2015 Topps Tier One Game Used Jersey Rainbow

I haven't been able to snag a 2015 Tier One autograph yet.  Patience is the key there.  However, I always try to grab the mem cards as they come out.  And for a couple years now, I've tried to get the single / double / triple mem patch rainbow.  The triple is always the tough get.  Grabbed that one on eBay and it showed up at the house a couple days ago.  Pretty sweet design this year.  The single is #58/199, the dual is #3/50 and the triple is #3/25.

2008 Topps Triple Threads Jersey-Bat-Jersey Triple Relic 2,226 Games #11/36

What to say about this little gem?  It doesn't jump up and say "wow" right away.  I think we've all gotten more than a little bored with memorabilia cards.  Eight years ago, however, I bet this card brought a lot more money than I just paid :)  I've always had a soft spot for Triple Threads and am glad to have one of the 2008's in my type collection for Fisk.

1996 Illinois State Lottery Ticket

At one point in the Fisk Obsession, I decided to be a completist.  I needed a collecting goal.  And for my sins, they gave me one.  That's many years ago when I discovered Bob Lemke's Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards and the Beckett Price Guide Checklists.  Both of those resources catalog, index and price all manner of non-card collectible items.  You guys know what I mean: 7-11 Slurpee cups, pinback badges, pennants, postcards, Matchbox cars, sew-on patches, coaster discs, dessert box bottoms, pencils, notepads, placemats, light switch covers, drinking glasses, shot glasses, etc, etc, ad infinitum.....

At one point, I actually had all of the Fisk stuff in the Standard Catalog and Beckett Guide.  All....of....it.  Not all the cards mind you, just this gigantic collection of chotchkies that had overrun my entire closet.  Except one item.  Sitting there on the "needs list" spreadsheet, mocking me for 15 years - the 1996 lottery ticket.

You see, there was *very* little Fisk material produced between his retirement from baseball in 1993 and his election to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2000.  While playing: lots of cards.  After induction: an avalanche of cards!  In between: bubkus.  Literally all 7 of those years are covered by about 10 items.  One of them, listed in the Becket Guide, was simply "1996 Illinois Lottery".  That's all I had to go on.  Nobody had ever heard of it, no photos, no eBay listing, nothing in the chat rooms.  It took me many years of pecking around to even figure out that it was an actual lottery play ticket with Fisk's image on it!  Great, I'm spending my free time searching for a ten-year-old used scratch-off.  Loser.  So after many years of looking and hoping, I setup a couple of eBay Followed Searches with things as broad as "Fisk (Illinois, Lottery)" and let it go at that.  Figured it was just one of those items I would never get.

Last week I crawled out of bed, grabbed a cup of coffee and sat down with my iPhone to check messages as I do every day.  Buried in the spam was an eBay message with results from my Lottery search.  I thought, "yeah, this is probably a false positive" and clicked on it.  And there it was: a listing for a lot of 5 Illinois lottery cards, all well-known Chicago Hall of Famers.  I was stunned.  Something to the effect of "no effing way" escaped my lips as I grabbed my laptop to double check this.  Sure enough, it looked to be the genuine article.  The seller wanted $8.95 on a Buy It Now with Free Ship for all 5 tickets!!  I slammed down those keys so hard my wife asked me "what's the matter?".  "Nothin'", I said.  "Card stuff," as a I completed the PayPal transaction in record time.

It showed up a couple days ago.  It's definitely not going to compete for most beautiful item in the collection.  In the end, it's a $1 scratcher ticket that somebody threw in a drawer because it had a baseball guy on it.  It's nothing special.  But to us fellow collectors out there, that feeling of snagging the rare item you've been hunting for - and hoping for - for 15 years.  Well, I guess you have to be a collector to understand. You're all mine, 1996 Illinois Lottery.  All mine....

1984 Topps Glossy Send-Ins 4-Color Mask Film Negative w/ Topps Vault COA 1 of 1

Ya know kids, I loved cards in the 1970's and 1980's.  I spent countless hours sorting, stacking, counting, organizing, imagining and playing with my cards.  In 1984 Topps did a promo where you sent in some prize card I think and you got back in the mail a pack of glossy cards with no logo.  They were plain front cards, but the printing was so nice and that gloss!! Wow, they seemed really high end and special 30 years ago.  So having access to some 1 of 1 Topps production items that actually produced all of these cards is extraordinarily special.  This is my fourth Topps Vault Fisk item and while not the most attractive to look at or monetarily valuable, they are like holding a little piece of Topps history in your hand.  Very cool.

