Another show report

 Here are a bunch of scans from a recent card show!  Very random, but I will try to give some color...

This first scan was from several different dealers and different price points.  The Niekro was a dollar and the bottom row was 'probably?' 50 cents.  The rest were dimes.  Don Mossi for a dime!  Numbered LaSorda for a dime (even if it's an ugly card)!  Fun stuff.  The Fred Lynn reminds me of the first All Star game I really paid attention to.  I was rooting for the NL, but Lynn hit a grand slam, and the AL rolled.  Good times.  The old timers Rice is cool, and the Miggy is numbered /45.

Now some randomness:

Yep.  I'm not really a Pirates fan, but I still paid dimes for these.  Guess that's what happens when old oddballs fall into my lap!

Speaking of dimes, I found a small dime box with a bunch of brand new youngsters.  Check these out.

Yep, Julio Rodriguez and Wander Franco for a dime.  But I am probably more excited about the others.  I don't often get to add semi-hot rookies to my collection until after the hotness has worn off.

The next three cards, I grabbed for dimes just on a whim as I sped through the boxes.  Didn't realize it, but they appear to be box bottoms.  Blank backs.

I'm going to transition to my basketball purchases, and this awesome dime box find is a perfect way to do it!  When I saw this card for sale, it made me laugh, and the dealer got my dime.  Pretty funny, but I do feel bad for poor Amed Rosario who has 'transitioned' into LeBron.

I only grabbed about 20 basketball cards, all from 20 cent boxes, but many of them turned out to be great deals!  Quite a few of the cards in this scan seem to sell in the "few dollars" range, not the 20 cent range.  I really had to work for these though, the vast majority of the cards in these 20 cent boxes were pretty junky.

At most card shows, I get into a bit of a feeding frenzy in the cheap cards, and buy some dupes by mistake.  Here are the dupes I grabbed this show.  And yes, the Niekro from the first scan was one of them.  

Why don't we reward any of you who have slogged through this mess of a post by offering these 6 dupes up to you readers**.  Claim in the comments!  Also, please take more than one, I'd rather not use 6 stamps to get these out to you!  I'm a cheapskate!

Let the people know!

 One great thing about all the card blogs out there is that if you let people know what you collect, they will often find it for you. Really, that's what wantlists and '10 most wanted' widgets are all about.  

Well, the same thing happens in other card collecting areas, be it Twitter, Facebook, Forums, TCDB.com or whatever.  Getting the knowledge of what you want out there is rewarding.  And it happened to me, most recently at a card show.

I have been trying to get to the local card show as often as I can the last few months.  Digging through dime boxes!!  And over the last 4 shows, I have told at least 4-5 fellow collectors and dealers that I will take any Shawn Kemp RCs that I can find.  As long as they are cheap!  And I usually find at least one or two a show.

Well, all that talking really paid off this last show.  On my way in, one friend grabbed me and handed me 4 Kemp RCs, 2 Fleer and 2 Hoops.  Free!  Jackpot!  Then, at the first table (I always go to the same 2 tables as soon as I can), I found 2 more Fleer.  At the second table, the dealer mentioned that he had seen at least a few Kemps in his dime boxes and I should see if I could find them.  OK, I'd rather he had pulled them out for me, but for dimes, hey, that's what I come for.  I ended up finding 12!  Took me quite a while, but worth it.

Another show acquaintance came by and said he saw a few at a table down the way, so I headed that way.  These ended up being quarters, really the most I will usually spend, but I went for it and got 11 more.  While I was there, another guy mentioned that he saw a graded Kemp RC for cheap at another table, so I made my way that direction.  Didn't end up buying that, but I appreciated the help from a fellow collector.

And finally, on my way out, I stopped to talk to a guy I see most shows who was going through a stack.  And of course, there were Kemps in there!  Another 11, wow.  Unfortunately, the guy didn't want to let them go for anything less than 50 cents each, but at this point, I was in a Kemp feeding frenzy, so I bought them.

By now, I assume you either think I am crazy, or just stopped reading a while ago.  But here was my Kemp RC haul for a single day:

27 Fleer, 10 Hoops, 3 Skybox

My current collection totals for each brand:

71 fleer

111 hoops

51 skybox

Total: 233 Shawn Kemp RCs

Too Many Elliptical Breakdowns

 I need to do a catch up on incoming cards from awesome bloggers!  I received cards from three different bloggers, for three different reasons. One was contest winnings, one was a trade and one was just a RAK!

