One Sorry Blog

Part 10 in a series chronicling the One Sorry Blog Baseball Card Sell-Off
By Paul Rivas

Editor’s note: One Sorry Blog founder Paul Rivas is selling off his baseball cards on ebay with seller name onesorryblog, keeping only a precious and worthless few. He intends to sell every last card that will bring money at auction and donate the remaining 30,000 for no tax break. Realizing that his last hurrah in the hobby is upon him, Rivas is recording and reflecting on the experience at One Sorry Blog, the thinking collector’s blog.

I already mentioned spending $5.50 at my local card shop on three 86-87 Fleer cards, a move I fruitlessly tried to justify by selling off the DJ card on ebay. The card didn’t sell - twice - and now I’m stuck with it, to go with Tom Chambers, Larry Nance and George Gervin (I can’t remember if I still have the Gervin or if I gave it to the person who bought my Gervin lot). Which got me thinking, maybe I should collect the 86-87 Fleer set, or at least all those that I can get cheaply. There was an eight-card lot on ebay that went for $5 including shipping, and it was a struggle not to bid. Last night I fought myself in my dreams as to whether or not buying 86-87 Fleer could be called anything other than addiction. In my sleep, I regretted selling my Dr. J sticker card for $1.25. Awake, I don’t find it nearly as difficult to not buy things, but in that dream it was tough.

Everyone knows it’s insane to buy cards during a firesale. There’s no doubt in my mind that the Chambers and Nance cards are pop art pieces well worth their $2 price tag, but that’s exactly what most of the 167 things I just sold on ebay were. Style is no excuse. Quite apart from the fact that my relapse almost inspired me to make good on a long-held collecting fantasy, I shouldn’t have gone against the principle of the sale. Remember how hot 86-87 Fleer cards were? They were hot, and I’ve always sort of wished I’d bought them in 1986, when I started collecting, instead of 86 Topps baseball, but that’s another gripe entirely. I acknowledge that I did a stupid thing, but I’m not sorry, and therein could be where the addiction lies.

I knew when this Sell-Off started that it would be all-consuming and heavy duty for as long as it lasted, and that it wouldn’t last very long. All of a sudden, the payments have all but stopped coming, and the 4:45 trips to the post-office are a thing of the past. Maybe I anticipated missing it all, and that’s why I bought those three cards. I tend to think it had more to do with my having come straight from looking at cards with Rob H. for three hours when I bought them. In any event, my ebay feedback is up to 68 now, 100 positives overall and the one mutual punk-out I had with one of my first buyers. It feels good, I suppose, having perfect feedback, and that’s where they get you. Despite being a nightmare to navigate, ebay is sure fun, and easy to get sucked into. As I write this, I’m watching five auctions for 86-87 Fleer items.

Saturday, I listed 14 lots, the last of the singles that are worth the effort and shipping costs to sell. In fact, their worth could not be more in question. I’ve lumped bunches of things together that didn’t sell or that I’d yet to try to sell. I started them all at the legal minimum $0.01, and have slashed shipping costs. It’s likely that some of the 14 lots will sell for less than the worth of their $0.08 rigid top-loaders. On the other end, I’m hoping the Kobe and Garnett stuff brings at least $5 per go. Of course, the stuff in the middle that I don’t think about is what will determine whether or not I make enough money to have made it worth the hour or two I put in on Saturday. Starting everything at $0.01 was Andrew Nixon’s suggestion, and starting the auctions on a Saturday afternoon was Rob Helms’s.

I predict that everything will sell for $0.01!

i’m trying to fix this.

Part 8 in a series chronicling the One Sorry Blog Baseball Card Sell-Off
By Paul Rivas

Editor’s note: One Sorry Blog founder Paul Rivas is selling off his baseball cards on ebay with seller name onesorryblog, keeping only a precious and worthless few. He intends to sell every last card that will bring money at auction and donate the remaining 30,000 for no tax break. Realizing that his last hurrah in the hobby is upon him, Rivas is recording and reflecting on the experience at One Sorry Blog, the thinking collector’s blog.

With the pace of the Sell-Off slackening a bit, I’ve been forced to find new ways of bringing in a few dollars. One has been to sell a few sets, which I’m finding to be as much trouble as I had feared it would. I currently have 93 Bowman, 93 SP and 94 SP for sale, each of which is missing the one big card, and entire versions of 96 SPX and 92 Upper Deck Minor League, which of course has 1992 cards of all the best 1993 rookies. I sold a complete 90 Leaf set to the winner of my 90 Leaf Frank Thomas. I’d offered the complete set on top of the Thomas for an additional $20, including shipping, and he accepted.

Now listen closely: if that same bidder hadn’t won five other items and paid $5.50 in shipping, this would have been quite a bad deal for me. As it turned out, mailing everything together, wrapped in bubble plastic and wedged in another cardboard box, cost $5.58. But the box I stupidly bought cost $2.50, and a roll of bubble paper cost another $2.50, not to mention packing tape for $2.50 more. I’ll use the bubble plastic and tape for future set shipments, but next time I’ll just wrap the wrapped set in brown paper and call it a day, rather than spending foolishly on a second ill-fitting box. There was also the problem of my having forgot that I’d offered the set up at this price and also listing it on ebay. This meant the leading bidder and one of this Sell-Off’s biggest supporters was devastated when I explained to him why I was ending the auction early. I’ve made a mental note to only list things in one place at a time.

