eBay Wins #247

Here are the rest of the 1989 Fleer cards from my eBay bargain hunting. As you can see, they were mostly from team lots, including Pittsburgh and Atlanta, and LA and Oakland in the last post. Since I usually sort my cards by number, I appreciate a set that keeps teams contiguous.

1989 Fleer
#214 Jose Lind
#215 Junior Ortiz
#216 Vicente Palacios
#217 Tom Prince
#218 Gary Redus
#219 R.J. Reynolds
#220 Jeff Robinson
#221 John Smiley
#222 Andy Van Slyke

Andy Van Slyke started with the Cardinals, and Vicente Palacios nearly finished with them, except he played in Mexico for 3 years after St. Louis and came back to play in San Diego for part of a season.

1989 Fleer
#223 Bob Walk
#224 Glenn Wilson
#283 Mark Gubicza
#385 Dennis Martinez
#421 Jody Davis
#547 Mario Diaz
#584 Milt Thompson
#585 Jose Alvarez (x2)
#586 Paul Assenmacher

1989 Fleer
#587 Bruce Benedict
#588 Jeff Blauser (x2)
#589 Terry Blocker
#590 Ron Gant
#592 Tommy Gregg
#593 Albert Hall
#594 Dion James
#595 Rick Mahler
#596 Dale Murphy

It's hard to believe Ron Gant only played in St. Louis for 3 years, but he was here when they returned to making playoff appearances in 1996.

1989 Fleer
#597 Gerald Perry
#598 Charlie Puleo
#599 Ted Simmons
#600 Pete Smith
#601 Zane Smith
#603 Bruce Sutter
#604 Andres Thomas
#605 Ozzie Virgil
#637 Cannon Arms (Chris Sabo/Bobby Bonilla)

In this photo, Gerald Perry, Ted Simmons, and Bruce Sutter were all Cardinals, as were both of Chris Sabo and Bobby Bonilla.

1989 Fleer
#647 Prospects (Randy Kramer/Miguel Garcia)
#649 Prospects (Jim Corsi/Bob Milacki)
World Series
#4 Dramatic Comeback
#5 Gibson Steals the Show
#10 Series Caps Award-Winning Year
#12 Dodger Blue, World Champs

I'm not sure if the World Series cards were inserts, or were just as common as the base set cards, but I got quite a few of them since two of the lots were LA and Oakland.

1989 Fleer
World Series
#1 Dodgers Secret Weapon
#2 Rookie Starts Series
#6 "Bulldog"
#7 One Swing, Three RBI's
#9 Sax's Speed Wins Game 4
Stickers
Atlanta Braves
Los Angeles Dodgers
Oakland Athletics
Pittsburgh Pirates

And it finishes off with the rest of the World Series cards, and some team Stickers. I've got a lot of these around, I should really peel them and put them somewhere around my desk at work or something.

There were only two doubles in this post, which is a good number for my eBay purchases. By my count, that's a total of 53 cards, which rang up 26.5 cents out of the half penny box. See, I told you it would even itself back out.

eBay Bargain Tracker
Total Cards Bought	4765
Total Spent	$60.45
Per Card	1.269 cents
Change	-0.008 cents

Zistle Trade #27

I'm not very good with keeping up a First-in-first-out system of stuff to post, because when this trade arrived in the mail I thought, here's a group of cards I can scan and file away quickly. First, because there were only 6 of them, and second, because they are all from the same 1993 Studio set, making the steps to sorting them much shorter.

1993 Studio
#47 Jose Canseco
#73 Chris Sabo
#117 Terry Pendleton
#119 Mark Whiten
#147 Lee Smith
#188 Joe Girardi

This trade knocked out about half of my remaining needs for this set, which was mostly just the Cardinals in the set. Although, upon further reviewing the set, I missed Bobby Bonilla, Will Clark, Vince Coleman, Royce Clayton, Larry Walker, Andy Van Slyke, Delino DeShields (Sr.), Willie McGee, Lance Johnson, and Tino Martinez. I must not have ever looked through it exhaustively, but added cards while searching for specific players. So, the net effect of these trade is 4 more cards on my want list. This is actually a set I really like, and I may try to finish it at some point, but for now I'll just try to get at least the rest of the Cardinals.

Zistle Trade #16 Part II

My Zistle trading binge continues, and this time I got enough Cardinals that I had to split into two posts just to tag them all. In return, I sent off some 2011 Topps Lineage cards, several of which were triples and quadruples, because I bought several discounted packs and blasters of that set.

Part I

1983 Fleer #613 Gary Gaetti
1990 Upper Deck
#225 Ozzie Smith
#278 Milt Thompson
1992 Donruss
#116 Kent Mercker
#163 Brian Hunter
#208 Tony Pena
#424 Chris Sabo
1993 Hostess
#18 Andres Galarraga
#25 Ken Griffey, Jr.

Since I made these trades at the same time, I wound up trading for the Chris Sabo card twice. But, I'm not too upset about it. The main draw in this trade was the Hostess cards. I'm not sure how many Hostess Baseballs I ate in the summer of 1993, but I feel like it was on the order of dozens. Before these two, I had 25 unique cards from the set, and 9 duplicates. A quick blog search indicates I've received 4 in trade, and sent off a few, so that probably means I got at least 30 from eating the baseball cakes. Most importantly, I now need only 5 more to finish the set.

