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!

2020 Facebook Marketplace purchases: pre-pandemic panic purchase

After a lot of work sorting, sorting, sorting some more, and scanning, I'm finally ready to show off Facebook Marketplace buy #2!

Just a couple days after this one I came across another interesting deal: a guy a bit east of my usual card show was dumping three roughly medium flat rate-sized boxes for just $10. While I don't know that anything really stood out to me, not all of it looked like the usual junk wax crap, plus some newer cards were peeking out, so I thought it would be worth the low price and drive. Granted, the cards were mostly flung willy-nilly into the boxes, so I could expect some condition issues. Still, why not see if there was anything useful for me and in terms of trade bait?

As it turns out the seller was trying to make a few bucks getting rid of these after selling his better stuff earlier. I didn't think to screenshot the Facebook post before he deleted it, but this might give you a good idea of what I brought home:

With the exception of some of the stuff in the upper-right corner, this is it. Yes, plenty of junk wax-era stuff, and I've filled up more than one of the boxes so far with stuff that was damaged. But before taking into account anything else, I'm happy to say that I was able to parlay some 600-800 of these cards (plus a few more I had on hand) into my (at-the-time) biggest TCDB deal, one I'll show off soon. In addition, I've got some fun stuff to add to future trade packages, plus a nice chunk of set-fillers I'll likely toss on TCDB. Before I do that, if you have wantlists for the following, please feel free to send them my way:

• Baseball:
• 1989 Bowman
• 1991 Donruss (lots of both series)
• 1991 Fleer (~50ish)
• 1993 Pinnacle (series 1)
• 1994 Topps (series 1) plus some Gold
• 2015 Topps (1, 2, and update)
• Basketball:
• 1993-94 Topps (series 2) plus some Gold
• Football:
• 1992 Pro Set (series 1)
• Hockey:
• 1992-93 Ultra (series 1)
• 1992-93 Upper Deck (series 1)
• 1993-94 Stadium Club (series 2)

I'm still going through everything once in a while to pull teams/players that I know some of you collect, and trying to weed out more of the stuff that's damaged enough that it's worth tossing.

Besides all that I kept some stuff for myself. A lot of it was like the rest--fairly dinged up cards from the late 80s/early 90s, but I enjoyed adding new items for some of my favorite players, especially some of my neglected Tigers PCs. Here's a look at all of that:

Item #1 is a near set of 1993 Pinnacle Series I baseball. Of all the sets that were pretty close to completion, this is the only one I kept since I couldn't see putting in the time or resources to chase the ones I wasn't interested in that much. Made a year before Pinnacle switched to a design that I think really improved things, this one's still pretty sharp, and the 310-card series includes some very good names, some of which I collect. I want to say after accounting for what I already had handy I'm about 20 cards away from this one, most of which are naturally bigger stars the seller pulled, but that's fine, I'll get 'em eventually. And look at all the new additions above, including guys I'm putting more focus into recently, like Tettleton and Palmer, plus a Barry Larkin I somehow didn't have!

Now we get to the first of five scans of general baseball additions. You'll see some of these guys a few times, like former All-Star C Lance Parrish, on '87 OPC and '91 Donruss, which was the biggest source for new stuff this time. Palmer's from a '90 Score boxed set that wasn't too far from complete, but pretty distant from being in reasonable shape in general! I even found a couple new Gwynns, and cards of former Tigers with new teams like Nokes, another fun catcher.

Tony Phillips is another guy whose collection I've added to lately, and he's part of a trio that finishes up '91 Donruss. Then we get to the love-it-or-hate-it Fleer set from that same year, as well as Leaf's second standalone issue, which include another Gwynn, even more Nokes, and the first of a couple Maddux adds. HOFer Jack Morris makes his first of a couple appearances too, besides the '93 Pinnacle you saw above.

