Ephrata Show Haul - Glitches In The Matrix

The annual Lions Club Card Show was held in Ephrata, PA this past Saturday.  Ephrata is between Lancaster and Reading.  It's always good for lots of vintage, especially Phillies if you're into them.  The show runs from 8 to 3 or so.  I got there around 10AM and stayed until about 2PM.

A quick side note: They usually have one guest signing autographs.  Steve Carlton, Jim Palmer, and Brooks Robinson were there in past years. (It may have been Brooks subbing for Palmer).  I don't even know where that happens.  This year the signer was potential top 3 NFL draft pick Abdul Carter, the Penn State linebacker.  He was scheduled to start at 11 after an interview, but didn't actually arrive until 1:30.  He "overslept".

Anyway, it was a decent show, although overall the prices were a bit higher than I expected.  Most of what I got were vintage commons from 1965, which I hoped to find for $2 each.  I paid twice that.  But let me show you what I got...

Picked up these two from "the guy at the end of the first row that has a lot of vintage hockey".  The LAD rookies card is a high number, so the price is reasonable.  Of course, I would see that card on every other dealer's table the rest of the day at slightly lower prices.  This is the theme of the show for me.

Went around to the next row and found these all marked at 50% off the listed price.  The ones you can't see are also $8.  Make a note of the blue ones for later.  Not sure what the couple unsleeved ones were quoted.  The dealer guy told me the price and I paid.  Initially, it seemed like I might have been overcharged...

But then I remembered that these two were in the mix, and I didn't realize how many $8 cards I had picked out.  So I did actually get a discount of close to 10%.  Banks is off center, but is good enough to escape the $60-100 price point I researched.  The Mets was right about where it should have been at $15 - also a short print high number.

Diverging from the vintage theme for a bit....  These were for my new collector friend Eric from the dealer I call "Brother Mike".  I get his emails about all the shows.  He doesn't have a huge table, but always has a diverse selection among what is there.  And the price tags are "just a conversation starter".  He marks them with what they go for on eBay - shipped - and you pay much less.  

I found these four for a dollar each in his stuff too.  The total was ten dollars.  For these and the two jerseys!  That's Brother Mike.

Figured I'd come across some JD5 up there.  They were from a guy on the back row that was getting ready to do a giveaway of some sort.  The sweater was $20 and the others were $5 a shot.  Daniels' stuff is like that.  There are like five more of those Topps Now cards to get.

Came back around after a hot dog lunch from the student athletic club or whoever it was selling in the other part of the building.  Went to my favorite guy at that show in the back side of the first row.  Wish I remembered his name.  Like a lot of dealers there, he really only does that show.  Got the Brewer, Shaw & Smith for a buck a shot (that's more like it), and then I "cheated with Pete" by getting this slightly well-handled but nicely centered speciment for at least ½ if not 20% of the going rate.  Figure that makes up for any overspending or mistakes I've made with this set build.  And there were some.

I also snagged these two fine examples of the last few SP mid-series '57s I need to finish my set.  Though even if I find the others, I still have Aaron, Mantle and Brooks Robinson rookies to spend on.

Left the show and decided to make a stop on the way home at the Morning Sun Marketplace in Thomasville since they would still be open.  Went to Jason's booth and found a couple more for my set build.

This shot was taken after I swapped the Briles rookie for the one I had in his PC binder.  The Jordan Addison is a Wild Card National Convention parallel numbered to 15.  Have never seen a current Wild Card card until this one.  

Almost made the mistake of buying another '57 Pyburn from there.  It was an off-center copy.  But I went back to the car and confirmed the ones I already bought at the show, so I put it back.  

But inevitably, this still happened....

They are virtually identical in centering and condition, and I paid the same price. 

But that's not the worst of it.  When I got it all home and checked off my lists, I went to put the '57s in the binder .....  and they were already there.

*Sigh*

It was a decent show overall, though.  Guess now I have a starter pile to send to COMC.

Stay tuned though - Chantilly show is this coming Saturday.  Nothing like back to back big shows....

Blog Bat Around: [Overproduction Preferences]

Time to jump into another Bat Around.  This one was perpetuated by three of the all-time top bloggers.  DimeBox Nick started it in 2023 with a post called Junk Is Junk, then Night Owl put a more positive spin on it, and just this month, San Jose Fuji contributed his take.  And that's where I saw it.

All three guys set their lists at six or seven choices.  I've only collected around 15 sets from that era in total.  I've (over)stated many times that I wasn't active with cards back then ('87-'94), and actually skipped everything from '85 to '03.  (Including '84 Fleer update, which I regret now.)  So I have really no nostalgia to go back to when ranking these products.  Instead, I made two lists of the sets that appeal to me (and I completed).  The first was in order of the most to least graphically appealing design.  The other was in order of how memorable it was building the set (many years later), and/or how much of it I still deal with it as far as trading, buying and selling.  Like how some sets I still handle all the time, and others were forgotten once I finished them.  I then combined the two lists to get the rankings you'll see here.  I'll do my Top Ten and a few Honorable Mentions in reverse order.