Shipping continues to confound me. After seeing what mailing the 90 Leaf would have cost had I not lucked out with the winning bidder being a multiple winner, I’ve upped shipping charges for complete sets to $11. The couple that already had bids remain at $9. This allows for $6 in shipping alone (more for larger sets), plus $2 in packing materials if I can get four sets mailed with the bubble wrap and tape I bought. That leaves $3 to cover gas for the special trip to the post office that mailing a set requires, not to mention time spent packing it up.

Mailing single cards no longer requires a trip to the post office. After a week of sales, I’ve figured out that a single card in a top-loader wrapped in a regular piece of paper and sent in a regular business envelope can fly under the radar and be mailed as a letter with a single 41-cent stamp. Technically, such items should be charged the parcel rate of $1.13 and not the letter rate, but only one postal worker out of ten has charged me correctly. Sending two or three cards this way brings the postage for the improper method up to 73 cents, and up to $1.35 or so for the proper one. One astonishing discovery has been that while bubble mailers cost between $0.80 and $0.99 apiece, they weigh nothing more than a regular envelope! How can this be? Who knows, but yea, verily, it is so. The only problem is that a bubble mailer is indisputably a parcel and not a letter. In summary, a single card in a regular envelope can usually be mailed for a cost of 51 cents (41 for postage plus 10 for a peel-and-stick envelope), whereas a single card in a bubble mailer costs $2.12. By this count, it looks as though I’m making almost $1 in shipping on every item, but then I’ve not counted things such as regular letter paper, staples, time and the occasional need to pay the parcel rate.

Much of what I’ve listed recently in the way of single cards has been as lots of several related cards of the same player. I thought I’d try something new and charge $9 for shipping for these lots, which was cheaper than what, say, eight cards shipped individually would cost the buyer, and 50 cents cheaper than if one buyer bought all eight individually. Selling the lot for cheaper and charging more in shipping would save me close to 50 cents on ebay listing and final value fees, and I was sure buyers would be quick to figure this out. I struggled with the ethics of this, given that I’ve professed to make no money on shipping, but I figured that $3 or so in excess shipping here would go toward gas money, or something. The only comment I’ve received on this new practice came after the lots had been listed for a couple days, by the buyer of both my Moses Malone and Shaq rookie cards, two of my favorites in the entire sale. He suggested that although he didn’t really care, this bit of chicanery might be against ebay policy. I said I’d think it over, and I’ve since decided to heed his concern and drop the shipping down to $6. Thanks to him for reminding me of what I’d stated at the beginning of this sale of my entire collection piece by piece: that my interest was in seeing the cards go to good homes at final prices that reflected their value to buyers.

Another buyer impressed me with his good taste when he picked up my Darryl Dawkins and George Gervin rookies. I was also glad to see a local buyer and friend of mine land my entire collection of 14 Magic Johnson comeback years cards for $1.98 in two separate auctions. This guy was also the recipient of the first One Sorry Blog Baseball Card Sell-Off Readership Appreciation Prize. When I remembered that he collected Marlins cards, on account of his having decided in 1992 that he was going to back the Marlins when they came into the league, I ended the auction for a 94 Bowman’s Best and 96 Finest refractor Edgar Rentería on which he was bidding and gave them to him.

There are more OSBBCSORAPs to come, folks, so keep reading, leave comments and check out the auctions for a chance to grab some great stuff for $0.99. Ninety-five percent of what’s for sale now has one $0.99 bid or no bids at all.

Part 7 in a series chronicling the One Sorry Blog Baseball Card Sell-Off
By Paul Rivas

Editor’s note: One Sorry Blog founder Paul Rivas is selling off his baseball cards on ebay with seller name onesorryblog, keeping only a precious and worthless few. He intends to sell every last card that will bring money at auction and donate the remaining 30,000 for no tax break. Realizing that his last hurrah in the hobby is upon him, Rivas is recording and reflecting on the experience at One Sorry Blog, the thinking collector’s blog.

It was in Nicaragua, the country that gave you Dennis Martinez. We were in the last days of the big schlep. Clare had flown home with her Network TV Slut of a sister. I had risen at 5:00 a.m., a good hour or two later than the hours at which I would be asked to rise for the next two days’ buses to San Salvador and then Tapachula. Alone on my last night in Managua, I watched my first American football game of the season, Monday Night Pats at Ravens. I decided to start rooting hard for the Patriots to go undefeated and my Randy Moss rookie cards to be hot at $100 apiece. There followed some thoughts on what I would do for money when I got back to the U.S., and what I would do with all the stuff that I had stored around the county and forgotten about in my two years living in South America. By the time the Pats had pulled it out, I’d decided that slashing 30,000 cards would clean out the closets and bring a few dollars at the same time.

In Santa Barbara, two months, 95 auctions, three private sales and $1163 later, the Nicaragua story is laughable. The Pats slothed it in the Super Bowl, the Moss cards are the only ones I haven’t reclaimed from consignment at the card shop to auction on ebay, and a visit with a friend has served to remind me that 30,000 ain’t even that many: Rob, who has commented on this series, keeps 70,000 1987 Topps.

