Setting The Pace

I set a few goals for my hobby regarding CollectingCutch in 2021, which you can revisit here. 

One of the goals I am looking forward to the most is seeing what Pirates playing days cards (2005-2017) of Cutch I can acquire this year.  I set a goal of only 50 cards from his Pirates playing days because of a few reasons.  

It's a nice even number.

It's basically one a week for an entire calendar year.

A lot of cards from those days have either "dried up" or are not available for reasonable sale prices.  

There are also a lot of his minor league uncirculated autographs available, but I want these cards acquired to feature a Pirates logo or in Panini's case state that it is a Pittsburgh card.  I could easily go to stonersports on eBay and add 25+ dual player printing plates of Cutch with guys that never made it in the majors to star levels or even have meaningful careers.  I'm going to pass on those.

This is going to be fun because there are a lot of tough gems to get for the collection still and many of them are from 2009-2017.

To kick things off here is a card that I haven't seen pop up for sale very often since it's 2017 release.

2017 Topps Inception blue

I owned the black 1/1 and the magenta printing plate 1/1, but hadn't gotten the blue to 25 copies.  

It's funny how sometimes the semi rare cards (/25) become tougher to acquire than the rarest card in the rainbow.

More exciting than the fact it popped up, is the price I paid for it.

$11 for a single modern card of a guy who has fallen off track of his HOF trajectory might seem like a lot, but I can now cross off this card from the wants list and put it into the haves list.

And for $11, that is perfectly fine with me.

This is my first pickup of 2021 of Cutch's Pirates playing days cards I added to the collection.  I do have 2 more coming and they were both ahipped without tracking and it's been two weeks since they were dropped off at the post office.  If they arrive this week, I am on pace to hit the goal of 50 new Pirates playing days cards this year.  If they don't arrive, I have some ground to make up as we head into February.