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....