Been sifting through the baseball part of "the hoard" I just bought. Haven't wanted to do much of anything else since I brought it all home. Suffice to say if anyone has want lists for sets in the 2000s that include Hall Of Famers or some rookies, I should be able to help you out. More on that later.
For now, here's the last portion of my 2019 National purchases - almost all of them.
A couple '64s from a husband & wife dealer who I've bought from before. They usually have good deals on vintage. Somebody just posted about getting that Koufax WS one cheap. And ya gotta love Kellogg's 3-D goodness! Most of these were a dollar or less, with the stickered ones half off.
Check out that Padres uniform with the green sleeves underneath!
More vintageness from another guy's stuff that was nicely priced. The 57's were two bucks and the '64s were a dollar a shot.
Meant to crop a couple of these better. Something from several decades - '75 minis - this was the first of two batches of these I got that day. The other one is even better. The '53 Heritage, Fleer Yanks and DKs were all a quarter or so. More lenticulars from the previous dealer to knock down the other set I'm building. More of those to come this day as well.
This batch I got towards the end of the day. My Stadium Club list took a real beating. Got some inserts for the same price as the base cards. Plus bonuses of Griffey and two flagship inserts. Not sure if I got another Griffey in my A&G boxes, but this one was to round out a "3-fer" offer at this table.
These came from a seller that prices his stuff by the color of the toploaders. If I recall, red was $5 and white was $3 or something like that. Decent prices for these particular cards.
The lone hockey card I got was actually found by Stuart. At least I can say I killed one vintage set at the National!
One of my favorite vintage dealers had a big row of 1950 Bowman. I got on a roll finding ones that fit my set and were around the $4-$6 range (with a few exceptions of the scarcer ones). The stack was so big, I had to make a special trip back to the ATM. But aren't these nice?
See if you can pick out this guy's card in the group photo above. He generally goes by his nickname.
"Dizzy" is halfway into the second row.
Some of these complete the variations that are with and without the copyright lines on the back.
I had one more vintage purchase that I messed up and pulled the trigger a bit too soon, but I'll leave that for a future post. Next time - A combination purchase and trade from a guy that most of you know really well. And the stuff was even better than this!
So you've seen at least part of the spoils of my sports card shopping vacation. All that cardboard waiting to be sorted into the collection, but not until I finish the last stages of my volume inventory. I just want to know the relative numbers of what I have.
Well tonight, I may not quite have thrown a wrench in that machine, but it is going to be a little harder to walk around in the card room. I met a guy who has a basement full of sports stuff - mostly high end autographed items, and a whole storage space full of cards. He said he is trying to reduce the volume of stuff he has so he can move out of the house. I figured I like team and starter set trades, and could take some of the bulk singles off his hands.
I ended up with fifteen 5000 count boxes.
One is hockey, six are baseball, and the rest are football. Mostly leftovers from box breaks, or random samplings, starter sets, and everything else. Some products are whole rows, some are handfuls.
I'll be posting about certain batches as we go along. I'll be interested in bulk team trades and some starter sets, or want list filling.
Back to my haul from the 2019 National in Chicago. All these are from Thursday, the first full day of shopping.
Believe it or not, these are all Redskins cards. I finally had my detailed list of '52 Bowman large and small needs while I was looking at them and found a few of the college guys from the set that were draft picks by Washington. I've probably seen them before but without my list I wasn't conscious that I needed them. Always nice to add to the first ever team set of '48 Bowmans too. I'm pretty sure these were heavily discounted off the sticker price.
Same vendor had some nice vintage hockey at 50% off sticker price. The top two are Caps team needs, and then I whittled my '75-'76 Topps set down some more. I keep having to look up what year these are - I just don't know the hockey sets nearly as well as baseball or football.
This is probably a combination of a couple vendors. Various shiny and colorful Redskins. Most were a quarter or 50¢. Nice to see Guice is back in action this past week in preseason game 3.
Also from those vendor(s), 2016 Donruss and 2015 Gridiron Kings endless set builds. Got two Josh Normans on purpose, but most of the other 'Skins are for the sets. Again, the bronze bordered GK's are just base cards. They are pretty though. There are so many inserts in both these sets, it's just taking forever. Nice to find them cheap this time. I was later recommended to bust some 2019 Donruss, but can't pull the trigger unless I can knock something from past years off my lists first.
Back around to vintage football. Still looking for the last few for about four different sets at once. 1970 Topps is down to five, the game cards are about 70% finished, and '72 Topps is down to six, excluding the impossible high numbers, as well as '74 (not shown). 1976 is just over ten away.
