silence my razor-tongued critics. As for the Marquis, regular readers will know that's a particular card I'm trying to amass a silly number of. I've gotten over 300 now and every one counts (just ask Greg Maddux there).

So big thanks to Southpaw Cards for being awesome and surprising me with some bonus wanted cards. Sure, they're not expensive cards, but they've been on my wantlist for a while and the gesture is very appreciated. The only card in my "junk" wantlist he didn't hook me up with was 1984 Donruss Gwynn, which yes, I'll admit isn't really junk but I was just trying to sneak it in there. Ha.

Well, that's it for today. Thank you for your unwavering patronage!

Reggie!

When I collected cards as a kid (1990-1993), "my guy" was Reggie Jackson. I'm not sure why I was drawn to him. He had already been retired for a few years. Never played for my hometown Padres or anything. (My best friend Doug was already collecting obvious favorite player choice Tony Gwynn, so I didn't want to copy him.) But yeah, I guess Reggie just seemed like a mythical figure.. larger-than-life.. Naked Gun.. World Series hero.. all that.

So while I collected a lot of players back then, Reggie was my main guy. My Reggie PC was the cornerstone of my collection. When I got back into collecting a couple decades later, I was pretty much over Reggie. Still had my old PC (among the 15% or so of my original card collection that I held onto) and still picked up a new card here and there, but he definitely wasn't my focus anymore. Even so, only my Gwynn cards can challenge Reggie as my largest PC today.

Today's Reggie's birthday, so figured I'd take the opportunity to post my Reggie collection here on the blog. So strap in and let's look at about 160 cards in chronological order.

Oh man.. this card. I talked my mom into buying this card for me at the LCS back in the day. I think it was like $300. It took me like a year's worth of allowances and chores to pay her back for it. I wasn't complaining at the time, but after the mid-90s card-values bubble popped, this card crashed and is now worth about a tenth of what we paid for it. Bummer. It's in great shape, other than being off-center. I even "custom made" a screwdown case for it, though the lettering hasn't held up too well.

Here's the back. "I'll wave to you from third!"

The '71 card was another prized possession from when I was young. I may have marker'd up the corners, but can't recall for sure. (Shame on younger me, if so!) The 1970 cards are both relatively recent additions.

I need Reggie's '72 Topps card. A glaring hole in my collection! I also need would like another '73 since I'm also working on that set, so it'd be nice to not have to share a card between a PC and a set, though I'm not above doing that. Ugly card, though, with Reggie making a granny face and his arms all blurry. Unfortunately, he won MVP that year, so we'll see this card again.

I've got a bunch of '74 Reggies, but funny enough, I still need his base Topps card. And yes, I'm not above counting team cards as part of a PC if the dude (or his signature, as the case may be) is identifiable.

Need his '76 base card. As for the SSPC, I know it's a hotly debated topic in the collector world whether the set should be considered '75 or '76, so took a noncommittal stance and put it in the middle. Still pains me there was never a playing-days Orioles card of him.

Here's that iconic yet tragic '77 Topps card with the cartoon helmet.

1979 Topps looks like it's trying to be a "real" version of the 1977 picture. That '80 Topps is my most-recent addition, picking it up from the last card show.

1981: The Topps monopoly crumbles. Donruss and Fleer take multiple helpings of a big star to bolster their checklist. Still pretty dumb that Fleer called him "Mr. Baseball" instead of his real nickname.

Lots of 1982 cards, including a couple shared with another PC guy of mine, Dave Winfield. Whoops, I think that Diamond King belongs in 1983.. my fault for looking at the copyright date on the back rather than the Angels logo on the front.

A lot of '83s.

1984. The big Donruss card is in a "custom made" card holder I made for it back in the day.

1985 includes that creepy 3-D Baseball Stars thing.

Looks like 1986 might be my most plentiful year for Reggies, including my sock card.

Looking good in 1987. Love the OPC card that's a morph between the Topps base and the Topps Traded card. Props to Sportflics for numbering Reggie's card #44 (his jersey number).

That's 99 cards from his playing days for me. (Dang, so close to 100!) Here we have the special tribute subset from Score (Oriole Reggie alert!), and a couple sunset issues. Fleer was the only big boy to give Reggie a real final card in 1988, but the post-strikeout photo they chose hardly seems to be a fitting tribute to a retiring great. The Sportflics card is nice...

...But the egregious error on the back (463 home runs instead of 563) kinda ruins it. Still a cool card, though.. and Sportflics' lenticular gimmick often makes people forget they beat Score and Upper Deck to the punch with full-color backs.

It's tempting to end this post here and do a "part 2" with the post-career cards another day.. BUT NO! WE MUST CARRY ON! Let's take a deep breath and dive into the post-playing-days cards.

[deep breath in........]

[deep breath out.......]

No cards in '89, but Reggie came back strong in '90 thanks in large part to the Baseball Heroes insert set in 1990 Upper Deck. I'm still missing a few of them. The 2 in the upper right aren't dupes.. one is a slight variation:

One of them has a pure white "HEROES" whereas the common version has thin black shading lines in the word. That was a pretty neat pull, though I would have preferred one of the autographed cards that were inserted 1:million.

