It's that time of the year again.
I love each quarter when it is time to redeem the bucks that I have earned the previous 3 months. The last "purchase" was an autograph ball of the 2014 All Star Game MVP and two time AL MVP runner up Mike Trout. Well I am still trying to reacquire all the autographs I sold off during the ball purge so what better autograph to get than the man who beat Trout each of the last two years for the MVP. One Miguel Cabrera.
Miguel has been a great player since he burst onto the scene with Florida and helped them win their first World Series. He was then moved to Detroit where he will probably finish up his career. It has been a great one so far and he is a sure fire Hall of Famer. The 3000 hit and 500 home run club will probably welcome him in before his career is over. He is only 31 and he has 2100 hits and 379 home runs. Being in the AL helps as he can slide over to DH in his waning years.
I didn't want Miguel's autograph on a Marlin card so that narrowed my focus to Detroit cards. Secondly it couldn't be a sticker autograph. That narrowed my search even smaller. I wasn't a big fan of the Museum autographs of Miguel as they looked a little crammed onto the card. With the prices being comparable I decided to turn my focus to my second favorite (Bowman Chrome is first) brand, Topps Five Star. I didn't want the patch card so that gave me only 75 cards to work from. There is the base autograph numbered to 50 and then the rainbow parallel numbered to 25. It didn't matter to me which one I got my hands on. It just had to be a nice copy and considering it was Five Star it could only have minimal corner "issues".
Found a seller that didn't have much history on eBay but his feedback was perfect. The auction was to conclude in the middle of June which was about 2 weeks till my eBay bucks would be available to me. As I have done before I contacted the seller asking if he would trust me to not pay for two weeks after the close of the auction if I won it. Thankfully like the other times I have done this the seller said no problem. Now I just had to win the card. He had a reserve on the auction and would not tell me what it was but with eBay bucks in my back pocket I could put in a bid a little higher than I normally would to secure a hard to acquire card.
Auction was coming to a close and the high bid was at $67 and some change but the reserve had not been met yet so even if I was the high bid it wouldn't mean I would win the card. I had a feeling I knew where his reserve was set and I put a larger than normal bid in and with it the reserve was met. Two seconds later I was declared the winner.
2 weeks later I sent him payment via the bucks program and a week after that I had this great looking Cabrera card in my hands. Nothing out of pocket and I reacquired a high priority autograph for the collection.
Looking at it in person I believe it would grade out to a mint 9.0. No way does it receive a gem mint but I still might submit it as I would like it encased and have a spiffy 9.0 assigned to it.
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