Here We Go

I missed out on all but the first few minutes of the KC/Pats game yesterday since Kate had her roller derby banquet last night.  I'm bummed the Chiefs lost and happy the Cardinals won, so it's a bit of a wash.

After the most improbable of endings to the Steelers Wild Card game last week, this is a game that they realistically shouldn't have even made it to.

 Not that I'm complaining.

 I'll gladly take another game, even if the odds of winning aren't leaning our way.

 Still, I'll gladly take either "one last" scenario today.  If the Steelers lose, it was still a solid showing in a year where injuries (Bengal induced injuries, I might add) took a huge toll on all of the team's stars.

 And if they do improbably pull out a win, it will be a little bittersweet, since it would presumably be the last game for Peyton Manning.  While Manning annoyed the hell out of me for most of his career (I was a Ryan Leaf fan, which took me about a decade to get over), in his final years I've come to respect the hell out of his ability and intellect on the field.

 I honestly don't know that we will ever see another player who has been able to control and dictate a game quite the way he has.  And even if his body can't do the things his brain calls for anymore, I'm always a sucker for a good sunset story.

 So either way, I'm looking forward to watching the rest of this postseason.  Just please, please, please...somebody, anybody, knock off the damn Patriots.

Bigger is Better

I was going through the piles of stuff that cover what I used to call a desk, and realized I had missed sharing one of my favorite new additions.  During one of my recent flea market hunts, I came across a vendor who had a ton of signed photos and cards.  She had owned a memorabilia store in a mall years back, but at this point was just slowly trying to clear out inventory.  I picked up a few cards that have disappeared into one of my many boxes.  But the real finds were the signed photos.

 I'm typically not a big fan of signed photos.  Cards are easier to store and I can slide them into my binder pages for easy access.  And while I could eventually see myself getting some of my nicer photos framed, the likes of Paul Maholm or Brad Eldred aren't really wall-worthy.  Still...nostalgia!

At 3 for $10, I ended up bringing home six signed photos.  Most were backup Steelers from the mid 00's.  But there were a few gems.  The top photo is former Steelers wideout Yancey Thigpen.  Thigpen had a couple of excellent seasons for the Steelers, but his career quickly fizzled out after leaving Pittsburgh.

 And how can you not love Kordell?  He was the player every kid in my area idolized, and I proudly wore my Kordell jersey while playing backyard football with my friends.  The signature looks like it is probably from earlier in his career, which would make sense with a photo from his Slash days.

 Jim Tracy doesn't exactly give me the warm and fuzzies, doing an atrocious job with some pretty bad teams.  But...2006 All-Star jersey!  Yep, I spent $3 cuse I like pretty jerseys.  Are you surprised?

And finally, one that might actually find its way to a wall.  I have a nice pile of Jumpin Jack Flash photos, but I really like the look of this one.  And you can never go wrong with an autograph of your favorite player.

Flea Market Shenanigans

It's been a pretty busy summer around here, which at least partially accounts for the lack of posting.  While it hasn't been as often as I would like, we've hit a few flea markets this summer with some great results.

These cards all came from a flea market trip two weekends ago.  My regular vendor at the flea market bought the collection of a friend who had died unexpectedly to help the family out.  He's more of an old school vintage guy, and really didn't know much about what he bought, but wanted to help the family out at least a little.  This is actually my second time digging through the collection.  The first time, I picked up some great cards (which I'll get around to posting eventually), but didn't want to spend toooooo much, so cut myself off after a while.

I was headed out that direction to help my parents rearrange some furniture since the nearly year long house remodel is almost over, and figured a little flea market stop wouldn't hurt.

 I felt pretty good that I had gone through the cards pretty thoroughly the first time through and pulled out anything that was a "must have" for the collection.  There were about six monster boxes.  But the vast majority of the cards were football rookies and baseball prospect cards from the last couple years.

 I imagine there was some really nice stuff in there at some point, but the dealer said the family shopped the collection around at the big Robert Morris show, and some dealers picked off all the best stuff.  So while it wasn't exactly a treat to flip through 300 2014 Bowman Jameson Taillon cards, it was worth it when I hit some gems.  The Newcomb above was a welcome addition to my long-long term plans to put together the 1960 set in any condition.

