Completion

Before I get back to trade packages tomorrow I wanted to show the completed Flair Showcase Legacy Collections of Jose Guillen and Al Martin.  Below is all three rows for each player, starting with Row 2 and ending with the most difficult, Row 0.

Thankfully this turned out to be cheap and pain free to complete. A seller that seems to specialize in 90's inserts had a complete set of these so I was able to fill in my gaps with ease.  My hope down the road is to finish the Jason Kendall portion.  I had a chance to add a few of his recently, but prices were all over the place.  These are the type of cards that will sell for $5 one day and $30 the next.

Thanks for reading.

Upgraded to a New Row

A couple weeks back I went into painful detail of the intricacies of 1997 Flair Showcase.  You can see that post here.  The set itself is very confusing, but it did produce some great looking cards.

The seller I purchased the cards from was breaking up an entire Legacy Collection set.  It was interesting to see how much some of the big names went for.  Here are a few that caught my eye so far.

Ken Griffey Jr Row 2 = $374.00
Barry Larkin Row 0 = 356.99
Derek Jeter Row 2 = 305.00
Ryne Sandberg Row 2 = 281.00

The Larkin was a little surprising, but the Row 0 cards are supposedly the most rare of the 3 varieties. The remaining big $ sellers were all over the place.  You can definitely tell which ones had bidding wars as guys like Jorge Posada went for huge money. Yankee collectors were definitely fighting there.

Here are my additions for Row 1.

As you can see they are both represented in the hitting pose while Row 2 was baserunning.

By the way in case you are wondering I was able to grab Row 0's to complete the Jose Guillen and Al Martin trifecta.  You can do that kind of thing when your team only had low $ players.  I should be able to show the Row 0 next week.

Thanks for reading!

Expanding my Cardboard Legacy

1997 Flair Showcase is confusing as shit, but has tons of cool cards in it.  At one time the parallels were fairly easy to find, but I've noticed an uptick in interest the last few years on eBay.  Makes sense as interest in cards from the mid to late 90's has gone up across the board.  Thankfully the Pirates only have a few lower end type of players that got featured in this set.  So for me a card that would have normally sold for .99 might be $3.  For a Griffey or Jeter collector it might be $20 to $80.

Where Showcase gets confusing is in the "Rows" and "Sections." If you want to learn more about the set here is a link.  Basically the whole idea is that each player in the 180 set had 3 different levels that had different designs.  That is where the "rows" come in.  The "sections" were parallels offsets of the rows.  See what I mean about confusing.....

A couple weeks back I found a seller that was breaking up an entire Showcase Legacy Collection parallel set.  Kudos to whomever put that together as these are all /100. The seller at the time had the Jason Kendall, Al Martin and Jose Guillen for the Pirates.  I ended up with Guillen and Martin.

Quick side note, 1997 Flair Showcase was the first set to have a true 1/1 parallel called "Masterpieces."

Thanks for reading.