Making Over $50 on One Fatima Card -- Same Exact Certification #

Just a little tidbit about how I sometimes make summer money with baseball cards. Here is a 1913 T200 Fatima baseball card I just bought. Notice the PSA certification number:

I bought this one via bid last night for $106.50, quite cheap for a 1913 Fatima, in PSA 1.5 Fair condition. The PSA certification number, if you don't want to click the pic--and you should; it's a nice card--is 19195087. So, last night, $106.50, Cert. #19195087.

Of course, before you agree to spend that much money, you research online how much that card has sold for recently on ebay, to make sure you don't overspend. Specific bids on ebay can inexplicably go crazy; I saw just last night some T206 PSA 2s go for almost $40 (you can get them typically between $23-$28) and I saw 3s go for over $50 (you can commonly get them for $35 to $45, max) and so on. Well, one of the ones I saw had sold via bid on May 9th of this year, just a few months ago. Here it is:

This one sold for $157.50. Same card, same condition, same grading company. (Same ebay company, too.) I thought this was rare, since 1913 T200 Fatima cards themselves are pretty rare, so I looked a little closer. You can, too, just click the pic. You might notice the same thing I did. This wasn't just the same card--a 1913 T200 Fatima Cincinnati Reds in PSA 1.5 condition--but it was literally the same exact specific card. Look at the certification number. Exactly the same: 19195087!

What're the odds of that? That means that someone on May 9th--just two months ago--bought this exact same card on a bid from this ebay company for $157.50 (plus $6 shipping). But something happened. Either he didn't actually pay for it, so the same company had to re-post it for bid, or he did pay for it, but either because of financial hardship or something else, sent it back to the same exact ebay company he bought it from to begin with, which re-posted it, and I bought it via bid for $51 less than the original buyer bought it for just two months ago. $150 or so is a decent, common price for a Fatima in this condition, so my $106 bid is a steal. In fact, the original buyer in May spent $157.50, plus $6 shipping, plus another $3.50 or so when he mailed it back to the company to sell for him. At 15%, this company made $23.62 off of him when he bought it, plus whatever profit it makes from the $6 shipping, since it definitely doesn't take $6 to ship this one card to the winner. Then it re-posted it for him and made another $15.97 from the sale to me. So this poor guy spent $157.50 to get it, and got just $106.50 - $15.97 back from it, so $90.53. So $157.50 - $90.53 is $66.97, plus another few bucks for shipping it back to be re-sold. So let's say $70. So this guy lost $70 on this same exact, same certification number, card. In less than 2 months. It takes about a month to mail it to an ebay company: let them itemize it, list it, let it be bid on for about a week, itemize the sale of it, wait a max of 5 days for the winner to pay for it, and then another few days for that to clear through PayPal for the guy to get his money. So that means the original guy owned it for less than a month before he decided to send it back to the ebay consignment company to re-sell for him, at a $70 loss. That sucks!

To maximize a profit, I won't sell this one anytime soon. (It's my only Fatima, so I hopefully won't sell it at all.) I'll wait until the end of the baseball season, and I sell via a different ebay company, anyway. A card in this condition normally sells for $150+. This one, and a Fatima PSA 2 that sold for a crazy-low $126, are the only two out of dozens in my research, in a 1.5 or 2 condition, that I saw sell for less than $150. Sometimes you make more by not selling, and waiting a little. And since I spent $50 less than usual, it won't have to re-sell for much more for me to see a profit from it. I'm confident that it'll sell for about $150+ when (or if) I'm ready to let it go.

Ken Griffey Jr. 1989 Mother's Cookies RC #4 in PSA Gem Mint 10

Photo: Ken Griffey, Jr. 1989 Mother's Cookies #4 in PSA Gem Mint 10

Not too much to say about this one, except that it's a great picture, and is one of four cards of Griffey produced by Mother's Cookies in 1989. I've got this one, #4, and his #3 will be here shortly. Still on the lookout for a decently-priced 1 and 2. This one is supposedly the hardest to get and of the greatest value of the four. I got it for $30.75, including shipping, and PSA currently values it at $45, for a profit of $14.25---not too bad for a recent card. I've got #s 1 and 2 on my radar, but I'm waiting for their prices to come down. These are a bit more rare, so they won't be up for bid on eBay regularly.

