Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Lose, Sometimes It Rains Part 3

One of my primary player collections is former Cardinals outfielder Ray Lankford.  I have shared my love of Lankford cards on this blog before and am always on the lookout for new cards.  The problem is that after twenty some years of collecting a minor star I am at a point where I am mainly looking for things like printing plates and parallels with extremely low print runs.  Printing plates and low prints runs are usually pricey gets, but one of the great parts of collecting a player like Ray Lankford is that I have never spent more than 50 to add a card of his to my collection.  Ever.

The highest I ever went on a card of his was $43 for a copy of his Essential Credentials card from the 1998 Skybox EX-2001 set.

This set is highly collected and the Essential Credentials parallels often sell pretty high.  A star player out of the set might easily reach triple digits in price and could go for multiple hundreds.  It's just the price you sometimes pay if you want to collect a specific player.

Have you ever asked yourself where your line is on a single card of your favorite player?  Being a Ray Lankford fan, I really never thought I would have to answer that question until this week when a copy of his 1998 Donruss Crusade came up for auction on Ebay.  There are two copies of the Crusade cards, the green copies numbered to 100 and the red copies numbered to 25.  I already have the green copy.

Which left the red copy.  I always watch cards on Ebay and then bid at the last minute.  No need to bid five days ahead of time.  Many theories on this, but that's for a different post.  The seller of the card had several Crusade cards up for auction and the pricing quickly escalated with the Lankford card.  The morning of the end of the auction the card was sitting in the high 30s.  I was more than willing to go into the forties and even push it into the 50s if I needed to go there.

I came home from work, ate dinner, and checked the auction.  I was crushed....

Fifty dollars for a Lankford card?  Sure.  I think I could have convinced myself to go higher still, but I could not look at the screen and honestly justify spending $172 on a Ray Lankford card.  The card ended up at $182.  Needless to say, I did not put in the winning bid.  I am sure at some point another copy of this card while pop up and I will have a chance to add it to my collection.  Hopefully for less than $182.  In the meanwhile, I picked up some other cool Crusade cards.