MAIL DAY - eBay via Buffalo - Part 1

In the past few years the Cardboard Queen and I are incredibly lucky to have met two amazing people named Ben and Megan Wagner. I met Ben through work as he is the play-by-play man for the Buffalo Bisons and we quickly became good friends. The first time we all met, we visited Buffalo and ended up sitting in a Duff's (mmm, wings!) for close to seven hours. Needless to say we all got along very well. Since then we have gone to Buffalo and they have come up to visit several times and we love every visit, every time. 

One of the added benefits of having friends on the other side of the border is having access to US mail delivery for many things that either a) won't ship to the Great White North or b) cost a fortune to send up here. Thankfully Ben and Megan are always willing to help and we're extremely appreciative of the access to their mailbox. We had plans to see Ben this week as he was coming up for a speaking event called Pitch Talks, which I would highly recommend getting to if you're in the city, and catching the Jays dominate the Cubs on Wednesday night. We're also headed down to Buffalo next weekend for an event at Coca-Cola Field called Brew Bash, which I will play DD as usual to, so with those things happening, I figured it was a good time to sneak in a few eBay purchases and use the Wagner mailbox for delivery. 

With a couple of new products out in the last few weeks there were a few new cards on the market to choose from including the first official rookie cards of Stroman and Sanchez. My approach with eBay is quite simple; Find as many bargains as I can and never, ever pay full book price for a card. Thankfully I was very successful in the last few weeks. If I were to buy cards on eBay, most are from US sellers, and have them shipped up north it costs almost $10 extra per card, which is nuts. Typical shipping on a card to the US is under $3. To Canada it is $8-$13 per card plus the chance it gets "pulled over" at Customs and GST gets added. It's simply just not worth it.

This is part 1 of what Ben brought up with him this week:

These are Sanchez and Stroman Rookie Card Autographs from the 2014 Topps Chrome product I showed a few weeks ago. The Stroman is the base auto version while the Sanchez's are numbered rarer versions. The one on the left is a "refractor" numbered out of 499 and the one on the right is the "black refractor" numbered out of 100. All told I spent $32 on the 3 cards that book for $60.

This is a Daniel Norris autograph from his first appearance on an officially licensed card from Bowman Chrome in 2012. An official rookie card doesn't happen until a player reaches the majors, so we should see some later this year or early next now that he's been in the bigs, but this is the first autograph of Norris in an official product. It books for $20 and I paid $12.50. Finding Norris and other Jays autograph cards in Toronto would cost at least full book and sometimes more #marketdemand

Marcus Stroman from the 2014 Bowman Platinum product autographed and numbered out of 199. It books for $15 and I got a great deal at $3.

The worst looking, man that's a bad head shot, but the most valuable card I picked up is a Bryce Harper RC (Rookie Card) from 2012 Topps Heritage. This card was only available as part of a 100 card box set and there were only 1000 sets produced. It brings my Harper RC count to 11 but the toughest and most expensive ones remain. This one books for $150 but I picked it up for a bargain $43. 

Part 2 of the eBay spree will hopefully arrive in the Buf next week and I'll pick them up on Saturday. I got some really great deals that I didn't spend over $9 for a single card. Until then. 

MAIL DAY - Harper, Stroman and Lawrie Galore

While there's not many more exciting things to a collector than ripping open some packs and finding the latest big hit, I'm trying to build my collection and focus on Bryce Harper and some Blue Jays like Brett Lawrie and Marcus Stroman who has quickly become one of my favourite players. While at the National in Cleveland I didn't find a ton of things I was looking for but without going the eBay route and bidding on a multitude of cars, there's a website called Check Out My Cards (comc.com) that makes things much easier. Essentially, they are a consignment site where people send in their cards and the site scans and prices everything for you and then people like me buy stuff.

Stroman doesn't have a huge collection of cards yet which makes things easier to collect of course. Unfortunately like most things in the hobby these days, the ones I'm missing aren't cheap as they're primarily autographs and low numbered parallel cards that are very pricey. My favourite card I got from this bunch is the card at the top of picture 2. It's a logo from a hat of the New Hampshire Fisher Cats where Stroman played last season. 

The card in the top picture - lower right is one of the earlier Harper cards from 2009 Upper Deck when he played on the USA U-18 team. It's essentially the earliest card of him that isn't over $100, therefore somewhat affordable. The bottom picture is a 5x7 card that was a random insert in last year's boxes of a product called Allen & Ginter, it's pretty sweet. 

