This Was A Surprise
March 30th, 2010 by slangon

Seems to me that Beckett is not too popular amongst the collecting community, or at least not the part of the collecting community that I’ve been exposed to in the last few years of my re-involvement in the hobby. I’m not saying thats a bad thing and I’m not saying thats a good thing. I’m just saying.

I personally don’t have much use for Beckett. I’m not a big believer in slapping a fixed price on something as personal as a collection. I guess it might help give a ballpark guideline, but just because somebody tells you that your card is worth $100 don’t mean you’re going to find someone to fork over $100. Also, as I move more and more towards collecting vintage cards, I find most of the information as far as new releases and the like have no bearing on my collecting habits one bit. I’m not 100% dogging Beckett. It is cool to see the preview images of a set that’s coming out, especially if it’s a set that I was looking forward to. I also use the website often to get info on sets and checklists.

What does any of that have to do with anything? Well one thing I that I do keep my eye out for on Beckett’s website, just because I’m a greedy little S.O.B. who is always looking to score some free cards, is their whole Free Stuff Friday thing that they do, well, every Friday.

For those who don’t know about it, every Friday on their blog, they list all the different cards that they’re giving away. For each card you want to sign up to win, they ask some question that forces you to look up some inane bit of information on their website, thus driving up their site hits. Then you leave a comment with the answer and your name and email. Then they randomly select a winner from all the people who answered correctly. Usually they give away some really kick ass stuff that someone else probably gave them for free from all sports. I’m not sure how long they’ve been running this on their blog, but I’ve been signing up for it pretty much every week for months now, without ever even sniffing some free cardboard.

Until now that is.

About 2 weeks ago I got an email from someone named Chris Olds with “Free Stuff Friday” as the subject. Now I may not be as in the loop as some other folks when it comes to the hobby of card collecting, but I do know that Chris Olds has something to do with Beckett. That paired with the subject line got me pretty excited so I sent Chris back my address and a few days ago I ended up with a package from Beckett.

The giveaway that I ended up winning was for a 5 card Tristar Obak Update set, which is pretty awesome. Tristar inserted these into packs of its 2009 Prospects Plus set. There’s 5 cards in the set, each one of which came in either 3 or 4 different variations.

Pretty cool cards. I never got around to buying any of the regular Obak set, but was fortunate enough to get a bunch of the Mets from the set from the Beard a while back. I always thought it was a cool, if slightly wacky looking set.

When I first found out that I won these cards I looked them up on the Tristar site to see what players were included. Thats when I found out about all the variations. Like a handful of cards from the regular set, all five in the update set has regular or 1909 backs, 1910 backs and 1911 backs. In addition, the Stephen Strasburg card has 2 different 1910 backs. When I saw all the variations, I figured that Beckett would just be sending me a set with the regular, or 1909 backs. Not so.

Here’s the backs of the cards.

This here is the back of the Strasburg card. It’s the regular back, which is based on the 1909 version of the orginal Obak cards. I guess this card squeaked out right before Stephen signed that deal with Topps.


These are the backs of the Dustin Ackley and Donovan Tate cards, both which are the 1911 back variation. Again, they’re based off of the back of the 1911 version of the original Obak cards. Tristar further differentiates the variation with the triangle around the card number. I don’t quite get how both of these guys are the #2 Overall Pick, but who am I to argue.

Next up is the back of the Tony Sanchez card. Here we switch back to the regular old 1909 back.

Lastly, we have the rear side of the Matt Hobgood card, which is the lone 1910 back. And just for reference, here’s the orginal 1910 Obak back.

There was also a nice greeting card enclosed that was autographed signed by Chris Olds himself.

It’s funny that the last few weeks, they’ve been giving away a lot of stuff autographed by Chris Olds on Free Stuff Friday. I think the week that I won this Obak thing, they were giving away a baseball signed by him. Who knew?

Anyway, there you have some pretty nice free cards, courtesy of Beckett. I guess persistance really does pay off.

2 Responses to “This Was A Surprise”

  1. It’s always nice to win something when you least expect it. Free Stuff Fridays are great. I’m no huge fan of Beckett and I really hate it when somebody says to me but book price is. . . book price, sonny a card is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Compare book price to ebay finishing prices and almost always it’s well below what’s listed in Beckett or TuffStuff for that matter. There’s a reason it’s called a Price GUIDE. Anywho sorry about the rant and congrats on the win, nice snag. Keep up the good blogging.

  2. Save that signature and make a kick ass custom cut auto card from it.

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