My Barney Boo Boo Bonus...Now With the Post...Thanks A Lot, Blogger

The blogger scheduler is still messed up and the original post for today didn't go up on time.  I quickly posted it before church and the post was blank!  Blogger, you're killing me!  So here I am after church and Bible class, rewriting the story.


Yesterday I mentioned that the Barney error card seller sent me eleven extra cards for the trouble his mistake caused.  Here's what he sent

That's eleven Golden Giveaway code cards, unused code cards.  These things can get around $2 each on Ebay, so it's like he sent me another $22, which would cut the price of my Barney card down to only $38.....if I would sell the codes.


I had a decision to make, sell the cards or go ahead and redeem them myself.  It took me two seconds to decide....to redeem the cards.  I figured I was already ahead with the discounted price the seller gave me on the Barney card.  Having the code cards was like playing with house money.  I was going to roll the dice.


And I did very well!


My eleven cards netted me...
3 Team Coins
3 Player Coins
6 Hall of Fame Coins
2 Die Cut cards...I'll have more about them a little later.
for a total of 14 items!


I ended up with extras because of the bonus you get when you reach three coins in a category.  Even better, by reaching 6 HOF coins, I got a $10 certificate to use at shoptopps.  


The best for me was winning two die cut cards.  The odds are 15:1, so it should have taken 30 codes to get two cards.  I got two with only 11 codes.  I was on a roll.  There are 100 die cut cards, and two of the 100 are Cubs.  Do you think I was able to get a Cub?


....




....




....







You bet!  Not only a Cub, but Ryno!  He was the first card I unlocked.  And what are the odds I pulled the other Cub too?  Could it be???




....




....




....




....




....







Nope, I got a Cardinal instead...but not for long.  I quickly put the Wizard of Oz up for trade to get the other Cub, and within an hour...





....Starlin Castro was mine!  I was on quite a roll. I'm not planning on getting any more codes, so I went ahead and requested delivery on the cards.  I hope to have them in had within another week or two.


Now let's total things up.  I rolled the dice with the $22 the codes were worth and ended up with a $10 certificate and two die cut cards that are selling for around $10 each--that's $30 total.  Not too shabby!


So when all was said and done, a card I originally paid $77 was mine for $60 along another $30 worth of stuff.


I left the seller positive feedback!

My Barney Boo Boo Bonus

Blogger schedule didn't work and when I went to manually publish, the post was blank! I don't have time to fix it now...I'll get to it later today.

My Darwin Barney Deal

So here's how I ended up getting a great deal on the Heritage Darwin Barney Error card:


My winning bid was $74.57, plus $2.50 for shipping, and as I always do, I paid for it right away. Well, the next day I get a message from the seller thanking me for the purchase and telling me that he would ship the card as soon as I pay for it. My heart raced as soon as I read that. I don't usually buy high-priced cards, and now I thought I might have bought one from a scammer.

I immediately checked my Paypal account and it showed that the payment was made. It also listed the payment as "unclaimed." I didn't know what that meant, but at least I knew I made the payment. I messaged the seller and said that I made the payment the night before, as soon as the auction ended.

He responded that his Paypal showed no payment but he would check into it. I still didn't know what to think yet; was this all part of a scam to cheat me out of my $77?

We kept messaging more info back and forth and that eased my mind a bit. It looked like the seller really did want to work things out. The breakthrough came when I gave him the email address that the Paypal went to. It was the wrong address. The address he entered with ebay was one letter off of his actual address. That's why my payment was shown as "unclaimed." Paypal had no one registered with the incorrect address, so the money was just sitting there.

Now we had to figure out how to undo this mess. Again, the seller was very helpful, as he realized that this was all his fault. What we ended up doing took a bit of a leap of faith on my part, but it turned out to be the right thing to do.

First, I cancelled my payment, which was simple to do since it was unclaimed. The money went back into my Paypal account. Then, he cancelled the ebay transaction. Once cancelled, I needed to still pay him for the card and trust that he would send it to me...my leap of faith. Because of the hassle I was going through, he gave me a new price for the card, $60 including shipping. Saving $17 sounded good to me, so I sent him $60 via Paypal. I felt somewhat safe, since there is buyer protection with Paypal and I had all of the ebay messages we sent as backup.

Just three days after I paid the card was delivered. He paid $5.35 to ship it priority mail. So in the end, it was just a sellers mistake, not a scam, and I got my card for the lowest price of any Barney Error card on ebay.

But wait, there's more! In addition to the Barney card, the seller added eleven more cards for my trouble, and when you figure the value of them, I ended up with an even better deal. That story is for tomorrow.

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.

A Card I Already Had

Blogger is still messed up. This post never went up as scheduled so I manually posted it. Anyone else having the same problem?

In this post from six weeks ago, I showed some Sandberg cards from 2012 Topps that I got for my player collection. Do you remember the post? I didn't.

Because last week as I was looking over Cubs cards on Ebay, I spotted the Sandberg Gold Rush card for only $1.



Not remembering that I already had one,I bought it! In fact, I looked over the Gold Rush checklist, saw that there was one other Cub, Starlin Castro,



and I bought it too.

When I got the cards in hand, I had a strange Deja Vu feeling. I looked in my Sandberg collection and realized why I had that feeling. Oops!

Then I went back and looked at my post and saw what I wrote about not wanting the Castro card. Oops again!

Anyone else buy a card, forget they bought it, and then buy a second one? My forgetfulness only cost me a couple bucks. Anyone get burned for more?

Cubs 2012 Media Guide

This was scheduled to post at 9:00 a.m. Blogger never posted it, so I did manually this afternoon. Is anyone else having issues with scheduled posts?

Last week I was able to add media guide #56 to my Cubs collection:



My collection runs from 1957 (when the Cubs called them "Roster Books") to 2012.

Four players (Wood, Castro, Dempster, and Garza) are featured on the cover, along with manager Dale Sveum. In the bottom corner of the cover is this picture



Ron Santo and Kerry Wood. Notice that the newspaper ad was doctored to reflect Santo's election to the Hall of Fame.

The book is 360 pages of information, though a bunch of it has been printed in previous editions. Media guides are a great source of information for me, especially with my Five Random Cubs Card posts. Where else could you learn that in 2011, Reed Johnson hit .324 in the seventh inning or later.

My media guides are kept on my desk, within grabbing distance when I'm in the computer. It's nice to have 56 years worth of Cubs minutia at my fingertips.

Ryno in a Museum

This is a stuffed Rhino in a museum. It is not a sports collectible.



This is a charging Ryno in a Museum. It is a sports collectible, the newest card in my growing Sandberg collection, from Topps' new Museum set. The picture on the card is from Ryne's final season, 1997 (that is Jackie Robinson 50 year anniversary patch on his right sleeve). The 37-year-old hit .264 with 12 homer and 64 RBIs in 135 games. It was pretty obvious his skills were slipping; he made the right call to retire for good this time.

The 100 player Museum set is what Topps used to call Marquee, a high end product that I usually stay away from. Starlin Castro is the only other Cub in the set, and I'm not planning to get his card. I was able to buy the Sandberg for two bucks. Not bad considering that a pack of five cards of this goes for $50.00.

I'm happy with the base card. I'll leave the others to the high-rollers.