2003 Upper Deck Post Set

About a week ago I posted about my quest for the 1990 - 2003 Post baseball card set. After posting about them I headed to eBay and started searching for the sets I needed. The 1995 set was found easily. In fact, I bought a lot of two sets. I could not find a 2003 complete set though. Lots of singles, but no complete sets.

I did find one seller that had each card in the set at reasonable prices and free shipping. Still, buying each individual card of the 31 card set at between $1.50 - $3.00 per card got to be pretty pricey fairly quickly. I reached out to the seller asking if they would sell me set at a certain price since they had each card. They responded, “no”, but they did offer a 40% discount on purchases of 4 or more cards. That helped, but the “set” purchased one card at a time still set me back about $28.

Here it is. Upper Deck put out this set. The first and only year they would do the Post set. I actually like the design. Very reminiscent of many of the Upper Deck sets from that timeframe.

There was also a 6 card promo set that are completely different. I picked up this set as well. It will get its own post though.

Curious to know if anyone else out there has this set. Seems like it was probably not available as a complete set via a mail in offer like so many of the other Post sets from this timeframe, so it would need to be put together one cereal box at a time, which would be costly and take some time to assemble the 31 card set.

Ice Cream and a History Lesson

When I bought the 2001 Topps American Pie Gary Carter card off eBay to complete my set I utilized the seller's Buy 2, Get 1 Free deal and grabbed these two cards.

A 2002 Topps Nestle Ice Cream Mike Piazza card. I didn't check to see if I already had this before I bought it. I figured if I didn't already have it for my Piazza collection I would need it for the Nestle set for my oddball collection. Turns out I didn't have it in my Piazza collection, so it went in one of the binders I have for that.

The Charles Goodyear Allen & Ginter card is from 2009. I live in Goodyear, AZ so I have a very small Goodyear collection. The Reds and the Guardians (wow, that was weird to say) have the Spring Training homes in Goodyear, so that is mostly where the cards come from. I thought this would be a nice addition to that. Goodyear, AZ was named Goodyear because the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company purchased 16,000 acres of land here to grow cotton to reinforce their tires. Goodyear actually became a town in 1946.

Did you know that about Goodyear? Probably not. Do you care? Probably not. But I live here and so I thought it would be cool to add this card to my small Goodyear collection.

2001 Topps American Pie

A couple of years ago I bought a collection and it had a 2001 Topps American Pie set in it. Well, it had a 2001 Topps American Pie set that was missing one card. So I went on eBay and purchased the card I needed to complete the set. One of my 2022 hobby goals is to complete 100 sets. It's situations like this that prompted me to set that goal.

The set was already in sheets (back to back) when I bought the collection. I don't typically put my cards in sheets back to back, but since these are already in sheets and sheets seem to be in short supply right now, I will wait until another day to redo the sheets.

In the meantime. Here is the set.

You can see the spot for the missing card in the phot below.

Here is the one card I needed. I picked this up on eBay for $1 with free shipping. They also had a Buy 2 Get 1 Free deal, so I added 2 other cards for $1 each, so I got the 3 cards for $2 shipped.

Here is the back of the card, so you can see what they look like.

How about you, do you put cards back to back in binder sheets?

Congratulations....Dodgers.

I had some time off last week and was able to hit up The Batter's Box card shop during the day on Wednesday. It was packed. I was surprised at how busy it was at around 1 pm on a Wednesday. It's good for the hobby. There were a few people that were browsing and buying, but I noticed a lot of guys come in and grab supplies and leave. I thought that was interesting. They must be getting their cards elsewhere.

I wanted to by some Ultra Pro pages, but they were out of boxes, so I'll have to go back later. Darn. But let's take a look at what I did get.

I saw this and remembered that I had missed out on one about a month before at an auction at the same shop. It sold for around this price so I decided to grab it. I also remembered that when I posted about missing out on the "set" Night Owl mentioned that it probably wasn't a complete set. He was right. This package is just one of 6 packages for this set. From what I can tell, there are 1,095 cards in this set. It goes from 1 - 1,105, but some card numbers were never issued, so there are "just" 1,095 cards.