I seem to have forgotten just how many of the cards I kept were from 1991! The top two rows here finish up that year, with more Leaf, plus Score, and UD. It was great seeing the versatile Phillips back in a Tigers uni, maybe as much as it was weird to see Brookens playing for Cleveland. Gwynn gets a second appearance while Cal makes his lone cameo today, continuing his march to 1000 items in my PC. Then we jump ahead to '92 with Conlon and Donruss' Triple Play. Lawson was a Tigers pitcher in the '30s while Mullin pitched in the opening decades of the 20th century and put up some nice numbers, plus he no-hit St. Louis on Independence Day of 1912. Tanana was in his eighth and final season in Motown when the card above was made, and the next year was his sunset season.

Future Tigers 3B Dean Palmer was one of 80 members of Pinnacle's Team 2000 insert in its 1992 debut release, then made the cut for the following year's 30-card Team 2001 insert. I did a quick check and I believe only five of those 30 failed to have a career that lasted at least until 2001. The back of Morris' '93 Triple Play card notes that the former Tiger who'd just won his second straight ring had set an AL record by making his 13th straight opening day start. Fryman was the only '94 Topps Gold card relevant to my collections

Then there's a big jump forward to 2008. I like how that year's Topps Opening Day base cards had red borders, differentiating them from flagship nicely. The white V-Mart card is a gold parallel /2199. J.D. and Nick start a little run of Topps cards of former Tigers from the last decade.

The last of the baseball concludes with this interesting mix, including four more ex-Tigers from 2015 Topps/Update, with A-Jax making a much appreciated appearance. An unlicensed Ernie Harwell Bible verse card makes for an interesting find and marks the end of the verticals. The horizontal stuff offers yet another Lance Parrish item, plus a 2012 Opening Day base of JV, and those two sandwich Griffey's lone spot in the lot, on the very cool 1993 Upper Deck Iooss Collection insert, which featured images by the noted SI photographer. That means my favorite quartet of Griffey/Gwynn/Maddux/Ripken was represented completely here!

The other sports weren't nearly as represented, which is fine because I still found some keepers. I pulled three former Michigan Basketball guys from the '93-'94 Topps pile, including '89-'89 champs Rice and Robinson. On the NFL side, AC and Vaughn came from the huge stack of '92 Pro Set and Owens was from a group of fairly rough '90 Topps cards (on a design I definitely prefer to that year's baseball version). Meanwhile, PC guys Griese and Shoelace got adds from 2001 UD Rookie F/X and 2013 Prizm HRX Rookies.

Last up is hockey, which was mostly a Red Wings affair. That's no big surprise given how close this guy was to Detroit. A good bunch of what I kept came from the sets I mentioned above in terms of what's available, which is awesome since Stadium Club and Ultra offered some very nice photography and designs. This group is a who's who of 90s Hockeytown greats, plus I snuck in a new card of former Wolverine Jeff Norton for good measure.

Hours (days?) of fun and a huge TCDB trade easily made this lot worth more than the $10 I paid, and I look forward to enjoying it even more by sharing more of it in trade packages with many of you. While I don't expect to find anything as good as the two purchases I've posted recently again soon, it's nice to know it's still possible. While I keep looking, stay tuned for that enormous TCDB trade recap whenever I get it all organized and scanned, unless it's interrupted by a new blogger trade package, which is always welcome!

2020 Facebook Marketplace purchases: Go Blue? Don't mind if I do!

I'm now caught up enough for a minute that I can finally show off at least one of my two Facebook Marketplace hauls.

Way back in mid-March when "stay the hell at home" wasn't quite what it was now, I actually came up with a diamond in the rough of Marketplace's mix of scams, overpriced crap, and poorly-spelled listings:

Those of you who followed Too Many Manninghams for a bit would know that I absolutely love the TK Legacy Michigan product and am out to get everything I can from its base, insert, and autographed sets. So this was quite exciting indeed to come across before even taking into account the ridiculously low $20 price point. I'm generally willing to pay up to $5 for TK Legacy autographs I need, so I definitely consider this a steal. The image you see above includes 18 Michigan autos, three of Michigan State guys (Drew Stanton is pictured with the Lions), plus an Omar Vizquel IP/TTM. You can also see stacks of TK Legacy base and inserts for both the Wolverines and Spartans.

