Going off the beaten path for baseball cards

Comc and Ebay are the usual options for buying baseball cards, but it pays to get off the beaten path some times for baseball card buying options. 

For instance, I bought some cards from Kit Young a month ago. Kit Young has been around for a long time, so he isn't exotic, but he isn't the knee-jerk option like Ebay.

This time I bought from a site that specializes in O-Pee-Chee cards, OPC baseball. I bought 4 cards from them; ironically, only one was actually an O-Pee-Chee card. 

First I got 2 cards for my 1959 Topps set build: Drysdale and Hodges. Neither of them are in great condition, but they're both totally acceptable to me.The backgrounds are interesting too. It felt good getting 2 hall of famers out of the way. I now have 56 out of the 572 cards in the set, which isn't bad considering I haven't been actively working on it for that long.

This was my favorite of the lot, both just as a card and as a deal. It was just $5, a real steal for a vintage Whitey Ford, and I also just really like the card. 1964 Topps has a nice design, and I like the pitcher-coach designation. Not something you see everyday.

This is a 1966 O-Pee-Chee card, though it looks just like a regular Topps card on the front. 1966 OPC was one of the rarest OPC issues of them all, so I was very pleased to get a Felipe Alou for a very reasonable price. 

The "Printed in Canada" line is the only way to tell that it's an OPC card. 

Overall, I got some good cards at good prices from OPC baseball. As with Kit Young, not all the cards are priced as well; really, I think I might have gotten all the good priced baseball cards. But I'll definitely be checking back occasionally to see if there are any more good baseball cards.

This series of purchases really shows that it pays to consider options other than the go-to sites like Ebay.

A windfall

 So, for a long time I'd had this card of Mike Trout. I liked it because it was Mike Trout, and it was shiny. I had no idea where I'd gotten it; it was just in my cards with a couple other cards from that set. You can probably guess where I'm going with this.

The card. A 2013 Topps Blue Slate parallel.

I put it up for auction a few weeks ago, because with the boom in modern cards and the Mike Trout Superfractor selling for 4 million dollars, I decided it was the time to sell. It had some corner wear, the result of it just being in my collection for my years, but it still sold for $80. 

So now I had all this money that I wasn't sure what to do with. I wanted to get a 1933 Goudey hall of famer, but it took a long time to decide on one. I ultimately decided to get a Waite Hoyt card, as it's a nice one.

Overall, I was pleased with my purchase. It's in very good condition, except for a surface wrinkle on the front, and it's a very attractive picture. Waite Hoyt himself wasn't too bad, either. He won 237 games over his 21 year career, and won 22 games against just 7 losses with a 2.63 ERA for the 1927 Yankees. 

I now have 12 out of the 239 cards in the set, with 2 out of the 64 hall of famers. I'm starting to get discouraged again about how many hall of famers there are in the set, so I'll probably switch my focus to 1959 Topps for now unless I find a really good deal.