I found it surprising that these are the first cards I'm posting of Andres Galarraga, Brian Hunter, and Kent Mercker. I'd especially expect a card of Galarraga to have come up by now.

Another nice card in the trade is the Gary Gaetti rookie card. He first played a few games in the majors in 1981, and in an era before the modern Bowman, he didn't get a rookie card until he completed his first full season in 1982.

Zistle Trade #14

My trading partner today wanted just one card, a 2011 Opening Day Mike Stanton base card. He's doing quite well right now, so I sold high (I think) for a collection of 1992 Donruss Cardinals.

1992 Donruss
#397 Royce Clayton
#424 Chris Sabo
#428 Will Clark
#481 Omar Olivares
#533 Geronimo Pena
#553 Rich Gedman
#570 Scott Cooper

I've still got 44 cards on my wantlist for this set, of which 43 are Cardinals and one is Deion Sanders, just because. Of course many are like these Chris Sabo and Will Clark cards, playing in other uniforms. There are a good number of them among the 188 cards of this base set I have, too. Free Agency keeps my collecting net wide enough that I'll probably never finish my want list.

Pack Stash, Super Mega Jumbo Ultra

...which is the full name of Fleer Ultra before they changed it for showbiz purposes.

I reached back into the pack stash and found a pack of 1994 Fleer Ultra, Series 2. It's a huge pack by today's standards - 15 cards! (Edit: clearly a math degree doesn't prevent counting errors. There are 17 cards.) I got one Cardinal, which is probably a decent ratio, but 2 players I collect.

1994 Fleer Ultra
#310 Chris Sabo
#314 Mike Greenwell
#330 Bo Jackson
#337 Ozzie Guillen
#340 Jack McDowell
#343 Carlos Baerga
#347 Eddie Murray
#367 Brent Mayne

The non-Cardinal I collect is Bo Jackson. He played his last year for the Angels, something I probably won't have gotten right if asked as trivia. I also got former Cardinal Chris Sabo, Hall of Famer Eddie Murray, and future manager Ozzie Guillen.

1994 Fleer Ultra
#374 Pat Listach
#382 Wes Weger
#384 Rick Aguilera
#390 Shane Mack
#399 Xavier Hernandez
#412 Terry Steinbach

No Cardinals here, but the A's were my favorite AL team back when there was no interleague play. Now it seems odd to like any team my favorite team plays against every few years. As a kid, I think the real reason I was drawn to the A's was the uniqueness of a team wearing green, and Terry Steinbach's wearing plenty of it here.

1994 Fleer Ultra
#364 Tom Gordon
#401 Terry Mulholland
Phillies Finest #11 Darren Daulton

I almost didn't catch that the Darren Daulton card was an insert, until I sorted out the cards by number and saw there was no way it could be in Series 2. I'm always learning things I didn't know - or didn't remember - about older sets. That Phillies Finest set, to celebrate their world series appearance I guess, just has 10 cards of John Kruk, and 10 of Darren Daulton. I would have figured there would be a matching insert set for the actual champions, the Toronto Blue Jays, but none seems to exist.

March Radness Win, Part VII

[Part I]
[Part II]
[Part III]
[Part IV]
[Part V]
[Part VI]

I "won" a prize, in that I managed to have the worst bracket of all in Cards on Cards March Radness contest. I legitimately tried to win, in fact I didn't even realize there was this consolation prize until the contest was over, because I stopped scoreboard watching about 2 rounds into the tournament because I did so poorly to start off. The good thing about winning cards from a fellow Cardinals fan is that he can't resist dumping a whole bunch of his Cardinal duplicates on me, which I'm more than happy to take.

I've reached the end of this prize, but this post has the most cards of all. Lucky for you, they're not all scanned. You'll see what I mean at the end.

As I flipped through the 1990 Donruss from the package, I set aside anyone who was a Cardinal. This wasn't based on research, just memory, so I may have missed a few. And I actually had to look up Chris Sabo because I thought I knew he was a Cardinal, but I don't really remember it, if that makes sense. As it turns out, he played 5 games for us after the White Sox released him in 1995, but was again released during September.

1990 Donruss
#41 Andy Benes
#42 Delino Deshields
#210 Dennis Eckersley
#230 Will Clark
#242 Chris Sabo
#349 Tom Henke
#378 Jamie Moyer
#578 Larry Walker
#674  Pedro Guerrero

1990 Donruss
#695 Eric Davis
#697 Mark McGwire
Bonus MVPs #BC-12 John Smoltz
#BC12A John Smoltz (Erorr)

I've bid on this Tom Glavine/John Smoltz error card on eBay a few times, but it always seems to go a bit high because of its perceived value.

So, how many non-Cardinals were there from 1990 Donruss? Oh, about this many:

1990 Donruss, sleeved and ready to be sorted

I haven't gone through them completely yet, but it looks like if this doesn't complete my 1990 Donruss set, it brings me very close. What an awesome prize for a blog contest. Now of course, I realize if my want list consisted of refractor parallels and cards numbered to 25, instead of lots of cards widely considered junk wax, I'd probably have gotten a much lighter envelope, but I love these cards. That's the cool thing about collecting instead of investing in cards; show me a bunch of ugly 1990 Donruss card and I can get as excited as one fancy relic "from no particular event". To sum up, thanks again to madding, and go follow Cards on Cards.