2016 eBay purchase: happy Sweetest day to Lou

Yeah, yeah, Sweetest Day was last Saturday, but the title works so let's stick with it.  Also, I bought today's cards last Friday, so there's that.

Despite the large number of players I PC, it's not always easy to add a bunch to one or more of those collections at once.  Luckily, eBay came to the rescue and did some damage towards the checklists for five different guys I collect, two in particular.  Four of those are featured on today's TMM post, including blog favorite Rich Hill, whose Dodgers were bounced from the playoffs yesterday, but who at least took advantage of a second 2016 postseason opportunity by winning game 3 of the NLCS for L.A.

All told I purchased 13 cards from massive eBayer BurbankSportsCards.  Ordinarily I probably wouldn't pay their prices for most of the cards you'll see, but enough had been difficult for me to find, and I just couldn't put a price on the feeling of accomplishment knocking this many cards off checklists.  So in the end I threw down a bit more that $15 delivered and enjoyed some much-needed progress.

Of those five total players, one of them is a mainstay on this here blog:  Lou Whitaker.  I've already had some pretty good fortune in working on his supercollection, but one deciding factor on this purchase was the fact that I was able to add six new cards!  None of these are especially significant individually, but I'll explain just how helpful they are in a minute.  First, the cards:

1988 Score Glossy and 1989 O-Pee-Chee

1991 Topps Tiffany and 1993 Topps Inaugural Marlins

1993 Topps Inaugural Rockies and 1995 Stadium Club Members Only Parallel

See?  A junk wax-era base card, a quartet of boxed set-style parallels, and a mid-90s parallel.  Ok, now for why these are significant:  I now own Lou's run from his '78 RC all the way through his 1992 issues (131 cards) and 229 out of his 250 cards through his farewell 1996 season.  In fact I'm short just three of his cards from 1993, though one of those is the always tough Finest Refractor.  But at this point adding six new cards at once is a big coup as I try to collect 'em all.

On that front I'm currently at about 83%, which means 239 of 287 cards I'm counting.  Also, if you include the "others" I don't consider as part of his mainstream checklist, I've now hit the 250 mark--255 to be exact.  That means I've got fewer than 50 cards to track down, though many of those will be difficult-to-find recent cards, especially hits.

By now it's probably pretty obvious why I was willing to pay more than $1/card delivered.  But if all you read is this post, you're missing out on the card that convinced me to dig through BurbankSportsCards' inventory in the first place.  Don't miss out on that by heading over to TMM this afternoon!