1991 is mostly represented by the dumb Upper Deck set that mashed up photos of Reggie and Nolan Ryan with Looney Tunes characters. It's crazy to think about, but for a few months in the early 90s, Looney Tunes made an inexplicable comeback and was huge for a brief moment. Space Jam and all that. The cool kids in school all owned a shirt or two with Tweety, Bugs, or whoever. But it didn't last long. The hologram with Daffy is kinda cool, and at one (very brief) point may have been among the most valuable cards in my collection. You could probably find it in a dimebox today.

But yeah, that ridiculous Looney Tunes set is probably responsible for killing any drive in me to be a Reggie supercollector. The inserts in 1990 Upper Deck seemed like a pretty bad-ass tribute. But that was just the tip of the iceberg, and the post-career cards of Reggie would just keep flowing unabated into the thousands. It's definitely too much work to be a serious Reggie collector now, but God bless any of you out there giving it a go!

The Kellogg's miniposter doesn't really count as a "card" I know, but it folds up into nearly card size, so it's kept with my Reggie cards and so, whatever, here it is. As for the real cards, well there's an unlicensed Clark Bar card and a super ugly cartoon card, both from Upper Deck.

I don't have any Reggie cards from 1994-1999, so we've jumped into the next millennium. 2001 features a fuzzy text card (I've cut out a window in the sleeve so I can feel the fuzz and still protect the corners). As for the Post 500 Home Run Club card, I originally just had the sealed copy, pulled out of a cereal box myself. That "mini" isn't really a card, but just cut out of the cereal box so I could see what the front looked like (the other side of the unopened pack includes Jimmie Foxx, I believe). Years later I got the other copy off Listia. So I don't really need the fake mini anymore, but oh well, it's still in my collection.

As for the two '69 rookie refractor reprints, I must confess that these aren't really kept in my Reggie PC, rather they are included in my complete sets of 2001 and 2002 Archives Reserve, respectively. I plucked them out for this photoshoot for completeness' sake. I wouldn't mind getting dupes of them someday for the PC. I also need second cards of '71 and '73 Topps since I'm working on completing both of those sets. Otherwise, I can't think of any complete sets I have (or am working on) with Reggie cards. Oh wait, 2003 Retired! F*ck! Forgot to pull that one out.

The Orioles card (!!) is from a Baltimore Lottery thing. It sells for like $15 on eBay and a buck-fifty on COMC. I have the complete base set of 2004 Retired, but luckily I pulled a dupe of Reggie, so the pictured card is truly part of the PC, not borrowed from the set. As I mentioned, I forgot to pull out the Reggie base card 2003 Retired and am too lazy to retake the photo (already did once when I forgot about the Lottery card.. it's not dated on the back.) But yeah, I think 2003 Retired is my only Reggie card not pictured in this post.

The PC goes dark for 2005 and 2006, but comes back strong with a couple Masterpieces in 2007.

2010 has some cool cards, though the one of the left looks like Reggie is saying, "Get that frucking camera out of my face before I break it!"

I don't typically count contest cards like that one up top as a real card, but I made an exception for this one featuring that shitty 1977 card again. The '75 on the bottom is one of those 60 Years of Topps reprints, I believe. I accidentally bought it for a couple bucks on eBay thinking it was a vintage 1975 Topps card. That was back during my reintroduction to the hobby a few years ago.. I'd like to think I wouldn't make that same mistake again today. Not sober, at least.

2012 has some decent cards, including a wonderful mini (Oriole Reggie alert!) in the style of 1987 Topps.

Here's my only certified auto from Reggie, made extra cool in my eyes by being a Christmas Card.

And we close out with a few cards from the past couple years. Another Orioles card, but made less cool by the fact that Topps already used that same photo recently on the '87 mini. Booo, lazy Topps.

I used to have an autographed Reggie baseball, but I got rid of it before I moved. I hate collecting baseballs. Too awkward to store and too many condition things to worry about (fading, yellowing). I've only got one now (Dick Allen auto).

But one non-card thing I have hung onto is this plaque with a signed 8x10...

I believe this was a Christmas present from my mom long ago, bought at the card shop in the mall. It might be legit, but who knows. Whatever, it's kinda cool.

Finally, the container wherein I keep my Reggies is a bit of a collectable in its own right!

When I was a kid, my friend Ricky's dad worked as a mechanic for Pacific Southwest Airlines, an airline based out of San Diego known for smiling planes (awesome!). They went out of business in 1988 (just like Reggie!) This metal first-aid kit case I got from Ricky all those years ago always seemed like a good place to store cards.. somewhat resistant to water, fire, etc. So I kept my Reggies in it, and still do. I used to keep some of my other "good cards" in it too, but eventually Reggie took it over for himself.

Thanks for reading.
Happy Birthday, Reggie!