I could do a supplemental post about how the complete/factory sets have sold on eBay for me in the last year on top of all this.  I'm shocked any of it sold at all, but let me know if you want to hear about how they moved out.

So here we go.

Honorable Mentions - just outside the Top Ten are these sets that I liked but didn't make the cut.  All the rest that aren't shown here somewhere have never had much of any appeal to me.  You'll notice some omissions that are popular elsewhere.  Leave a comment with the ones you expected to see.

1990 & 1994 Leaf

'90 Leaf is one of the more simple but elegant designs.  I didn't own a set until a couple years ago when I bought one at a shop.  Singles of this set are scarce in the wild in my experience.  Again, the history of this set and it's "eliteness" is lost on me.

'94 Leaf is a nice visual with the marble swoosh and foil logo, but it's the opposite of it's '90 counterpart in that singles are all over the place.  It's probably the default set that makes me think "Don't need any of those" the quickest.

1990 Fleer

 I like the look of this one a lot too.  Simple but colorful enough (frames are several different colors), easily readable, with team logos.  I think this was one of my Summer/National week projects in the 2010's where I'd build a set from the OVP era for cheap with Stuart from SR75's help.  Either way, I got the bulk of it from him, so it didn't take long.  The Canadian flavor would be interesting, but I don't think there are any radical differences from the regular one like '77 OPC vs. Topps.

1994 Triple Play

Yep, I'm going outside the Big Six with this list.  Since I'm coming from such a late perspective, everything from this era is basically the same for me.  The Fire Red premiere of TP is over the top, but I like the other two incarnations a lot.  Distinctive logo, nice treatment of the name, and prominent team logos.  Maybe a thin line on top of the name with the postition would have been nice, but these are still cool.  I have no memory of how I built this one, so it falls short.

1988 Topps

Simple graphics with overlapping photos - always a plus.  The minus - everyone's got six tons of this in their extra stuff.  Love the variations.  There's not much more to them when you think about it though.  One of the least represented in the Heritage/Archives/Flagship tribute cycles.

Now the winners:

#10 - 1994 Pacific

I am the King of 1994 Pacific.  SR75 convinced me to buy a huge box of packs back in the summer of 2008.  I opened them all up and sorted them into a few sets.  Still searching for some of the inserts and very elusive checklists.  My extras box has finally shrunk to two rows instead of three.  Quite often I'll trade someone a whole team set at a time.

#9 - 1990 Donruss

Yep, that's right.  I LIKE 1990 Donruss.  The speckle and line design isn't the most fantastic, but it's more about the error quest and all the other peripheral sets that go with these - Aqueous Tests, Bonus MVPs, Grand Slammers, Best of AL & NL, Learning Series, and The Rookies, and Pack border vs. Set borders.  Not to mention the quasi-nostalgia of 2016 Donruss football, that improves the look.  I'm casually after the Master Set - but that doesn't include the "INC" vs. "INC." variants.

#8 - 1993 Stadium Club

I'm not sure which of the first few SC sets I actually have right off the top of my head, but I chose this one to represent the brand in general, really.  The red bar behind the name gives just a little more presence to the text than in the other sets. 

#7 - 1994 Pinnacle

Another fairly simple design, it's just the name badge - cool use of gold on black - and the team in a half circle underneath, that can go unnoticed.  I have memories of building this one for a while.  This set exemplifies the move to more sophisticated designs beyond the junk period.

#6 - 1993 Studio

Love the use of logos for the backgrounds.  Brings the graphical elements to another level.  Making them hat logos is cool too.  Studio is one of those secondary star-only sets, but I think they are consistently more elegant than regular cards.  Portraits can be lame, but Studio makes it classy.

#5 - 1989 Topps

As I mentioned before, I stopped building sets after 1984 until 2003, but I bought two boxes of '89 when they were out just to see what cards were like right then.  (Ironically, I have four wax boxes of '89 in the sale lot that could recreate the experience.)   Surprised these calculated out to be so high on the list since of the ten sets I had for sale, four of them weren't actually complete.  So now I have to trade for some singles, including Pete Rose.  That's points off, but I almost have them all now.

#4 - 1991 Studio

Yep, going there again.  This was the premeire issue of this portrait product.  The black & white gives it more sophistication, and the border color is neutral enough not to draw attention away from the image, but rich enough to be distinctive.

