A Prime Deal!

The thought of looking for cards on Amazon has never crossed my mind. My normal go to merchants are eBay, Comc, Sportlots and occasionally Beckett Marketplace. If I need some weird off the wall item for my house I'll head over to Amazon to purchase it and have it in my hands within two days. Or, I'll use their streaming service to catch a movie every now and then on Prime. That being said, I decided to take a few minutes yesterday to browse around Amazon just to see what they had to offer as it relates to cardboard. Those few minutes ended up saving me over $150 I've been watching on eBay. There are two Bowman Sterling Refractors on eBay that are listed at $50 a piece as well as a graded copy of a Topps Opening Day Gold parallel for $100. $200 for three cards is just too rich for my blood. Of course there is an ungraded copy of the Opening Day Gold parallel on COMC for $142.28 but I won't go there. So, how much did I pay for the three cards listed above on Amazon? $30 dollars. I guess I'll have to start keeping an eye out on Amazon for more deals.

The Bane that is Short Prints

I've come to expect that each year I'll have to track down a short print or two in the Topps flagship set. Photo variations, retired stars or hall of famers, you name it and Topps has done it all for the sake of adding cards we collectors must chase if we want to have a "complete" team set. Sure, I could choose to ignore them completely and stick with only collecting the standard checklist, but the ocd portion of my brain would always be stewing over these cards. Of course it wasn't always like that. I still remember the junk wax days fondly knowing that I could put together a Reds team set for less than $5. Now it's not uncommon for me to spend around $20. If there's a super short print involved then all bets are off. That being said, I just noticed this past weekend that Topps released it's series 2 set for this year and I wasn't surprised to find out that there were 3 short prints in the series. I was able to track down the 12 card base set as well as the 3 short prints on eBay for just over $23. I wonder if there will come a day when Topps decides to go back to the way things were and put a stick of gum back in a pack of cards and remove those nefarious short prints from flagship. Who am I kidding, that's just asking too much.

It ain't over til it's over

It's been a year and a half since I've been able to add another card to the 2013 Topps Votto Rainbow. Patience definitely pays. I was surprised last week to see this black printing plate pop up on eBay. I already have printing plates for Opening Day, Chrome and Topps Mini but I had yet to find a printing plate for the base Topps. On top of that the other three printing plates I had were for different colors: yellow, cyan and magenta. Luckily I was able to come out as the high bidder and I'm now anxiously awaiting for it's arrival in the mail. With this pick up I'm down to just needing five more cards for my rainbow: 2013 Topps Factory Orange numbered to 230, 2013 Topps Wrapper Redemption Silver Slate numbered to 10, 2013 Topps Opening Day Toy's R Us Purple parallel, 2013 Topps Chrome Camo Refractor numbered to 15 and 2013 Topps Chrome Pink Refractor numbered to 5.

Hitting the Halfway Mark

Today I was finally able to cross the halfway point for my Joey Votto Rookie project. I've been looking for this 2008 Topps Chrome Copper Refractor for quite a while and I finally found one on Beckett Marketplace for a price to good to pass up. This is my 45th different Votto rookie card. That just leaves me with 45 more cards to go. Unfortunately, many of the cards I still have to chase are numbered parallels and refractors. The possibility of me completing this project by the end of the year are slim to none. Regardless, it's been a fun little project to say the least. I'm hopeful that by the end of the year I'll cross the 60 card threshold. If you're interested in seeing what cards I've amassed thus far you can check out my progress here.

Lou Gehrig says...

Lou Gehrig says that I got this Tony Piet for a steal. I stumbled across this listing last week on eBay with a starting bid of $.99. Once the auction wrapped up this past Sunday the auction ended with a final price of $.99. There are no creases in the card and with a few fuzzy corners and a little bit of surface wear I would say that for once I came out way ahead on a listing. I love the design of the 1934 Goudeys. With the Gehrig tag line on the bottom to the sharp colors and baseball diamond drawing in the background, this is one of my favorite pre-war card sets ever produced. The Piet is the first Goudey to enter my collection and I hope to add a few more before the end of the year.

Not Everything is Black and White

That being said, everything is black and white when it comes to the 1948 Bowman set. Last week I was able to purchase 4 out of the 5 Reds cards I needed for this set at a decent price. While I'm not a huge fan of the 48 Bowman set, it still holds some significance being the first set distributed after World War II. Almost every single card I've seen of the set is either a portrait or staged photo. Bowman did follow up the 48 set with a 49 set that incorporated color, but that wasn't much of an improvement. My opinion is that if Bowman was going to use a black and white color pallet for their intro into the baseball card arena, try to make the border exciting or something. Just look at the 1922 American Carmel cards. Those cards are black and white but their design is amazing. Just my two cents. I still find it fascinating that Hank Sauer started his major league career playing for the Reds.

Milling Around

Here's the latest T206 to enter my collection. This marks my 12th T206 card and the first to feature the Old Mill advertising. I'm 11 cards shy of completing the Reds team set so I'm officially past the halfway mark on completing this team set. On a side note, I discovered that Dubuc was caught up in the largest scandal in baseball history. During the 1920 investigation into the Black Sox Scandal, evidence was discovered showing that Sleepy Bill Burns had advised Dubuc that the 1919 World Series had been fixed and that Dubuc should, therefore, bet on the Cincinnati Reds. Dubuc was neither a participant nor a conspirator in the scandal, but was pursued for his "guilty knowledge" of the fix. (according to Wikipedia).