Cleve’s Auction Night: Turning The Pages

I got a little bid happy last week when I went into Cleve’s to check out this week’s auction items.  There was just so much good stuff, and I’m in one of my dangerous “Baseball Card Fever” modes where I can’t seem to get enough of baseball cards.  

I put in a lot of write in bids at Cleve’s.  

A lot.  

There were several pages of 1965 and 1966 cards that were in supreme, mint condition.  I wanted them, and put in what I thought were reasonable bids…on…every…. single…. page.   I assumed, reasonably, that several other bidders would also want them so to increase the odds of one or two slipping to me I needed to bid on all of them.  I also understood for the condition these were in (they were so crisp that I had to look at the backs to see if they were part of some reprint set I didn’t know about) my modest bids had only about a 5-10% chance of winning at best.

Apparently, those other bidders I was counting on were all out of town this week.  I know this because when I called Cleve on Wednesday to see if I won anything, and he said, “Oh yeah, you won a bunch! The usual vintage buyers were all out of town.”   My heart skipped a beat, and I’m not sure if it was from excitement from winning this sweet loot, or fear of how I was going to explain this to the lovely wife. 

Don’t get me wrong.  She’s completely supportive of my hobby and is fine with whatever I buy.  Except she’s not fine with whatever I buy and she’s a little bit crazy and frankly I’m pretty frightened right now.  

But I won’t let that stop me from sharing my treasures with you.  And if this is the last post you see from me, please know that I have enjoyed working with all of you and wish you well in your future endeavors.

Here are the 1965s I picked up.  This is a beautiful set in my humble opinion, and my favorite from the 60's.  A few nice names are here including Hall of Famers Mazeroski, Santo, and Fox.   It's also neat to get a card of Jim Bouton, author of Ball Four.  

I think these are my first cards from 1966.  Not a bad design and these cards are in ridiculously good shape.  Not really a lot of big names, but the Curt Flood and Richie Allen cards are nice to have.  From the small amount of research I've done on Richie Allen, he sounds like an interesting person. 

 Finally, I picked up a page of 1968 cards of mostly commons.  All of this will be great filler for my sampler album.

I'll grade the purchases in groups by year since I don't feel like grading every page:

1965 18 Card Lot $20-  A   This probably is a little pricey, but the cards are in superb condition and there were 3 HOFers that I know of included. 

1966 27 Card Lot $20- A   NRMT cards from 1966 at least than $1 per card is pretty good I'd think.

1968 9 Card Lot $5-  B   No big names other than the Frank Robinson checklist, but still got them for less than $1 each.