Saturday would have been Card Show Day

Buckle up, this post is going to get Rosier. There was a card show scheduled today here in the Twin Cities, but it was cancelled (May show is still on for now, but I suspect that too will be cancelled). The local Card shops in town are basically doing online sales only right now, which I think is perfectly reasonable and smart. I have added a few things recently buying online as a replacement for the monthly show. This post is pretty close to what I might pick up at a show if I attended in person.

If you are already sick of my Rosie Rainbow ravings, please scroll on down to Ichiro and start there. 

The release date of Bowman was pushed back, which has me wondering if series 2 will also be delayed. I am stretching my Rosie Rainbow muscles early on Topps Heritage. Rosario is one of the Twins' short prints, that one actually ended up costing more than the purple refractor after shipping. Chrome refractor, Silver refractor, White refractor. There's a gold refractor I missed out on (didn't want to pay $130 for it), and there's probably a 1/1 and printing plates out there too. I might call this Rosie rainbow "complete"

Oh, except there's also an online exclusive 5x7 numbered to 10 that I found. Added that too!

Ok, this is as Rosie as it is going to get! Josh Donaldson signed with Minnesota in the off-season, and this is pushing me even closer towards the 1974 Topps set build. His Throwback Thursday online exclusive features the underrated design. Rosie also had a Topps OnDemand Black and White card, an UTZ card, and GQ came out this week somehow, so I found the Gold Chrome parallel of Rosie for that set.

Ok! Here is something different. Jim from cards as i see them posted this one a while back and I was happy to add Ichiro's "sunset" card to my collection. He was creating a backlog of them with his 2018 comeback with the Mariners, then the 2019 Tokyo series that opened the season. He's probably actually retired now for real. I wouldn't be opposed to another cameo in the future though! Let him play whenever he wants like Minnie Miñoso!

I saw this card on Twitter and immediately grabbed a copy on eBay. This is the Topps 75-76 Seattle Supersonics team card, complete with 747 jet (not supersonic) and coach Bill Russell (definitely super)!

Speaking of team cards, I'm still working on the 1959 Topps set, and I have just two team cards to go, Pittsburgh and the Yankees. I picked up this Cleveland card with a couple of All-Stars

Specifically these two All-Stars!

Then I watched about 10 different Mantle auctions for this card for three weeks, and ended up doing a Buy It Now anyway for the best possible deal I could find. Fortunately or unfortunately, I didn't win any of those auctions. Paid a little more than my highest bids were.

Willie Mays, widely regarded as one of the best to ever play the game, still criminally underrated and I picked this up for a fraction of what I spent to acquire Mickey Mantle. Not complaining, but that's messed up!

My favorite thing about these All-Star Cards are the cartoons on the back - Awesome! I think I prefer the back of Mazeroski's card to the front. I waited this long to get it just because I didn't like the photo selection. (similar to my 1961 Topps Killebrew holdout).

Go find the closest card shop (or your favorite one if you have options), find out if they sell online, and buy some cards from them if you have the means to do so this weekend! But above all, please take this thing seriously and stay safe. We'll all be back to the new normal eventually in the meantime everyone's health should be the number one concern.

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

Being Thrifty at the Card Shop

I took a trip to the local card shop today, as I was in need of more 9 pocket pages to complete my 1959 set, as well as all the rest of my still incomplete binders. I could order online, but why not productively waste an early afternoon?

I have a fairly small hockey collection, but the vintage cards and the Stanley Cup collection has been languishing in a box instead of in pages. The shop had a table full of used binders, and I found this decent looking hockey binder. A little dusty, but no rust and no cigarette smell . . .

So what was inside? Mostly 1989-90-91 Hockey.  I went from pages like this:

To a page like this:

Or a page like this:

To a page like this!

Much better. But I know you're curious about what was in the binder, so here's a sampling of the sets, courtesy of the North Stars:

There were 36 North Star cards, and most of the rest of it will be available for trade, just let me know if you are interested in a particular team or cards from a set, I'll let you know what was in there.

There were 4 "art" cards

A handful of prospect / rookies (these were the biggest names).

A few fun things. Brad Marsh is one of the last NHL players to skip the helmet. The bottom two cards are the hockey equivalent of a bat rack card.

speaking of mini collections - gcrl has a "tatooine" collection of all-dirt baseball cards. these could be "hoth" cards? I think I might hang on to these.

And a small number of interesting shots...

