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Hello Guys.
I had to chime in here. Jeff is the poster-child certification # buyer. PSA says "jump" and he says "how high can I bid". If he lands nice cards it's by accident. The seller of the Carew posted the card in his set and then on eBay with a high price tag to bait this poor fellow. He must've seen someone else do it the week before with another higher-ticket card...a Fisk, I believe it was. Now, who was the guy who supplied that Fisk...

All I can say is that the ORIGINAL holder of that Fisk card was much happier with his 9 and saw the way Jeff was spending and thought it would be great to have Jeff finance the rest of his '77 set-building efforts.

Jeff has taught me patience and ego-control. Through wonderful coaching from friends and fellow collectors, I have been able to allow him to outbid me at outlandish prices for cards I needed and have picked up the next copy I've found at a fraction of the cost. This was a valuable lesson.

I'd try to bid that Fidrych up to the moon, but I'd be scared I'd actually win that ugly overgraded thing. I think he bought nicer copies of that card raw in the past couple of weeks on eBay.

Estang, he's spent WAY more than that. How about a 63-card bulk PSA 9 lot for 25 a pop? Another 70-card job at 30 a pop. Heck, I sold him well over a grand worth of duplicates myself. When you solely purchase your cards already graded from predominately bulk PSA submitters (as I have learned first-hand) you wind up with an extremely expensive, unattractive set on the whole. That is going to be SOME fire-sale when he wakes up with 20k worth of CC debt and unloads.

I truly believe that, whenever possible, MONSTER-looking sets are built brick-by-brick by discerning collectors who understand the issue they collect. They know what each card is capable of and exhibit a keen sense of what the factory limitations are. Across the board, the best-looking sets you'll find are submitted first-hand by educated set-builders. I used to think it was a race...now I know better.

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