I’m almost ashamed to call myself a Red Sox fan sometimes. All these years I’ve been collecting cards I’ve gone above and beyond to obtain certain cards for my collection, yet when it comes down to it, they rarely feature players from Boston. Why? Because aside from Ted Williams, most of these players are over looked in this hobby, so I feel like I can always find a good deal. Carl Yastrzemski’s rookie card is a prime example.

Yastrzemski is a Hall of Famer and the last man to hit for the Triple Crown, yet you can always find a rookie card of his for less than $40. And while $40 isn’t a lot when it comes to a rookie card, I’ve never really been in the mood to plunk down that amount — or close to it — for a decent looking Yaz. That is until last week.

As has been the case with many of my vintage rookies, the situation dictated my purchase. In this case, the seller had a screwy title in which the term “PSA 3″ was bunched together, thereby negating the keyword “PSA” all together. I wouldn’t call my purchase a steal, but I got a graded Yastrzemski rookie slabbed in decent condition for  less than $35. Considering the alternative of spending $30 for a so-so looking one and then spending about $15 or so to have it graded, this worked out fine.

As for Yaz’s rookie, this is a must-have for any Red Sox fan, and one that any rookie card collector should own in any condition. It kills me that lots of collectors — myself included — have spent more money in recent years on rookie cards of guys like Rickie Weeks when they/we could have owned a hall of fame rookie card all along.

This entry was posted on March 15, 2009 at 11:06 pm and is filed under Random Rookie Recap with tags baseball, baseball cards, Boston Red Sox, Carl Yastrzemski, Random Rookie Recap, rookie card, Topps, Triple Crown. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.