Slabbed Single Sunday

I've added about a dozen new graded cards to the collection so far this year - not counting the 1956 Topps set build which is just a handful of cards away from 75% completion. The initial plan was to get three or four posts out of my recent COMC pickups and eBay flips but the mini-stories weren't substantial enough on their own. Instead you get a 4-in-1 post, starting with:

The most expensive card from my COMC order was this mid-grade sunset season food issue of the legendary Hank Aaron. I've had this on my wantlist for a while and didn't see anything else worth spending $29.99 on, so I grabbed it. I've now got three vintage graded singles (plus a bat relic) of Hammerin' Hank; I should have four but the 1962 Topps card I bought on COMC a few years back was rejected by PSA for 'recoloring' 😡


This won't make sense to most of you. but I'm working on a project to acquire at least one PSA-graded baseball card (in EX 5 or better) for every year from 1950 to 1980 and have every team represented within that mini-collection. So I would need one Senator pre-1961 and another one post-1961, one St. Louis Browns card and one Orioles card, one Brooklyn Dodger and one Los Angeles Dodger, and so on. [If I decided to seriously pursue this project, the 1956 Topps set would count toward years but not teams.]

I haven't had a PSA membership in several years, and I've missed the fun of picking up cheap vintage singles on COMC, sending them in to PSA, and stashing (or selling) the newly-slabbed and graded cards. Unfortunately, like a lot of companies, they jacked up their prices during Covid and priced out the working class collector like myself. And you don't get any free submissions with a basic membership anymore.

So, when COMC offered a PSA grading special right around the holidays, I cashed out my Christmas bonus and submitted some cards. Here are some of my favorites:

All of these were COMC pickups, and came back at grades I was pleased with (though I was hoping for higher on the Sheldon Jones.) The Boyer and Dryden are modest upgrades over the amount invested, but I planned to keep both regardless. Apparently I have a good eye for 1953 Bowman Color cards; years after picking up a Billy Loes that graded out a Near Mint 8, another sight unseen purchase graded high: 

This was probably the best ROI of any single in my PSA-via-COMC order; it's probably worth twice the total of the card + grading fee.

I also had a 1953 Bowman Color Gus Zernial that graded a 6 - but I sold it on the site and bought these:

$18 for a high-grade vintage single of a well-known baseball lifer, and $13 for an old friend...

..though I didn't notice until scanning this that the bottom left corner of the case (top left in this scan) is a bit cracked. Still, I'm happy with this "trade".

Not everything I submitted was a winner, however. A 1933 Goudey single that I thought would be a 2-3 graded out at a 1.5. The Johnny Mize 1948 Bowman I bought on a whim was nowhere close to mid-grade (got a 3 on that one) and the other Gus Zernial I submitted came back a 5:

If I do another blog series this year it will be on the history of the Philadelphia/KC/Oakland Athletics, but I've got to get my audience back first. A lot of my regulars have been busy, or are no longer blogging.

BGS slabs seem to have fallen out of favor with graded card collectors. I haven't bought any in a while but I always like the way modern cards looked in their holders. There was one COMC seller practically giving away dozens of former Boston Red Sox prospects who never stuck, and I was tempted to grab a couple at these prices:

For the price of two Red Sox I instead opted for a low-numbered refractor of an active pitcher/DH who has missed significant time recovering from Tommy John surgery:

Brendan McKay probably won't make much of a major league impact but I couldn't resist adding this to my Blue Rays mini-collecion for well under $10. It pairs nicely with the pack-pulled Evan Longoria I sent to BGS about 15 years ago.

Can you tell it's time for me to get a new scanner? The McKay scan makes the gold BGS label look silver, and the more recent scan of this Longo (on the left) is far worse than the scan from my Sports Card Tour post six years ago (on the right).

My phone isn't much better, as I will demonstrate shortly. Not sure if it's the lighting in my card room or the camera itself, but card photos from my phone often come out blurry.

Here's a Michael Jordan All-Star card I picked up for my 1988-89 Fleer set. Scan on the left, phone pic on the right:

This classic card didn't cost me a dime out of pocket; the $65+ shipping was paid for by my eBay flipper friend. I'd sent him a bunch of cards to sell on his store page (okay, I did have to pay shipping for that) and he spent the proceeds on this at my request. He's the reason I plan to attend a card show next weekend; some of the cards he's sold for me were pickups from his local shows and I'm planning to return the favor. If I find some vintage singles - slabbed or unslabbed - for my PC, that's a bonus.


If I go, I'll have at least a couple post-show blogs to cover my pickups. If I don't, then perhaps I'll start that Athletics series a little sooner.

Thanks for reading!



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