2018 eBay purchase: Rip in a Box

Back on Monday I showed off a Michigan-centric boxed set I purchased on eBay, and now I'm back over here to post a similar pickup.  Back in 2001 Fleer Celebrated Cal Ripken Jr.'s career with a 60-card set, one I'd been thinking of buying for a while.  I finally did in early March, nabbing two of them (one for fellow Ripken collector Jeff) for about $15 to justify the shipping.

2001 Fleer Ripken Commemorative 50000 is "limited" to 50,000 set produced and comes in an Orioles orange box featuring a seal indicating the set's number.  It also stars multiple instances of a logo designed to commemorate Cal's career on such items, a logo that can also be found on every card.

Speaking of those, the overall design is pretty much textbook Fleer, though there's more than just one to analyze as the cards are broken down into

• Career Highlights (10 cards):  the theme here is pretty clear.  These are done in the style of 1982 Fleer, Ripken's RC from the brand.
• The Streak (13):  some other highlights from his 2,632 straight games played.  If these are patterned after another design I don't recognize it.  
• Final Season (17):  a big change after the first 23 cards these are largely black and orange.  They pick some oddly specific highlights like final games against several teams, but there's good ones as well such as a couple highlighting the fun he had at the 2001 All-Star Game.
• Fleer Reprints (20):  a bit more weirdness here.  It was a fun idea to reprint one Fleer card from each year, though for some reason 1993 is represented by Ultra, the only case where that happens.  Additionally, "reprint" may not quite be accurate as the quality of the fronts suggests that someone scanned each card and they printed the image that way, leading to surprisingly grainy-looking cards!

Strange choices aside it's a fun set and a great way to add 60 new cards to my Ripken collection!  Here's a look at the fronts and backs of each of them:

And with that I'm nearly caught up for now.  You'll get to see eBay singles purchases here and on TMM soon, and I'm putting a bunch of time into another mega Sportlots haul.  And that doesn't even include 150+ COMC Spring Cleaning cards I'll be shipping in early June once the free shipping voucher goes into effect.  As the weather and MLB season heat up, so will my posts!