An Impluse Buy

There's nothing wrong with the occasional impulse purchase, right?

Right?

I sure hope not, because when it comes to cards I'm a sucker.  I can resist eating out for weeks at a time.  Squeeze that last drop out of the toothpaste tube.  Make a meal from those random food items that always get pushed to the back of the pantry like I'm a contestant on Chopped.

But all that self restraint and thriftiness goes out the window when I see a shiny baseball card.

I'm a sucker for the 1998 Donruss Signature set.  It is, in my eyes, the greatest looking autographed set ever made.  And the crown jewel is the Century parallel /100.  The dark royal blue just makes the cards pop in a way I love.  Except that they're an autographed 90's insert /100.

The opposite of thriftiness.  I have a couple Pirates, and a couple more unnumbered replacement cards that came onto the market in the Donruss bankruptcy sale.  But when a few true, numbered, copies were listed last week I knew I had to at least take a crack.

Most I ended up handily outbid on.  But I was able to snag one.  For the tune of about $2.  Wilson even has a vague Pirates connection, spending some unmemorable time with the Bucs, which was a far fall from the Indians powerhouse teams he had been on previously.

Did I mention I landed an autographed rare 90's insert for $2?  Yep, no complaints over my impulse buys here.

Fun in the Sun

Alright, I'm not entirely sure there's a sun outside.  But I think there is, somewhere underneath all that snow and clouds.  But after my last couple posts were bemoaning the state of my collecting interest, I thought it was about time something a little more sunny.

 Literally.

I'm pretty burnt out on a lot of aspects of the hobby right now.  But that doesn't mean there aren't cards out there that still bring a smile to my face.  I've fallen madly in love with the 1998 Donruss Signature set lately.  And looking at these cards, can you really blame me?

These two are actually from the '98 Preview set, which were inserted into packs of '98 Donruss.  Both these cards are some of the more common ones at 400 copies each.  The yellow borders are definitely unique, and give the set a distinctive look.

The set has been a lot of fun to search for.  I'm still holding my budget pretty firm so some of the bigger names are still absent from my collection.  But even on a bargain budget, I'm finding much of this set is relatively easy to track down.

And better yet - I'm having fun doing so!

Impulse Buys, Set Collecting, and the Art of Finding a Good Deal

I' mentioned a while back that I decided to start collecting the 1998 Donruss Signature Series autograph set.  I had the best intentions of sticking to the 99 card base red set.  I swear, I really did.  

And then...I didn't.  After all, most of the 90's star power was short printed to be in the parallel sets only.  So my altered mission statement was the red set plus whatever select players who didn't make have base autographs that I could afford.

I was browsing ebay last week when I spotted one of those very short printed cards - Ellis Burks.  Burks was perhaps one of the lesser of the Blake Street Bomber crowd, but this was a great chance to pick up an auto of him.  Better yet, it was only $1.99.  Reading the auction description, I noticed the card was an un-numbered version, presumably one held back as a replacement that later made its way out the door during a bankruptcy sale.   Such things rarely travel by themselves, so I checked the seller's store to see if there were any other '98 Signatures.

 As luck would have it, the seller had a handful of un-numbered greens and blues, all at decent discounts on what the card would sell for as the numbered, pack pulled version.

And after all...combined shipping, yada, yada.  So yes.  I technically violated my rule of just having one autograph per player in the set.  But...the blues just look so damn nice. 

All 5 cards ran me about $15.  That's the price of a single pack of the 1998 set when it released, which most likely would have yielded something like a Kevin Orie base auto.   Shot of winning the lottery there's no way I'd ever complete the actual master set.  But I do think I'll round up as many of the blues and greens as I can when they can be had for a decent price.

Or at least that's what I'll tell myself for now...