'roids or not?

i'm going to start a little series called 'roids or not. i'll try to make a case for the player using roids and a case for the player not juicing. i'll let the readers decide. this is a democracy, so majority rules.

first up, bret boone. you may remember this ripped second baseman from his days with the mariners. in his career, he posted a .266 batting average, 252 home runs and 1,021 RBI in 1,780 games in 14 Major League seasons.

case for steroids:

from 1994-1997, boone had a 162 game home run average of 14. now, when you look at 1998-2003 that average jumped to 28. his 2001 season was truely remarkable 2001 season which included 37 HR, 37 2B, 141 RBI, and a .331 average. boone again put up big numbers in the last season of non-annonymus testing in 2003. that season included 35 HR, 35 2B, and 117 RBI. his numbers dipped in 2004, not dramatically but noticable. he only managed to play 88 games the following season with 7 HR. that was his last season. he went from 35 HR at 34 years old to out of baseball at 36. besides, have you seen pictures of the guy.

case for clean:
well, there are 2 arguments for saying that a player is clean. first, his numbers didn't change after MLB started testing. boone fails this one miserably. second, you have to prove that the guy has character, integrity, or morals. now how does one prove this? it's hard to say. you'd have to dig into his personal life pretty deep to get a true answer, but for the purpose of this writing, i think charity work or community work would make a good litmus test. i'm a pretty good google searcher, but i still couldn't find any news stories or articles about boone and his charity or community work. if anyone can find one, i'd be happy to include it in this defense.

so what do you think? juicer or not?
bret boone circa 2002 bret boone circa 1996

so i might have been a little off

so my $25 offer for the max carey cut auto might have been little off. but hey, i was closer to the price than the guy that wanted $200 for his copy. plus you have to consider that the above auction was for a carey numbered to 50. the $200 one was numbered to 72 if you didn't remember.

i figured it would go lower because there had only been 7 views of the auction with 2 days remaining. so i guess interest really picked up in the waning moments.

why pay more?

the bottom paragraph of my last post has inspired me to look for slabbed autos of hall of famers and older, deceased players. while looking, i ran across joe wood. now if you don't know about mr. wood, you can check his stats out here. his career winning % is right up there with the best of them. sure his number were accumulated right before the live ball era, but he never started more than 39 games in a season either.

smoky joe, as he was known, had a pretty good season in 1912. he posted a 1.91 e.r.a. and 34 wins. he also threw an amazing 35 complete games and had 10 shutouts that year. his autos can be had for less than the price of a blaster.

crazy buy it now prices

i've recently decided to change the focus of my collecting. i used to collect just frank thomas cards. the big hurt is on his last wheels career wise so i decided to find someone else to start collecting. i dabbled in dennis eckersley autos for a while, but i didn't like spending between $10 and $15 per card.

i settled on adrian gonzalez. he's the young slugging first baseman for the san diego padres. this has been a fun en devour. i scour ebay for autos going for under $5. i've picked up quite a few. i've also been putting together a rainbow from 2007 topps brands. i have pretty much every parallel except the red and red refractor from bowman and bowman chrome, the red refractor from topps chrome, and the superfractor from finest.

lately, i've been getting into pittsburgh pirates hall of famers. i've been focusing on relics and autos. recently i ran across a max carey cut auto with a buy it now(bit) or best offer(obo) price of $200. this just seemed ridiculous to me because the card was numbered to 72. its not a rare card! combine that with the fact that there is at least 278 other cut autos of him in other products. also, his slabbed psa/dna index card autos go for bit $20 which is essentially what a cut auto card is.

so i offered the guy $25 for the card. he was not too happy with me for the offer and wrote me that it was a waste of his time and he's blocking me from bidding. the real waste of time though, was putting the effort into writing that message. i have a feeling that he's going to wish someday that he took my offer. i'll post more on that later though.

should this be allowed?

so you buy '52 Mantle from a guy who says he bought it at an estate sale. you then go on ebay and create an account. after a few actual sales, you build a nice feedback rating with 100% positive feedback.

then you post the Mantle you bought for a one day no reserve auction. you tell the story about how you got it, and you make it very clear that you are selling it as a REPRINT. the bidding reaches $381 with just over 2 hours to go. the card sells, and is shipped out.

buyer recieves a $860 mantle reprint. you cancel your ebay account and open a new one. rinse, wash, repeat. i think i'm going to pass on this one.

Beckett and completed listings on ebay

Why doesn't Beckett (or anybody else for that matter) compile the completed listings from ebay? This would help collectors know what their cards are actually worth. I'm sure many collectors already do check out the completed auctions of the cards they're looking for, but this would make it easier for everybody. It would also make Beckett relevant again.

I'd be willing to pay $10-15/year for online access to a database that has all of ebay's completed card auctions. I'd want it to be sortable by player, year, brand, card, autos, serial #ed, and relics. Give me the mean, median, and time history plots for all of the completed auctions. The time history plots would help show trends in player prices. Beckett or ebay or somebody needs to get on this, pronto.