The Search Is Over

Soon after getting back into the sports card hobby in 2007, I discovered a card set that hooked me once I laid eyes on it.  A then-recently released product, 2005 Upper Deck Baseball Heroes just had the right mix of elements to get a prodigal collector like me interested.  It had a clean design, one reminiscent of the inserts in early UD sets.  It came in a cool tin that could still be found and was somewhat affordable.  It was a one-pack-per-box product, something that was novel to me and totally different from the card landscape I left behind in 1994.  It came in all sorts of cool colors and variations.  And most importantly, there were five cards of the guy I had my heart set on collecting: Robin Yount.

I remember writing a similar post back in the Thorzul Will Rule days once I acquired all of the blue, green, red, and bronze Yount cards in this set.  They still look really pretty in binders, especially since the first three colors come in a regular, relic, and autograph variation, fitting nicely in rows of three on a nine-card page.  Back when I completed that portion of the rainbow, I knew in the back of my mind that I wasn't really done.  There was still a set of five silver variations, jersey relics-only, that had to be found.  I had some of those at the time, but was short of a true quintet.  Because I can't go back and find the post (Thorzul Will Rule has been wiped from the internet aside from glimpses here and there via the Wayback Machine), I'm not sure what year I "completed" the Yount rainbow.  I'm reasonably sure that it's somewhere between 12 and 15 years ago.  That's how long I've had an eBay saved search ready to tip me off in the event that the final silver parallel I needed went up for sale.  Every couple of years, I would get an alert that there was one available, but it always turned out to be one of the four I already owned.  The same saved search would also hit upon some other pieces of Panini crap that were also limited to 15 copies.  I came to the realization that I would never find that last card.  The Baseball Heroes just came out too long ago, the unopened product has dried up, and all of the copies were in the hands of other collectors unwilling to let them go.  The (admittedly passive) search would go on, day after day, completely fruitlessly.

Until last month.

It came in the mail a couple of weeks ago, but life happened, and I'm only getting the chance to share it now.

2005 Upper Deck Baseball Heroes #61 Robin Yount Game-Used Jersey Silver Parallel (10/15)

"It's a beaut, Clark!"

What a great card.  Nice pinstripe on the jersey, a perfect photo, and beautiful color.

The only thing now is to find a place in the binder for it.  As you can see below, the other four silvers already fill up a page with the bronzes (#/50), so there's no more room in the inn.  What to do, what to do?

Well, this set is at the very front of a binder holding my Yount collection from 2005-present.  The very first page only contains the five Yount base cards.  I've just kind of left it that way since putting the binder together, not sure why, but now the extra space is coming in handy.  The OCD half of my brain still wishes for a way to fit ten cards into a nine-space page, but the other half rationalizes the reality of the situation.  We will just have to settle for less than perfection.

It's been a pursuit both good and worthwhile.