Bill March 12, 2020 2 Comments

I don’t always go to card shows, but when I do I hit the cheap stuff.

I really don’t go to a lot of card shows. Whether that’s because of family duties, work, or general business… or just because I am not always a “crowds” guy, I just don’t get to a lot. We have a good amount of regular shows in this area. Some are better than others, but this latest one is one of my favorites.

I have a shop that’s located a little over a half hour away, but while other shops are closer, I consider this my shop. They have a back area that they will have events in and that’s where they hold their shows. It’s probably 20+ tables. That’s good but the vast majority I don’t have much of an interest in.

There are so many tables that have higher end cards. And it always surprises me how much basketball, football, and hockey are on the tables. Being mainly a baseball guy I just avoid a lot of them just purely for that. I also tend to hit the tables that seem less frequented than others. But there’s always at least one guys with some cheap boxes and this time I hit one pretty hard.

Let’s take a look at what I picked up.

My Main Purpose – TTMs

My main goal of hitting what was 10-cent boxes this time was to get some TTM cards. The ONE guy that had these boxes had a good lot but they weren’t organized in a way I like. That meant a bit more digging. But I was able to find some good chunks of cards. For instance he had a ton of ’01 Topps that I was just able to dig through and find TTM names that I recognized. You can probably see them in the picture above. So overall it was a great day for TTM fodder.

The Prizes

I did find a few main prizes, or at least they seemed like prizes to me. The first was this ’78 Lou Whitaker rookie. To be honest, there are certain cards that I see that I’m probably just going to grab. Given that most of these boxes didn’t go past the 90’s, it was easy to see the things that stuck out. I don’t even know if I officially recognized what this was at first.

This little hot spot was even better. I don’t care much about the quality when it comes to finding cards from the ’50s. So finding these ’59s was awesome. The only one that is a little worse off is the Lenny Green which has some writing on the back. Upon further review, it looks like someone was signing Lenny’s name. I wouldn’t say its an autograph as it’s “signed” at least twice that I can see.

Before They Were Mets

This shiny cards were pretty interesting. They came at the back end of the numbered cards in Series 1. I like that these were the cards that told the story of the year before. Obviously the season highlights did that, but I like all the Postseason and League Leaders in one spot too. The effect on these cards was slightly off though.  Maybe its just my old man eyes though.

Just Grab It!

As I said there are some things I just grab and ’82 Topps is in that range. Of course it helped to see Gibson, Molitor, Murphy and Yount in the box. There were some other “leader” cards too, but this was maybe 20 cards of ’82 Topps that I just grabbed and filed through really quickly and then set it aside.

These chunks I took even less time with than the ’82 Topps. I don’t have a lot of ’83 or ’85 Donruss so I just grabbed them. It’s probably 50-75 cards, maybe more. But I didn’t even file through them until I got home. I just took them out and through them in the box I was piling everything into.

These I was taking a litte more time with because I was reading names for TTMs, but it’s also harder to read names on these cards because of the foil. But heck, Zito, Sabathia and Peavey prospects cards are worth a pull.

My Boys

I don’t grab every Met I see.

No, for real, I don’t.

OK believe it or not, these were some of the Mets I grabbed as I went through. I might have some of them already, but if I like the card I don’t spend too much time at 10-cents per card.

While I normally am not an “old guy, new cards” type of guy, I just can’t resist sometimes.

Overall this was an extremely successful outing and I got a ton of stuff. So what did all this come to? Well, the guy said, “those are 10-cent boxes and the more you grab the better the deal.” So I filled about three quarters of a box and showed it to him… $5! No argument here.

I don’t think he knew everything about all the cards he had (outside from the 10-centers too). But that’s fine with me. He was a nice enough guys and honestly it appeared that if it wasn’t what he was into he just wanted to get rid of it. It seemed like he came into some cheap cards that he just wanted to get rid of. Fine by me.

There was a show scheduled for this Saturday. But given all that’s going on, I think I’m skipping.