My First Internet Trade

I couldn't wait to leave the office and get home today, because I was pretty sure I would have a ton of cards coming to me through the mail today.  I was absolutely correct.  I had three envelopes waiting on me.  What did I have?  Let's walk through them.

1.  Complete set of Jays Potato Chips MSA Set:  I wrote a week ago about the Jays Potato Chips set put out in the Chicago and Milwaukee area in 1986.  That post led me to scour eBay for those disks, and I got a complete set for a grand total of $5.50 including shipping.  They are in great shape, and I am very pleased with this purchase.

2.  A 1990 Robin Yount Collect-A-Book:  An oddball item for my Robin Yount collection, this was another eBay purchase that also was not too expensive -- $1.50 including shipping.  It's a pretty common oddball item, to be fair, but I didn't have it and now I do.  Here it is:

3.  A 2014 Red Rain shiny Jean Segura parallel and a gold Carlos Gomez parallel:

These beauties were the ones I was most excited about because they came in a trade I made with ARPSmith from ARPSmith's Sportscard Obsession.  A week and a half ago, he blogged about liking the mini-1989 die cut insert series that accompanies 2014 Topps this year and about how he liked the set enough to try to put it together.  Seeing as I had one I was willing to part with -- a Justin Verlander -- I left a comment saying to e-mail me to work something out.  

When he e-mailed me, he suggested that he send me these two excellent Brewers cards in trade for the Verlander.  I agreed quickly, and we did the trade.  Thanks, ARPSmith!  

Now, who wants next?  

1986 MSA Jays Potato Chips Disks

As a kid, one thing I enjoyed was going to the grocery store.  For one thing, my local grocery store carried baseball cards -- remember those days?

But, more to the point of this post, going to the store was fun because it seemed like some other food product was trying to get kids to bug their moms into buying the product by inserting baseball cards.  One example of this was the then-Chicago based potato chip manufacturer, Jays Potato Chips.  Now marketed by Snyder's of Hanover, back in the 1980s Jays was the potato chip of the Midwest.  I can't tell you they tasted any better than any other potato chip, but they sure did taste better than the South's potato chip, Golden Flake.

In 1986 and in an effort to ensure that blood sodium levels remained appropriately high for Midwestern kids, Jays teamed up with MSA -- which had a license from the players' association but not MLB...meaning, yup, no logos -- to issue a 20-disk set consisting of 7 White Sox, 7 Cubs, and 6 Brewers.  Considering that, the checklist actually has a number of good players:  Carlton Fisk, Tom Seaver, Lee Smith, Ryne Sandberg, Paul Molitor, and Robin Yount are all there.

Complete sets can be found pretty cheaply on eBay.

Here are four of those discs, along with the back of the Seaver disk to show an example: