Blog, Batta, Blog!

No sooner do I make my "final" blog entry, officially declaring an "I give up" on the W502s, then they start falling out of the sky.

First, I win a nice one on Ebay. Then, I find another decent one on the B/S/T forum on Net54. Then I lose a nice Ty Cobb on Ebay. Now there are two more on Ebay and two more at one of the larger auctions. I'm primed and ready.

Picked up five T205 commons tonight, plus a T205 Jennings. Over the weekend I got my favorite card from the T205 set as well - Zach Wheat. For the Wheat, I splurged and got a higher-grade card than I've been normally getting for this set - this one is an SGC 60.

At some point over the weekend I realized that the two sets I'm currently building are the 205s and the 502s.

Scans to follow.

A few posts ago, I included a scan of the PSA 5 Tris Speaker I latched on to in one of the smaller auctions earlier this year.

As promised, I crossed it to SGC. Here it is.


In case you can't see it because the scan is too small, it graded out as an SGC 50. That's right, a 4.

Evidently the back is covered in glue. You really can see it, I don't know why I didn't notice it in the PSA holder. I'm surprised the glue hasn't been removed, considering where I bought it, but I'm not about to remove it myself. I already have a ridiculous offer for the card - and I know why. Removing the glue turns this card into a much higher-graded example.

After picking up ten upgrades to my '38 Goudey set over the last two months and boosting my set's GPA to 6.08, I came to the realization that there are very, very few cards left that I can upgrade. My next goal is to bring every card in the set to a PSA 6 or better - I have nine PSA 5s left in the set.

Problem is that two of them are DiMaggios, and all but two are HOFers. The process of taking these nine cards to PSA 6 is likely to cost me thousands and thousands of dollars. Coupled with the fact that my other cards are very close to being as high grade as possible, I've begun to realize that the upgrades for this set will be few and far between now.

Despite having walked away from my Yankee quest, I realize that I do need a set to build. As evidenced by my past blog postings, the W502 set is going to take me forever, so I've renewed my focus on the T205s. Over the next few weeks I'll be scanning the cards I currently own (about 20% of the set), and creating a T205 page on this site. My intention is to share all the scans here, as part of my crusade to prove to the hobby that lower-grade T205s can still be beautiful, even with the nasty border chipping.

I'm also changing the name of this blog, because it obviously has evolved beyond just a chronicle of building the W502 set. At the rate it was going, I was making blog entries every couple of weeks, just to let people know I was alive. With its new focus, it's now a little more blog-like.

I grew up a Yankee fan in Northern New Jersey in the late 1970s/early 1980s. It was the time of Billy Martin, The Bronx Zoo, and the great Yankee comeback of 1978. My hero was Graig Nettles - as a young little leaguer with major league aspirations, it was Nettles' defensive play that taught me that the glove was not just something you wore inbetween at bats. It was Nettles that helped shape my belief that a perfectly-turned double play was more exciting than a home run, and that an impossible, diving stop was what made baseball such a great game to me.

Anyway, during that time, I always considered the Yankees' greatest rival not to be the Red Sox, but the Kansas City Royals. That team gave us fits with the Yankee-killer pitching of Larry Gura and Paul Splittorff, and the pesky offense of Al Cowens, Amos Otis, and John Mayberry. But the Royals had one guy that I hated above all.

George Brett.

Brett was the best hitter in the American League, a guy who could kill you at any point in the game. No pitcher was immune - not Guidry, not Figueroa, not Lyle, and certainly not even Gossage, as evidenced by his playoff performances.

That's why the Pine Tar Game gave me so much pleasure. It was Nettles that pointed out Brett's gratuitous use of pine tar, another example of how in baseball, intellect trumps everything. Watching Brett lose his mind when he was called out was worth the eventual loss to me; the vision of this guy who was always so cool at the plate coming completely unglued and having to be physically restrained from killing the crew chief that day made me laugh uncontrollably.

A few years after that Game, Brett was doing an autograph signing for a promoter in New York. One of the guys who was working for the promoter, acting as a "handler" for Brett, spent the entire session riding him; ragging him about the Yankees, the Royals' inability to beat them, and the Pine Tar Game. Then, in the ultimate display of moxie, after the session was over, the guy hands Brett a baseball and asks for an autograph.

The result was this treasure I was able to add to my collection about a year ago, a message Brett seemed to be constantly sending to Yankee fans throughout my childhood.

While I was building my '38 Goudey set, another collector was working on the set at the same time, in the same grade. Eventually he and I got to know one another, and we had a friendly sort of competition over the set. Our sets were virtually identical in overall grade. Recently, that collector friend decided to consign his set to an auction house and move in another direction.

Enter my friend (who I won't name, because I don't like mentioning someone's auction winnings without their permission). My friend won the set, and within minutes had reached out to me to open up a dialog about possibly swapping some of our cards. His goal was to keep the commons from the set in PSA 5 or so, and fill in the HOFers at the PSA 7 level.

In today's mail I received eight upgrades as part of that deal. After not having had a lead on an upgrade for months, I upgraded TEN cards (including the DiMaggio and the Gehringer) in just a few weeks.

The upgrades helped me achieve a goal of an overall grade of 6.0 (actually 6.08). This is a really big deal for me, and thanks to my friend it cost me less money than it could have.

