The Bed-time Story versus Auction End Time Dilemma

Anybody other dad-collectors have this problem?

I have two little kids who are totally awesome.  They, to be clear, are not the problem.  Being little, they like (demand) their daddy telling them bedtime stories.  Emphasis on the plural, one is never enough.  And I absolutely love indulging them. I have a pretty good repertoire of random stories based on a cast of characters I've built up over the years - Eddie the Excavator, Smoogy Woogy monsters, Captain Redbeard the Pirate, a cat named Nyan Nyan who sings in a high pitched voice and gets outraged when anyone tells her to stop singing,  and all the dinosaurs are regular players.  

So why am I going into this level of detail about bedtime story telling in a blog about baseball cards?  Because of Yahoo Auctions.

I get the majority of my cards on Yahoo auctions, and sellers on there almost always time their auctions to end in the evening, usually at the exact same time I am upstairs telling bedtime stories.  I used to be able to get the kids to bed a bit earlier, but now their falling asleep almost exactly coincides with auctions I have placed bids on having finished about 10 minutes ago.  And I've lost a lot of them!  Recently my evening routine has been:

1) Me telling the stories,
2) Me waiting for kids to fall asleep;
3) Once they fall asleep, me racing downstairs at light speed to get my tablet and check if any of my auctions are still going on;
4) Me cursing when I see they are all finished and that my "items won" page is empty.

The problem is with me really.  My usual strategy is to put in placeholder bids on stuff I'm interested in as I find them during the course of the week. Then I revisit everything that is finishing on a given evening and figure out which stuff I want to go high on and which stuff I will let go.  Sometimes I'll have 7 or 8 things I'm bidding on.  In that case I can't just bid high on all of them because my budget usually only allows me to afford one or two of the things I'm bidding on (unless its a bunch of cheap cards).  So I have to watch the auctions end in real time. If I win the stuff that finishes early, I'll drop out of bidding on the stuff that is finishing later because the early stuff will have exhausted my budget.  Conversely if I miss out on the stuff that finishes early, I'll put higher bids on the stuff that is finishing later because I still have some free funds.

But this strategy doesn't work unless I'm actually watching the auctions end one by one.  So I've been forced to rethink my bidding strategies and basically just toss up big bids on stuff I'm deadly serious about buying and ignore the "I'll take that if the price ends up being right" things I used to buy a lot of.  Its not as effective though and I wish the sellers would move their end times either up or down a bit.

Do American dad-collectors have this same problem with Ebay?

2019 Calbee Series 2 is Here (Yawn)

I just realized that it is already July and I am only just now getting around to doing a post about this year's Calbee set.  I'm so late Series 2 is already out, so I'll skip the first one and do a post about the second, which I just bought in complete form off of Yahoo Auctions.

Since last year I've decided that my way of evaluating new Calbee sets is based on photography, since the base design only seems to vary slightly from year to year now (between using Roman letters and Kanji for player names).  As I noted last year Calbee sets have become dreadfully predictable in their use of photography, to the extent that it is all based on three rules.  1) position players except for catchers are only shown batting, 2) pitchers are only shown pitching and 3) catchers are the only ones who sometimes are shown fielding at their position.  So my way of evaluating a new Calbee set is based entirely on how much they were willing to "wow" me by deviating from these three rules.

This year, unfortunately, the boring photography trend has continued.  70 out of the 72 cards in the base set (such as the entire Swallows team, pictured above) conform to the rules.  Individually none of the photos are bad, but collectively the repetitive site of everyone doing more or less the same thing gets very monotonous.

Its not just the poses that are boring, but also the framing - the players are always cropped so that they take up all the card.  Again its not a bad thing individually, but sometimes its nice to see a bit of variety (like a picture of a player with an impressive backdrop taking up a bit more or the card, see the Nagashima and Oh card at the head of this blog).

The monotony in framing leads to odd things, like the fact that every card of the Chiba Lotte Marines has the same infield dirt taking up the exact same amount of the bottom of the card - it almost looks like a colorful border but no, its just the result of near identical photo framing.

These are the only two cards that deviate from the batters batting/pitchers pitching/ catchers catching photo selection: one guy running the bases, the other fielding.  Neither are particularly exciting and suffer the same identical framing problem, but at least they are a bit different.  But I mean come on, just 2 cards out of 72?

In addition to the regular 72 card set I also got the 12 card opening day pitchers subset (boring!  Same photo problems as the regular set), and the 4 card checklist set which has the only interesting pictures in the entire thing:

See?   This is what I want Calbee cards to look like! Both of these cards show guys doing exciting things other than batting/pitching and both of them are framed to allow some background to be visible in the picture.  Wouldn't it be nice if Calbee made the entire 72 card set like this instead of just the 4 card checklists!  I mean, they used to do that back in the 70s for crying out loud, why not now???