Okay okay okay... The Shohei Ohtani rookie auto story or is it stories?

 We are going to begin at the beginning. While I was up in Georgia taking care of my Uncle (I sure do miss him.. he was so good to me), I would drive back home every couple of weeks to gather my mail, pay bills and the like and drive back all in the same day usually. But, once in a while I'd get to stay a night at home. On those instances I'd make sure to hit the Walmart that is super close to my house (2 minute drive). Well, on back to back home visits back in 2018 I hit paydirt. One trip bought some blasters and took them back to GA. Opened them up and got the first Ohtani auto. Next trip grabbed some more but different product, again took them back to GA opened them and bingo another Ohtani auto. One of them is numbered to just 25 too. Now I don't recall which blaster was first but that really doesn't matter. I knew the odds was crazy 2 weeks 2 Ohtani autos. That is when I decided that my buying retail blasters was done. Now, I have always had extreme luck when buying blasters, and pulling great cards, but these two made me put the brakes on. For awhile the only blasters I bought were the Holiday boxes and Stadium Club, which was short lived as both could be had pretty cheap on Ebay as complete sets. So that ended before I came home permanently. 

I guess now would be a good time to drop in the cards.

Black frame numbered 18/25.

84' Retro Rated Rookie Signatures, the rarer of the bunch although this one isn't one of numbered parallels. 

The cards are Gem Mint. Any scratches you see are on the top loaders that I of course immediately put them in. Once home, I put the cards in a certain box and looked them up on all of the sites. Ebay and comc didn't have any these at that time, but back in 2022 I continued to watch for them and sure enough I got to see them both pop up and was at that time was valued at $1,500.00 and the other $2,500.00.

I must of decided that I needed to put them somewhere else and just forgot about it. Then two months ago one of my readers or maybe another in person trading buddy was looking for some one that the last name was I think "N". I was updating my L's at the time and knew I had the N's and O's in a staging are if you will and pretty easy to get to. I went digging, didn't find what he was looking for and decided hey why not pull out those Ohtani's and look them up again. I didn't remember which cards they were so I had to pull them out to look up. They were NOT in the box. 

I was devasted, thinking someone had snagged them on me. Completely forgot about moving them somewhere else. Anyway to get this long story closer to the end I will fast forward to my PC update of the letter M. There are ton of M's, so it would take a month just to sort the M's. (I am not quite half done entering them into TCDB as of today, but almost). I am currently on Pedro, but anyways when sorting the M's I found my two Ohtani cards mixed in. I guess I figured nobody would look for Ohtani in the M's (obviously why would someone be looking for Ohtani, lol). sometimes stupid is just stupid. I found them and I looked them up, and HOLY CRAPOLA batman, the prices ranged for graded which these are HIGHLY likely to get 10's were ranging from 25K to 150K. WTF, I said to myself even raw copies were $7.5K - 30K. I figured you know I should sell these cards. Buy a cheaper Ohtani rookie auto and call it a major win with some cash to boot. 

Even the Optic card above is pretty rare even if it is the Bronze version and still tough to even find one. Currently Ebay has 5 of this rarer version for sell. I did find different parallels RAW ranging from $5.5-15K, and 2 holo prizms priced at $33K each slabbed. The Ginter has one Black Frame for sell on Ebay right now for $25,000.00 slabbed of course. No RAW cards to be found. Just the one, heck even the un-numbered base card goes for $25K too slabbed. ComC doesn't have Ohtani framed mini auto let alone the black frame. In fact they only have a total of 15 black frame autos none of which are slabbed. They do have a Braves I need at 50% off ($6), but no sense buying something that I can't afford to ship to me. (No free shipping this Black Friday. Maybe their sales will SUCK so bad this weekend that for Cyber Monday they'll offer free shipping, lol.)

It was the following weekend when I went to the Tampa card show, and mentioned to Justin that I would sell him the cards. He hasn't been up here though. I still have bother cards. I know the owner of my LCS collects Ohtani. I haven't decided whether I should mention them to him or not. I am thinking I should grab the dinero while it's still good. Then again I'll have to deal with but they're RAW. What do you think I should do with them?

I did stop in the shop yesterday, grabbed a couple hundred dime cards plus a couple of other things. SEE BELOW.

This is just a wrapper, but I bough the technically complete 70 card set with it for $2.00. I will scan them if you guys want to see the set of umpires. LMK in comments.

I also grabbed an unopened box (100 packs) of these 1990 panini stickers which I did in fact need. Got the complete set however I needed 4 of the Braves for my Braves team, so I am short there. Some of you will find a few of these in your stacks. Back to the dime cards (that is what I paid for them). I found a good size stack of Florida Gator cards too. Nearly a complete set, but not close enough. I'll have to look at what I need. That set is a mix of all Gator sports and yes Tebow was there Chris Collinsworth too, lol. Several other former big names in there too. If you want to see them also LMK in the comments below.

Tomorrow is Wacky Wednesday so I wish you all a very Happy and blessed Thanksgiving! I had planned on starting the "What are the Odds" posts yesterday, but looks like a Thursday tee time for that kick-off. I've got lots of stuffed scanned from trades, gifts, wins, purchases too so the line-up card is filled for a good minute or two.