Dude’s got fourteen 5000-count monster boxes of 87 Topps. Think about what that means for my unopened wax box of the stuff. No good. Garnett cards are hot now, good. Kobe scoring 100 before I list my last ten of his rookie cards, also good. But a 96 Score Cal Ripken #2131 1:100,000,000 packs only brings $0.99? No good. I had dedicated a line or two in this limited edition blog (you are 1:120, one of only 120 readers per day) to how that card was the best card I ever got out of a pack and how I got it in the last pack I ever bought at Great American Baseball Cards. The card was on ebay seven days and inspired $0.99 (49p UK) in bids. How many 12-year-olds made mint condition Leaf sets in 1990 in Santa Barbara? That should make my 1990 Leaf set 1 of 1 or 2, tops, right? And if it is the only one, why shouldn’t the first and best 1990 Leaf set ever assembled by a Santa Barbara 12-year-old command a premium? Here I have the answer to the question of the year: How much is my baseball card collection worth?

86 Donruss Canseco rookie? $7.50. 85 Topps McGwire Olympic rookie professionally graded NM-MT? $10.50. Two (2) mint 87 Fleer Bonds rookies? $23.50. What surprised me is how I couldn’t find anything bad to say about a market such as the current one, a market in which a graded 95 Bowman Andruw Jones NM-MT is only worth $5.50. Who’s Andruw Jones? That card shouldn’t be worth money! Neither should elementary school kids have to spend four years’ allowance to get a nice Canseco rookie! I have no problem with a world in which a mint 93 SP Jeter is $132.50 and a 94 SP A-Rod PSA 8 is $127.50. I say cheap Cansecos for the kids. Meanwhile all adults should read Canseco’s book. You read it on One Sorry Blog: Canseco’s is a hilarious, truthful, irreverent, watershed work, the modern day Oddballs, only in the A Monograph on the Juice called Juiced! sort of way, in which only one in eight paragraphs begins, “I remember this one time in Oakland…” or whichever city. My copy was a present sent first class USPS to Buenos Aires, and I read it the day it arrived.

At the rate things are going, I’ll be selling stuff for another ten days or so. I can imagine listing the last saleable items in the next few days, or maybe I’ll wait to see how the current stuff ends up. I have four real nice sets for sale right now, two of which are missing the best card. I have two very nice rookie card lots for both Kobe and KG to put up today or tomorrow. Beyond that, I can’t see there being very much to sell that’s worth the five minutes and $0.20 required to list it on ebay. I suppose I could package a bunch of rookie and star cards together from ten-year spans and sell those, but it sounds like a right kerfuffle.

Then again, why not? I’m still of the mind that everything, if sold on its own and for its own merits, will sell. I can give you ten good reasons to buy my entire Nolan Ryan collection, but will you want to pay enough to make it worth my while to dig it all up? The fact is, a very high percentage of baseball cards are not only worthless, but a liability. Unless you’re selling the cards out of the back of your Volkswagen, as I have three times since this firesale began, somebody’ll have to pay to ship the stuff. I make no money on shipping, because I think that for what I’m doing, making money on shipping is bad style. If it’s not postage, it’s gasoline spent to get out to Longs on a Saturday, or the half hour spent in line waiting behind two moneygrams to Mexico that the computer was slow to process. I want this firesale to serve as a real-life price guide for the month of February 2008 for anyone who finds himself wondering what a certain of these cards is worth. The final price of all my auctions is the actual price the buyer is willing to pay plus the actual shipping charges and expenses. All the end-of-auction prices for the cards in my collection are, to the penny, exactly what those cards were worth, that week, on ebay.

Part 6 in a series chronicling the One Sorry Blog Baseball Card Sell-Off
By Paul Rivas

Editor’s note: One Sorry Blog founder Paul Rivas is selling off his baseball cards on ebay with seller name onesorryblog, keeping only a precious and worthless few. He intends to sell every last card that will bring money at auction and donate the remaining 30,000 for no tax break. Realizing that his last hurrah in the hobby is upon him, Rivas is recording and reflecting on the experience at One Sorry Blog, the thinking collector’s blog.

Thanks to the many multiple buyers I’ve had so far! I think this is what we’re all striving for. In my experience, doing several deals with the same buyer or seller makes life easier and cheaper on all fronts. I suppose these folks have been enticed by the option ebay gives viewers to view a seller’s other items, as opposed to finding several of my cards on unrelated individual searches, but I don’t know for sure.

Today was my first big day item-wise, with 27 auctions closing. 24 things sold for about $100 total. Not surprisingly, two Jermaine O’Neal parallels and a chingered Doug Flutie rookie did not sell. I still have 131 items for sale, and each of the next few days will involve action similar to today’s. My autographed George Gervin white replica rookie from Topps Chrome, I think, went for $12.05. I’d started it at $9.99, the highest minimum bid I placed on any card in this entire firesale, because I wasn’t sure too many people would be looking for Gervin cards, and I didn’t want to let it go for too little, since I like it plenty and would have been happy to have kept it. Yet today I posted a remarkable 12-card Gervin lot that already has one bid. I also have an 86-87 Fleer card of him for sale. Jermaine O’Neal and Al Harrington autograph inserts bring a buck or two. This shocked me as being absurdly low, but I suppose it shouldn’t. My Byron Scott autographics only went for $4, and he used to run with Showtime. Remember those Skybox autographics? I knew a guy in town who paid $200 for the Grant Hill.