Some Bo's from recent years that didn't look familiar, and a Willie Jones reprint that Stuart found.
Then I found a vendor I had bought from at a couple previous Nationals. Don't know him by name, but found out that he only does Nationals. He's always good for hard to find inserts at fair prices. This year, he had a great selection of other stuff I almost never see in these 2009 UD Philadelphia minis. Shown here with one veteran short print and most of my second base set needs, these are rookie players from that year. They resemble Topps Magic, but are by Upper Deck.
But the minis also have a retro theme and feature cars, planes and trains! I know Billy Kingsley would like these...especially at 50¢ a shot.
Was also able to load up on 2018 Ginter mini inserts. Had a chance to round out a lot of these from the seller with the cheap football, but they pulled the Beckett out and when they couldn't find some of the retail ones in there, they wouldn't sell them to me. And I overpaid on some of the regular ones (including the duplicate). The others from the insert vendor were in snap boxes among several different products all sorted out - Goodwins, Ginter, Gypsy Queen, and even rarer stuff...
Killed my last few T205 Topps minis with these.
And then went for some player (and babe) collection minis when I found a box of each back style from Golden Age. The Mellos are the scarcest. Three Catherine Bachs, three Dusty's and two Farrah's show most of the design variations. Threw in Lindsay Wagner just to round out the pretty ladies.
Same vendor had complete insert sets for very reasonable prices. I keep adding to my Ripken tribute binder with stuff like this. Cool to find them in one shot.
Also got a few Heritage insert sets. I find starter lots of the base sets, but rarely get inserts with them. This helps to jump start some of them, including this 2003 baseball flashbacks set.
Got three from 2007. Won't take nearly as long to knock out the master set on these now.
Here's the '07 flashbacks all spread out. Works out to 20¢ apiece. I'll take that all day!
Next time - last day at the show, but an additional haul from a well known character in the blogging world.
Cars - Mustangs and Datsun 280Z. The best time period for Mustang designs is the early 70's. They're huge, cool, and badass. Boss 302, Mach 1, with the stripes and big engines. The only reason I wouldn't own one would be that there are a ton of them around. Though that really applies to the newer ones more than these classics.
The Z was really my first favorite car. I just love the body design. There hasn't been much of anything like it since. Don't think I've ever actually sat in one, but have always admired them. Not sure I'd even fit in the thing.
Card set - 1971 Topps. Some people like the psychadelic tombstones of the next year, or the dual color '75s, but for me, I gotta stick with the coolest. The black bordered '71 set always takes it.
Comics - Deathlok, Spider-Man, Iron Man. Of all the heroes, I've probably got the most Spider-Man titles in my collection than any other. It helps that he had like five different titles at certain times - Amazing SpM, Marvel Tales, Peter Parker the Spectacular..., Marvel Team-Up, etc.
I followed Iron Man from just before issue #100 through the alcoholism issues, and beyond.
But my favorite character of all is Deathlok. You could say that he's Marvel's version of RoboCop before RoboCop came along. He's a cyborg assassin who has a computer embedded in his head (that he argues with all the time). There have been several incarnations of his story over the years even into this decade. I saw where he was a minor character in the Agents of SHIELD tv show, but I've never seen those episodes. His are the only books I own that were produced after the mid to late 90's.
Honorable mention to Machine Man. (There's a theme developing here, don't you think? Two cyborg comic heroes featured on a blog with a Borg theme)
And these were the Guardians of the Galaxy, not the raccoon and tree people they are now.
Baseball Players - Luis Tiant, and Jim Palmer. The bulk of my player collections are guys from the 70's. So my favorite players from then will be the top few PC guys. El Tiante is just the coolest guy, and Palmer won a ton of games for my home team Orioles.
Movies - Dirty Harry series, Three Days Of The Condor, Cannonball Run / Smokey & The Bandit. The Star Wars movies go without saying, so I won't rehash that whole thing.
Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry in five movies from '71 to '88. That's just good fun.
My other choice is a rather obscure movie with a stellar cast and director. It's a spy thriller that was updated and made as a mini series on AT&T / Audience Network just a year or two ago. That show was good too.
And there were a few different movies that kinda blend together from back then. Burt Reynolds stars in Cannonball Run (1 & 2), Smokey And The Bandit (1, 2, and 3). All of them about cars, babes, cops, and living fast. Not deep plots, but some memorable scenes.
Music - The 70's were the foundation of all the guitar based rock that I love so much. Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, the Doors, KISS, Queen all started then. I don't necessarily like some of their early albums, but all of them have classic tracks from back then that you still hear all the time today.