Ken Griffey Jr. 1989 Fleer Rookie Card in PSA Gem Mint 10

Photo: front and back of Griffey's 1989 Fleer card

Not much to say about this one. I got it recently after being on a bit of a Griffey kick lately. I got this one, a 1989 Topps Traded and a 1989 Mother's Cookies, #4. All rookie cards, all perfect 10s, all to be put on here soon.

This one I got for $30 and PSA says it's worth $30. I usually make a profit from my buys, but every now and then I break even or take a hit. On this one I broke even. I don't expect it to drop too much, but it probably won't gain much, either. In 2002, this one sold for about $64 and it now sold for $30, so that's a drop, but I don't see it dropping further. PSA indicates that this exact card in my collection may be from the Dmitri Young Collection, so that's very exciting, and led to me taking a chance on it.

Mike Trout 2011 Bowman Draft RC

Photos: from my own collection

Here's a Mike Trout Bowman Draft rookie card.

This is not to be confused with the 2011 Mike Trout Bowman Chrome rookie card, or the 2011 Mike Trout Bowman Chrome Draft rookie card.  Both cards with "draft" in the name are #101, while the Chrome is #175.  Go figure.  What I can tell you is that when I went to bid on these, and the many dozens of other options that showed up, I had to look at my Beckett Graded book to see which one was which time and time again, since the three different cards also have different values.  I had to stop a few times and adjust my eyes, and it doesn't help that the listings on Ebay are often misleading or flat-out incorrect.  The sellers didn't seem to know what they were selling, at times, since some said they were selling a Bowman Chrome when they were actually selling a Bowman Chrome Draft.  There were many other misleading tags as well.  Crazy. And, oh yeah, there are tons of bunched-together listings in the Beckett book, and they tended to blur together after awhile, too.

I also had to look at the established Mike Trout rookie cards from cardboardconnection.com, which lists the actual rookie cards of every important player.  This is now necessary, since there are so many cards that say "rookie" or "RC" on them, but they're not actual rookies, they just got released in the player's rookie year.  That makes it a rookie, right?  No, because there are so many subsets from the same card company that not each of them are considered rookies.  Plus, there are a lot of "prospect" cards, which used to mean rookie, but now doesn't.  And some players have a rookie card even before their rookie year or their prospect card--see: Mark McGwire's Olympics card, which is his rookie.

For those who're wondering, Mike Trout's only rookie cards are: 2011 Bowman Chrome #175; 2011 Bowman Chrome Draft #101; 2011 Bowman Draft #101; 2011 Bowman Sterling #22 (Good luck! That one's BV is $150 for a NmMt 8 and $500 for a Gem 9.5 / 10); 2011 Finest Baseball #94 and 2011 Topps Update #US175.  (See how the Chrome and Topps is #175?  That's because Topps owns Bowman, but all the Bowman Draft sets and subsets are #101.)  That's a lot to see, and blur through, while you're sorting out listings by condition, cost, reputation and listing accuracy--the last of which was terrible!

And thank you to Cardboard Connection for providing those separate rookie and prospect listings.

By the way, did you know that prospect cards are released before the rookie cards, so you'll see them before you see the rookie cards, which used to be the ones you'd see first?  And some prospect cards are traded and bought like they're rookies, and are often worth much more than the rookie cards!

Anyway, as I mentioned in the previous Bryce Harper entry, I don't usually buy recent rookie cards. Bryce Harper is an exception worth taking a chance on.  Mike Trout is an exception you have to take a chance on.  Trout is a no-brainer, like Pujols was, but more so, because Pujols was so obvious, and so alone in the field of new players at the time, that he didn't even have to be awesome to be the one to buy at that time.

