One Man's Thoughts on Sports Card Collecting

Sunday, March 17, 2024

With Ha-Seong In My Heart

After a month of coming up empty, I finally managed to find some retail jumbo packs of 2024 Topps at my local Target earlier this week. Any kind of hit from a retail pack is always a nice surprise, and in this case I managed to pull this sharp-looking red crackle parallel of Padres shortstop Ha-Seong Kim!



I just missed the "eBay 1-of-1" - this one is serial number 6/199. 😄

I have to admit, I didn't realize just how strong of a year Kim had in 2023. He posted a 5.8 WAR, with a .260 avg, 17 homers, 60 RBI and 38 steals, capped off with a Gold Glove at a premium defensive position. As Larry David might say, "pretty, prettay, prettay, prettay good"!

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Picked Up A Grail Card For My Griffey Collection

 Hi! Wow, so 8 years since my last post, huh? Did I miss anything? I'm sure not much happened while I was away, I feel like it's been a pretty boring near-decade....

Anyhoo, I thought maybe it was time to fire up the ol' blog again. I have no idea if I'm still on the blog roll or not, so if you are reading this maybe you could do me a solid and just say hi in a comment? It would be nice to know if anyone is actually seeing this post! 😄

And now, on to the actual point of the post - I managed to get my hands on a Griffey card that I've been trying to get since before I even started this blog in the first place!! 

I've loved the 1998 Pinnacle Epix cards since they first came out. It has always been a dream of mine to get all the Griffeys, but I've been stuck trying to track down the Purple and Emerald Season cards that came out of 1998 Zenith for years. Scratch one off the list!



With the addition of that purple beauty, I've only got one more left to go.

Apparently one of the Emerald Season cards was actually sold on eBay recently.....for $350. I suppose that price is unsurprising, given that Pinnacle only made 30 of those cards to start with. Add to that the odd gimmick Zenith had that year with regular cards hidden inside of 5×7 cards, and there are almost certainly less than 30 out there in the wild. But, maybe someday....

It's good to be back. I hope to hear from some of you soon!