30 Day Baseball Card Challenge

Sunday, October 28, 2012

Set Showcase #24: 1999 Topps Gold Label "Race to Aaron"

Thirteen years ago, Topps honored Hank Aaron by producing this beautiful set that highlighted players who were chasing Aaron's all-time home run and RBI titles.



Each card was printed on thick card stock and featured a portrait photograph of Hammerin' Hank, along with an action shot of another player.  The holographic foil used by Topps gave collectors in the 90's,  the "refractor" technology they loved.



The backs provided a comparison of the player's career numbers with the man himself.


Set: 10 Cards

Home Run Race:  #1 Mark McGwire, #2 Ken Griffey Jr., #3 Alex Rodriguez, #4 Vladimir Guerrerro, and #5 Albert Belle


RBI Race:  #6 Nomar Garciaparra, #7 Ken Griffey Jr., #8 Alex Rodriguez, #9 Juan Gonzalez, and #10 Barry Bonds

As we all know, Bonds broke Aaron's home run record five years ago.  But ironically, he was included in the RBI section.  Speaking of RBI's.  A-Rod is the only remaining person who has a shot at that title.  He's currently 7th all-time and needs a little over 350 RBI's to become the new RBI King.


Hall of Famers: 0% (0 Players)

As of right now, none of the eight players in the set are enshrined in Cooperstown.  However depending on how you feel about the "Steroid Era", there should be anywhere from two to five future HOFers.


Beckett Value:  $60

This is one of the rare times where the individual values add up to less than the complete set value.  If you took the time to look up each individual card, the 10 cards book for $57.  However, Beckett lists the whole set at $60.  

McGwire and Bonds are the two highest valued cards at $10/each.  Griffey Jr. and A-Rod each have two cards in the set... and both are listed, along with Garciaparra, at $6/each.


eBay Value: $3.99

Completed eBay sales show that singles of A-Rod, Griffey, and McGwire have all closed in the $5 range, so these prices technically fall between the low and high value range in Beckett.



However, I lucked out and found a seller who listed the set as "Race for Aaron", instead of "Race to Aaron".  The error allowed me to grab the complete 10 card set for $3.99 (free shipping).

Today's question is...


Have you ever capitalized on an eBay seller's grammatical or spelling error?

I'm sure I've lucked out before, but this is the only occasion I remember off the top of my head.

Happy Sunday and sayonara!

11 comments:

SpastikMooss said...

Sweet set, and nice deal! It's been a while since I capitalized on an Ebay misspell, but I've definitely done it before. The last I remember was someone mispelling Larry Fitzgerald's name on a 1/1. I told a few collectors on Blowout about it and one of them ended up winning it for a steal!

Fuji said...

Wow... that would have been a pretty sweet find. Thanks for sharing.

Jason Presley said...

A few months ago I landed my 1982 FBI Disc Dave Winfield (on a complete box with the Vida Blue disc) for about $14 due to the obscure wording used in the eBay listing.

Fuji said...

I had never heard of these discs until tonight, but I just searched them on eBay & Beckett. WOW... based on what people are asking and what Beckett has them listed for... these suckers must be hard to find.

Very cool find! Congratulations.

Jason Presley said...

They were impossible up until a few years ago, then some started trickling into the market. Sort of like those 1990 Donruss Aqueous Test cards that started to flood the market in the past 18 months after being extremely tough to find.

gcrl said...

I've found some nice Steve garvey cards before by searching for 'gravey'.

Fuji said...

Nice... love to add some nice Padres cards of Gravey ;-)

Fuji said...

Yeah... I've notice that those 1990 Donruss Aqueous cards have popped up a lot more frequently in recent years... mainly on eBay and COMC. Do you think it has to do with us living in the internet age... where everything is now accessible at our fingertips?

Jason Presley said...

I think that is a big part of it. Now someone who happened into a large cache of something obviously unusual and likely rare, can find message boards and blogs full of frustrated collectors trying to find said obscurities. Then they can start listing those oddities, a bit at a time, and make a whole lot of money. There was another seller on eBay that had a bunch of uncatalogued 1990 ProCards AAA promo cards. Thanks to the message board at juangone.com, they realized there was a demand and were able to turn over something they acquired for peanuts got a couple hundred dollars. And I picked up an previously unknown Hensley Meulens card in the process.

Jafronius said...

There's a website, fatfingers.com, that will search ebay for misspellings based on the term you enter. Hopefully that will help with your searches!

Fuji said...

Thanks... just checked it out. Awesome website.