40 Card eBay Lot

I was in grade school in the 1980's, and had a card "budget" that was typical for a kid in grade school.  Which is to say, my parents more or less bought baseball cards for me.  As such, I was never really in a position to speculate on rookie cards in 50 or 100 card lots.  My "speculating" consisted of hoarding the copy or two (or even three) I might pull from packs and trading with friends.  Aside from Tim Wallach's, I don't think I ever even reached nine of a single card but maybe a handful of times.  Nine sticks out as the number, because there was a brief period during which I was very proud of my full page of 1989 Topps Ricky Jordan (of the Phillies) rookie cards.

So while I never speculated on rookie cards in 50 or 100 or even 10 card lots, other people did, and I'm very happy that was a thing back in the 1980's.  Because that greed, er, "speculation" has allowed me to amass over 1,100 copies of Tim Wallach's 1982 Topps rookie card some thirty years later.  Just like  the guy expected when he loaded up on the Fullerton can't miss prospects rookie card in 1982, thirty five years later he'd sell them on the internet to some guy in New Mexico for a tiny fraction of what he paid for them.  Thanks for keeping them safe for me all these years.

With any large lot of the same card, the best part is the variations.  No, not the different colored, shiny, rainbow sparkle artificially fabricated non-sense the children enjoy today.  I'm talking about good old printing and cutting variations, organic variations if you will.  Below are the winners from this lot:

The top row are four of what I'm calling "sun faded" prints.  The black is normal, but all the colors are way too light.  There is a close up scan of one below.  In the lower left is a copy that looks like it got a double or triple treatment of the blue ink.  It's next to a "normal" copy just to show the difference.  Finally there was a extremely miscut copy.  The front of that card is perfectly centered.  The back however, has a good portion of the bottom of Ken Griffy Sr.'s card, though at the time we just called him Ken Griffey (I can't tell from the numbers, I just know Griffey to be positioned there next to Wallach on the uncut sheet).

Updated Total for 1982 Topps: 1,185