SGC 2.5 1940 Play Ball Met Ott Winner Selected!

About a month ago, I announced a giveaway of an SGC 2.5 1940 Play Ball Mel Ott card to gain more subscribers here in my newsletter. I hoped to double my subscriber count, from roughly 260 to 500. I am pleasantly surprised to announce that I reached 700 subscribers today!

To select the winner, I exported my subscriber list into Excel, assigned a number to each, and then used a random number generator to select a winner. I don’t ask for names from subscribers, so I only have an email to go by. So I emailed the selected winner and hope to be able to announce their name in Wednesday’s newsletter.

Why You Should Stay Subscribed

In the next couple of weeks I’ll be rolling out a long-running series here in my newsletter where I rank iconic GOAT grail cards that are attainable for many people. More details on the criteria when I’m ready to announce it, but there will be multiple lists: men’s sports cards, women’s sports cards, and non-sports cards. I’ve worked on this for months and consulted with experts. I’m really excited about it!

I hope you’ll join me.

I’ll also be doing more giveaways here for my newsletter subscribers. And I’m increasing my newsletter output to 2-3 per week. More cards, more stories, more analysis.

Will I Start Charging For Premium Subscriptions?

I don’t think so. I polled my subscriber base last week and got favorable results, but some of the “no” respondents did a great job making a case against it for me.

So, like any good newsletter writer, I will work with sponsors. I have two who are interested, but if you have a company and would like to sponsor this newsletter, please reply to this email and we can talk about it.

Upcoming Card Previews

This is really sick:

And another preview:

Too much space for the autograph, but last year we said the same thing and then I think it ended up being smaller than the mock-up. We’ll see.

YouTube Comment Of The Week

We have a two-fer today, as it relates to the case of the man who was allegedly buying sports cards on his job credit card and was claiming he was buying pool chemicals:

Upcoming Videos

I think I’m going to take a couple of days off, because…

Channel Highlights From the Past Week

I posted 6 videos last week, something I hadn’t done since my 56-day streak that ended 2022 and started 2023.

My favorite video of the week:

I got to meet up with some great collectors and bought some great cards:

And man, did a lot of people misunderstand this video:

Normally I would reflect on that and assume it was my fault. Like I tell my kids, if no one understands what you’re saying, it’s probably your fault. But I re-watched it and I think people are just not paying close enough attention. Here’s a summary:

• Card graded a 6

• PSA told submitter it was graded a 6 because of a print mark on the back

• Submitter uncovered many, many examples of the same card in PSA 9 and 10 slabs.

I think my error was in telling the entire story, which included the submitter (TJ Is Online, who has a new YouTube channel too) cracking the card out of a BGS 8 slab. So everyone focused on the cracking, which had no impact on the story.

But I did hear back from Ryan Hoge, president of PSA, and he sang a different story:

This is helpful! But why did customer service tell TJ something different?

Look, it’s good that the President of PSA is responding to tweets about his company’s products and issues. But is he citing different print lines than the one customer service did because he knows we made a good case for that print line on the back being bunk? Or was the customer service representative wrong for some reason? I don’t know.

Either way, PSA announced that same day that they’re close to rolling out Graders Notes. A welcome addition.

My Pickup Of The Week

It’s gotta be the PSA 3 1956 Ted Williams I bought at the card show, as seen in the video I shared above!

Links:

A good article by Victor the Rookie Card Specialist for Hobby News Daily about which Michael Jordan card is the true rookie. I’m still undecided.

This is a wild story of sports card addiction. I don’t agree with everything he says, but it’s worth a read I think. The dude emptied his 401k to buy more sports cards!

Here’s the story of the guy who has over 100,000 of the same Pokemon card.

And when there’s an article that combines Maine and sports cards, I share it.