2020 Facebook purchase: boxing day (with recap from last night's break!)

So I ended up doing things a bit out of order by breaking the '88 Pacific Legends box last night before posting this, but then again it's my blog and

Here's a quick breakdown on how this purchase came about, plus a bit of a look at everything I ended up with.

Last Monday I was perusing Facebook Marketplace again and noticed a guy not too far from me had posted a bunch of listings for a few things that caught my eye, starting with boxes of Topps commons from the 70s (and 1980) at very good prices. I was hoping to grab those for Jeff since he's working on a number of those sets, and he was definitely interested in these.

Besides those I was after a nice pile of 80s and 90s boxed sets, plus a couple of boxes of the aforementioned Pacific Legends cards, one of which I offered to Fuji.

Happily everything worked out and after about a 45 minute trip both ways and $80 cash I was back home with quite the bounty. I've already sent Jeff and Fuji their cards, which they can share at their convenience if they feel like it, and now I can cover everything else here.

  

First up: the results of my Pacific Legends box. I had a blast ripping packs, sorting cards, and talking to Fuji, Andy, Chris, and Chris last night, not that the video is a great indicator since I was spending a lot of time off-screen sorting. I don't really do boxes anymore so this was a fun treat for me, even if it came from the junk wax era. The $10 price was perfectly acceptable to me as I chased a complete set, and maybe a second?

While set #2 wasn't quite meant to be--I pulled only one of card #20, Jim Bouton--this was a fun rip of 36 packs of 10 cards each while attacking the 110-card run. Considering how bad collation could be back then, though, one set plus practically a second was a steal at that price! The player selection is awesome--Bill Freehan and Mark Fidrych join the likes of Kell and Kaline, not to mention Teddy Ballgame, Hank Aaron, and more--and the hits kept coming.

I did a quick breakdown and ended up with 367 cards, even when removing the six Tigers I already had in-hand, broken down into:

• Set 1: 110/110, 100%
• Set 2: 109/110, 99%
• Set 3: 60/110, 54%
• 53 quadruples
• 31 quintuples
• 4 sextuples

I'm working on tracking down one more Bouton so I can finish my second set, plus I have some dupes to help others, possibly even Fuji when he breaks his box!

With that covered, the rest of this post will show off everything else I grabbed, which was in the form of 80s and 90s boxed sets that set me back $1, $2, or $5:

Most of them can be seen here, and I'll go into a bit more detail below. The majority of these were a buck with some of the ones on the bottom making up the $2/$5 group.

And my favorite find of this haul was a 1992 Stadium Club Dome package for just $5. It's not that these are rare, but I don't think I'd ever seen one in-person, so having all the pieces is extra cool!

I opened anything that was sealed and got all the cards put in order, because that's always fun, then tried to get a quick look at fronts, backs, and any extras from each box. In this scan you can see (top to bottom, left then right):

• 1986 Donruss Highlights (56 cards): pretty obvious by the name. Includes a mini Hank Aaron puzzle.
• 1986 Fleer Limited Edition (44): a bunch of stars (like Gibby and Sweet Lou, whose card I didn't flip over to show off the back, d'oh!) plus free stickers.
• 1986 Kay-Bee (33): a collaboration with Topps that shows off young Superstars, like Tony Gwynn at the time!
• 1987 Fleer Award Winners (44): another obvious one. Also comes with stickers, which is a common theme among these.
• 1987 Fleer Baseball All-Stars (44): yep, 44 cards and stickers, plus wot it says on the tin.
• 1987 Fleer Limited Edition (44): you can see where I'm going with this. Look up a couple rows in the photo to compare the two designs.
• 1987 Fleer Record Setters (44): why not 45? I dunno! Cool stickers again.
• 1987 Kay-Bee (33): same set size as the year before, but the word "young" is left out and this is all "superstars" chosen quite well--few if any duds.
• 1988 Fleer Baseball MVPs (44): Fleer didn't have any problem coming up with excuses to print boxed sets, and that's fine by me!
• 1989 Donruss Traded (56): I've always been a sucker for trade & rookies-type sets. The real ones, that is, not the monster that Topps Update has become. Nolan Ryan on the Rangers seemed like a good sample card, and this one also came with a mini Musial puzzle.
• 1988 Score Young Superstars I (40): yeah, this should have been above the Donruss cards chronologically. Oh well. This is Series I of the super glossy young star cards Score produced in their debut season, and they also came with the mini lenticular trivia cards the brand would be known for for a few years.
• 1987 Fleer Mini (120): ok, these are here on purpose, at least, since I thought I'd put them last due to their oddball size. That's a little Eric Davis base you see, plus a rad version of the Tigers' best logo in sticker form.

I believe all of these were $2 apiece except for the UD hologram set on the bottom, though one or more might have been a buck more:

• 1989 Score Rookie/Traded (110): that's a good size for one of these sets. I think this one was $3 which seemed reasonable enough when you consider the Griffey seen here is a RC, one I didn't have! Also, more mini holograms.
• 1990 Topps Debut '89 (154): this one kept the standard '90 flagship design but added a banner up top mentioning the player's debut from the previous season. I couldn't help but show off card #84 of Yankees pitcher Kevin Mmahat--what a last name!
• 1990 Score Rising Stars (100): welp, I did it again, probably because I keep thinking Debut '89 is from '89, though it isn't. Anyway, here's another super glossy set filled with up-and-comers (and holograms). A huge stack of these was part of an earlier Facebook purchase of mine but pretty much all of them were damaged, so this was a nice replacement.
• 1990 Score Rookie/Traded (110): very similar to that year's colorful (as usual for the time) base set, except with orange borders. No huge stars to chase here, but some fun stuff, like cards of hockey dude Eric Lindros and football player D.J. Dozier, as highlighted in this Baseball Card Backs tweet yesterday.
• 1992 Upper Deck Team MVP Holograms (54): I already had a few of my PC guys' cards from these, but I just couldn't ignore the awesome packaging and presentation here. The shrink-wrapped packaging has a cardboard sleeve touting how limited this thing is, and that protects a sweet branded hinged plastic case. The super premium holograms were banded together with a COA starring Junior Griffey, too! Each team at the time got repped by their best pitcher and hitter, plus there's a couple checklists, giving you 54 cards.

Last up is the super cool 1992 Stadium Club Dome set, so called because it came packaged in a little replica of Toronto's SkyDome, host of the '91 All-Star Game. If you thought the presentation above was great, try this: the 200-card set goes into a fairly typical box, inside a molded plastic stadium that opens (and looks like R2-D2 at the bottom), and into another cardboard box!

This one includes 100 draft picks, 25 Team USA cards, 56 cards highlighting the '91 All-Star Game, and 19 more covering the playoffs and World Series. I grabbed fronts and backs from all four subsets, with my favorites being the mulleted draft pick and a back starring one of my favorite names in the game, Basil Shabazz. I'm definitely geeked to have such a nice looking Stadium Club set in my collection, and the original packaging is a very nice bonus.

Now that I have these covered I'll be back soon with another eBay buy and at least one more trade package, so watch for those as I figure out how to make room to store all of this!