I've been lacking in my Lawrie collection and thankfully he's not an expensive player to collect so I loaded up on a bunch of cards that weren't too damaging on the wallet. I think I checked off almost all remaining rookie cards and found a few cool special inserts pictured in the bottom picture including the classic post game pie in the face card.

Lots of new 2014 products are out and more coming out all the time so they'll be plenty of new stuff to chase. With the debuts of Stroman and Aaron Sanchez this season their first true Rookie Cards are starting to pop up in some of the new stuff so it's time to start saving my pennies!

Pack Busters - 2014 Topps Chrome Baseball

Before I tackle the mail delivery from Check Out My Cards this weekend, I stopped by and picked up a few packs of the latest baseball product from Topps on my way to the Jays game Friday afternoon. Topps Chrome is one of the better values out there with boxes (24 packs) going for around $70 and packs for $4. There are 2 autographs in each box and various parallels and inserts. I grabbed 5 packs and was pleasantly surprised with the results. Meghan, from here on out known as the Cardboard Queen helped and would have won pack wars hands down.

Future AL Rookie of the Year Jose Abreu graces the packs of 2014 Topps Chrome

Here are some of the decent stuff pulled out of the 5 packs - Billy Hamilton RC, Trevor Rosenthal Refractor, Manny Machado Blue Refractor #/399 and a Yu Darvish Chrome Connection Die Cut insert (1 in 12 packs)

And then the Cardboard Queen decided she wanted to up the game and pulled this beauty out...

That is a Matt Davidson 1 of 1 Rookie Autograph Printing Plate. Printing plates are used to make the the actual cards and are a very difficult pull (1 in 12,400 packs!!!). A great hit that I'm very happy to add to the collection.  

MAIL DAY - COMC coming soon

This stack of cards arrived in the mail yesterday. Will work on getting pictures and post done this weekend.

Some people have asked for more info on the last post with the big hit from the case break. The latest trend in the hobby is called "Case Breaking". People buy a case of cards, which has several boxes inside. The cost is high but people sell off individual teams and you can pick or are done at random at a much lower price than buying a whole box. They open all the boxes and then whatever cards are pulled goes to whoever has each team. It's a cheaper solution for the collector than buying some of the higher end boxes that are out there these days (average cost is anywhere between $100-$500 per box) especially if you only collect a certain team or player.

As I said yesterday, I won a spot in this case break at the National Convention in Cleveland in early August. There are 30 teams in the NBA so each person who won a spot was randomly assigned a team. My team was the Detroit Pistons. I thought others who had some of the bigger name teams were the lucky ones but I would soon be pleasantly surprised. The product they were breaking is called Panini National Treasures. One of the cool parts was that this product wasn't even launched until August 20th so this would be the first time anyone had seen any of these cards. It is an extremely high end product with retail boxes going for over $500 each. Now remember, these boxes come with only 10 cards in a box! Obviously WAY out of my price range, but thankfully this was free. Inside this case were only 3 boxes for a total of 30 cards in the case.

Every card in this set is gorgeous. It's a high end set for a reason and Panini really does a great job of making the cards highly sought after. Panini doesn't have a license to produce MLB cards so this is one of my few interactions with their products. Two of the 3 cards I got were what I would call average or below average cards in the set as far as value goes, but hey I was getting free cards where they were plenty of people who walked away with nothing. The Grant Hill jersey swatch card is numbered 12/49. The Kelly Tripucka patch-auto card is numbered 53/65 and is one of the nicer cards to add to my collection as he has one of the better signatures you'll see on a card.

The big boom of the pulls and it was definitely one of the bigger cards in the case, was the Kentavious Caldwell-Pope Rookie Patch Auto numbered out of 10. I've seen several of these cards on the internet of KCP and others going anywhere from $500-$3000 so it was a pretty great score. Who knows if I'll get anywhere close to that much for it on eBay but it's worth a shot. It's a beautiful card but hopefully it can be turned into just as nice baseball cards instead.

Some awesome Lawrie, Stroman and Harper cards coming up in the next post  

MAIL DAY - National Grand Case Break

Finally received my 3 cards from the Grand Case Break at the National in Cleveland in early August. Some pretty sweet looking cards highlighted by the Caldwell-Pope which is heading to ebay pronto. I was lucky enough to win a spot in the draw (1 of 30 people) and then I got 3 cards in 3 boxes (out of 30 cards total) so it was a pretty great FREE haul. Ebay here we come...

JUNIOR

There's only one card that could start my card blog and that's Junior. I'll keep posting my latest finds and mail pickups. Waiting on 3 packages I hope will arrive soon. Until then, here's Junior...