#3 - 1993 Triple Play

This product combines a few of my favorite elements in one.  Black borders, overlapping photos & graphics à la '88, distinctive team logos, and specialty cards (most of which you had to read the back to understand, though).  It's not the most beautiful design, or the most memorable, but there's just something I really like about '93 Triple Play.

#2 - 1987 Donruss

Black borders and big team logos again, and this time, a very balanced design.  I like the gray band of baseballs with the yellow edges, and the varied colors in the name strip.  Even the company logo looks good.  (And kudos to Donruss for consistently putting the year on the front so you don't have to check the back for copyright date.)  I bought my set for like $3 at the LCS that I frequented for decades.  I've finished the matching Leaf set too.  The Opening Day set is even nicer in dark red. 

#1 - 1988 Score

It's not because I'm still trading for the remainder of my original damaged set, or that I had 48 factory sets for sale at the beginning of the year (now down to half that).  But all that contributes.  The color choices are great, and there's six of them.  These just stand out over and above anything else in that year, much less that time period in general.  They're simple enough to blend in with the other sets, but appealing enough to me to set them apart.  '89 was decent, but a downgrade, and Score went to hell after that until 1996.

 

Don't flame me for the ones I left off (and don't especially like), but do leave me comments so I can tally up the votes for those I suspect you'll say.  Let's see if floating letters beats woodgrain, if you know what I mean...

Happy Pi(e) Day

 
Obviously...

(Pea-yay)

Up and coming, maybe...

And then there's this, of course...

Don't think there's anyone who's number was 3.141592654 though.

Cardboard OCD Chapter 7 (Revised): The Trick To Stick

Back at the start of the pandemic, I wrote an OCD article about processing mail packages and printing labels.  At that time, I was printing the labels on paper and taping them to the mailers.  

I've updated the process now to use sticker labels.  And with all the set sales and TCDB trade packages that have been flowing out of here, I'm glad I did.  The trick is aligning the label as it comes from eBay or the database to the proper orientation to print out on the actual stickers.  Here is that process...

So you get your label from eBay or PayPal/ShipStation etc. and it shows on the screen like this.  (eBay labels face one way, and the others are the opposite, in my experience.)  Hit the CTRL + Print Scrn buttons to take a screenshot.

Then open your favorite graphic editor.  I still use Paint Shop Pro 4 from the early 90's.  One of these days I'll take a course in PhotoShop.  I also recommend PhotoScape X that will do the same job.  Either way, you just need some way to crop and rotate your label screenshot.  Select just around the lines and below that little code box in the corner.  I leave off the tag lines (lower left). 

 

Then rotate the image 90° to the left (or right) to stand it up. 

Then copy the label image to the clipboard.

I print labels out of Word since it's less cumbersome than the Avery program.  

Paste the label image in, select it, and right click.  Go to Size and Position...

I've found that 68% is the right proportion to make the image fit the label properly.

With the image still selected, go to Mailings > Labels in the menu bar.

Confirm that you still have it set for the right label under Options - I switch between 5168 Shipping Labels and 48160 address labels, and even though I have two different documents set up to print each one, Word in its infinite genius only keeps whatever the last setting was.  Then change to Single label and set the position of the next available sticker on your current sheet and hit Print.

That's probably overkill as far as useful procedure.  Many of you probably have a totally different way to print these out.  Let me know in the comments how you get 5168 labels to print properly without having to modify them like this.

Trading With Myself (Or The World)

Business is good.

Those sets are flying out of here, almost a couple every day or two.  I'm still in disbelief about how 1988-1990 sets are selling so well.  And if you don't know ~ eBay is a lot of work.  This is why I'm only posting a couple times a month.

But anyway, that's not what this post is about.  I finally photographed my last COMC order that I submitted in November 2024, and took delivery of in January.  I was trying to come up with a better way to show over 200 cards, but I ended up just laying them out and taking pictures with minimal glare.  I was only mildly successful at even that.  All the little bar-coded slips are still in each card's sleeve, though I did try to overlap them and crop them out.  But since they're all in penny sleeves, they catch all the reflections they possibly can, sorry.

Since my inventory on COMC is down below 100 cards, my credit balance is way up.  The last batch I submitted was 90% from the storage hoard (the upstairs batch in my house).  They've done well, and I've paid the owner his part, though I haven't cashed out the credit on the site.  I figure since I've paid out the money, I might as well get the cards from the site for myself.  My last order was over 200 cards like I said.  And most of them were around a dollar or less, so there are many more coming back than have gone out.  

  

The Trout above is one of several set hits that I knocked off with this purchase.  Set hits were not the majority of this order, though.

Stupid reflections...

The four 2006 Ginters are set killers.  The Trout is the penultimate 2012, but I still need Harper's rookie too.  Cal is the last one I've been searching for to finish that SP insert - and he's been elusive!  As you can see, the Pacifics are promos, and the first half of that group that I decided to dive into while picking out this order.  Jeffries is the proper Prism version - not the circular type.  And the Dominators and black GQ minis are both rather lifelong quests it seems...

