Custom Ink

There are a lot of nice things about moving (aside from the actual moving...that was terrible).  Going from driving an hour each way to being 10 minutes from the office is nice.  Not tossing a rent check into a financial black hole every month is great too.  But the best part?  Being able to stretch out a bit.  Our is a cape cod with about 1,400 sq. ft.  It's not huge, but after living in apartments or dorms since starting college, the idea of not having to store all your extra stuff in the same spot where you're also trying to live is a real nice change of pace.  And from a collecting standpoint, it's nice to be able to actually have my entire collection (well, mostly.  I still need to unload a few more boxes from my parents' house) in one place.

It had gotten to the point where new cards that came in were just getting tossed into boxes to be dealt with later.  There was no space to sort through them in our apartment.  Well, later has finally come.  There are probably 6 months + worth of mail that had just been added into boxes.  Cards that, for the most part, I had taken a quick glance at and then into the box they went.

In with that group were come customs that my collecting pal got signed for me during Spring Training this year.  She lives right near the White Sox camp, and I was able to whip up customs for lesser known players who didn't have many cards.  And she was gracious enough to get a few signed for me as well.

These two are by far my favorite.  It's almost impossible to find a photo of the LaRoche brothers together from their time in Pittsburgh.  This shot was the best I could do, even though I'd have liked to have both guys facing forward.  Andy signed this last year when he was in Sox camp as a non-roster invitee, and Adam apparently finished it up before he left the team this spring.

And the Zach Duke card is one of my new favorites, custom or otherwise.  Though they only wore them for 2 seasons and across a couple dozen games, it's amazing that no photo of the Pirates "McDonald's" vest made it onto cardboard.  Heck, even finding photo evidence that the jersey existed is tough.

A Great Start to the Weekend

Nothing tops coming home and and finding cards waiting in your mailbox.  My trading has nearly ground to a half in recent months, and my buying has largely been via COMC and in person at shows and flea markets.  Trips to the mailbox have been a little less exciting.

But it looks like we're starting the weekend off right, with not one but two packages waiting for me today.  Shane from Shoebox Legends and I both had some stacks sitting around that could use a warm, loving home.

 Shane sent me a great assortment of cards, and a good majority of them were new to me.

 Maybe it's just for me, but some of the most "common" parallels are always the hardest to track down for me.  The Diamond Sparkle parallels are still my favorite of the various foil variations Topps has done in recent years.  Slowly but surely, I'm closing in on the team set.  Very, very slowly apparently.

And while I'm pretty sure it wasn't intentional, Shane even managed to send me a couple new PC cards with his protective fillers.  I've been stockpiling a small collection of League Leader cards.  It's not a full blown mini collection (yet), but any time I see one of the big stat caterogies - homers, batting average, era, strikeouts - it's been working its way into a small pile that will probably get its own binder.  What can I say, while I consider myself pretty in touch with the new stat metrics, I'm still a sucker for counting stats.

And I had no idea Mike Sweeney was the Royals captain.  Then again, it's the Royals.

 

But hopefully this stack of cardboard goodness is just a precursor to the weekend.

 There's a (kinda) local mall show this weekend.  Ok, in reality it's about an hour away...not really that local.  And I really should be saving up my budget for the big Robert Morris show in May.  But...well, hi, my name is Mark and I'm an addict.  But the mall is in the direction we'll be headed tomorrow, so I can totally justify a stop.

 Kate and I are headed to my parent's tomorrow to make some Easter candy.  Every year my grandma made chocolate covered fondant eggs.  They're lightyears better than anything you'll find at the store.  And on Easter day, everybody got an egg when they went to visit.  Since I was grandma's favorite, she would usually let me pick which flavor I wanted ahead of time.  But they were all good.  

 I would bite off the smallest bites I could manage, trying to make the egg last as long as I could.  They were that good.  And grandma only made enough for everybody to have one, which always made picking my flavor that much harder.

Grandma passed the family recipe to my mom.  It's been three years since she died, and probably 5 or 6 since she was well enough to make the eggs.  So this will be the first years we've made the eggs since she died.  It's not meant to be nearly as sentimental as it sounds.  These are chocolate coated goodness, and I'm really looking forward to seeing if we can make them anything close to grandma's.

And, hypothetically, speaking, I may be looking forward to not being limited to one egg!

 There should also be some flea market shopping in store for me this weekend.  I'm planning to make a trip Sunday morning to the flea market up the street that I discovered last weekend.  Kate is hanging out with a high school friend that day, so I'll be free to dig through dimeboxes to my heart's content.

The last card of this post that came in the mail today was an ebay purchase.  One of the things I like about Donruss has been the number of parallels and numbered cards that you hit in a box.  This Neil Walker is the gold parallel /49, though it didn't show up very well in the scan.

I won the card for a whopping $1.04 with free shipping.  I was a little surprised when I ripped open the bubble mailer to find this card inside.  The seller paid $2.25 for shipping the card in a bubble mailer, even it sold for less than half that.  I appreciate the gesture, but I would have been perfectly find with a PWE.  I kind of feel bad the poor guy took a loss on selling the card, especially on a card I already felt like I won dirt cheap.  But at least I'll leave him nice feedback.

 

You Know You Have Too Many Cards When...

I browsing COMC yesterday running my usual array of Pirate searches to see if there were any good sales or if prices had been lowered.  And there it was...an absolute steal.  A sparking beauty in cardboard form primed and ready to join my collection.

I had the card opened in its own tab and was ready to click buy when I thought it best to double check against my Excel file.  I've been buying too many doubles lately on accident, so I wanted to be safe.

Much to my surprise, my Excel file told me that I did indeed already have the card, complete with scan and a notation of the numbering.  And I guess that wouldn't be too surprising.  After all, with 11,000+ cards it can be easy to forget one or two.  And I should be glad I saved myself $1.75, right?

The card was a 2009 Bowman Chrome Gold Refractor of Adam LaRoche /50.  And therein lies the frustration.  I freely admit I have a lot of Pirate cards.  But there are also a lot of Pirate cards I don't have.  Something like 30,000 non-1/1's.  That's a lot of cards to hunt down.  And a lot of cards I'll likely never be willing to pay the going rate for.

So it's a bit frustrating to see a gem sitting there at a rock bottom price.  A dollar seventy-five for a gold refractor?  There are dozens and dozens of gold's that I don't have from all years.  But that's the way it breaks sometimes.  And yeah, I could have just bought it anyway and tried to flip the card for a profit, but that's not really my style.  I'd like to think some other collector was able to take advantage of the great deal.  Maybe that karma will pay itself back to me one of these days, in the form of a cheap, shiny, needed gold refractor.