Elliptical Man - RAK

I posted about how I liked Spud Webb, and BOOM, 4 days later, these three Spuds showed up in the Mail.  Now that's nice!

Thanks Brendan!

Gavin - Contest winnings

Gavin from Baseball Card Breakdown has been holding contests most of the summer where you have to guess the serial number of a card.  Since that is basically a game of luck, and not skill, I figured I had a chance, and yep, I won!!  Here are the cards I won:

I enjoy (and want) all older refractors, and the 2004 Topps Chrome refractors are especially nice, especially the Black.  The cool Griffey Mega Metal is a Gavin custom, and I knew I had to have it!  The Munson is a Burger King version, always appreciated, and the Dawson is from the 2003 Topps Retired set.  Thanks a bunch Gavin!

But that's not all.  In true Gavin fashion, he added another custom!!!  An awesome Griffey, front and back scanned to show the attention to detail (the back scan has the back of the other Griffey custom for comparison).

Dennis - Trade

And last but not least, Dennis from Too Many Verlanders put up a 1991 Topps Desert Shield card for trade, and I pounced on it!  I sent him some more Verlanders to make sure his blog name stays accurate, and he sent both the Desert Shield card as well as a sweet numbered Randy Johnson Diamond Kings card (in keeping with MY blog name).  Thanks a ton for the trade Dennis!

Luzinski steals the show

 A recent card show produced with better than usual dime boxes!  Every card in the first three scans was in a dime box.  Don't believe me?  I'm not lying!

Ooooooh, shiny!  In fact, that Kershaw on the left scanned so shiny that I had to double check the actual card.  It's not quite that bright in hand, but still awesome.  These were such great finds, I had to double check that I was really looking through dime boxes. 

More

2007 and 2008 Moments and Milestones.   What a couple of weirdly conceived sets.  But for dimes, I will not be leaving these in the box!

More!

Oddballs galore.  Just a lot of fun here.  I usually strongly prefer Eddie Murray in an Orioles uniform, but this Indians copy might be my favorite of this bunch.

Ok, end of the dime box bonanza.  Obviously, I grabbed far more dime cards than those shown, many of which were just as good as the ones I decided to scan.

Here are some I grabbed from various other places.  Some were in quarter boxes, some in 50 cent boxes and some from a stack I built at one table that I paid for in bulk.  More on that further down!

OK, back to that stack from one of my favorite dealers.  It took me about a half hour, but I built a stack of around 25-30 cards from his stock.  I'm pretty sure that the Brett, Sabathia and O'Neill refractor in the last scan were in the stack.  And the main card I was interested in was this one:

Sweet card!!  It had a price tag of $15 on it, which might be fair, but I am a notorious cheapskate, and wouldn't pay that much for it.  I carted the stack of cards over to the dealer and asked how much for all of them, hoping for one of his bulk discounts.  I told him I really wanted the Luzinski, which at the time, I thought was a mistake.  But he hemmed and hawed for a minute before saying, "buy the Luzinski at full price and I'll throw in the rest".  Yahtzee!

Gotta love those good quality dealers.  I guess that's why I keep going back to him!

I stumbled across three stamps...

 Don't expect a ton of these, but I have to do something other than just show off my new cards, right?

So as the title says, I have three stamps I found in a pile of stuff I was going through.  So I decided to use them on a quick giveaway.  The first three commenters to claim cards will be rewarded by me using one of my stamps on them.  Just pick up to 3 of the cards below and I will ship them out to you.  If I don't have your address (or you think I might not have it) then shoot it to my email.  The email can be found in my profile on the sidebar.

Available cards:

The Scherzer isn't as rainbow-y as it looks in the scan, but still shiny.  The Schwarber is a refractor.

That ain't Spud Webb!

 My son recently threw a few bucks in my PayPal account, which I never use anymore.  It was a really small amount, so I decided to throw those 'free dollars' away on some random Ebay stuff.  Being only a couple of inches from being a dwarf myself (that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but I have always been short), I decided to grab cards of some short NBAers!

Here is what I brought home...