And Dio with Rainbow just never gets old. He's the godfather of metal, having enjoyed an illustrious career with Rainbow, Black Sabbath and as a solo act.
TV Shows - There were several hero action shows at that time. Bionic man and woman, Wonder Woman, Charlie's Angels of course. And cop dramas like Starsky & Hutch, Kojak, Baretta, McCloud, and the Rockford Files. I remember all that stuff. Especially the theme songs. SWAT had the coolest one. I even had the 45rpm record.
The funniest show on tv was the Carol Burnett show. Used to watch it at my grandma's house. Tim Conway and Harvey Korman were always cracking each other up. Vicki Lawrence went on to do Mama's Family, which was a series based on skits from the show. They taped live in front of an audience.
Cars - Mazda RX-7, Toyota Supra. My Mom had a couple Camaros in the 80's. She started with a '75, then traded that in for a silver one in the new style around 1983 or so, then a year or so later swapped that one for a white one that she put clear headlight covers on with cute little butterflies on them.
I always liked the RX-7. A friend in college had an older one that he traded in on a Porsche 911. The Mazda was much easier to drive. Never learned much about the rotary engines or anything, but wanted one as my first car. Test drove one around 1986 when the design changed, but I couldn't afford it at the time.
Also kinda liked the Supra. My first car was a Celica, but not a Supra. They were separate models back then.
Cards - My collecting stopped in 1984, so I consider anything after that to be inferior. But '83 was a great year for designs. Fleer and Topps put out one of their best efforts of the decade.
Honorable mention to 1988 Score, which I'd pick up much later.
Comics - This was the bulk of my comic collecting. I was into a lot of Marvel books, Limited Series, Spider-Man titles, etc. Later, the universes were being revamped, and I read both sides. Both DC & Marvel have done it all over again since, so I don't know much about current heroes or their legacies.
Baseball Players - Cal Ripken, Jr. and Julio Franco. I watched a lot of Cal Ripken, being an Orioles fan. I don't actively collect him as a player (there's WAY too much), but I've been snagging up his tribute sets and the like lately. He's one of the most respected players ever and was on my home team his whole career.
I didn't know about Julio Franco until after he stopped playing. It just fascinated me that a guy would play that long. He played for teams that I have no connection to, so I'm probably into his cards more than being a dedicated fan. So many of the other players I like started in the latter part of the decades, so they crossed over the 70's and 80's. Franco is more defined as an 80's (and beyond) player to me.
Music - Sheena Easton to Huey Lewis to Dokken. First album I ever bought (on cassette) was the gorgeous Scottish lass with the powerful sweet voice. Sheena Easton was big in the 80's. Catchy tunes that promoted girl power and love. And gosh, those eyes. She even made it into some tv shows - one time marrying Don Johnson on Miami Vice.
Still looks pretty good these days....
Then I got the first KISS album without their makeup and discovered how guitars could make music heavy and strong. I was hooked. I've been a metalhead ever since. Dokken was my first favorite hard rock band. They had great riffs and rhythms, but were still melodic and you could sing along. Love their clean sound. It always seemed like they were the most "natural" band I knew, which means if I was air-drumming along, and hit that cymbal at the end of a lyric line, it was really there. They did a lot of mugging for the camera in their videos, but I think that was more the director than them being silly.
And of course, the best leather and studs metal band, Judas Priest.
Still into all these bands. I live on the same few channels on SiriusXM in the car that play these bands.
Movies - Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Die Hard, Witness, Field Of Dreams. Harrison Ford is great. All kinds of great action and adventure movies in the 80's. I watch Die Hard every time it comes on. And we did a scene from Witness in one of my college film classes. Copied it shot by shot. And who in this hobby doesn't like Field Of Dreams?
We had a kid that looked just like the original. Our Danny Glover actor didn't show, so we substituted with one of us white dudes. The gun was even bigger than what Glover had. (Warning - the scene gets a little bloody)
TV Shows - Dukes Of Hazzard, Miami Vice, Airwolf. More action, adventure and pretty girls. Nobody ever totaled a car or got hurt in Hazzard County car chases. Miami Vice was just cool with Jan Hammer's soundtrack in the background. And there were a few shows like Airwolf that were borderline sci-fi and just fun. And they had cool theme tracks too.
Here's the musician incorporated into scenes from the show in a music video. He's not quite as badass as Crockett & Tubbs.
An intro to Airwolf:
Whew! These are marathon posts and they take even longer to compose. But now I've got three decades left!
