Have you ever?

 I hadn't, that is until I did. What am I talking about you ask? We've all been busting down the door over at Sportlots over the last year and half and longer. What I haven't done over there is bid on one of their auctions. They're different, but I bid on my first one, and I won.......YEP.

I bid on a lot of 2008 Upper Deck cards. This is a set I am building, and needed a lot of the cards. 

I seen the shipping and adjusted my bid. I put a max bid of $5.00 and waited.

You have to wait to win. They prevent sniping, and in order to win an auction it must go 3 days without an outbid on you. As you can see above I won the auction for a quarter. (.25), Wow.

Then to top it off, the guy priority shipped them, and two days later I had them in my binder. I wound up needing 159 of the cards for my set build. Pulled another 40ish for my PC binders and about 25 for another collection. So pretty good deal for me. I am certain the guy paid more than he got from me than the shipping actually cost. Unlike yesterday's post this one Praises the heck out of the seller (Mike7830). 

I do have some eye brow raising questions though.

Do you see any difference in the cards above?

I didn't wither, until I was sorting them and noticed that several cards had no gray (look at the number area as well as the stat bar/line. I did my research and found a forum on TCDB from a year or so ago. ONLY cards numbered 701-799 have this variance, but nobody count it as a variant or parallel. 

Here are a few more grayless backs that made it into my PC's.  Some say they believe it was just a boo boo in the printing, and some do not because they pulled both the base with the gray and without from the same fat pack boxes. Who knows, but they are different and i did get one of the three high numbered Braves, so just two more to find.

 

Remember when?

I do.

 

I remember pulling the redemption for this card way back last year. I registered it/redeemed. I waited and waited and finally after whatever the period was (I think 120 days) went by that I was able to request a replacement and I did so. That seems like it too has been several months ago. 

Low and behold yesterday I found a bubble mailer laying at the door with the original redemption card. Apparently Fed-Ex delivered it which brings me to the point of my post title. I am not one that gets a lot of non post office deliveries, never have been. Not even with Covid did my UPS or Fed-Ex deliveries increase. Nope. My guess is a lot of people have increased their home deliveries since Covid, but even before Covid with Amazon (although they use the post office a lot). Not me. I have had a few from both UPS and Fed-Ex and what I remember is that the delivery person would ask for a signature most times, not always but most of the time. When they didn't they at least knocked on the door or rang the door bell. These days, nada, nothing they drop and leave. At least that has been my experience over the last few years. In fact, last week I got another Fex-Ex package (actually two), t.v. trays (I needed to replace the ones we had). Anyways, last week was storming everyday, pouring down rain. Not only did the driver not knock on the door or ring the bell, they left both boxes sitting at the base of our 30 foot long wheelchair ramp......in the rain. Why didn't they bring them up the ramp and sit them on the covered porch? Pure shit I say. Either they were sorry excuses of a human being (wasting good oxygen) or they were "offended" by the US. Flag that is always on display (again, wasting oxygen). I remember when customer service was important, and people took pride in their work. Those days at least for now seem to be gone. One day....one day those good things will be back.

Wacky Wednesday: 2020 Topps Old School series 9

 Topps released it's 9th series of Old School Wackys last year during the height of the pandemic. I did not buy the set from Topps. They charge way to much. However, I was able to pick up the full base set online, probably Ebay (I don't remember) for a relatively low cost.

I have no idea why Topps issued these stickers as part of the Old School run. There is nothing about them that resembles the original 16 series of Wackys. As you may know already I decided that 2020 would be the last year of trying to complete any of the "NEW" Topps Wacky releases. I did do they 2020 weekly sets. For 2021 they have gone to on demand only once again, but this time with a monthly release which is better. I'm just not buying it from them. If I see the sets cheap (and I mean cheap) I'll pick those up. I run the checklist and print runs on my excel pages just so I know what is out there should I run across some and I'll know what set it is from. Anyways, this post complete my run of Wacky Packages until I re-do my collection and get them all done up in binders. 

I'll be back to posting some "Wacky" (interesting) baseball cards on Wednesday moving forward.

Wacky Wednesday Series 15: 1975

 1975 series 15.  I own 18 of the 30 stickers. I also have a checklist and a completed Puzzle.

The puzzle.

Both printings * and ** on the Hack's.

Most stickers have a retail value of $10.00 with the exception of Bloodweiser which is $15.00. However, most can be had a for a few bucks each. 

I do not own any today from the 1976 16th series (original final series) yet. Those are some very pricey stickers.

I do have one set of Topps Old School to show you that will make their debut on this blog next week. It is Old School Series 9 which Topps released online only last year 2020.

Incoming

 Last week I got a surprise bubble mailer from P-Town Tom. Tom was sent me a slew of Braves in hopes that I could use some.

