Tuesday, May 24, 2011

The usual crap...

Ok, I got my 2000 Bowman 'set' in the mail today and it is no surprise to see that it has 31 cards missing. What is it with card sets from the USA? I have only ever received a complete set from ONE dealer in over 100 purchases of hand-collated sets. That dealer is Strictly Mint. They really do a great job in ensuring their sets are complete. That makes the slightly higher prices worthwhile to me. At least you're going to get what you pay for!

The worst part about my 2000 Bowman set? No Oswalt. No Zito. No Zambrano. No Francisco Rodriguez. I await the reply from the seller who is supposed to 'assume all responsibility'. Unfortunately that doesn't happen often enough.

I am rather angry right now, and also worried, because I bought the 1995 Bowman set from the same dealer. That set is supposedly in Ultra-Pro pages, so it would be difficult for them to leave cards out of that one... Let's see eh?

Nick J

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

New sets!

OK...

Again it's been a month or so, but I haven't been too active on the baseball card market lately, despite the surging Aussie dollar.

I put an end to that a few days ago, with the purchase of the 1995 and 2000 Bowman Baseball sets for around $40 each.

I have always been fascinated by the 1995 Bowman set, mostly because I'd only ever owned 49 cards of it until this week. Running through the checklist, it looks to be a truly amazing set, especially for the key RC's within. Everyone knows about the Vlad and Andruw cards, but I didn't realise it had the Rolen card as well. Chris Carpenter was a nice surprise, as was Bobby Abreu, Stem-Cell Colon, Aussie Damian Moss, plus a couple of Dodgers, including Karim Garcia. I really wish he lived up to his potential, because he really had it all.

The 2000 set has a few jewels of its own, including Roy Oswalt, Aaron Harang, Ben Sheets, Brandon Inge, Carlos Zambrano, Eric Byrnes/Terrence Long, Lyle Overbay, Francisco Rodriguez, Brandon Phillips, Aaron Rowand, Brett Myers and Barry Zito. Most of them are pitchers, which doesn't mean much in terms of dollar value, but means a lot to the set builder.

I also bought a few more Piazza cards, which makes my collection of his cards in a Dodger Uniform total over 400.

Did I mention the 144 packs of 1998 Pacific Online that I got last month? They were/are awesome! I STILL didn't finish the set though. Bummer!

Till next time...

Ta
Ta

Beef