the card show must go on

hold on to your hats, 

we are going to see some cards!

after skipping a few card shows since last fall, i decided to check out the first show of the year. it was the monthly club show held on january 8, and i was looking forward to digging through the 5/$1 boxes that had yielded some solid bargains in my last couple of visits. unfortunately, someone at the december show had bought all 9 of that dealer's 5/$1 monster boxes and he said that he hadn't had time to reload.

i persevered and dug through his 7/$5 and 3/$10 boxes instead. here are a few of the cards i found, in addition to the 2018 topps chrome sapphire edition yasiel puig card up top:

2021 topps silver pack mookie betts and cody bellinger

2021 topps heritage high numbers tommy kahnle

topps made this card a short print. it's a guy who spent all of 2021 on the disabled list.

2018 topps corey seager gold parallel

look at seager lunging for that pot of gold!

2009-10 upper deck hockey johnny weir autograph

ok so i will watch ice skating with my wife sometimes during the olympics and i don't mind weir and tara lipinski. i also enjoyed the "family guy" episode that featured them (not sure if they voiced themselves or not). with the winter olympics coming up, i figure i can flip this pretty easily.

2011 topps chrome julio teheran autograph refractor

you will see a few braves cards here. i am reloading for trading!

2014 panini national treasures wei-chung wang jersey/auto

i was intrigued by the taiwanese signature

2014 topps chris sale future stars that never were gold parallel

2017 topps chrome alex reyes autograph blue refractor

i think someone in portland can look forward to seeing this in their mailbox someday in the future

2018 topps johnny cueto 1983 black parallel

i might be running in to a giants fan in the future so i need to be prepared

2018 topps update trea turner jackie robinson day commemorative medallion gold parallel

i bought this one for my "42" collection. didn't notice it was a gold parallel until i got home

2019 topps gary vee direct 360 live your hobby bryce harper and clayton kershaw

i knew these were online only cards, but not much else. i suppose i should have just taken the kershaw. not sure who wants a gary vee bryce harper card.

2019 topps update mookie betts rainbow foil and gold parallels

2021 topps 3d xander bogaerts

some red sox stuff that caught my eye.

obviously, this trip turned out to not be quite as good of a deal given the pricier boxes, and there were definitely cards in those boxes that probably belonged in a 5/$1 box, but i still muddled through. i wound up with $60 worth of cards that he let me have for $50 which was nice. six of those cards came from the 3/$10 box, so i guess that means i found 62 cards. 

here are some more of them:

that howie kendrick card in the last scan is from the sapphire edition of 2020 topps chrome and is numbered to 10. if only i were a kendrick supercollector!

i found some more cards from a couple of other bargain boxes from a different dealer. this one guy who always has a couple of dime boxes is also always frustrating. you have to keep straight which cards came out of which box because i guess he sells a box for a friend of his and wants to keep track of how much money that box is generating. this time was even more frustrating because he had dime and quarter boxes, but the cards weren't in sleeves or marked in any way. i am pretty sure i got a couple cards confused by the time i was done, but i only spent $3 with him so i couldn't have messed up too monumentally. that was 18 cards, by the way. i think these are the 18:

but i might have mixed some of them up with the cards from the first dealer. i was happy to find that 2021 topps heritage corey seager card, regardless of who it came from. there were some random 1984 donruss cards in the dime box, but none of the five cards in that first scan are actually from 1984 as i am sure you can tell.

finally, i found another regular dealer who had some vintage marked down and i picked up three more cards for my 1957 set build:

i now own just over 90% of the set!  he also had some vintage bargain bins, and there was a snap case with some 1971 o-pee-chee cards in it. i misread the text on the case and thought he was selling them for a quarter apiece. no, he was trying to sell the lot for $25. still, he gave me four of the cards for a buck which was nice. here are three of the four i chose:

he was kind enough to point out to me that these were different than their topps counterparts! i resisted the urge to tell him about my blog. the fourth opc card was this classic

that i've already sent elsewhere.

all in all i spent $63 which was not too bad. there was another show the following weekend that i skipped, but i do plan to be at the show held earlier today. supposedly, the 5/$1 boxes will be back in full force. stay tuned!

repack recap

i was super surprised to find a repack hanging in a walgreen's a couple of months ago. actually, there were two, but i only bought one.  here's a post from the lost collector about an identical repack, and i share all of the observations he made about the ambiguity of the contents based on the new packaging.

now on to the cards, presented here in the order in which they were found!