I already had this one, but I can use it in my "signing collection". It is glorious. From the dazed look on Murphy's face to the cop in the background or maybe it's the blue suit....no it's the signing left handed. Dale Murphy was right handed...throwing and batting. Most people didn't know that he picked up writing left handed as kid though.

Now, here is a card Tom sent that I didn't have. Thanks Tom.

Wacky Wednesday: Series 12

 A few more additions to my Wacky Collection.

The puzzle for the 12th series.

I had hundreds of this series that were part of that 5th grade confiscation. My mom and I moved at the Christmas break back to Georgia, and I was unable to retrieved them from the principal at the end of the school year. Man, what a loss. I still need 6 more stickers to complete this set.......again.

My 2021 Stadium Club Braves team set

 Got them all (14).

Eight horizontal and just 6 vertical cards. I prefer vertical (in case you didn't know), and same for the card backs too. Now, to work on the set build. There were no singles or dime/quarter boxes at the last show. There were plenty of boxes, Hobby and retail (flippers). I have yet to find a base set on Ebay, but I check everyday. Well, I take that back, I seen one that was asking $119 bucks. I don't think so. I scooped up a slew on SportLots for .18 each. I can wait until they are cheap.

Last of the vintage from Jax. 1969 Topps.

 I was able to find some upgrades for my 1969 Topps set build.

Eleven of these were upgrades to my binder and 5 cards were new to me.

A few more vintage from the show.

 Running with some 68's.

What is great about these 68 Topps is that the lowest card number is 400.

Three of my pickings were upgrades for cards already in the binder, and one of the newbies will need to be upgraded (the backwards facing card).

Didn't grab any big names, but knocked down several high numbers.

We'll run with some 69's next time.

1967 Topps

 I was able to add quite a few 67's for my set build.

I paid .25 each for these additions.

Among these were 8 upgrades to cards I already had plus 3 others that I needed but will need to be upgraded (those are the ones that are backwards).

All in all made 41 changes on the list (38 removed and 3 marked for upgrade). The 67's made up $10.25 of the total of $40.00 I spent on vintage cards at the show. A good mix that included some high numbers, rookies, and semi-stars.

Wacky Wednesday: 1974 series 11

 Getting this post out early this morning before Elsa gets here. First band due any minute.

My 2nd favorite puzzles of the entire first 16 series. 

Another completed set.  Sleepy is the most expensive sticker ($15) (look I got both printing variations...yea me). The 2nd most expensive sticker is Cult 45 ($10). The rest can be had for $4-8.00 which is full price so should be able to find them for a buck or two.

Going to go hunker down to weather this storm. 

Quarter vintage

 I actually used my cheat sheets Saturday as I poured through boxes of vintage. The boxes were dollar boxes, but as I am a bulk buyer and repeat customer....it is always much less. This trip cost me a quater a piece for the vintage. I grabbed one 1960 Topps.

The backs are great! 

I also grabbed nine 65's:

One of the 65's was an upgrade.

I also added 23 cards to my 66' set build. Three were upgrades and two will need to be upgraded.

The backwards card (and a few to follow through these posts) mark pick ups that will need to be upgraded.

Thursday will be a post of 1967 Topps, the set that provided the most new additions to my set builds.

Yep, I went to a card show this weekend

 I headed over to Jacksonville on Saturday. Walked around to see what was there, and wound up at my buddy Fred's table where I spent the remainder of the day.  No, I didn't bring home a ton of cards. Right off the bat, Fred handed be a half filled 600 count box of Series 2 Topps. I won't bore anyone with those. I had already p[ut together the series 2 set. Just lacking 1 card Hayes #644. Nope, wasn't in the box. Still I appreciated the box, because I could get my PC guys out of it and put the rest in the trade boxes. Fred charged me $5.00 for them (easily 200 cards). That's just two cents apiece including the super stars. That makes the day a win all by itself, but I picked up something else from Fred. 

When the day was done, Fred told me to look through another box real quick. I pulled these out, he said they are free. FREE, Game used, Jeter, Brooks, purple, Nolan and Ichiro for free. Yep win. Now onto to the other buy. I looked where Fred usually has odd ball things like the programs I picked up the last two months. None this month.

A complete twelve "Post-card" set of Nolan Ryan. And then there was this....

I scooped them up quick. Fred said......you may have guessed $5.00. 

Obviously the cards above would not have taken 3.5 hours. Fred had the dollar boxes there, this time they were all vintage. So I loaded up with my sheets with me, I pulled cards I needed for set builds. I will post about those by the year. Meanwhile......

I grabbed these extras for my PC. They were a quarter each.

See ya tomorrow with a start on the 60's vintage.