The Hobby Store

Today was my first journey to a hobby store in nearly a year. The last time I went to one, I was with my girlfriend in Austin and she got barked at by the owner. There were a few tense moments there for sure. One of the things I like the least about those places is that the stores are generally very small and you can almost feel their beady little eyes peering into your soul, hoping to extract some blood, er, cash from your person. I should know - I used to work at one of these places. Well, to be honest, I was only in high school and got to spend a lot of my time sorting instead of dealing with customers.


There don't seem to be any hobby shops that deal primarily in sports cards in Portland any longer, so I had to venture out into the suburbs to go a shop I never particularly liked all that much. I always thought it was way too expensive. This time, I noticed that they had relocated into a smaller space in the same strip mall, and it was definitely a lot brighter and friendlier than in the past. I picked up 7 cards from the dollar bin (6 for $5, but I got carried away and bought too many), some supplies and a few random packs. I will post one of the packs on A Pack A Day soon (hint: it's EXTREME) as my initial post there. The Skip Schumaker Chrome card is the first card I ran across that was a keeper, and I'm pretty happy about it as I didn't have any of his cards yet. Skip is having a pretty solid season in his first full season of regular MLB action, but he's been absolutely atrocious against lefties (.158/.238/.179 versus a .351/.412/.504 line against righties.) Edmonds is one of the two players I collect, redundant as it may be considering that I collect all Cardinals in general. I've gotten several of the Ultra Diamond Producers cards lately, but none of Jimmy Cub (eww.)


Ozzie is the first player I ever started collecting. I grabbed three of his cards.


This is from some sort of fake rookie promotion that Topps did as the card is in the style of his official 1979 Topps rookie card, but the photo is different. I'd tried unsuccessfully a couple of times to get one of these off of eBay for cheap, so it was nice to see it in the dollar box. Every card shop needs a dollar box. For that matter, I wish more places had quarter boxes.


Here's one from a Fan Favorites set. I don't really know what those are all about, but they basically seem to be reprinted cards with a gold logo, slightly weirder card stock than the originals, and occasionally suspect player selection. (I got a hilarious "player" from this set in a trade with Ben from the Baseball Card Blog awhile back that I'll have to image and post sometime.)

This card is shiny. I don't know what else to say about it, except that I miss Rolen's glove, but not his dilapidated shoulder.


The future is soon for Wainwright. That is, he should be coming off the DL in the relatively near future. I really hope that the idea of making him the closer again was just a terrible idea spawned from Cardinals broadcast Al Hrabosky rather than something the team is really entertaining.

Side note: Check out Indians Baseball Cards. Always. for an awesome tournament that David is holding involving 1993 Triple Play scratch cards. I actually have some unblemished scratch cards in my collection including one of Oz.