Minor League Singles Review (and Tony Campana)

TL;DR at the beginning: Found a good vendor for minor league singles and beefed up a PC

At the beginning of the month, one of my goals was to hopefully be able to track down one Tony Campana need this year. I thought this to be a longshot because I was pretty sure I had gotten this PC down to nearly all just 1/1 needs.

Campana spent all of 2017 with the Sioux City Explorers of the American Association of Independent Professional Baseball League. I've had a saved search for "Tony Campana" on eBay for a couple of years now and it fluctuates between 85-95 results at any given time. I had never seen a Sioux City Explorers card for him come up and incidentally, never thought to look for one. If there was one, it should pop up, right?

After I picked up the 2016 Syracuse Chiefs card right before the end of the year, I decided to at least check. Lo and behold, when I searched for a Sioux City Explorers team set, I found one on eBay and it included Campana!

Unfortunately, the set was going to set me back $25ish shipped. I tried the online team store but didn't see a set posted for sale. I could have called and probably picked one up over the phone but instead, I went back to the eBay seller to see if they'd be willing to sell a single.

They declined saying they only broke apart team sets if they could see one or more cards was damaged in the pack and their Sioux City Explorers cards looked fine. BUT, they did point me in the right direction and told me to check out minorleaguesingles.com. I had never heard of this site before, never read about it on any of the blogs or anything. (If you did write about it, let me know, I'd like to know what you thought.)

My first impression of the site wasn't the best. It was yellow. It was a bit primitive in terms of the bells and whistles I've become accustomed to when buying online. There is nothing "for sale" on his website, meaning you don't actually know what he has. The email address was AOL. The opening paragraphs on the main page had a lot of "I don't do this" and "I don't do that" while explaining his business. Just a couple of red flags.

But I've worked in retail/customer service, so I know how customers can be. The guy running this site has probably dealt with some bad ones before. The customer isn't always right and sometimes, you have to be blunt. So I kept digging around.

When I got to this paragraph, I was just hoping it wasn't too good to be true. The last sentence says he has cards from every known 2017 team set. Hopefully, somebody didn't buy all the Campanas!

His ordering process consists of you emailing him or calling him and giving him a list of the cards you want. He looks for them, tells you if he has them, you pay, he sends them. Very old school.

He claims to have an extensive database full of minor league cards and offers a free search service. I decided to take advantage of this and get a feel for how this guy does business. I sent him an email asking him to search his database for Tony Campana cards. His response, 8 minutes later, yielded these results:

Noice. Not only did he have the 2017 on his list, he had another card that was previously unknown to me, a card from the 2011 Boise Hawks DAV set.

Granted, these were cards he knew to exist, not that he necessarily had them on hand. His email asked if I wanted him to check his stock. Of course, I did and I actually ended up asking for 9 cards total.

Since I had gotten some autographed previously, I figured I might as well get those cards replaced with unsigned ones for my team sets. So I asked for 2 of the Sioux City, 2 of the Boise DAV, 2 of the 2010 Tennessee Smokies and one each of two Reno cards and Iowa card. I owned a Smokies team set from 2010 but this lets me keep that Campana card with the set, gives me one unsigned and one to get signed. Crazy I know, but that's what happens when you're a team collector with a PC as well.

A little later that evening, he let me know that he had them all. Awesome. The prices weren't spectacular but they weren't outrageous either. There was a caveat cropped out of this screenshot that stars and prospects may be priced differently, but I didn't have to worry about that with Campana. 

I had 7 cards in the $2.10 category and 2 for $1.95 for a card total of $18.60. Shipping was $2.10, not unreasonable, especially compared to some of the gouging on eBay shipping. This brought my total to $20.70, quite a bit more than I thought I would spend when I came to this site looking for just one card, haha! But I was getting nine Tony Campana cards, including two new ones.

I didn't read the fine print until I was writing this post but for orders under $20, buyer pays actual shipping cost. Over $20, and he would pay shipping. In hindsight, I could have gotten an extra card to bump me over that $20 threshold and come out cheaper because he'd pay shipping. Live and learn.

The cards arrived in three separate PWE's with the nonmachinable stamp, so I got what I paid for. Each card came in a card saver, three cards to an envelope. The interesting thing is that they were all mailed on Saturday (the day after I ordered, so quick ship there), but they trickled in over the course of three days. I received one on Tuesday, one Wednesday and the final one on Thursday. Weird!

So what did I get for my $20?

2017 Sioux City Explorers

2011 Boise Hawks DAV

I like the card ( I don't have too much orange in my collection), but that photo choice is terrible!

And just to show off the rest of Campana's minor league cards:

Overall, I am very satisfied with my experience. I'm glad that I didn't judge this book by its cover and am thankful to the eBay seller that pointed me his way. The emails were cordial and he responded very quickly. Despite "just" PWE's, the cards were very secure and arrived safely. I usually buy the whole team set but this Campana PC was a special circumstance once he left the Cubs system. I would not hesitate to use this site again and definitely recommend it if you have minor league needs.