Not One But Two White Whales

I, like many of us collectors, have a love/hate relationship with our great online money pit of the four colors, eBay. We love it of course because of all the great additions to our collections that we can find, the easily customizable savable searches, and its ease of use. On the other hand, we hate it because of how easily it can leach our money, and for the constant reminders it provides us about pieces we don’t own.

I’ve got about a dozen saved searches, mostly for some of the more odd items in my collection and a few Astros catchalls. One that I’ve kept an eye on for a while is the “jeff bagwell cape cod” string, an endless hope that someday I might find Bagwell’s two cards from his 1988 summer on the Cape.

Here’s the catch though: most of the time these cards are found slabbed, on account of their rarity, or packaged as a full set (both of which feature Frank Thomas, Chuck Knoblauch, and Mo Vaughn). The slabbed cards ride in the 30-50 dollar region, the smaller 30 card Ballpark set is about the same, and the much larger P&L full roster set runs about 125 dollars.

No thank you.

So I’ve politely held out, hoping to score either single card for about ten bucks ungraded. Imagine my surprise last week when a result popped up for not one, but both of what I’ve considered my White Whales! I threw in a best offer which netted me both of these for just ten dollars including shipping.

Alright, alright. Enough jabber. Take a look at these beauties! Well, the photography on the P&L set is notoriously atrocious, but these are so cool to have, and now they’re finally home in my collection.

Until later,

 – Marc