The in-person pickup went fine and I added the following new items to my collection:

This group includes three of what I consider the "base" cards (numbered with "L" for "Lettermen", I believe), one Coach, and five checklists. There are two new Braylon cards, one a checklist, and a Bo as well. TCDB tells me I now have 31 of 197 base cards, one of five coaches, and half of the 14 checklists.

This next group opens with four cards starring former Michigan fixture Bennie Oosterbaan. The player and coach whose name graces the team's field house is one of four players (Anthony Carter, Brian Griese, Mike Hart) to get the "Legend" insert treatment, and I only need card #3 in this set of five. Then it's on to a quintet of the eight "Game Day Diary - The Rivalry" inserts I added this time, cards that cover the storied back-and-forth between the Wolverines and Buckeyes. I particularly like the 1902 and 1940 game scores!

And here we have the rest of the inserts, including the other three rivalry cards, one of which covers the enormous 1969 upset victory for the good guys. I now have 10 of the 22 cards in this set, and in case you're interested, a similar one was made for the UM/Minnesota Little Brown Jug rivalry. The other five are from the Program Covers series, a very cool look at past programs. I have eight of the 56 made, and these are hand-numbered to either 400 or 250 copies each. For those interested, here's the games and their results:

• Minnesota, 1923: 10-0 Michigan
• Wisconsin, 1926: 37-0 Michigan
• Ohio State, 1927: 21-0 Michigan
• Chicago, 1905: 2-0 Chicago (the only points Michigan gave up that year!)
• Ohio State, 1941: 20-20 tie

And last up are the autographs I needed, one each from five different sets. The one new Go Blue autograph is my first of the amazingly named Hercules Renda (named after dynamite!), a former player and assistant coach. His signature is beautiful and this is a textbook example of why this set is so great, besides covering players that wouldn't get cards otherwise: look at all the detail he put in, listing his playing years and jersey numbers, plus a notation mentioning his coaching. Wow! Speaking of being impressed, that's my 130th of 185 autographs in this set.

Next is my first All-American auto from a pretty solid 18-card set. Muransky--or apparently "Big" Ed Muransky!--was an OT in the late 70s/early 80s. I'm now short just his base card of his three appearances in this product as I've had his Go Blue signature for a while.

The Quarterback Club Autographs set (which is sometimes changed to "Quarterback Collection" as seen here) is a 30-card set, and David Hall ('82 and '83) is my sixth of those. These are hand-numbered in quantities between 50 and 500 copies, and Hall's is /200. As with Muransky, I already have his Go Blue auto and just need his base issue.

The most well-known player in this group is former WR #1, Anthony Carter, and my 10th of his autographs happens to be my first from the 10-card Playbook Autographs set, one highlighted by legendary coach Bo Schembechler. Each subject drew out a favorite play that got printed on the card, which they signed. The back mentions that this play "was used in a 9-3 victory over Ohio State in 1980 in Columbus," so that's pretty cool. It's also hand-numbered /300.

Last up today is former RB Billy Taylor from the M-Stat set that focuses on a key number or record tied to a player. Taylor's claim to fame here is a 102.4 YPG average (3072 rushing yards over 30 games (he didn't record a carry in three other appearances)). One of my favorites, Mike Hart, appears to own the record now. Anyway, Taylor has a great looking signature on yet another hand-numbered (/100) autograph, my third of the 34 in the set, and second Taylor to go with--you guessed it--an M Go Blue auto.

(I'll also mention in passing that a Kirk Gibson football card came up in the Michigan State pile so I decided to keep it but not show it here because this is a Michigan blog!)

In addition to what I showed off here there were lots more autos and other cards, and some of those are ticketed for future trade packages or TCDB, so they won't go to waste. Either way, I certainly got more than my money's worth and I'm thrilled!

Please stay tuned for an even larger recap of an even bigger haul coming up soon.