Mystery box incoming, ETA next week sometime. It will be epic and worth checking back for.

I was browsing the bay looking for some interesting cards and came across this horrifying triple cut card out of 2007 Co-Signers baseball. The idea behind the card is cool (although I wouldn’t have picked A-Fraud to go along those legends personally) and features 3 cut autographs of Alex Rodriguez, Mickey Mantle, and Joe DiMaggio.

I can’t recall seeing such a poorly miscut Mantle autograph before. Who knew Ickey Mantl was so good at baseball? Cards like this are a crime against collectors.

The auction can be found here.

Now that the NFL season is over, I am pumped for baseball to return. In 22 days the first spring training games kick off followed by a slew of products. We are a mere three weeks away from the ever so popular Topps Heritage which will be a spinoff of 1961 Topps, one of the better looking vintage sets produced in my humble opinion.

Then in mid March we get Goudey (if Upper Deck is still in business) which brings back the awesome Sports Royalty inserts, including case hit autographed versions.

The end of April should also introduce the National Chicle brand, which has already been seen in football, to the baseball market. While the football version was horribly underwhelming and featured tacky sticker autographs plus unrecognizable pictures, the baseball version promises to be fully on card so there might be hope!

Presumably Allen and Ginter will also be brought back, but I have yet to hear any news about that set. It is my personal favorite of the retro themed sets so I’m hoping it makes a strong return with something new to it. There also hasn’t been a mention of Goodwin Champions, but I have a feeling Upper Deck is going to be backing off from announcing any products releases for the baseball market.

Before the past year I was normally turned off by these retro products, but my addiction to Masterpieces has rekindled the romance so to speak. Retro cards and baseball just go together. It would be nice if the retro sets were not so overly priced for the contents however. Since hits are generally not what collectors are going after purchasing these, the prices should reflect that, but they rarely do.

Thursday night I placed a order for a box. I say mystery because I want it to be a surprise to the readers, obviously I know what is coming. But, I am guaranteeing it will be a more interesting break then normal.

Since the box won’t get here til Thursday (crazy slow shipping by the way) I figured I’d throw out a few hints and try and build up some suspense.

Hint # 1 It cost over 100$

Hint # 2 I’ll be able to hold all the cards in it with 1 hand

Hint #3 It won’t break my new years resolution

Hint #4 It isn’t Ultimate

Hint #5 It is a actual hobby box of sports cards, not singles, memorabilia, etc

That is about all I can say without giving it away. Make sure you come by next Thursday night or Friday afternoon to see what came in.

This card eluded me for far too long. It is one of the shorter print patch autos, numbered out of 499, and apparently Brohm didn’t wear many jerseys that contained 3 colored patches. On top of avoiding buying from scam artists, this card was stupid expensive and rare to find.

A interesting thing I just noticed, while typing this post up and looking back at my old rant of not being able to buy this card because the seller was selling fake rookie premier autographs, this is the SAME EXACT CARD. The serial numbering matches, but the seller was completely different. Below is the picture from the auction from the known scammer.

I don’t have any idea what to think about this. Anyway, this card ran me 72$ even, bringing the overall cost up to 1586.99$

Despite all of Upper Deck’s bad publicity over the past month, their 2009 Ultimate has been a enormous success in popularity. I’ve seen quite a few cases broken now, and while there are some impressive hits (hey, it was enough to convince me to try my own box) looking at the product as a whole, damn is it expensive for what you get.

That comes out to a little over 113$ per game used or autographed card, that seems extreme to me. Looking through mine and my fathers cards I came up with a list of 1,700$ worth of cards you could have instead.

My estimated value of these cards based on eBay sales is 1690$. So which would you personally choose? Keep in mind this is just using cards that I have access to, I’m sure you could make much more compelling arguments about better ways of spending using singles already listed on eBay.

I know someone will eventually reply saying someone has to open the boxes for the singles to be for sale, and yes that is true. My problem with that assertion is, if no one were buying the boxes, the prices would be substantially lower, making the risk verse reward of opening the boxes reasonable for more people. This product originally released at a much more reasonable price range of 72-78$, until everyone decided to raise their prices. People could cite demand as a raise in price and that is somewhat true, but demand is also relative to scarcity. Remember the “insanely super short printed” 2009/10 Exquisite Basketball that was going to sell out in 2 days? The same Exquisite you can still buy by the case?

Anyway, don’t take this post too seriously, I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind about their spending. I just thought it was a interesting way to look at how things are priced to try and understand the rational of busting instead of buying singles.

Sometimes we all get caught up in the excitement of our hobby, it is easy to do when major things are going on in something you enjoy. But when you take a step back, and look at how our hobby works to the view of a outsider, this hobby is filled with scams, stupid gimmicks, ripoffs in every box, forgeries, and manufacturers who are known forgers themselves.

Everywhere you turn on eBay you run into fake patches and forged autographs, most are fake and easily spotted by those in the know. Unfortunately, a lot of people in our hobby aren’t in the know. Then there are cards that came from packs that have highly questionable authenticity, produced by companies who were found guilty of counterfeiting.

The big dog in the industry is turning into a running joke in the hobby. Between losing a lawsuit and admitting to producing counterfeit cards for a kids game, and essentially provoking MLB into guaranteed litigation, I don’t know how people can have confidence in Upper Deck. If they are willing to scam kids over a card game, it is not out of the question to scam anyone on sports memorabilia.

“At this point, Upper Deck doesn’t have a lot of Life Points. We’re talking about behavior that, from a defense attorney’s standpoint, I can’t defend and I am not going to defend,” said attorney Richard Howell, of Rutan & Tucker, who represented Upper Deck during the trial.  ”I’m here defending a counterfeiter. And now I have to deal with that issue.”

Quote source found here.

We have other companies selling boxes for a 200$+ price tag that yields cards that sell for under 10% of the box price. The same company who had to pay out hundreds of thousands to collectors for over producing short prints.

I guess my question to you the readers is, why do you/we keep supporting the hobby the way we do? Why do we blindly trust the companies who have time and time again scammed anyone they could?

My personal response is I do it out of my passion of sports and ignorance. But sometimes it feels like we are living in a real life Don West commercial.

Some things never change, but hey they at least have a high book value!

So, what do these all have in common?

If you are going to take on SPA, single colored patches isn’t the right way, especially on rookies with whom you are using photo shoot material that you can preplan how much you want produced.