Hello! And for those of you that read along during my soft launch during the 2020 MLB season, welcome back!
If, like most people, you may have missed my initial soft launch last year allow me to introduce myself. My name is Michael Roche and I collect baseball cards. My introduction to the hobby first came in 1998 during the home run race between Mark McGwire and my favorite player at the time, Slammin’ Sammy Sosa. The battle between the two NL Central division rivals not only held the rapt attention of a young MJR but also fueled a booming card market, to the point that my cousin protested my aunt giving me my first packs in case there was a McGwire or Sosa card in them. Unfortunately for me, but much my cousin’s relief, there was not. None-the-less, I was hooked.
For many years afterwards the flames of my baseball card passion ran red hot. However, as the age old story goes, those flames steadily cooled off and were replaced by more *ahem* worldly interests in high school and college. But although those flames were replaced, they were never extinguished completely. In the summer of 2011 I rediscovered the hobby and have been back ever since.
In the nearly ten years of being back in the hobby I have been lucky to explore many different ways to collect. From set building to player collecting, prewar to game used, I’ve dabbled with many different card collecting approaches. The one area I have been hesitant to dip into however has always prospecting. The number of players, the different variations, and amounts of money that get thrown around always seemed overwhelming. Never-the-less, I was determined to try my hand at it. This website is a result of that determination.
The goal of this website is to identify the top minor league players that have made their First Bowman Chrome Autograph debut and determine what the current market value is for those cards. You can find out who those top players are and read my methodology for selecting them here. You can also find out how I determine the card values here. By using these methods I hope to discover undervalued cards that have the best chance of increasing in value. Please keep in mind however that I am only beginning to explore this arena and I would strongly recommend taking any of my predictions with a large grain of salt. Just to prove how much or how little I may know, you can follow along with my results and keep me honest here.
That is a brief glimpse of my collecting background and the aim of MJRsportscards.com. I will continue to post blogs every week leading up to the season and then reintroduce the Hot/Cold and Trending lists. I’m very much looking forward to starting this journey again and can’t wait to see where it goes in the new year. Thanks for taking the time to read and explore the site. I hope you’ll find this to be a useful tool when it comes to adding to your own collection. Happy collecting!
MJR Sportscards 