After The Fox

I've stated more than once several dozen times over the years that I am not particularly 'condition conscious' when it comes to my vintage sets. But I do have preferences and, well, limits. And when you assemble sets using a good sized 'starter' lot you always end up with a certain percentage of stinkers in the mix.

Issues with corners, centering, creases, marks, and paper loss might or might not cause me to decide that I need a better copy of a card. I don't really have a formula that tells me 'this card goes over the line' or anything like that. It's just a gut feeling. This is where I usually paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said in the Court's 1964 ruling on an obscenity case.. 'I can't define it... but I know it when I see it'.

That's how it is for me when it comes to upgrading or no upgrading. Condition X doesn't automatically trigger my eBay finger, nor necessarily does Condition X + Condition Y. But when I'm flipping through a binder I'll pull a card that just looks 'wrong' in the slot.


I got the ball rolling on my 1960 build a few years ago with a nice 200+ card purchase from eBay and was pretty pleased with the results. Oh, there were a few dogs in the mix, but overall I had no complaints. I received this '60 Nellie Fox All-Star as part of the lot. He managed to stay in his slot for about three or four years until the terrible back of the card got to be too much for me. Observe...


The Old:

That's pretty brutal. But the back side is where the damage was so I managed to ignore it, at least until recently. When I pulled it to look at it in hand I noticed (again) that the back was so damaged that the cardboard loss goes almost all the way to the front of it. Not good. So a few weeks ago I found a better one. These are not very costly and I really, really like the design so I don't know what took me so long to get a better one....

The New:

That's much better. Off-center? Sure. But I'll take it. I have two or three commons that probably could stand a bump but they will do for now.

A Tale of Two Mickeys

A few years ago when I was putting together my '58 Topps set I had to hunt around for a Mantle card that was in decent shape yet still affordable.Atone of the TriStar shows here in Houston I found the card above in a dealer's case and asked about it. The price he quoted seemed too good to be true but he proceeded to mention that he had submitted it to PSA and had it sent back ungraded. He suspected it was trimmed. After showing it to a couple of people at the show that I've dealt with and trust I ened up buying it.

As you can see it's really a beauty. I stuck it in the slot in my '58 binder, knocked off the last few cards I needed for the set, and figured I was done. But something nagged at me. What if PSA had rejected the card because it was a reprint/counterfeit? Trimmed I could live with. Heck, I have cards with writing on them and it doesn't bother me. But the thought that it might not be real bugged me.

Flash forward to this spring and during one of eBay's 20% off days I happen upon a cheap graded Mantle for a good price. With that discount and beaucoups of eBay Bucks I nabbed it for less than $70.

Meanwhile, with a verified Mantle in hand I did what I'd wanted to do for a long time. I sent my trimmed(?) Mickey to SGC for authenticating. It was my first venture into the world of paying to have cards graded and slabbed. SGC has a box on their submission form which allows you to request them to slab a card even if it is altered as long as it's deemed to be real. It took a couple of weeks and about $30 but back it came, looking good in a slab:

It was a relief to know it was a real 1958 Topps mantle even though by now I had another one. And it didn't stay cooped up in plastic long. Once I' scanned it I broke it free and Mickey returned to his rightful spot in my '58 Topps binder. Right there in the sheet with, among others, Don McHahon, Les Moss and my slot-filling Bob Lemke-made #145 Ed Bouchee card.

It's a beautiful thing.

That newer Mantle will stay in it's slab until I decide what to do with it.

Last Piece of the Civil War Puzzle

Time to put the Topps Civil War News set to bed with what is probably my last upgrade. I found a copy of card #44 on eBay last week for a decent price and it came in yesterday. It's far from pristine but it fits well with the condition of the rest of the cards in the binder.

It's also not the most graphic or well drawn of the bunch but it does have 'death' in the title so there's that. BTW...if you are scoring at home there are 14 cards of the 88 in this 1962 set that have 'death' in the title, three use the word 'deadly' and three more with 'doom'. 

And if you're thinking that my upgrade card could use an upgrade check out the new one and my original copy scanned together:

That trashed copy was part of my original bulk purchase of 20-something cards last summer. Here are the backs (the improvement is more dramatic in-hand):

So thus ends my pursuit of the Civil War News set. There are a couple of cards that could use a replacement if I decided to be fussy about it but rounded corners don't bother me much. You can check out the post that marked my kicking off this chase by clicking here.

Upgrade Mania

After chasing the '59 Topps set a card or two at a time I decided that a more efficient way to collect a set was to start with a large lot purchase. Doing so gets you a big jump on the set at a reasonable cost per card. Downside being that large but affordable lots invariably contain some filler cards that will need upgrading. That's even true in my case despite my rather liberal view of what makes a card 'acceptable'.

I employed the 'large lot' strategy with the 1960 Topps set, the Civil War News set and most recently with the 1958 Topps set. Each purchased lot definitely had a card or two that fell into the 'I won't even put this into the binder' category.

1960 Topps Don Elston.

This beauty came in my 200 card lot. All-in-all the cards were pretty sweet but this one? Yikes.

Actually the corners were pretty nice but I think I went to eBay the day the cards arrived and found a better one:

Softer corners but at least Elston has a face.  I like to pass along my vintage dupes but there was no way I could put that first one in a PWE. It went in the trash.

1958 Topps Hank Foiles.

The guy who sold me the big lot of '58s had them in a box in card number order. That meant that Hank Foiles here, card #4 in the set, was  right on top. I remember immediately thinking that I'd made a huge mistake. The cards in the listing looked to be in at least Fair shape, most looked better than that. But if this card was representative of what I was getting then even at under a buck a card I was going to be very disappointed.

Luckily the Foiles card was the worst card in the box. By quite a wide margin. Again I had to wonder why the seller had even bothered with it. I didn't do as I did with the '60 Elston and find a replacement right away but I found one for sale on eBay from a seller I've dealt with and loaded it in my cart. I bought it a few days later with some others. Again the replacement Foiles card isn't perfect but it is perfectly fine for my binder.

The new one looks even better when placed alongside the original.

1962 Civil War News 'The War Ends'.

This card came with the original lot I picked up on eBay that averaged about a dollar each. It may be definitely is the worst card I've ever paid for. I had fair warning though. The seller went out of his way to make the condition of some of the cards very clear. He even emailed me about it after I paid.

It was obviously trimmed to include the card number.

With the cost of nice ungraded cards from this set being pretty high (routinely in the $7 to $10+ range) I did well with the lot I bought. So I didn't feel bad for paying $8 for the replacement

It's off-center but nearly every card in the set was miscut, or so it seems from looking at what I have and what is for sale. But other than that it's the nicest example of the nearly 50 CWN cards I now have. Bottom line...CWN #82 went from worst to first in my binder.

I'll continue to play the upgrade game with my 1958 set. But other than the Foiles that will have to be when I'm finished with the thing.