 Going through the boxes, the collection was a bit of a mystery to me.  There was a box with a fair amount of vintage, mostly early 70's commons and a few early-mid 80's star cards.  And then the boxes upon boxes upon boxes of commons from recent Bowman products.  How many Dri Archer and Alen Hanson cards does one man need?  Apparently the answer is "a lot."  I'm guessing the original owner was buying up a lot of those Bowman paper lots that flood ebay.

There was some 90's and early 2000's stuff too, but not a lot.  Though I did fine a nice run of Kordell Stewart commons that will fill in quite a few gaps in my collection. 

 Best guess?  The guy collected some in the 80's, narrowed down his collecting in the 90's, left the hobby when the game used/auto revolution happened in the late 90's, and then came back to the hobby semi-recently using some of those old school "hoard ze rookies!" mentality.

 Maybe I'm weird (I am), but I always find it interesting to see how other people collect.  There are so many ways you can approach the hobby, and I find it interesting to see what make other people's hobby radar tick.

 There were some interesting odds and ends still in the box, but the majority of my stack was just plain old commons.  I added a good chunk of my needs for 2014 Heritage, Gypsy Queen, and a few of the other sets from last year that I'm woefully behind on.

 When it was all said and done, I had a nice stack.  I asked him how much, and the vendor said just give me whatever you think they're worth.  It's an interesting system we have - he always gives me a fair deal on the stuff he knows prices on, and trusts me not to rip him off on the rest.  And I get the impression he doesn't have much into these cards.  For a cool $10, everybody was happy.

 When I got home, I counted up the haul.  I ended up with just over 100 cards, pricing everything out at about a dime a piece.

 Can I count this as a dime box haul?

 While nothing is exactly going to set the world on fire, I was able to add some cool new cards and fill in some holes in recent sets.  I do everything I can to stay away from all the prospect-centric sets, so it's convenient when somebody else does all the legwork for me and I can pluck up what I need for my binders.

If I'm out that way again soon, I'll definitely be stopping by for round three with these boxes.  They're probably picked over of all the really exciting stuff, but there were a few commons I realized I still needed and I may take a closer look at some of the Steelers and Pens cards just for the hell of it.

All hail flea market season!

Slash

Probably my only complaint about 90's cards is the fact that the Pirates were almost entirely overlooked from all the great insert sets during the hobby's insert boom.  Not that I can really make a case otherwise.  Brian Giles and Jason Kendall may have warranted inclusion in a few more insert releases.  But for the most part, the Pirates didn't have the players worthy of being in a set of the 10 or 20 best players in the game.


Fortunately it was a different story on the football and hockey side of things.  For a while, the Steelers had the hottest thing in the hobby.  Slash was just...well, cool.  It seemed like he could just about anything on the field, and perhaps more importantly do it in ways that hadn't been seen before.

 I decided to revisit my Kordell collection a couple years ago.  And by collection, we're talking the dozen or so cards I had pulled as a kid, including my treasured Stadium Club RC.  Some of the higher end cards still sell for decent money.  But with the insane number of inserts out there, there's plenty to chase that falls in my price range.

 All these cards came from the card show last month.  Better yet, there were only $.25 each.  A few are numbered, and a few others are inserts that would have been considered a big pull back in the day.

All the cards had price stickers ranging between $5-7, which I'm guessing would be about what they would have booked for in the early 00's.  The dealer said he had picked up a huge Stewart collection a couple years ago, and was happy to see somebody picking up the Slash cards.

Somewhere out there I'm sure there are some great Kordell collections sitting in boxes, collecting dust.  Hopefully one of these days I'll find them.

Card Show Pickups

I was able to triple dip over the weekend, stopping home for my mom's birthday, visiting with some friends, and hitting a mall show nearby.  Overall it was a great weekend, even if the show was a little weaker than usual.

Pirate cards were pretty slim 'pickins.  I managed to find a whopping 5 new Pirate cards.  But the other areas of my collection benefitted, including more than doubling my Geno Smith collection.  When Geno was heading into the draft, I had every intention of starting a super collection of my former student.  When the pick was announced that he was going to the Jets, the only thing I could say was "shit."  Not only was he going to a team that would quickly throw him into a starting job that he frankly wasn't ready for, he also went to the biggest market, undoubtedly driving his card prices higher than I would want to pay.

