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!