#1 Most Wanted Obtained

"It's good sportsmanship to not pick up lost golf balls

 while they are still rolling." 

-Mark Twain

I now have in hand the 2005 Topps Rookie Cup, Rookie Relic, Tim Wallach.  I picked it up off of ebay last week.  As you can see the listing makes no mention of the word "Relic," which these cards are known as, and incorrectly list the year as 2006.  As a result, I was able to pick this up for under $10. Maybe I should have pointed this out to the seller, but it was a really nice "golf ball."  In the interest of easing some of my guilt (which is nominal), here's a quick plug for this seller.  He has a ton of rare cards for sale, if your looking for something particular, check out this link to see his items.

This has been my "most wanted" Wallach card since pretty much the moment I found out it existed several years ago.  I often search ebay for just the words "relic," "2005," "Rookie Cup," in the unlikely chance it showed up as part of a larger lot of these, and just to gauge the price they sell for.  It's also because all of the online checklist and date bases list this card as "Tim Wallace."  I've long chalked that up to one typo and widespread plagiarism, but having never seen a picture, maybe Topps did in fact alter the '82 base card and change "Wallach" to "Wallace," and even if they didn't people misspell stuff on ebay all the time.

I don't really feel any guilt for taking this card for the price I did.  It may have been a little low, but it wasn't robbery by any means.  There's currently a Brian Fisher "Relic" available as a "Buy it Now" for $9.99.  There's also a Gary Mathews for $99.99, but in fairness that Mathews has been listed for well over a year now.  

A quick search of completed listings for these shows they have been selling in the $11 - $37 range for players probably not as well known as Wallach.  But when your dealing with print runs as  low as these I'm not sure the correlation between a players popularity and price is as strong.  All it takes is one crazy fan/relative/or player themselves to really want the card, and suddenly the price goes nuts.  

The site "Check Out My Cards" currently has two of these for sale, the Juan Bonilla is the one I used for my Most Wanted page image and has been there for awhile, suggesting these may be overpriced.  All in all, I feel very fortunate to have obtained this card for the price I did.  Especially given that I was prepared to do something very stupid, and went with a max bid that likely would have been grounds for divorce.

This card will be getting it's own post later this week, one that is more boilerplate for the purposes of cataloguing all the cards.  The "Wanted List" has also been updated.  I'll keep an eye out for #1 of 2 of course, but am not about to pay the equivalent of a car payment for it.