Cheap autos

You can't buy a new automobile under $20,000 in the US anymore. But you can still get dime autographs on eBay. That's the "cheap autos" referred to in the title. An eBay seller called Autograph Den has started regular auctions of thousands of penny autograph cards. They are almost all TTM or in-person, but they seem reasonably authentic. Good enough for me, in a world where we can't even get consensus on which are the real bases from Hank Aaron's 715th home run.

I happened to catch this the first time it was going on (or maybe I hadn't caught previous ones). I bid a dime on almost everything and came up with the winning bid on close to 250 of them. From this I learned that eBay only lets you pay for 50 purchases at a time, so it took quite a while to actually pay for everything while I waited for my cart to slowly refill. Then the seller didn't box everything together, but sent most in a box but some in a couple of envelopes. One of the envelopes still hasn't arrived. On top of that, the box was missing about 30 cards that were supposed to be in it (same tracking number). It took a very long time to figure out which cards were missing. After opening 30 tabs to say that I didn't get it, I got 30 messages from eBay saying that my package had arrived and maybe I should ask my neighbors if they stole it. Finally the next day I was able to send the "didn't arrive" messages. To the sellers credit he refunded me right away, but I'd have rather have had the cards. I guess he misplaced 12% of my order.

He's still doing these auctions but very little is slipping though, as I guess more bidders are noticing these auctions. Still, if you like cheap on-card autos, Autograph Den is probably a good eBay seller to check out.

Naturally none of these were stars. The biggest names were Scott Fletcher and Zane Smith. Even though I would never do TTM or ask someone for their autograph in person, I do like the look of autographs on cards. They do feel special, so it was nice to cheaply beef up my small collection.

Lots of these were from minor league team sets. Some that stood out included the very 90s design on top.

I really like seeing junk wax cards with autographs, it breathes new life into them.

Shiny/refractor cards used for autographs, very cool.

It's fun seeing other colors than blue or black. The metallic colors look really good, especially silver.

There was even some duplication, meaning I have some extras available. Two to trade of Wilkin Ramirez (Tigers) and one Peter Bergeron (Expos).

One weird quirk for myself is that if I get an autographed card, and I don't have the non-autographed card, I add it to my wantlist. So I will be adding a whole lot of random cards, mostly minor league or Bowman, to my wantlist and TCDB wantlist soon.