If you’re wondering which is Kobe’s best rookie card besides Chrome, it’s apparently E-XL 2000 by a nose. My Kobe E-XL-2000 sold for $19.05 as compared to my Finest, which only brought $17.50. I professed to have every Kobe rookie card, which I was sure I did until I went running to my parents’ house to dig up the Topps Chrome that I saw was bringing $130 on ebay only to find that I literally had every one but that one. Disappointing, but had I checked my inventory beforehand, I wouldn’t have wasted a trip. I had the O’Neal and Garnett 96-97 Topps Chrome, but not the Kobe. I do have every Garnett rookie, but they’re going fast. It’ll be interesting to see which inserts command bucks and which slip by for 99 cents.

A Canadian bought my Mark McGwire Finest mullet card, and my autographed Garnett insert is going to France. People are really taking to my $1.50 shipping option, as I thought they would. All I did today was put up that Gervin lot and possibly the only two sets I’ll sell intact: 90 Leaf and 96 SPX. I was proud to have made the 90 Leaf set, and I was probably one of the only 12-year-olds in town to put one together. I collected the 96 SPX in my time working at Rob and Eric’s card shop. I tried something a little different today, and listed the shipping for each of the above three items at $9, instructing buyers to consider this when bidding. I’m curious as to whether it will have any effect on the final price. I have quite a few older basketball cards finishing tomorrow.

Whose rookie year card do you think will bring in the most: Dr. J, Moses Malone, Gervin, Darryl Dawkins, Magic, Bird or Rodman?

Part 5 in a series chronicling the One Sorry Blog Baseball Card Sell-Off
By Paul Rivas

Editor’s note: One Sorry Blog founder Paul Rivas is selling off his baseball cards on ebay with seller name onesorryblog, keeping only a precious and worthless few. He intends to sell every last card that will bring money at auction and donate the remaining 30,000 for no tax break. Realizing that his last hurrah in the hobby is upon him, Rivas is recording and reflecting on the experience at One Sorry Blog, the thinking collector’s blog.

Fully four people have written the ebay desk of One Sorry Blog in the last week saying how inspiring they’d each found this little series. A few folks have conveyed their comments on the blog to me verbally, perhaps thinking (as I did) that no one else reads it anyway, and a few others have cabled to say that they’re still reading. One bidder sent me a message on ebay suggesting that I might get more bids for one of my rather nice Garnett cards if I listed it in the basketball instead of baseball category.

In every instance, the message has been encouraging, and surprisingly in line with what I posited in the first part of this series, namely that my turning my early life’s work out to the collecting masses at absurdly cheap prices is a good and necessary thing for the hobby. Everybody is stoked on these cards, and wouldn’t they be? I’ve been astonished at what good condition they’re in (like that Moses Malone, for instance), and as I put another 25 for sale every day on ebay, I’m continually finding things that even I find exciting, and I’m supposed to not be interested anymore.

The card shop owner had warned me: “Be careful. This is just how Josh started again. He came in here talking about selling all his cards, and then he’d find something here that he thought was cool. Then he was buying packs, and now he’s collecting again.” I laughed, but kept finding reasons to go back the next day, on my way to or from my parents’ house, where the scanner and good internet connection are. I’ve probably been in the card store every day for the last week, or more times than I had in the last ten years combined.

Yesterday, though, I saw something there that I hadn’t seen before: one of those old 50-count plastic boxes full of 86-87 Fleer basketball singles. Now I don’t know about our readers around the country, but 86-87 Fleer has never been a common sight in Santa Barbara. Nevertheless, there they were, 50% off book. The two that caught my eye were Larry Nance in the dunk contest and Tom Chambers’ rookie card. I knew I couldn’t bring myself to buy them, not with the money I’d just collected from the sale of my 52 Topps Feller. Then I saw the Dennis Johnson, and I told myself that I could sell the DJ on ebay and it would practically pay for the two.

Like almost all the singles in the card shop, they were on consignment, but these happened to belong to a former teammate of mine on the A’s in the coach-pitch league. I wrestled with it for a good minute or two, and the card shop owner even offered to give me my money back after I’d made the purchase. Yet the moment that I picked up a Tom Chambers rookie card from the most iconic set of basketball cards ever made for $2, I knew what an old neighbor of mine had felt two weeks ago when I’d sold him my 89 Upper Deck factory set for $40 in the post office parking lot and he said, “I’ve wanted this since I was a kid!”