I believe this package contains 18 sheets. With 15 cards per sheet, that means there are 270 cards in this package. There are 6 different packages and they don't all contain the same amount of sheets and cards.

These are plentiful on eBay, but they are going to be around $15-$20 per package when you figure in shipping. With e needing 5 more packages that means another $75 - $100 for....Dodgers cards. Yikes! I think I'll just wait to see if I can come across any more of these locally for around the price I paid for this one. That would put the set in the $50 range, which I would be okay with. That's about a nickel a card. I can live with that.

I know there are quite a few Dodgers collectors out there. I know some of you have this set or are working on it. How are you viewing/storing this set. Do you keep the sheets intact or have you separated the cards out? Since the cards are slightly smaller than a normal card, if you are separating them, how are you displaying them?

2001 Post Cereal 500 Home Run Club Set

I'm working on completing the run of modern Post cereal cards. This would be 1990-1995 and 2001-2003.   I'm not going after the Canadian version of the 91-95 cards, so there are 10 sets.

The 2001 Post 500 Home Run Club set is a small set. Only 8 cards total. I knew I needed a couple cards to complete the set but wasn't sure which ones exactly when I came across a few in a dime box at The Batter's Box card shop this past week. I grabbed all of them just in case. A couple were damaged, but I grabbed them to act as a placeholder in case they were one of the cards that I still needed. Turns out in my haste, I even grabbed two Killebrew cards.

I ended up needing the Jimmie Foxx and the Mike Schmidt and neither of them were damaged, so I was super happy!

It's a nice looking set with a great group of players (obviously since they are part of the 500 Home Run Club), but it's disappointing that it doesn't include all the members of the 500 Home Run Club.

1990 - Complete

1991 - 1, 6, 9, 10, 15, 28, 30

1992 - Complete

1993 - Complete

1994 - Complete

1995 - Complete (pending eBay purchase)

2001 - 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16

2001 500 HR Club - Complete

2002 - 12, 23, 30

2003 - Complete (pending eBay purchase)

The Home Run King from The Diamond King

I got a package this week from The Diamond King. It was unexpected, but after opening it and seeing what was inside I remembered that he had commented on a recent post about having some of these cards for me.

31 different Barry Bonds Home Run History cards that I needed. Not only did I need all of them, but most of them are from early in the set which is good because I didn't have many of those. This puts me at 542 unique Bonds cards, so I am just 220 away. Still a lot, but certainly doable. I'd like to finish this project this year.

Once I reach 762 different Bonds cards I'm going to put the Home Run History cards in order and then fill in the rest with all the other cards of his that I have. I think it's going to be great! Thanks Kevin!

2016 Topps Archives 65th Anniversary Set

I bought one box of 2016 Topps Archives 65th Anniversary back when it came out. I even kept the box. Each box had one back with 16 cards including 1 autograph. I think I pulled a Jeff Conine auto in my box. There are also parallels and I think I got one. So that gave me just 14 cards towards the 65 card set.

I liked the concept of the set a lot. One card from each Topps set; 1952 - 2016.  Since it was only a 65 card set I put it in sheets and hoped I would find the rest in dime boxes. No such luck However; back in late January one of the guys I follow on Twitter came across a ton of the cards from this set in a box he got at Goodwill and I sent him my list. 

He was able to knock off every card on my list except for one; the 1989 Ken Griffey Jr. I found that card I needed on eBay for $1 with $1 shipping and it arrived a few days later to complete my set.

As you can tell, the front of the card is the same as the original card, but the backs are different. The numbering on the back of the cards corresponds with the name of the player. For example, the number for this Ken Griffey Jr. card is A65-KG. So the checklist list the cards alphabetically which is how I initially had them in the sheets.

When I got the rest of the cards I decided to put them in chronological order and I think I like that way better. Here is the set.

Some pretty iconic cards were used for this set, but there are a few that sort of make you scratch your head. Like Bucky Dent over Rickey Henderson for 1980 Topps. Who are some other questionable selections?