Mike Trout is different because he is shoulders above some very impressive newer players in the past few years.  Bryce Harper also stands out almost as much.  But there's also Paul Goldschmidt, the most underrated player in baseball, who's finished second in the MVP voting the past two straight years, and who noticed?  Very quiet player who plays for a very bad team; had he played for the Yankees, we'd be talking about him like we do Trout and Harper.  (I've been trying to get a Goldschmidt rookie, too, though I have far surpassed my holiday spending.  But a Mint Condition Goldschmidt Topps Update RC is only $10--and that's Buy It Now, not even bidding.  (Bids tend to be a few bucks cheaper.)  Anyway, I feel Goldschmidt is a sleeper, and I'm going to get his rookie now while it's cheap.  I just did the same with Jose Altuve's, which is just plain cheap; I got 7 Altuve Bowman RCs for $7, including shipping.  Ungraded, sure, but I gave to a friend the one with a few corner dings, and I'll send the best of the others to get graded and take my chances.

And we haven't talked about Rizzo, or Correa, or Arrieta, or any of the other ones.  These last 3-4 years have been amongst the best three to four year stretch for rookies since the early 90s.

Anyway, Mike Trout stands way above all of these guys, and the collectors seem to know it, since his ungraded Bowman cards sell for about $20 when bidding, and over $30 for Buy It Now.  Lots of buyers are Buying It Now, too, which tells me they're in very high demand, since experienced Ebay shoppers would rather spend $10 more just to know they can get one.

I spent $19.38 for the one pictured above, and that includes shipping.

So I'm taking a chance, because once I send it away, it has to be graded an 8 or better for me to break even.  In fact, an 8 is just $20 BV, so I'll lose out a little bit because I have to pay for it to be graded (I wait for the $5 or $7 specials from SGC) and I have to pay about a buck combined for shipping and insurance.  (I send 10 cards at a time to SGC, because it costs the same to ship and insure 1 card as it does 10 cards, so you may as well do 10.)

Since I'm spending another $7 to $9 or so on the grading, shipping and insuring, I need this card to get graded at least an NmMt+ 8.5, worth $25, in order to break even.  I have no idea whether this card is that or not, as I have long ago decided that I'm not going to drive myself crazy predicting a grading company's grade for a card, since I have conclusive evidence that they're often wildly off their own grading scale, and so it's basically a crapshoot.  This is especially true of newer cards.  (I've been very good at grading T206s--but the grading companies have been much more consistent with their grades for those, too.)  Even cards from the mid-80s have been graded one or two grades different than I'd predicted.  Why's my 1980 Rickey Henderson RC an 8 rather than a 9--which is a difference of about $275 in Ebay bidding value?  Couldn't tell you.  What's the difference between my Rickey 8 and the previous Rickey 7 it just replaced?  I don't know.  The corners and the gloss and the centering are the same.

Will this one break even?  I don't know, but here's why it's worth the chance for me, and also why I bought a 2011 Mike Trout Bowman Chrome RC and a 2011 Mike Trout Bowman Chrome Draft RC:

--Trout's RC values have increased lately and, I believe, will continue to do so.  For a long time.

--My Trout Chrome RC is a 9 and the Chrome Draft RC is a 9.5, so I've got my Mint condition Mike Trout rookie card situation covered.  (Those deals will be blogged about when they come in.)

--If this one is a dud--say, a 6 or 7--I can give it as a gift to either a relative or a friend of mine.  Neither takes this anywhere near as seriously as I do, and would love to have a Trout rookie of any grade.

--Worst possible scenario: I can sell it at the occasional yard sale I have every other summer, and I can get $20 to $25 for it, no problem, especially from older folks who love baseball but hate the internet.  And there's lots of those!

And that's why I bought an ungraded Mike Trout rookie, and would do so again, for either the relative or the friend who doesn't get this one.

Sorry for the long entry!