That’s the only way I can describe it: I’ve felt like a kid the last couple weeks. This blog is proof, I mean just look at how many new posts have gone up here in the last week versus the last several months. In preparing to give the friend who bought my Feller card a bunch of old commons, I went through a 3200-count box of pre-1986 cards to make sure there wasn’t anything in there that I should keep. I discovered a pile of about 75 cards in penny sleeves containing rookie cards of the likes of Billy Joe Robidoux, the San Diego Chicken and Fred Dryer, whom I only ever knew as Hunter. My friend said he could see how excited I was about this whole card thing again, and I told him that what was so exciting about it was that I had no idea how long it was going to turn out. I changed my mind every day about how much to keep, I didn’t know if half the cards I put on ebay would even sell and I was still only had four or five auctions ending per day. I’ve sold 20 things for $668 thus far, but I have another 152 auctions ending in the next week. Everything is fleeting these days, and I’m finding that I whenever I sit down to do anything related to cards I feel braced with youth. I write these blog entries at 2 a.m., and I’ve been arriving at my parents’ house earlier and earlier in the day.

The biggest news from the Sell-Off in the last couple days has been that my much-touted 93 SP Jeter rookie went for $132.50, whereas a Garnett autographed card that books for $150 and for which I paid $70 went for $29.02. What’s even more astonishing to me is that a Scoreboard Jermaine O’Neal autograph card looks like it’s gonna go for the 99-cent mininum. My big question these days will be how much money these lesser cards go for. I’m only expecting 10 or so of the 152 items currently remaining to bring in more than $10 apiece, but If Kobe scores 100 points in the next day or two, I’ll be rich.

You just never know with ebay, and that’s part of the fun. There obviously aren’t very many Jermaine O’Neal fans looking for his rookie cards this week, but who’s to say that there won’t be next week? All those great cards I listed that don’t look like they’re going to sell for $0.99 have to be worth more than that to somebody, right? Are you telling me nobody wants a Larry Bird card with Rambis in the background for 49p? No one needs a Doug Flutie rookie card in the next 15 hours?

Part 4 in a series chronicling the One Sorry Blog Baseball Card Sell-Off
By Paul Rivas

Editor’s note: One Sorry Blog founder Paul Rivas is selling off his baseball cards on ebay with seller name onesorryblog, keeping only a precious and worthless few. He intends to sell every last card that will bring money at auction and donate the remaining 30,000 for no tax break. Realizing that his last hurrah in the hobby is upon him, Rivas is recording and reflecting on the experience at One Sorry Blog, the thinking collector’s blog.

Remember that guy who didn’t pay until I took him to ebay court? Well I was struggling with what Feedback to give him, and I finally opted for neutral. Feedback is what each party says about the other after the transaction, and it’s overwhelmingly positive. A legitimate negative Feedback usually means the person is either an idiot or an asshole. After no contact from ebay username greightwhitehype (lame) anytime in the regulation seven-day period following him winning $178.50 in auctions, I filed a dispute, because, damn it, this is a firesale and I’ve got to get this stuff out the door! He paid the next morning (yesterday) and I shipped him the cards the same day WITH FREE INSURANCE to show that I appreciated his paying, even though I’d felt compelled to leave neutral feedback on account of his flakiness.

This morning I fire up ebay and see that the cheeky bastard left me negative Feedback, saying “BAD EBAYER DOES NOT GIVE ANYTIME TO PAY FOR AUCTION!”

I know, huh?

So I sent him a message right away saying:

EBAY POLICY IS 7 DAYS TO PAY. NOT ONLY DID YOU NOT PAY, BUT YOU NEVER EVEN CONTACTED ME. I WAS THE BIGGER MAN HERE AND GAVE YOU NEUTRAL FEEDBACK EVEN WHEN I COULD HAVE GIVEN YOU NEGATIVE, AND HERE YOU GO AND SCREW ME! AND ALL OF THIS AFTER I SHIPPED YOUR ITEMS THE SAME DAY I RECEIVED PAYMENT AND WITH FREE INSURANCE!!! YOU LOW-RENT PUNK!!! YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF. YOU’RE A DISGRACE TO THE HOBBY AND TO EBAY.

I then logged on to gmail and saw that he had also followed up the negative Feedback he he left with a proposal that we mutually remove the feedback we left about each other. Since I’d already given him a good written undressing, I reluctantly accepted. When I see a negative comment, I always go and read what the other side said. I’m confident that people would do this in my case, particularly since these two negatives (two items sold to this gypsy) are coming after three glowing positives, the entirety of my Feedback, but I’d still rather not have 40% of my Feedback coming from this blackmailer. After more than 100 transactions over the years, I’ve never had a negative Feedback on ebay, and I’d just as soon keep it that way.

His excuse was that he’d been out of town and couldn’t get to a computer. Then how did he ever bid? And why didn’t he say so when he made that Immaculate Bid?

What do you folks think happened here? Do you think he was trying to either not pay or screw me from the beginning? Did I overract to his having gone in the tank for a week?

Part 3 in a series chronicling the One Sorry Blog Baseball Card Sell-Off
By Paul Rivas

Editor’s note: One Sorry Blog founder Paul Rivas is selling off his baseball cards on ebay with seller name onesorryblog, keeping only a precious and worthless few. He intends to sell every last card that will bring money at auction and donate the remaining 30,000 for no tax break. Realizing that his last hurrah in the hobby is upon him, Rivas is recording and reflecting on the experience at One Sorry Blog, the thinking collector’s blog.