2015 Panini Diamond Kings Hall of Fame Heroes Bat Jersey Auto # /15

This is the second or third recent post on a Panini product where, once again, I'm going to say that I like this stuff.  To be fair, the only cards going on the Fisk Obsession blog are the sweet hits, the cards good enough to share.  I have plenty of Panini base cards, parallels and inserts that are total crap - box filler that makes Topps base look high end.  But the beautiful art work on this Hall of Fame Heroes card just takes the cake.  Simply stunning imagery.  Of course, it helps to have a bat relic, a 2-color jersey relic, a sticker auto, and a serial number to 15! :)  But I would be happy to own and display this as a base card just because of the art.

2010 Upper Deck Exquisite Collection #19/75

If I'm not mistaken, this is only the second one of these I've ever seen on eBay.  The first one I believe the guy was asking ~$200.  I was stunned when I first saw because, at first glance, it just appears like a fancy base card numbered to /75.  However, after a little looking around I found out that 2010 Upper Deck Exquisite was never actually a released set.  The base cards were seeded into packs of Upper Deck Series 1 as case hits.  This is where it gets interesting.  In March of 2010 as part of a settlement with MLB, Upper Deck agreed not to release any more baseball cards.  So the patch and auto versions of Exquisite were never released and the /75 base cards that would have been threaded into product all year until December, stopped its release before Opening Day in March.  So, no telling how many of these cards are out there in the market.  So when I saw this one on eBay, I made the owner a reasonable Best Offer and grabbed it.  It's a beautiful card in-hand, which is what Upper Deck was best at.  It's also the thickest base card I've ever held.  It took a 180-point top loader to hold it.  All in all, stoked to have this (rare?) card in my collection.  I can't say much for the art, though.  Fisk's face looks like an alien.  Interesting choice in art for such a high end product.

2004 Upper Deck SP Chirography - Hall of Famers - On Card Auto #08/25

I love when people put up nice autos with a $0.99 starting bid :)  I'm not saying they're getting ripped *at all* it's just that I get tired of seeing every nice auto go up with a 5 million dollar Buy It Now and not accepting best offers.  That stuff sits there and sits there, twarting the hopes of the owner who obviously is not real motivated to sell.  In this case, I was able to finally pick up this very nice 2004 SP Chirography auto for a reasonable price.  I do think I got a good deal because of the "HOF 2000" inscription which adds value.  Having Bob Gibson, Tom Seaver and Yogi Berra on the card doesn't hurt either.  Having it be numbered to /25 isn't awful at that.  It's on-card and the blue sharpie looks really crisp against the white background.  All in all, a very sharp auto card in my opinion :)

2015 Topps Finest - Finest Greats On Card Auto

Finally a blog post about a current release!  Rarely can I afford to grab an on-card auto card during the initial release.  Prices for cards these days seem to just go up and up.  Lucky for a Fisk obsessive, the 2015 Topps Finest release is littered with un-numbered autos seemingly by the dozen.  A few weeks after release, could grab this one within my price range.  Of course, the numbered and parallels are way out in the stratosphere price-wise, but these base un-numbered jobs make it reasonable to own an auto of a current release.  This is something like auto number 54 in the Fisk collection.  And a pretty sweet looking design to boot.

2010 Topps Series 1 Peak Performance Game Used Bat Relic

As an officially obsessed Fisk player collector, I'm scanning and searching for new cards everyday....um OK, several times per day.  Somehow this one had gone right past me in 2010 and it has been *very* rarely been seen on eBay.  One came up about a month or so ago and sold for waaay more than I was winning to pay.  That, at least, confirmed its rarity to me as other collectors saw it as having value.  I was bummed to miss it; then, pleasantly, another one came up this month!  It's funny how that happens with rare cards, they come up in bunches.  So I ended up snagging this one for a much more reasonable price.  Happy collector :)

2014 Panini Classics Legendary Players Bat Auto #08/10

I am generally too lazy to use the scanner.  Like many of you, I'm too damn busy working and raising kids to take alot of time for cards.  Wish I had more time, but ya gotta have priorities.  But it's Father's Day and I'm feeling decadent, so here's a scanned card.  As I said in my previous post, Panini is pretty spotty and I thought the Classics release sucked.  Didn't even know this card was in the release until I saw it this year on eBay (in 2015, it's a 2014 card).  It's a sticker auto which drops it down in my view, but the overall design really works and looks sharp IMHO.  Being numbered to /10 really adds alot to it.  Paid alot for this card, but am very happy with it.  Happy Father's Day!!

2014 Panini National Treasures Silhouette Patch Auto #05/49

Panini is pretty hit-and-miss as far as I'm concerned. They either knock it out of the park or totally suck. NT is one of their better releases. I like the silhouette concept and its on-card.