Mismatched Mac

I was happy to see that Topps inked Mark McGwire to appear in their 2014 products.  Sure, Topps will inevitably overproduce Big Mac cards and kill off half of their value, but I could use a few new McGwire cards.  I know a few other Cardinals and A's collectors who feel the same way.  So far McGwire has made an appearance in Tribute, Museum Collection, Archives, and Tier One.   I was really surprised that Topps included autographs and high end jumbo relics of the slugging first baseman in their flagship set.

Don't get me wrong, I love the Topps base set, but it's not the usual place where you find a lot of high end stuff.  McGwire has both an autograph and jumbo patch in the Topps Series 2 set.  I busted a Jumbo box a few weeks ago, did not pull anything McGwire, so I started trying to find a patch or an autograph.  The autographs were more than $100, but were sticker graphs.  I moved on to the patches which were an odd mix between A's and Cardinals patches.  However, the cards have McGwire in a Cardinals uniform regardless of the patch color.

I lost about half a dozen of these auctions during the past two weeks, but finally managed to snipe on elf these out at the last moment.

This would be an A's patch on a Cardinals card, but it is still cool as hell to own a jumbo patch off of a Big Mac Jersey.  The Cardinals patches seem to have a slight premium over the A's pieces, but I would be willing to spend it if I knew I could land one for sure.  The Cardinals patches also seem to be a little bit harder to come by.  Clearly Topps made 100 jumbo patch McGwire cards, but they are clearly from different jerseys.  It would have been cool if Topps had serial numbered the Cardinals cards and A's cards separately.  I am complaining about trivial things though.  Great card and not even my best Mac card I landed during the past week.  More tomorrow.