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.

Specifically Pacific

Back when I was in high school my local Kmart would often mark down Pacific cards.  It was almost impossible to pull anything other than base cards, but I still loved buying these up for pennies on the dollar. I would see pictures of crazy inserts and high end autos and hope that I would be the lucky one opening a dream pack.

Well that day never came, but I still have fond memories of spending my hard earned high school money on cardboard. The funny thing is some of those early parallels and inserts stood the test of time on the secondary market.  A Derek Jeter Cramers Choice insert /25 recently sold for $125 and some of the short printed parallels of the base cards can go for big bucks as well.

2000 Pacific Al Martin Platinum Blue Parallel /75

I recently picked this Al Martin up for .99 and utilized the sellers combined shipping offer to add some trade bait as well. This continues my nice trend of finding some unique Pirate cards from this time period. It would be a fun project to add some more Pirates from the Pacific sets as their were 12 different releases back in 2000 alone! Can you name them all.....I had to go on eBay to remind myself what some of them looked like. Pacific Invincible was a very wild set.

Aurora
Crown Royale
Pacific
Pacific Crown Collection
Pacific Invincible
Pacific Omega
Pacific Prism
Pacific Vanguard
Paramount
Paramount Update
Private Stock
Revolution

Some nice challenges for player collectors in some of these sets. Several of the Pacific sets had low numbered hobby and retail exclusives.

Big series for the Pirates starting tonight. Hopefully the wizardry and black magic of the Cardinals will go away for a few days and allow the Buccos to take two of three.

Thanks for reading!