Obviously the last couple years haven't been that kind.  I still believe he can be a solid NFL quarterback, but I certainly hope it comes elsewhere than the media circus.

But the silver lining is that the rough season has finally pushed his cards into some of the discount boxes and into my collection.

A copy of the Crusade card had been sitting in my COMC watch list for a good deal more than the $.33 I paid for it.  And I was thrilled to pay $1 for the Prizm card.  I'm sure some people aren't happy with them, but I love the crazy number of colored refractors Prizm has added this year to their football product.

 In addition to these awesome cards, I grabbed a stack of 10 or 15 base new base cards for ten or twenty cents each.

 Finally my Geno collection will look like a collection, rather than a few sad cards in a page.

 And of course I haven't forgotten about the other WVU alums either.  Me like shiny.

 Keeping with the college theme, I snagged this sweet Randy Moss Press Pass card.  If you haven't had the chance, check out the RandU documentary on Nextflix.  I've enjoyed the vast majority of the 30 for 30 documentaries, though I think at this point ESPN has produced way more than 30.

 And what fun would a card show be without some dimebox digging?  I've been wanting a copy of this Wizard of Oz card for a while.  I wish we would see some of the goofy 90's painted Fleer cards again.

 And keeping up the retro feel, I love the border on this Verlander.  Panini did really well with the inserts in 2014 Donruss.  Now if they could just stop screwing up base sets...

 I can never say no to an auto out of a dime box.

 The Fleer Retro products UD put out are probably some of my favorite from the past couple years.  It's a shame to see them losing the college license.  But money talks in today's card industry.

 I started a small Wil Myers collection a few months ago.  But I may be on strike from adding his 2015 cards until the Padres make some changes to their godawful uniforms.

 The Pirate pickups were uneventful at best.  For whatever reason, Pirate cards as about as plentiful now as they were in 2006 when the Pirates were losing 100 games.

 I was happy to snag this SP'd Marte Diamond Kings for $.33, which completes my Donruss base set.

 I'm still kind of lost as to why the Pirates get so little local love.  In the 20 years the Pirates were losing, I'm sure many collectors turned their attention to the Steelers and Pens.  They were championship caliber teams with superstar players to collect.  But I am kind of surprised how hard it has been to find cards now that the team has turned things around.

 But the real star of this show?  As I was hitting the last table of the show, one of two dealers on the upper floor of the mall who didn't seem to be getting much traffic, I almost turned and headed home.  It looked like the typical ebay+30% table, where common autographs were priced in the dreaded 5/$20 box.  Nothing craps on a show like seeing cards I know I can buy for $1 on COMC grossly overpriced.

 But I decided to look through the dealer's cheaper stuff.  And boy am I glad I did.

 His dollar box looked pretty much on par with the autographs - Jeter base cards in toploaders for $1.

 But when I hit the Geno green/yellow Prizm, I figured I'd keep looking in hopes of finding some other cool Prizm cards.  Instead, I found about half a dozen parallels from 2014 Topps Tek.

 I've been excited about the Tek set since it was initially announced.  I decided not to order any boxes since Topps waited until the release date to put out a checklist, and after the the trainwreck that was Stadium Club, I didn't want a $50 box of Chris Owings.

 I asked the dealer if he had any other Tek cards, and boy am I glad I did.  He said he had been waiting all day for somebody to ask about them, and pulled out a big stack.  He said he didn't bother with all the variations, so just pull out whatever I wanted at $3/1.  Most were the common patterns, but I did find a couple of the more rare patterns.

 All in all, I now have 3 glorious binder pages of Tek cards, mostly of the 90's players from the set.  Better yet, when all was said and paid for, I paid about $.20 a card for the commons.

Add in the 3 autos I purchased for a total of $20 on ebay a while back, and I basically have the equivalent of 3 boxes and some spare base cards of Tek for a grand total of less than $30.  Sure, I didn't hit a coveted Big Mac auto, but I think I would still be pretty darn pleased had I pulled all these cards from a box.