first card was a 2020 topps jesse winker card

i almost wish i were a reds collector in 2020 just to have a bunch of cards showing all the different uniforms they wore during the 2019 season.

a couple of vintage 1968 topps senators

and then on to the mish-mash

big glasses on ernie camacho, and a nice ripken from 1994 topps. i think the 1994 topps set should have been a full horizontal set - i think the design works a lot better that way.

more junk

although one is a dodger

a hit!

i was surprised to see this card in the box. it's from 2019 panini national treasures. not sure when springer wore green (maybe in spring training on st. pat's?) but it is what it is.

more junk

it's interesting to note that the 1987 topps mohoric and davis are from the same set, yet the wood grain on the laminate design is way different. i know the burlap in 1968 topps varies, but i thought that was between different series, not cards from the same series.

more junk

although rickey!

more junk

greg brock hot repack!

the sealed pack inside was from 2021 topps opening day. here's what it yielded:

an ohtani, a parallel, and an insert. it could have been worse.

just last weekend, i saw about six or seven of these at the same walgreens and passed. i did see a different type of repack at the front counter though. it was four sealed packs plus a random bonus card. the images on the box showed cards from topps online releases like brooklyn or montgomery and the living set.  i bought one and it had two packs of 2019 topps series 1 (found a dodger stadium brandon crawford card), 

a pack of 2020 topps heritage, and a pack of 2018 topps series 2. the bonus card was a 2019 topps allen & ginter tim raines card, which i guess is a short print. probably not going to go for a repack again anytime soon!

back to school

many students and teachers returned to school earlier this month, some for the first in-person experience in over a year. i sort of miss the excitement of a new school year, but not necessarily the actual school part. anyway, i recently saw a listing for a sheet of letterhead from the old steve garvey junior high school in southern california (yes, it was a real school) on ebay and downloaded the image.

as you can see, the school was christened on october 1, 1977 near the end of the dodgers' pennant winning season. garvey was the face of the team and a fan favorite, and had just had a monster month to end the regular season. i remember hearing about this on the local news and wondering what the mascot was - dodgers? i still don't know.

a few years later, the school was renamed after our 40th president, ronald reagan. while there is also a baseball connection to be had there, i don't think that was the reason for the name change. more likely, it had something to do with garvey moving to san diego.

for card blog reasons, here's a steve garvey card i bought a few months ago

it's the 1/1 from the 2019 panini national treasures game gear dual materials bevy of parallels.

there have been a couple of schools renamed out this way in recent years - any interesting school names out there? i hope this school year goes well for everyone - students, teachers, and parents!

it's jacket weather

there was a significant snowfall here in the twin cities on tuesday last week, and the temperature hadn't risen above 35 degrees or so until wednesday of this week when it hit 45 degrees. it's definitely time to break out the jacket.

over the past three years, panini has been cutting up and distributing pieces of a warmup jacket that supposedly belonged to steve garvey. the latest issue to include the jacket is from 2020 panini immaculate collection - a subset appropriately called "jackets". as a good player collector, i've been trying to acquire these cards in which panini has paired the jacket with sticker autos, and have been pretty successful.

i have the "base" version, numbered to 25

and the gold version, numbered to 10

i don't have the emerald version (numbered to 5) or the platinum version (numbered to 1), but i did pick up the cyan printing plate (also a one of one)

that includes what i figure to be a sleeve cuff.  here's the back:

i can't say i've seen garvey's name in the same sentence as hornsby or simmons before. decent company for sure.

in 2019, panini used the jacket in their national treasures release. the retro materials subset included a big ol' piece of jacket

on the most common version of garvey's card. they used a bat piece 

on the holo gold version and a piece of his glove

on the silver version, which for some reason is numbered to a lower number than the gold version.

the jacket shows up in the 2019 panini national treasures game gear insert set as well. this is the triple relic version

but it is also there on the dual version, too.

however, the single relic version only has a bat chip.

i didn't chase all the variants of these cards, but i did add a holo gold version of the single relic

which happens to be the always exciting ebay 1/1 as it is numbered as garvey's jersey number. i usually only buy these when the seller doesn't have a premium on the buy it now price.  that was certainly the case with this 2020 panini absolute iconic ink card

2020 panini absolute also included garvey in the tools of the trade insert set, and i added the spectrum purple version

and the spectrum red version

which again has pieces of the jacket represented.  note the nasty corner ding on that last one - the card fell out of the toploader it was in when i opened the package. super.

anyway, the extended forecast shows temperatures climbing in to the 50's this weekend. i'll still need a jacket.