If you don’t intend to ever use ebay to buy or sell cards, you can skip this one. Still, I hope that you continue reading. I got some encouragement from my cousin-in-law (who has actually appeared on a real football card, which is probably more than any of us can say) today who said he found Part 1 interesting. I said that I hoped it would be interesting for anyone who had ever picked up a baseball card. I was finding it interesting, and I hadn’t seen a baseball card in ten years. And that, I guess, is why I’m writing all this. I’ve definitely been feeling some urgency to get it all down now, while it’s happening, because it could be that I don’t have enough good cards for this epic sale to last even a week.

My first mistake was to offer optional insurance for $1. As it turns out, insurance costs $1.65 and up. I now charge $2 for optional insurance. I didn’t used to offer discounts for combined shipping to winners of multiple auctions (which happens! - see previous post), and no one seemed to mind, but now buyers pay the full shipping price once and add $1 for each additional card. I’ve also implemented what I think is the best shipping for sports cards on ebay. There are two options: the card in a semi-rigid top-loader, wrapped and taped snugly in a regular piece of paper and sent in a regular old envelope for $1.50, OR, the card in a semi-rigid top-loader chucked in a bubble mailer for $3. I make a few cents on both of these options, as with insurance, but not enough to pay for gas to and from the post office. It’s occurred to me to charge a ton in shipping and take less for the cards, because ebay takes a percentage of the final auction price and not of the total auction plus shipping charges, and quite a few sellers apparently do this, but, well, actually I can’t think of a good reason why I don’t do this. I guess I’m striving for total transparency whenever possible, and it’s important to me for potential buyers to know that I offer fair and reasonable shipping rates, even if it costs me a little in the long run.

I’m listed on ebay as preferring PayPal, which I do, because payment is instant, despite never actually asking what percentage of my sales they take, but I also accept money orders and cashier’s checks, in an effort to not discriminate against the Internet shopper with bad credit, or perhaps the Latin American shopper, who doesn’t trust that his credit card information is safe online. But what I didn’t do until today, and what took me a good 20 minutes to figure out how to do, was include a payment address. A payment address is not my registration address or my shipping address, but an address where low-tech buyers should mail their homeless-style payments. This resulted in one buyer probably having to go use the Internet at his local branch library and write me asking for my mailing address for payments which, incidentally, is different from my registration address.

I mentioned that posting a new item for sale takes about five (5) minutes, but I neglected to mention that this was only possible after a 15-minute tutorial on scanning with Dr. Mary Nisbet and a frantic call to my mom asking her how to get the scanner working. Apparently, the thing to do is click scan, then click the little box asking if you want to use the “scanner drivers”, which allow you to perform fancier maneuvers with the thing rather than settle for the more basic options available if you don’t click there. So use the scanner drivers. Then “preview” it. Then something that looks an awful lot like scanning, and which the layman is likely to confuse for scanning, will happen. But it isn’t scanning, it’s just previewing. Then you draw a rectangle around the card and click “scan”, and then it scans for real. Posting similar cards consecutively helps speed things up. Going by sport and year seems to work best, so all the 95-96 basketball cards, then the 96-97s, and when the basketball cards are gone, switch sports. This is so you don’t have to change categories as often, which takes time. Oh yeah, all this scanning came after Craig told me someone told him that scanning works better than photos. I’d been wondering why my photos of my cards were coming out so bad compared to everyone else’s, then I learned it’s because everyone else’s were scans and not photos. Then my scans were no good, and that’s where Dr. Mary Nisbet set me straight.

Now, having 115 things for sale on ebay is an awesome prospect when the first 11 items brought in $408, but what happens when I have 25 auctions ending per day, and 25 payments arriving via Paypal and the mails? I don’t know - talk to me in three days. But what I think will happen is that I’ll no longer feel the need to check up on my auctions every two minutes. It’s also important to remember that I’ve largely been posting the best items first. I expect that eventually, when the popcorn kernels are only popping every few seconds and my cards cease to bring in even the modest $0.99 that I’m asking, I’ll cease to bother with posting 25 things a day. The saving grace is that ebay keeps track of five steps in an idiot-proof manner: buying, paying, shipping, seller leaving feedback, buyer leaving feedback and the item being returned (if necessary), so that it’s hard to lose track of where you are in the process. I leave positive feedback for buyers the minute I hear of them paying. Some sellers like to wait until the buyer leaves positive feedback after receiving the card, but I don’t have the time or attention to detail to get into mind games with buyers and remember who I’m withholding feedback for and why. I have a few things for sale now that I’m not sure will bring 99 cents plus $1.50 shipping, but I’ll know for sure in six days.

In the meantime, these are the things I’ll be thinking about and trying to improve as the big bucks start a-rollin’ in.

What do you folks think about bidding $50 for a card and paying $3 shipping vs. paying $33 for a card and paying $20 shipping? Would you be inclined to opt for one or the other?

Part 2 in a series chronicling the One Sorry Blog Baseball Card Sell-Off
By Paul Rivas

Editor’s note: One Sorry Blog founder Paul Rivas is selling off his baseball cards on ebay with seller name onesorryblog, keeping only a precious and worthless few. He intends to sell every last card that will bring money at auction and donate the remaining 30,000 for no tax break. Realizing that his last hurrah in the hobby is upon him, Rivas is recording and reflecting on the experience at One Sorry Blog, the thinking collector’s blog.

