National Baseball Card Day (Observed)

I had a floating holiday since New Year's Day was on a Sunday - I decided to finally take it today, and of course I took the opportunity to head over to my local card shop. Finding Clemente above was worth the trip alone!

I missed National Baseball Card Day on Saturday, so I decided to celebrate today! The shop had a quarter box with 2017 Archives, Heritage, Stadium Club and Series 2.

I felt like I had purchased a lot of Archives already, but I still managed to find a decent stack of new to me cards.

Not a big Pedroia fan, but that's an instant classic. Series 2 had several fantastic shots as well.

I snuck in one more vintage card in there - this one had about 5 staples in it at some point, which made it very affordable for me!

My first Topps Silk parallel! There was a box of odds and ends with sigs, parallels and relics, ranging from 2 bucks all the way up to 20.

I found this Park pinstripe relic in the same box. Rumor has it that Park and the Twins might be working on a buyout, which would be understandable given his struggles.

I also purchased a pack of Topps Chrome, which netted me this bonus card, so I guess I didn't miss out on NBCD after all! Did anyone pull a Minnesota Twin in their packs? I think Sano was the only guy this year, maybe Joe Mauer was in the checklist too...

A Winning Formula

Saturday was not card show day, but it was a special day in the Twin Cities. Three Stars Sportscards (Facebook Page) was celebrating the Grand Opening of their second location in the area, a good sign for card collectors and hopefully a hint of a healthy hobby moving forward.

They had lots of big giveaways, including a raffle and some high end box breaks. I am more of a meat and potatoes collector, so I oohed and ahhhed from a safe distance while people racked up the sickest of hits. I was perfectly content to dive into a series of quarter boxes.

The Twins box had some fun stuff including this in-person auto from a young Pat Neshek, his first pro All-Star appearance came as a Single A pitcher in the Twins system.

Under glass, they had plenty of big ticket signatures and relics of guys like Judge and Trout, but I gravitated towards the Kennys Vargases and Max Keplers. I think I got a really nice deal on this Five Star Auto.

I think Graded Cards are lame, so when I saw this particularly sad PSA Grading Sample for just $2, I was happy to snap it up. Juan Gone is one of my favorite players, and the card actually looked very sharp to my eyes. I don't know that this is at all a rare thing, and I'm pretty sure that they were just trying to make room for newer things with their box o' graded cards, but it tickled me all the same.

I was a little harsh on Topps the other day about their abandonment of the Rookie Cup for Series 2, mostly because I was bitter for dropping more money on a Hobby Jumbo Pack than I spent on any other item that day. There were some cool cards in there. The Andrelton Simmons card is (flame emoji X3)

Some Twins were found inside as well - Curtain Calls is a good idea for an insert, though I wonder how many of those moments are also on Topps Now cards....

This saved the Jumbo Pack for me - I am on the fence about stamped buybacks, but if you're going to pull one, why not pull your favorite player of all time?

Best of luck to Three Stars (and all the local shops), I hope to spend lots of time there in the coming years!

Oh Really, Topps?

 See if you can guess what is wrong with this picture.

I'll give you a hint, the same problem is on all of the series 2 cards, specifically Julio Urias, Ryan Schimpf, Tommy Joseph, and Kenta Maeda.

Seager and Sanchez are correct. What are you doing, Topps?

Several years back I had to improvise and use the Heritage set instead of flagship to fill my Topps All-Star Rookie roster\, maybe I can do that again....

What? Why? I'm about to "REDISCOVER" football cards if you keep this up Topps.