Getting serious

 

I snagged a couple of needed 1975 Topps buybacks off ebay several weeks back and I never mentioned it here.

Right after grabbing the Dave McNally and Gary Thomasson buybacks, I sank into a little funk about the buyback project. It looked like there weren't any that I didn't already have, or at least none that were in my price range.

One of the reasons for the funk is the '75 Steve Yeager card in buyback form had been selling for something like $13 on COMC for months and months, way over what was rational for an obviously damaged card. The Yeager is the first Dodger from that set I ever saw, a card I carried in my pocket to the school playground that year.

 

Then, just a couple of days ago, I saw on  COMC that the Yeager was available for $2.75. You should have seen the happy dance. I had already been preparing to request a COMC shipment, so I threw that card into the cart as fast as if it was the hottest new rookie and ordered up!

That got me excited about the buybacks again, and really I should have been super thrilled about the McNally and the Thomasson already because those two cards officially got me to 70 percent of the set in buyback form.

I

Round-number milestones! (In decimal form!)

I was so excited about the Yeager that I did something that I had never wanted to do with this bananas pursuit. In what had always been a breezy chase -- who knows what is left to get and who cares, la di da, la di da! -- I decided to get serious.

First, I added names to the numbers on my '75 buyback want list (that's just part of it, I can't fit the whole thing on the laptop screen).

 

Then I did some research and started color-coding the want list.

This is the whole thing:

And here's the little legend to tell you what's what:

I still haven't looked at sportlots and a couple of other sites, or done a complete scouring of ebay, but I think this gives me a clear idea of what's out there.

It opened my eyes as research often does. There are a lot more than the soon-to-be 463 buyback cards that I have. If you count up just the sold-out buybacks on COMC, that's 41 more cards, which means more than 500 cards in the set feature buyback stamps. (The Bill Sudakis card is available but it's selling for 10 bucks).

The TCDB search was enlightening, too. The brown-coded cards are probably the ones I should go after first as they are proof that someone has them in their collection and I could potentially trade for them. (That may be the thing that gets me to activate the TCDB trade mechanism).

In snooping around TCDB I noticed that a single collector has at least six of them. I don't know how successful I'd be in getting them from him, he seems to collect buybacks in general (which I don't get), and his want list is a single vintage card that I didn't know existed until viewing it on his list. But you never know. I didn't think I'd have 463 cards in the set as buybacks!

This exercise was interesting also because at least six or seven years into this pursuit I still don't have a good idea about what absolutely has not been stamped. The only things that I haven't seen in buyback form that makes me wonder if they ever were are:

1. The Brett and Yount rookies

2. The checklists

Anything else is fair game. All-Stars? I've got several of those buybacks and there are several others available. Hall of Famers? I've seen the Nolan Ryan buyback, a Killebrew and Seaver buyback and I have a couple HOF buybacks myself. Record-breakers? Team cards? Rookie prospects cards? I've seen several and own a few.

The thing that interests me the most are the common players where no trace of a buyback can be found. Those players include Dave Giusti, Mike Hegan, Tom Hall, Mike Anderson, Jim Mason, Bill Greif, Don Hahn, Carmen Fanzone, Don Carrithers, Alex Johnson, Elrod Hendricks, Ted Martinez, John Morlan and Vic Harris.

But all of that tells me there's more work to be done and more buybacks to pursue! Maybe by getting more serious about this, I'll uncover some of those mystery cards and also something cool (well not that cool because the cards have been stamped) like a buyback Lou Brock or Rod Carew.

And this gives you a better idea of what I need. I will take any of your stamp-ruined '75 Topps cards that are on that list!