Cleve's Auction Night: Back To The Goodie Box Days

Not only has my blogging come to a near stand still, my bidding activity at Cleve's auctions has been nearly non-existent.   I suppose that is no coincidence.  I've been putting in a few write in bids, but have been on quite a losing streak to a bunch of "card-blockers" who manage to out-bid me at the last minute.

Thankfully, my losing streak came to a halt this week with some solid auction wins, starting with a fantastic 1997 Bowman set, already in a binder:

Whoever made this wasn't messing around.  The "1997 Bowman" is print, not stickers.  I'm happy with this win, not only because I think it's a nice set, but because the work of putting it in a binder has already been done.  There are some nice rookies in this set:

Beltran

R.A. Dickey- although the value of this has dropped this year I think.  For a while it was a pretty hot card.

And my favorite:  Adrian Beltre

There are several other good rookies to show (Halladay for one), but I'll move on to my other wins.  Like this:

I may have overpaid on this ($4), but I don't care. 

The Puig was the only single card I picked up this week.  Besides it and the 97 set, I picked up my first goodie box in a long time:

I've been avoiding goodie boxes lately, mostly because 90% of the cards in them are junk, or things I simply don't need.  But this one looked very interesting so I put in a bid.  I was pretty surprised I won, mostly due to the inclusion of some the cards you immediately see in the picture.  Namely:

3 over sized A&G cabinet cards.  I don't have any of these.  Aren't they sort of hard to get?  And the players are really good- Cabrera and Cano.  The Roller Coaster card is really cool too, but has a small crease in one of the corners.  I paid $7 for the box.  The cabinet cards should about cover that don't you think?  Plus there was this:

This 1985 Donruss Puckett rookie is not as mis-cut as my scanner makes it out to be.  In fact, it's in very good shape.  I figure I got my money's worth with the above 4 cards right?  Right?

Among the rest of the some 200 cards were some decent player lots:

These were the lots of players I happen to like, but there were also around a dozen cards each of Clemens, Garciapara, A-Rod and Bagwell.

 Grades:

1997 Bowman Set in binder:  $6  A :  This set has a ton of great rookie and base cards.  It came complete in a nice, neat binder ready for the bookshelf.

A&G Puig Rookie  $4  B :  I have little interest in Puig, but I figure I'm not going to get this card any cheaper.  At least until a couple of months from now.  Crud, I should have waited on this one.  Oh well.

Goodie Box  $7 A+:  The cabinet cards are cool, and there is enough good stuff to spread around to my binders, listia and trade packages (most everything is available for trade).

I'm not totally back alive and kicking yet in this hobby, but Tuesday's auction helped get some momentum back!