Card Show Bounty

It's difficult enough these days to find places around here that sell baseball cards that aren't big box stores, so a few months ago I was pleased to discover that there is a monthly card show that is held in a cheesy shopping mall just outside of the city. Last time I was pretty successful at finding some bargain Cardinals to add to my collection, but I spent a great deal more time window shopping and being amazed at silly things like out of package Starting Lineup figures than I did actually digging through boxes and piles of cards. I picked up far too many cards to give equal time to here, so I'll just go over the highlights.

Football cards: I did not own a Duce Staley card, but now I'm glad that I do. I also got a shiny Randall Cunningham card, a couple of Eagles I've never heard of from 1978 and 3 cards of Oregon Ducks pictured in their college uniforms but with NFL logos that I'm saving for a later post.

Clyde Drexler cards: Blazers cards usually come at a premium around here, but I was able to grab 5 Drexler insert cards from the 1993-94 Fleer basketball set for $2. Inserted into wax packs that year were cards from a 12-card set dedicated to Drexler and his career highlights up until that point. I already had a few in my collection before I stopped collecting and had noticed them recently while flipping through my Blazers binder. I picked up card #5 and #7 at first, but then I noticed #13, #14 and #15 sitting in a snapcase all by themselves. This set is numbered to 12, right? I had no idea where these extra cards might have been inserted into, but it turns out that you could send away a bunch of pack wrappers and a nominal sum of money to receive cards #13-15 along with a free NBA Inside Stuff magazine. Unfortunately, it turns out there's also a card #16 out there, which you could only get if you actually decided to subscribe to said magazine. I could be chasing this set for awhile. Beckett's site actually proved to be useful for once in finding out this information.

Mysterious Ozzie Smith card: This is one of just two Ozzie's that I picked up, and I have no idea what it is. It has a 1995 copyright on the back and was made by Topps. I can't find a card number on it. It is super-gold on the front and super-glossy on the back, and embossed, of course. Oh well... whatever it is, I didn't have it.


Vintage Cardinals cards: Okay, basically anything pre-1980 is vintage to me. I got a nice, slightly beat up 1972 Topps Ted Simmons and an even more beat up 1971 Topps Joe Torre (and others) League Leaders card. For less than a buck, I'll buy just about anything Cardinals-related like these.

2008 Topps Heritage inserts: At 3-for-a-buck, these were hard to pass up, even though two of them are decidedly non-sports. Maybe... just maybe... I'll actually decide to collect the entire Heritage set and the inserts. But I won't go for the Chrome ones or anything. I think collecting a "set" of anything with serial numbers is insane.

Albert Pujols cards: I picked up 9 Pujols cards I needed out of a 3-for-a-buck box at the same table as the Heritage cards above. This 2007 Bowman card looks particularly nice.

2008 Allen & Ginter US Flag cards: 4 more flags for me at 50 cents a pop.

2008 Allen & Ginter base cards: I picked up 38 cards I needed for the set for 0nly 10 cents each. It could have been an even 40, but somehow I ended up with two Jermaine Dye cards and my Elijah Dukes card was somewhat mangled in transit to my home. I still need tons of these cards, though, especially SPs.



5 cent Cardinals cards!: I ended up with nearly 40 of these. The 5 cent box at one dealer's table ended up consuming by far the most time of what I had allotted for this day. To just highlight a few here, I found Cardinals cards with Jim Edmonds and Brett Tomko wearing retro uniforms that I'd never actually seen the team wear before. And there was an Edmonds faux-ticket card that is from the same set as a fascinating card I got from Dinged Corners a couple of months back. And then there was Larry Walker, looking more like a coach here than a player. Walker has been around the team as a coach/hitting guru the past couple of springs, so it would be nice to see him end up with a regular position one of these days should he choose it.

5 cent Blazers cards: I got a small handful of these, and this Gary Trent card is by far the most ridiculous of the batch. Basically, Trent is/was a ridiculous person, so the card design is very appropriate. Oddly enough, this is some rookie insert card, so it might have actually been sought after at one time.


Relic/Jersey cards: The guy with the 5 cent cards also had an entire box full of cheap game-used/autographed cards, which is something I had been looking for. I wanted to get a cheap card like this for someone I had traded with before, and I also hoped to find some interesting Cardinals stuff. They were all priced at $3 or 4 for $10, so I managed to pick out 4 cards. The first is the Taguchi card shown at the very top of this post. It was from So's rookie year, and I actually saw his first ever major league game in person, so he's a player that always sticks out in my mind. The card is also serial numbered (227/250) so at least in my mind it makes it a little nicer than some of the stuff you see in the regular Topps base sets that I end up buying these days. I also got a Tyler Greene autograph card, which I probably would have left had I not heard the news that he had been added to the 40-man roster just a few days ago. It's actually the first certified autograph that I've ever purchased. Finally, there's a Rolen jersey card (38/50) that unfortunately has a pretty chipped edge on the back of the card. I still felt like buying it.

Wax: When I decided to take off, I realized that I had not bought any packs. There was a box of 1998 Bowman for $15 that I had my eye on, but the guy left before I finally decided to cave in and buy it. I really had no idea who was in the set, but thought it might be fun to open anyway. I ended up grabbing 5 packs of 1984 Topps on the way out, priced at $1 a piece from the guy who had all the nickel cards and auto/game-used stuff. I plan on posting one of the packs on A Pack A Day and the rest will appear here at some point.