With two days to go before my next auctions end, I’ll take a minute to consider my totals thus far: 11 cards sold, all PSA graded (they were my only 11 graded cards), for a total of $408.

$408 is $408, right? Right, except when there’s a deadbeat bidder involved. Some guy bought my first 94 SP A-Rod PSA 8 and my 89 UD Griffey PSA 9 for $127.50 and $51 but… wait for it… didn’t pay until I filed a dispute inducing him to honor his bid. From the look of his ebay Feedback, it seems that every once in a while he decides to not buy or sell whatever it is he has promised to pay for or send. I’m lucky and thankful that he decided to pay. So much so, that I’m going to insure his $178.50 in cards free of charge, which will put me out $2.50 or so, but not really, because he paid $6 for shipping that will only cost $4. And if that isn’t proof that it all works out in the end, I don’t know what is. Good thing, too, because subsequently, my other 94 SP A-Rod PSA 8 went for $108, meaning I likely would have got less for the first one the second time around.

I now have 99 items for sale on ebay, more than I’d ever thought I’d have the patience to list, but I’ve also already hauled in $80 for two off-ebay transactions. While at the post office mailing off a few cards to winning (and paying) bidders, I sold my 89 Upper Deck factory set to an old roommate for $40, or exactly what it would have gone for on ebay, without the hassle of shipping an 800-count set and without paying any ebay fees. When another promising bidder asked a question about the A-Rod, we ended up arranging a deal for three cards that I estimated would have brought $50 on ebay. I let them go for $40, payment was instant via PayPal, and the guy was “VERY pleased” with the transaction. Now tell me if this isn’t the way to go whenever possible, given that there are folks loose on ebay who Otto in Repo Man would have described as “dildoes who don’t pay their bills”.

The third side of this story is that two of the three cards in that deal were 95-96 Finest KG PSA 8s, both of which I’d put on consignment at Great American Baseball Cards for $40 apiece, of which I would get $30 per card. Craig told me that one guy who likes Finest almost bought one. Craig’s was actually the first place I went when I decided to sell my cards. I left some Randy Moss, Kobe and KG cards with him, all the best of which are already on ebay or sold now. Craig doesn’t much sell stuff for a fraction of the alleged value, and good for him: cards bought from the card shop should cost more. When I interviewed him for a profile in The Independent in 2005, we counted 13 card shops in the Santa Barbara area that had closed since he’d opened in 1986, including Murderer’s Row, where I worked under its second owners. By any measure, Great American is an institution and Craig is a caretaker of the hobby. Buying cards there, however 20th century that may seem, should rightfully cost more than on ebay. After all, around the world, things that are charming, historic and inefficient always cost more.

It’s worth mentioning that the 95 Bowman’s Best Guerrero PSA 8 that I just sold for $27.75 was one that I had bought ungraded at Great American for $25, making it literally the only card among the 11 graded cards sold that I had bought or traded for years ago for less than it went for on ebay this week. I think that Guerrero card must have been the last single card I ever purchased at the card shop. The last pack I ever bought there was 96 Score. I was trying for the Cal Ripken 2131 card and I busted it!
That’s right, the best card I ever got from a pack came from the last pack I ever bought at the card shop I’d patronized for 10 years. Needless to say, it’s up on ebay now.

I never had huge luck with packs. In fact, a Lawrence Taylor RC from 82 Topps, also from Craig’s, might be the next best card that I ever got out of a pack.

Part 1 in a series chronicling the One Sorry Blog Baseball Card Sell-Off
By Paul Rivas

Editor’s note: One Sorry Blog founder Paul Rivas is selling off his baseball cards on ebay with seller name onesorryblog, keeping only a precious and worthless few. He intends to sell every last card that will bring money at auction and donate the remaining 30,000 for no tax break. Realizing that his last hurrah in the hobby is upon him, Rivas is recording and reflecting on the experience at One Sorry Blog, the thinking collector’s blog.

Greetings to all you noble collectors out there, millennial hobbyists. I’m selling my sports card collection for whatever I can get for it on ebay, trading memories for cash. This blog series is my contribution to the hobby, a chance for everyone who has ever collected cards in the last 20 years to see exactly what their cards are “worth”.

First, here’s a few things that are important to remember but too depressing to repeat: baseball cards from 1986 to 1996 are the most difficult to sell of any in history due to overproduction and steroids; baseball cards are difficult to sell in February because the season doesn’t properly start until April; football season is well over, and basketball playoff excitement is still months away.

