2017 eBay purchases: Too Many Plates! Part 1: baseball

Between May and June I won eBay auctions for a total of 17 different printing plates at a cost of a bit more than $100 (not bad!).  14 of those came from one awesome seller (markaguirre22), whom I can't recommend highly enough due to his great prices, excellent communication, and super fast free shipping.  A fellow Michigan collector, he was unloading some of his better stuff, and I was able to take advantage of quite a few great deals.  Better yet, over the course of my purchases he threw in three extra plates for free, giving me a nice round 20 to show off.  Several separate purchases rounded out the run on rarity.

All of the players are Michigan alumni that I collect, so you'll see most of them in three separate posts on TMM, one per sport, including this evening's post covering the basketball pickups.  However, I do have a couple baseball PC plates for you to see right here:

Rich Hill 2005 Just Autographs Printing Plates Black (1/1)

Plate #1 is one of the freebies I got from the aforementioned eBay seller, and it heads right to my Rich Hill PC, which as you all know is my favorite, so this was an especially nice throw-in for me.  It comes from a 2005 product sold by the well-known maker of minor league cards, Just, and shows Rich with the West Tennessee Diamond Jaxx (minor league names are awesome!).  Rich pitched 10 games for that AA affiliate of the Cubs along with stops at A and AAA plus a 10-game cup of coffee with the big club in 2005.

As you can see, these plates were encased by Beckett, making them uncirculated, and that makes it easier to identify them (thanks to the labels), if tougher to scan.  Apparently these came one per case.

Because I supercollect Hill I made a choice of what I counted as his "true" regular issue (and 1/1) cards and what I consider "others".  Briefly, anything from a major licensed (usually) manufacturer like Panini, Topps, and Upper Deck counts as the former while products like Just and Razor and the more oddball stuff fit the latter.  I then chase the mainstream stuff that I put into a checklist and track everything else outside of that in a separate tab on each player's spreadsheet.  This was actually the first time I ran into a non-mainstream 1/1 for any of my supercollections (at least until I went back and reviewed my Zach Putnam checklist, which featured a lot of Razor stuff, including 1/1s).

Anyway, a new Rich Hill, and a 1/1 at that, cool!  It's my 18th plate/1-of-1 of him and 128th hit overall.  Not bad!

J.J. Putz 2006 Upper Deck Printing Plates Black (1/1)

Card #2 is also a black plate, and oddly enough all four that I'm posting today (including on TMM) are black in a weird coincidence.  I promise I got a few of each color.

Anyway, this one is just a year newer than Hill's and features another former Wolverine pitcher, J.J. Putz.  It happens to be a plate for a base card I have handy:

See the resemblance?  The year these came out Putz put up a career-high 104 strikeouts along with 36 saves in a breakout campaign as the Mariners' closer.  The following year he'd make the All-Star team with 40 saves and a sparkling 1.38 ERA.

Of the eight Putz plates I now own (and 20 hits overall--mini milestone!), this is the earliest in release year by three years, and of course it makes me pine for the days of Upper Deck and choice for collectors.  It also set me back a measly tree-fiddy from the aforementioned eBay dude.

This pair plus the two you'll see over on TMM this evening give me a new printing plate/1-of-1 total of 71 with lots more to come!  Make sure to stay tuned to TMM for the forthcoming football and hockey plate posts if you like that sort of thing.