Cleve's Auction Night: 1985 Topps Set

It was a beautiful sunny day, the summer of 1987.  My friend Joey and I were wrapping up a fun afternoon at a card show in Amarillo, Texas and were getting ready to head home.  As we were leaving the show, Joey decided to live on the wild side and bought a pack of 1985 Topps for some ridiculous (at the time) price I don't remember what.  But he was convinced he would pull something great from that pack.  He couldn't wait to get home to rip the pack and opened it right there in his truck in the parking lot.   Lightning struck, and struck big:  he pulled an Eric Davis rookie card.  At the time the Davis rookie booked for some ridiculous amount, like $80 or something if I remember correctly.  We both went berserk,  bouncing and screaming in our seats,  because we were both broke high school kids and this was like winning a small lottery for us.  Plus, well, we were dorks.   But we didn't care what anyone who saw us might have thought and we celebrated vigorously.

For years and years, I coveted that Davis card, plus many of the cards from 1985 Topps.  It was a set I desired for many years but never could afford.

Years later, my day of glory and destiny arrived last week when I won a complete, mint and bound 1985 Topps set at Cleve's Tuesday auction for a measly $15 on a write in bid.   Fifteen bucks.  I mean, fifteen bucks for an almost 30 year old set that has already been placed in 9 pocket pages.  I picked it up Saturday at Cleve's, and the first card I looked for was the glorious Eric Davis rookie:

Listen, do not harsh my buzz and remind me that I could get this card for a quarter on sportlots.com now.  It's still a bad ass card.  In fact, I get that the whole reason I could get this set for next to nothing these days is because the "hot" cards that drove this set years ago are no longer that desirable.  But they're still big deals in my little mind.  Let's stroll down memory lane:

There are several cards that I imagine people first think of when they think of 1985 Topps.  The Mark McGwire rookie surely is one of them.   Yes, I know this star has faded, but I'm still glad to have it.  Speaking of faded stars, here are a couple of pitchers that surely should be Hall of Famers had they not done themselves in for various reasons:

But there is no shortage of HOFers in this set.  One of which is Kirby Puckett's rookie below, a fine looking card.

At worst, 1985 Topps is worth having because it's a great looking set.  It's simple, colorful, and has lots of great names.  I'm thinking of calling Joey and telling him about it.

Grade:

1985 Topps Set $15  A+:  It's a set I've always wanted, the cards are mint, AND someone already went to the trouble to put all 792 cards in pages.  That alone is worth what I paid for it!

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!

Old TTMs- Dedicated To The Lost Collector

I've gone from ignorance, to annoyance, to amusement, to addiction when it comes to Twitter.  I did not get it at first.  Now I'm checking twitter 20 times a day.  I don't tweet much, but I love watching my feed during Rangers games, and I really enjoy watching the little Twitter dust ups that occur periodically.  Sam at the Daily Dimwit, I'm looking at you.

The other night I enjoyed watching the Lost Collector tweet pics of a bunch of random TTM (through the mail) autographs he had collected over the years.  I thought I would outright steal the idea and show some of the TTMs I picked up long ago in my early collector days.  I also thought it would be interesting to see if anyone had any thoughts as to the authenticity of some of these.  I feel pretty secure about some, but others... maybe not:

This is probably my favorite.  I guess I didn't have a Craig Biggio card available to send at the time, so I used the back of one of those Fleer sticker inserts that showed pictures of stadiums.  I hope this is authentic!  If I can reasonably assume it is, I might send it in for PSA/DNA authentication.  It looks pretty close to other autos I've seen of Biggio on eBay.

This looks pretty close too.  I have to say, as a high schooler, I showed pretty good taste in which cards to send for autographs.  If it's real, this is awesome!

I can't tell for sure on this one.  Wonder if Canseco would verify it if I asked him on Twitter?

Wrapping up with another Hall of Famer.  I'd give this one about a 2% chance of being real.  It doesn't look like his signature at all to me.  Maybe I'm wrong.

And be sure to follow me and my non-tweets!  I'm at @napkindoon.  Don't bother following @Lost_Collector or @thedimwit.   They'll just cyber bully you and pollute your feeds with pictures of kittens and quiche recipes.