Laughing at these negative market forces, somewhere along the big schlep I decided to sell my cards. It was all part of moving back to my home country for a third time and getting rid of a bunch of stuff that I’d even forgot I had because it’d been stored in my parents’ closets so long. Stuff like Pulp Fiction posters and t-shirts that are no longer appropriate for an engaged man to wear in public. The only differences was that I had over 30,000 baseball cards. Shortly came my first major realization of how this whole process was going to work:

Nobody cares what sets you have!
Aside from the fact that they’re a hassle to ship and almost impossible to grade accurately for prospective buyers, sets are out. I had success selling my boss’ sets from the 70s on ebay about ten years ago, which is not at all relevant to my case today. As a set collector, this was probably the most heart-wrenching revelation of the whole deal: if I ever wanted to sell anything, I’d have to break my painstakingly assembled sets wide open and sack them for the one or two cards in each that someone might buy. In preparing to do so, I learned the most important factor in the card business today:

Condition is king!
Since there is no shortage of even the best cards from each set, the overriding determinant of price is condition. There are plenty of 89 Upper Deck Griffeys, but they’re not all in certifiable mint condition, as identified with a professional grade of PSA 9. Having a handful of cards graded in my final days as a collector was the smartest thing I ever did. Graded cards are the easiest to sell, as their condition is assumed to be indisputable. My graded cards were the first to go on ebay and brought in the most money, by far, per card. In turn, this simple fact drives all card sales on ebay. Any card that is a legitimate candidate for a mint or gem mint grading is one that will command a good price at auction. Check out some completed auction results if you don’t believe me. I have posted 75 cards for sale this week, the condition of every one of which I scrutinized and described as best I could. I’d gained a reputation for being a scrupulous descriptor of the condition of those 70s cards, and I feel that dedicating five minutes per card (the time it takes to scan the card, write the description and post the item on ebay) to describe each card accurately is a good investment. The last thing you want in a firesale is customers returning things. And in a true firesale…

Everything must go!
I ritualistically sorted through my singles eight or nine times, sorting and resorting into smaller and smaller piles, until I realized that I’d rather have the money for all but one or two of them, which comic man Shane Amaya aptly described as more pop art than sports cards. A stack of very nice 70s and 80s basketball cards that I’d set aside for myself went on ebay the next day. Why in hell was I selling them if I didn’t want to sell the nice ones? Five minutes per card is a lot of work when there are 30,000 to go, and if anything was worth selling, it was the historically and stylistically influential cards that I’d handpicked in my last couple years collecting as being culturally relevant. Surely the point of selling any collection is to sell the best pieces. Here I began to understand the crucial role that guys like me play in the sports card hobby:

Save the baseball card hobby - sell your collection!
When you commit to selling your collection piece by piece to the highest bidder, holding nothing back and accepting practically any price, you have a chance to do something great. Nice cards are injected into the hobby at a rate of 25 per day (two hours at the computer). By writing even a one-line explanation of why one of my favorite cards would be a worthy addition to any collection, I initiate a relationship with potential buyers. I can be sure that potential bidders will at least be aware of my point of view, which I hope will be inspiring. Just because I’ve decided I don’t need a great 87-88 Larry Bird showing his leg way up in the air after a rebound and Kurt Rambis in the background anymore doesn’t mean you shouldn’t buy it. It’s a great card! That’s why I got it in the first place! And because it’s in great condition, it’s suitable for even the most discerning collector. Whether it goes to a Larry Bird fan who doesn’t care what the corners are like, to somebody trying to build an entire 87-88 set in NM-MT+, or to a white power group, I can be sure it’ll be appreciated. Buyers get exactly the carefully selected cards they’ve been looking for and I am assured of getting exactly what their cards are really “worth”, and…

They’re only worth what somebody will actually pay for them on ebay!
There must be other sports card selling sites out there, but none can have anywhere near the traffic that ebay has, or be as easy to use. I’ve been astonished at how much simpler ebay is to use than I remember it and also at how much more I can do on ebay. ebay keeps track of everything. Paypal is awesome, and payment can be instantaneous. The trick is to get as much money as you can out of each card. When there were no bids on my graded Gwynn, McGwire and Piazza cards after three days, rather than risk somebody being the only one in seven days to be looking for a 93 Finest Piazza PSA 9 and grabbing the card for the starting bid of $0.99, I ended the auction and relisted them at $8.99, $5.99 and $4.99, respectively. They’re all selling now. I didn’t do that for my 95 Bowman Andruw Jones PSA 8, and after a week of very low traffic the winning bidder only had to shell out $5.50, probably a bit lower than what he would have had to pay if I’d started it at $4.99. There’s no danger of starting high-traffic items, like PSA 8 94 SP A-Rods, at $0.99, because the market will not let one of those sell for less than $120 or so. There is, however, a very real chance that there’s only one person looking for a Darryl Dawkins rookie card this week and that that person is willing to pay more than the $0.99 starting price tag. Cards like that one may only worth paying $0.20 to list on ebay, whereas $0.70 spent to list an exceptional 93 SP Jeter with pictures all over the place may have more than a $0.50 impact on the price of the final bid. ebay takes this fee plus 1% of sales, in my case, and Paypal takes another bit from credit and debit card payments.

So those are the dominant themes from these first couple weeks, which thus far include eight sales for about $280 (with one deadbeat buyer not having yet paid his $180 bill) with another 67 cards currently on auction. I’ll put another chunk up today, and hopefully every day, until they no longer bring in enough money to make it worthwhile. I’ll be posting new blog entries as often as interesting stuff happens.

How much would you pay for a 93 Finest McGwire showing his red mullet on front and back?

What’s one card from 1986 to 1996 that you’d like to have?