Blog, Batta, Blog!

Here's the Matty I won at Huggins and Scott. I am very pleased with it, as I am with all the T205s I won at that auction.

I'm also pleased with Heritage, as I won from them a 1938 Goudey DiMaggio in PSA 6, for less than my maximum bid (which is always a good thing).

I am also pleased with Robert Edward Auctions, as they were happy to take my 1953 Topps complete set and 1961 Topps near set on consignment, as I am finally liquidating the last of my accumulations of 1950s and 60s stuff in favor of more prewar HOFers, T205s and W502s.

I am NOT pleased with PSA, as they somehow managed to mess up an entire submission of mine, mostly 1938 Goudeys. One card in particular has been back four times and received four different grades.

This is it:



Old Hank began his incredible journey with me as a raw card, purchased from a respected, long-time dealer. I felt he was a 5 (so did the dealer). On his first submission he came back a 4. So I cracked it and resubmitted it, and it came back a 3. I laughed at my rotten luck, and cracked the card and submitted it a third time.

It came back a 2.

So I cracked it out and sent it back in to PSA. PSA rejected it - "not holdered, evidence of trimming."

Ayuh.



Boy, these look tiny. This program is acting all kindsa funky since I reinstalled it.

Anyway, these are the three new W502s I was telling you about. Whoever "you" happen to be.

I'm learning something about the backs of these cards, because at this point I have four different ones among the eight cards I have from the set. And I haven't picked up a Home Run back yet because Wealthy Collector Who Shall Remain Nameless smoked me on a Cobb last month.

Anyway, the four backs I own:

1) "ONE BAGGER - Hold What You Got" - printed vertically on the card, facing to the right.
2) "ONE BAGGER - Hold What You Got" - printed vertically on the card, facing to the left.
3) "ONE BAGGER" - printed vertically on the card, facing to the left
4) Blank back.

I'm pretty sure that there's no resource on these cards, and everyone I ask about them says "Umm, they're scarce. And a lot of them have glue on the backs."

So I don't know how they were printed, who released them, what the purpose of the game on the back was, why they were printed in two different directions. For all I know, they were issued by multiple companies like their cousins of the same year (Yuengling/Tharp's/Harrington/Sweetman).

I'm up for a good mystery, though.

-Al

So RapidWeaver (the web development program I use) came out with a software upgrade a few weeks ago. I'd been resistant to using it, since the program offers me everything I need. I'm a chimp when it comes to this stuff, and yet I think the site looks nice (thanks to RapidWeaver's built in "themes").

But I downloaded it anyway. Ass that I am.

Seems the geniuses at RealMac Software decided that photo albums no longer needed to be laid out in left-to-right rows. Evidently one long column down the left-hand side of the page is plenty good enough for them. After spending an hour trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, I found their message board, where they try and explain to all their customers that they really don't need tidy rows of thumbnails, lined up left-to-right across the page.

So I uninstalled version 3.5 and went back to version 3.2. Which means, of course, that the updates I made last week using version 3.5 are unreadable by version 3.2, and the blog posts are hereby dispatched into the ether.

Sorry.

Boy, what a week.

Wednesday I won two more W502 cards in the Goodwin auction. A very nice Stanley Harris and Ray Schalk, bringing my grand total to 8/60. I was actually very pleased with this, since the cards came to me for less than $180.

Thursday I went bananas in the Huggins and Scott auction. It was T205s this time, and I dropped some cash on a lot of 33 low to mid-grade raw cards, and some more cash on a lot of 11 SGC-graded midgrade cards (mostly 50s and 60s), including a Christy Mathewson with a Sovereign back.

I really wanted to add one of the four big cards in the set (Cobb, Young, Johnson, and Matty) before the end of the year. The Matty is probably the smallest-dollar card, but picking up a nice SGC 50 with a tougher back was a pretty cool thing.

I'm now about 40% complete, which is something I never thought I'd ever say.

Weird week this week for '38 Goudeys.

A few weeks ago I made a major trade with a friend, where I acquired eight upgrades for my set. Initially, one of the upgrades was for card #276, Zeke Bonura. My friend had a PSA 6, I had a PSA 5. We included it in the trade, but when he saw my PSA 5 he was really unhappy with it, so we swapped those two cards back. I was bummed, because I didn't think I'd ever see that card in a grade higher than PSA 5.

Of course just a week or so later a PSA 6 was listed on eBay; I won that auction and ultimately upgraded the card.

Then came the card that's currently my personal holy grail; the #258 Bobby Doerr in PSA 7. This is a tough, tough card, and suddenly one was listed on eBay. SMR (which is an utter joke) is $385 for the card, I figured $650 would win it. Initially I set a snipe bid for $680, just to be safe. Then I started thinking of how disappointed I would be if I lost the card for $690, so I upped my snipe to $725. Then I started thinking how few and far between this card is made available in this grade, so I upped my snipe to a whopping $865, thinking I should win the card with $200 or so to spare.

Of course I lost it, to the only other 38 Goudey guy I know of who needs the card. He paid $875.

So I'm still stuck with my PSA 5.

Well, so far I'm 2-for-4 on the W502s that have been offered over the last week or so. Here's the cream of the crop, an SGC 80 Artie Nehf, the second-highest-graded Nehf on the planet (there's an SGC 86 out there somewhere). I have an off-grade Meusel coming, and I missed a Cobb and a common, but I'm not done yet, either.

Snagged a bunch more T205s this week, which was nice, including a Zach Wheat - my favorite T205 card, in SGC 60.

I also got some oversized grades back from SGC this week, although it will be a while before I actually get the cards. I sent them some R303s that I needed scans of for an article I'm writing for SGC Collector magazine, and many of those came back 70s and 80s, which was great. I also snuck in my T3 Nap Lajoie (SGC 50, which I kinda expected, but it's a NICE 50), and my Newsboy John Ward (SGC 10, which was also what I expected). Can't wait to see those oversized bad boys in the new holder.

Kevin Saucier sent me this cool Sportflics Bruce Sutter card for my HOF set - apparently it's some sort of test issue, and tough to find. I know nothing from Sportflics. But he sent it as a donation to the collection. Kevin is a cool guy.