Go Gold! 1992 Topps Gold Winner Aaron Sele

September is Childhood Cancer Awareness month. As a nod to the Go Gold activities going on this month to help raise awareness of the leading cause of death by disease in children, I thought I'd contribute several "gold" themed posts sprinkled throughout the month. Here's the next one.

Let's talk about this card...

The 1992 Topps Gold Winner Aaron Sele RC. Pretty sure the gold cards from Topps were the first ever parallel inserts. Thanks for the madness, Topps. The regular gold cards were relatively rare. These guys, less so. When it became apparent that winning a scratch contest for regular gold cards became easy to scam, Topps decided to award these beauties. Or, that was the plan all along and created a little bit of publicity for themselves. This would have been a great card in the day. I remember buying a stack of 50 or so of the regular Sele cards as an investment. Which is why I'm not a card investor.

Really enjoy the design of the card. I'm a sucker for floating design elements, and go overboard when it includes the photo crossing over the design. This wonderful card has both! Add in the special gold foil and the interesting "winner" portion, and this is a card for the ages.

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I'm sure you all remember Miss Michigan Vivian Zhong from her interview with us. Her social impact initiative "Golden Warriors: Fight Like a Kid" is, obviously, quite relevant this month. As such, she's raising money though a "Gold Together" campaign. I highly recommend you support her efforts with a donation if you are able. You can find the link here.

Support her efforts to be Gold Together!

The 30-Day Baseball Card Challenge: Day #21

Tony, the wonderful writer of the “Off Hiatus Baseball” blog, started a fun activity based off the “30-Day Music Challenge” that Twitter users were taking. The list of challenges looks like this:

Today, we’ll continue with Challenge #21 A Card of a Rookie you thought you were Investing in.

I'm happy to admit that this didn't happen very often. I didn't usually buy anything specifically to invest in. Sure, I hung onto my 1987 Topps Pete Incaviglia cards because they were going to be worth a fortune some day. But, I didn't actively seek them out. I did buy a bunch of 1990 Score Mo Vaughn, but he was a favorite player of mine. So, I just wanted a lot. I also bought a certain Phil Plantier card before the $17 price tag doubled. Or more. But, again, that wasn't o much to resell after investing it. It was just getting my copy before prices went crazy.

No, the only card I can remember buying a bunch of with the specific intention of making money on the resale was this card.

Yeah. I know what you're thinking. Good thing I only did this once.

(Actually, twice. My one and only home shopping network purchase was the 1991 Classic minor league set because it had an exclusive Sele card. Yup.)

But, this one was a slam dunk. Sele was the Sox first round draft pick. He was going to be a stud pitcher to team with Roger Clemens to make an amazing 1-2 punch. 

Of course, that didn't happen. But, in illustrating one of the main problems with prospecting, it wasn't really that far off. It's one thing to say you should see the red flags and not invest in some top pick that goes bust. But, Sele did have a pretty long 15 year career. He made a couple all-star games. Finished in the top five of Cy Young voting, and won just about 150 games. That's a pretty solid resume. You can see how it would be hard to notice the difference between that type of player and, say, Greg Maddux. Sometimes you just never know. Which is what's tricky. Unless I'm going to say to myself, "I'm going to buy a dozen of every Red Sox rookie. If one makes it I'll sell them. Maybe those will cover the costs of the ones that don't. But either way I'm happy to have Red Sox cards." But that could be hard to do, which is why it's so appealing to pick and choose.

Just choose better than I did.