2015 eBay purchase: JV and Charlie

After slogging through a very quiet January in terms of spending I upped my game quite a bit this month with purchases from COMC, eBay, JustCommons, and Sportlots (plus a show), so as it turned out it was very useful having that extra money in the budget.  I was goofing around on eBay one day about a week ago and found a BIN that I knew I was gonna grab.  Before long I was checking out the seller's other stuff for combined shipping (the best invention since blue painter's tape!) and caught another nice card available via BIN.

Ok, that's enough introduction, let's get to the cards:

Justin Verlander 2007 SPx Young Stars Signatures auto

Believe it or not, I'm leading off with this as it's the lesser card of the two!  For about $25--which seems to be roughly the going rate based on a very small sample size--I picked up what becomes my third Justin Verlander autograph ('05 Topps Chrome and '07 UD Black),  It may be a stickergraph but that's actually not terribly noticeable here on a lovely horizontal design with a great pitching action photo.  

Maybe I'm being overly optimistic thinking he could return to something close to his Cy Young form of a few years ago, but I still feel like this is a good time to pick up something like this just in case.  Even if he returns with a subpar year, surprises like another no-hitter or stellar playoff performance could change card values again quickly!  Hell, even if it goes down I'm thrilled to have another signature from my favorite all-time Tigers pitcher.

So really, what could be better than a shiny new autograph of the player after which this blog was named (eventually)?  Try this on for size:

Charlie Gehringer 2007 SP Legendary Cuts Inside the Numbers Cuts auto (#52/60)

Now this, this is the card I grabbed initially; I'd been searching high and low for a Gehringer cut auto that met two requirements:  reasonable price and good-looking.  To this point I had yet to find something that satisfied both, not that HOF cut autos and low prices tend to go hand-in-hand.  I'm more than just satisfied with this one, though, because the cut signature looks great and I'm happy with the design, one that actually includes an image of the player (such a novel concept these days).  I do have one other cut auto in the form of this George Kell, but this one immediately becomes my favorite because of the design plus the fact that old Charlie is a PC double-dipper:  a Michigan Baseball alum who played for the Tigers!

Needless to say I've since cut down on my spending for the rest of the month, but it's pretty obvious that what money I did spend was put to very good use, with another nice autograph of one of my favorite modern players to go along with a sterling cut auto of a HOFer that hits multiple collections.

And now you should stay tuned for a bevy (yes, a bevy) of trade packages as soon as I can get them scanned and ready.