Getting Serious With the Player Collection

I've had player collections for five players (Ernie Banks, Andre Dawson, Ryne Sandberg, Billy Williams, and Darwin Barney) for the past year. I kinda fell into it had have just been adding cheapy cards.

I've been debating with myself just how serious I want to get with these and recently I set my path, forced on me by 2012 Heritage. That set included a short print error card of one of my guys, Darwin Barney. A real Barney collector would have to have that card, but it was going to cost some dollars. I'm not one who likes to spend big bucks on a single card, hence my dilemma.

Here's what I decided: For the hall of fame four, I'm just going to keep going the same way. There are just too many cards of these guys to try and catch up and have a "real" collection. Banks and Williams also have some pretty expensive older oddballs out there. I'm happy to just add a few new cards here, a few there, and let the collection grow slowly.

For Darwin Barney, I've decided to get serious. Since he's just starting out, there aren't a ton of his cards already, and I've got most of those anyway. So it's a matter of adding as much of the new stuff as it comes out, and that includes...



....the Heritage SP error card! And no, that's not just a photoshopped version, its the real deal, my real deal.

The good news for me is that by waiting a few weeks, prices have started to drop.
Here's all of the Barney SPs that have sold since March 17, with date and price

March 17, $122.50
March 18, $117.99
March 20, $99.99
March 28, $72.99
March 31, $82.00
April 2, $67.76
April 3, $65.00
April 7, $76.76
April 10, $74.57

That's a total of only nine cards. I wonder how many of these are out there? I bet there are still a bunch and people don't even know what they've got, since the mistake is hardly noticeable. The seller I bought from was unaware of the error variations for a couple weeks. When he read about it in a Beckett, he went through his cards and was lucky to find that he had the Barney card.

If you're wondering what I paid for my card, mine is the one sold on April 10. However, due to a mistake on the sellers part, I ended up paying less for mine than any of the prices listed. I'll tell you that story tomorrow.