The Time That Saturday Was Card Shop Day

I took a trip away from the craziness of the MN State Fair to visit the 2nd location of Three Stars Sportscards in Bloomington, MN. For showing up, a pack of Topps National Baseball Card Day 2018 was mine. For spending $10 on Topps products, I earned the Rhys Hoskins you see above.

I think I will keep Rhys, and I plan on sending Kiermaier to France as part of the next Triple Break / trade with The Card Papoy, but the rest are up for trade.

How did I earn the Rhys? I bought a jumbo hobby pack of Topps Chrome.

Bregman and Bradley are different versions of refractors, Didi and Max are the European representatives in the pack.

I actually pulled a refractor auto! It's a Marlin, though. I have now pulled three autos in packs in 2018, and they've ALL been Marlins. Let's hope that the third time is a charm and it won't happen again.

I always like to dig through the various boxes they put out at the store, scoring this die-cut Bartolo Colon from 1995 Classic.

There was a 3 / $5 auto/relic box, and I found several things to my liking, along with a fair number of cards to add for future trades. The Jesse Crain auto graph is numbered to 99, I think it is a variation because the stained glass is not colored in like the other cards I've seen from that set . . .

There was a stack of oddball box sets, and I picked up three Kraft Singles Sets- 1993, 1994, and 1995. I'm fairly certain I already have the 1994 Puckett, but the others are new to me, and again there's some more trade bait. The sets were all American League only.

Quick Stop at the ol Card Shoppe

Hopkins is a small town just on the outskirts of the Twin Cities, with a bustling mainsreet. Now it is essentially a suburb of Minneapolis, and the "downtown" area has a section of several blocks of shops, dining, and entertainment. Among those retail stores is a place called "Ultimate Collectibles" which sells vinyl records, comic books, and sports memorabilia.  

The main attraction for me is a long tall shelf of sealed packs from the 80s and 90s. This oddball set is all Dave Winfield career highlights, I was able to build the whole set with just 5 packs (it's a ten card set).

From the late 80s, Pacific had a run of "Legends" sets - should have posted Wally Moon yesterday, dang!

There were also a number of small complete box sets - this is a 50 card set from 1994 Stadium Club. No Twins in the set, though... Bummer!

From 1992, a really sharp set by Pinnacle showing the year's best rookies.

The backs are great, too!

Lots of fun stuff like Studio, too.

I planned to go in specifically to get more supplies (9 pocket pages and a new binder), but I walked out with a nice variety of packs to rip!

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...

What A Difference A Week Makes

Photo from Rochester Red Wings' Facebook Page

Soooo.... As I was saying, Bartolo Colon drew interest from several teams, and the Minnesota Twins were able to swoop in and sign him to a minor league deal. Speculation is that he could be in a Twins uniform as early as Tuesday against the New York Yankees.

I took a trip over to my local card shop today. Since Three Star Sportscards expanded to a second location, the amount of items out of storage and on the shelves has gone up. There was a nearly full box of these 1990 Topps DoubleHeaders, a strange creation that combined an image of the player's rookie card on one side, and their 1990 Topps issue on the other.

There were 30 packs left, each with one DoubleHeader inside. oddly, there were only "Checklist A" and "Checklist C" packs in the box. 

The pictures are thin and glossy like magazine pages, and snapped into place in a plastic stand.

There was a little inconsistency about which card Topps considered to be a player's rookie. Sometimes, they used a Topps Traded version (like Barry Bonds above) or they would use their first flagship card instead. 

I splurged on this sealed box of 1993 Topps Series Two. It's probably all Derek Jeter rookies.

There was a nice collection of oddball sets on a table - Found a fun group of Tombstone Pizza cards for 2 bucks.

I also picked up a Joe Mauer pre-rookie card from his days with the Elizabethton Twins in the Single A Appalachian League.

The Saint Paul Saints release a team set every year- in 2008 the set commemorated 150 years of baseball in the state of Minnesota.

The Saints carried on a tradition from the Veeck family. The son of former White Sox owner Bill Veeck was the principal owner of the team and had no shortage of events and unique promotions to bring in the fans.

There's a familiar face! Strawberry threw out the first pitch in the 2008 All-Star Game. He played for the Saints briefly before making a Major League comeback with the New York Yankees.

My favorite card in the set - my first Bill Murray card! Murray is a minority investor / co-owner of the Saints, along with a couple other minor league teams in the independent leagues.

oh and I also bought a couple hobby boxes of Stadium Club, which I will talk about later....