1959 Bazooka Billy Pierce. White Whale that will continue to elude me until I hit the lottery. OK, it's not that expensive but it's certainly will cost more than I can justify to myself. The top one of these two recently sold on eBay for $190. It sat at $72 for a couple of weeks tempting me. I finally put in a snipe at $90 and felt guilty so I removed it. I went back twice and re-entered a snipe and again I went back and deleted it.
Turns out it didn't matter. Someone (a couple of 'someones' I guess) took it way past my limit and beyond. As cool as it is I simply won't pay that.
Funny thing about the Pierce Bazooka is that for some reason I just never see it. I find others at shows. I see the Mays, Mantle, Banks and especially the Cepeda regularly. But not Billy Pierce. This example below is actually the only other Pierce I've seen offered and it went for a huge sum via an auction site.
But I did wrangle myself a couple of additions to the Pierce collection. This is a single 1961 Topps stamp. I've missed out on a bunch of these at auction because I wasn't willing to pay the sort of premiums that seem to come with intact pairs. I finally took this one for a few dollars.
These stamps were very very popular among the collectors at my school back when they were fresh. I remember swapping dupes on the city bus with my friends as we rode home. And of course we stuck them in albums. I had mine for a long time. I think it was purged while I was away at school in the mid-70's.
The second new addition is one of those things that wasn't even on my Pierce checklist. I just happened to stumble upon it with a casual Pierce search. This is a 1985 Coke White Sox card which obviously features Tim Lollar but includes a insert picture of Pierce. The whole set is done in this way with members of the '85 team shown with a corresponding old time Sox player. These are slightly 'oversized' cards, about the same size as so many of the 1980s 'police' sets.
I bought the whole set for to get this card. Luckily it was very cheap. Lemme know if you'd like the rest of them (but I'm keeping the one with Dick Allen on it!)