My next goal is to get all the cards at PSA 6 or better, except the DiMaggios.

And special thanks to my friend who consigned the cards, and my friend who won them, because without those two things happening I would not have found these upgrades.

------

I also added six new T205s this week - five SGC 40 commons and an SGC 50 common - and three E91Cs. The E91s were purchased simply as part of a recon mission. I want to buy some more of these to see if they motivate me the way the 38s and T205s do.

All this buying is sucking the life out of my budget, so I actually have to sell some stuff, too. I'm going to put it in the sale section of this website before it goes on Ebay, simply because I'm tired of Ebay's fees, and most of the bigger deals I've done lately have been private ones, off Ebay.

So there you go. There are some W502s in the next Goodwin auction - wish me luck (and don't bid on them).

Well, I got some grades back this week, and the W502 Speaker I bought back in June, once the highest-graded PSA 5, is now a modest, midgrade SGC 50. One of several PSA-to-SGC downgrades I took in my submission. Thing is, unless I absolutely need the card to cross, I always crack the card out of the holder before submitting, so SGC had no idea what the original grades were. I did get one bump.

I also got some PSA grades back, on '38 Goudeys - a Gehringer that I had that was initially mislabeled by PSA (in a 6 holder), came back with the right label, in a 7 holder. And a Hank Greenberg that once came back a 4, was resubmitted for a 5 and came back a 3, came back a 2. That's right, it's been a 4, a 3, and a 2, and I keep submitting it, hoping for a 5.

Ah, well. Love those red flips, though.

Picked up a few more cards recently, but have been doing more selling - unloading my '38 DiMaggio and the rest of my '61 Fleers. I snagged a 1936 Canadian Goudey Premium of Bobby Doerr that is quite cool, and got an E95 Sam Crawford in the 19th Century Only auction. And I picked up my first Scrapps Tobacco card, of Charlie Comiskey. I'll post scans when I get a chance.

Also added six new T205s to my collection, all SGC 40s and a 50. Very nice-looking. I'm slowly getting back into that set.

I also decided to consign my 1953 and 1961 sets that I refer about in a previous post to Robert Edward Auctions. Sure, Rob is a client, but I also think he gets the highest prices for cards because he knows what he's doing.

So I've been giving a lot of serious thought to what comes next. Not just because of the trouble I've been having in acquiring nice W502s (I didn't buy that lot at Mastro, by the way), but because of how my collecting tastes have evolved over the last year or so.

See, I had a goal of collecting one complete set from each year the Yankees won the World Series. I referred to it as my "Yankee Run." I completed half of 1936, 1938, most of 1939, 1943, 1953, most of 1961, half of 1962, 1977, 1978, and most of 1998. I was also working on - ahem - 1928. But it started getting disappointing to me, knowing that a T206 wouldn't fit into my collection. Or a 19th Century card. Or a 1957 Topps. Or a 1991 Upper Deck.

So I started working on a Hall of Fame collection. I discuss it in the HOF section of this website.

Buying Hall of Famers injected fun into the hobby for me that I'd never experienced. There were actually eight or ten friends who were all doing the same thing, sharing our new acquisitions with each other, educating each other about different card types. Suddenly I could buy any card type I wanted - and I wanted as many as I could buy. More people joined us on the journey, their enthusiasm made it even more fun.

As this went on, the amount of money I spent on my Yankee sets (except for 1938 Goudey, which has taken on a life of its own) began to dwindle, and my interest in prewar HOFers began to grow. I began working on a T205 set. I sold off my Diamond Stars, and then my 1961-62 Fleers went next.

Now, I've decided to repurpose my entire collection. My primary pursuit is going to be Hall of Famers. No longer will I strive to have only one card of each (as evidenced by the three Roger Bresnahans in the photo album). I'll be striving for at least one card of each player, and as many different card types as possible. I'd rather have a few hundred really cool cards than ten thousand 1950s commons. I can't look at ten thousand commons.

Oh, sure, I'll keep collecting Yankee stuff. I'm going to start a collection of cards and memorabilia that tell the story of the Yankees, from their humble beginnings at the Polo Grounds through the Steinbrenner years. But I'm going to do that later.

For now I'm having too much fun doing what I'm doing.

Which reminds me. I have a complete set of 1953 Topps baseball cards for sale. Overall, it probably grades EX. 60% of the cards have been graded by PSA, ranking the set #29 on the registry. Most of the cards grade in the 5-6 range, with more 6s than 5s. There are a few higher as well. The Mantle is very nice but has two trimmed corners. Aside from that, it's a great set, and if you keep checking back I will post scans if I don't sell it first. If you're interested please contact me.

And, of course, I will be selling a very nice, clean 1961 Topps near set. Mostly raw, VERY HIGH-END EXMT to NMT, with some better and a handful worse. A few minor HOFers are missing, and a bunch of high numbers (including the Mantle A-S card). The regular Mantle is a PSA 7, the Mantle MVP is a 7PD. If you're interested in this, contact me as well.

I'll continue to use this blog to chronicle what I'm doing. I'll also continue trying to build a W502 set (but not at $500 a card, which is what's been offered to me since I started this blog). I may even start an E91 set (believe it or not, I like these). But at least I'll be able to post more to the blog...