Brett & Brady are the entirety of my football set hits this time.  They are also two of the more elusive finds and set killers.  Favre is a throwback promo from 2005 and Brady kills my 2015 Field Access set.  There have been many attempts at a Stadium-Club-like, unusual photo themed product in recent times, but they never seem to last more than a year or so.  They just keep getting different names.  

Some hockey list hits from a few different decades.  Guy & Mark leave only the big rookies for those two sets (Yzerman & Roy respectively), and Gretzky for the former.  Pretty sure the three '89-90s should kill that set.  The Flames team card is from one of my favorite hockey sets - 2005 Parkhurst.  Still looking for the Leafs and some of the higher number cards which aren't short prints, but are still hard to come by.  The remaining inserts are from Parkhurst of '16-17.  I have more trouble finishing the huge sets of recent years than I do the older ones.  

While I'm working on hockey sets, I always have to get a second batch of the Capitals too.  Many of these complete the team sets either outright or by upgrading the last ones.

  

And finishing out the hockey theme, I updated my list of Manon Rheaume cards that I have and want and looked at a whole lot of her stuff on the site.  Ended up with these that didn't exceed the cost threshold - a couple bucks or less.  Her older stuff is still surprisingly costly.  I suppose she's the only reason that people still look at early 90's off-brand hockey.  She's officially on my player collection list now.  Like Edwin Jackson, and Jordan Addison, it's only on the Database for the moment. 

Let's keep going with the player collections, and I'll save the coolest stuff for the end.  (Sorry about the mammoth image count if you're on a phone or something).  Found a few missing entries from my smaller football PCs.  The Upper Deck on the lower left is Dan LeFevour in the CFL. 

Of course, my biggest football PC is still Priest Holmes.  I found tons of his and had to filter out my take just to the cheap ones.  Had to draw the line at these so I didn't spend all my credit.  Between him and Jordan Addison, I could go all night.  Except for a half dozen "easy" base cards, I've been down to mostly serial numbered and scarce parallels - and mojo hits - for Priest for years.

Now, here's where I really went nuts.  I said I narrowed down my choices for Jordan Addison.  And I really did cut out any regular base cards that I figured I'd get in trade on TCDB.  But I still ended up with all these.  I'm out of control.  Here's a look at some of them close up....

A couple jerseys among them.  Only a few bucks apiece. 

Got these "Keepsake" base and parallels.  Don't even know what they are, except low numbered.  

And there was this silly thing.  

And these are the epitome of the parallel glut that is happening these days.  These are, in fact, different parallels.  The left one is the "Mini Diamond Refractor" version, as opposed to the "Speckle Refractor" on the right.  Come on people, you're really running this stuff into the ground.

Rounding out the player collection theme, here's all the baseball PCs from this order.  Lou Piniella isn't really one of my major guys, but there are so many of his managerial cards out there for less than a buck or so, that I can't help but try to fill them in.  The Pookie Bernstine in the very top left is the eighth one out of his ten total cards.  The only ones left are the gold version of that one and a TCMA.  The MCI Sparky Lyle isn't normally autographed, but at only $3, I couldn't grab it fast enough.  Got a pair each of minor league coach cards and Chrome Anniversary parallels for Gene Tenace at the same time.  The bottom corner Edwin Jackson is a 2010 Printing Plate that was only $8.50 - one of about a dozen cards over $2 on the whole order.

Moving on to fictional beings, Deathlok is my favorite comic character.   The Specialist card finally ends that Marvel set.  The first two cards are the same Captain America cover shot, but vastly different interpretations as far as color.

More sci-fi, but this time the classic stuff.  The last card to finish all the color series of the entire Star Wars set.  I'm also whittling away the 1977 Star Wars stickers - the cheap ones of course - these were all less than a dollar.  I'll be finishing the 1980 Empire Strikes Back set soon too.

And now the bonus for reading all the way to the end.  A few lovely ladies to complete the package.  A strange playing card Sheena Easton - my first musical love, before I heard the sound of metal guitars years later.  A Farrah mini from Golden Age to knock another of the five backs off the list.  A recent Saraya wrestling card - AKA Paige from WWE.   And some colorful images of golf influencer and total smokeshow Paige Spiranac.

Thanks for plowing through all my mediocre images of some cool cards.  As if I needed to add more cards to my overflowing desks, I have yet another order kinda like this one (though not as large) being picked right now and shipment is set for early March.  Stay tuned for that one!

My theory is that I'm basically swapping the cards I sell for all this, so it's really a bargain. It's kinda like trading with myself - or several hundred COMC users all at once!