Muggsy RC!!  I think this is a card I would gladly take as many copies of as I could get.  Such a cool player.  And the other card is at least short (being a sticker).  But it isn't what I purchased!  I bought and paid for the Spud Webb from the same sticker set (1986/87 Canasta if you are interested).  And yet Dr. J showed up.  I guess I won't complain.  But if you have any cool Spuds send them my way!

Owl delivery

 I've been thinking that we need a pre-defined widget to drop into our blogs that makes the excuses why we haven't posted in so long.  Something like this:

I mean seriously, I have taken unannounced long breaks from blogging numerous times, and every time I come back, I whine about how life has been hard, or work has taken so much of my time or whatever.  Not that those things aren't real, but nobody comes to my blog wanting to hear my sob story, right?

Anyway, I am back and hope to get back to normal posting times.  I have some content lined up, unfortunately, a lot of it is just "look at what I got" posts.  I will be trying to mix in some "Flash Freebies" as well.  And I definitely want to get some more PWE drafts going, but probably not until September.

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On to the post!  As you have probably seen on numerous other blogs, Night Owl has recently blasted out twenty 250 card packages to some of his lucky readers.  This is my report!  In the interest of getting this post out there, I only have three pics, but there were so many fun and interesting cards in the box that didn't make it in here.  

I chose these 9 cards as some of my favorites in the package:

Yay!  Stars, oddballs, cool photos, early Prizm and of course, The Chicken!

There were also a ton of young-ish players in there, lots of rookies.

And the cards I have shown were exactly the kinds of cards I would have expected from the great Owl.  Fun and variety.  What I did not expect was this great card straight off my wants!

Woohoo!!  Thanks a ton Greg!!

Anyway, I don't feel like this post has done Night Owls delivery justice, but hey, at least I posted again!

Closet box dimes

 So I have a 3000 count box of cards that I have been holding on to for a long time, thinking that if I ever do a card show, I might put it out as a dime box.  But it's been sitting in my closet for years, and I don't really know if I will ever do a card show.

Anyway, I needed something to write a quick post about, so I grabbed a small handful of cards (turned out to be 51 cards in the handful) out of the middle of the third row of the box to look at.  I grabbed one card of each player in the handful to show here, 27 unique players:

I chose the 'most interesting' card of a player if there were more than one.  For example, I think there were 4 Barry Bonds in the handful.  The HoloGRFX card in the scan was the most interesting.

You can tell the box has been sitting around for a while, because there's nothing new in there!

So from this small sample size, what do you think?  How would I do with this type of selection in a dime box?  What card(s) would you pay a dime for in this selection?  What card(s) do you think would never get bought?

Missed four Dodgers

 My last post covered some finds from a recent card show, but when I was putting all the cards away, I came across a few more that I wanted to show.

There is a dealer who is a 'bad condition' collector that often has a table at these shows.  He collects all the older sets, and will take any condition as long as he has every card.  And often he upgrades one of his cards, so he has a box of truly horrible condition vintage for cheap!  Sometimes I think it is overpriced, sometimes good deals, but it's the only way I am likely to get some of these cards, so it's usually worth a look.

Anyway, I didn't find much this time, but what I did find had 3 things in common. 1. They were truly hammered.  2. they were dirt cheap.  And 3. they were, by some cosmic coincidence, all Dodgers.  Here they are:

They were all 10 cents except one, but I can't remember which one was a quarter.  Doesn't matter though, does it?  Drysdale sure looks snazzy, doesn't he?

Cheap and fun

 I picked up around 225 cards at the card show last week.  The vast majority were dimes, but there were a few .25, .50 and even one $3 card in there!

Here are about 30 of the 225 cards I picked up.

1. Todd Van Poppel - TVP was a big, big name in the hobby for about 4 months in the early 90s.  Wasting a dime on this one for nostalgia was worth it.

2. Jose Canseco - total proof that Canseco's muscles were all natural!

3. Albert Pujols - My 1st Dodger's card of Pujols!!  Numbered too, soo cool for a dime.  I also grabbed several other Dodgers Pujols cards at this show.

4. Ichiro/Pete Rose - Strange design for a card, but Rose and Ichiro were both monster players.  I like it.

5. Harmon Killebrew - #d /99, seemed like it was misplaced in a dime box.  

6. Clayton Kershaw - Topps Tek are weird to me, but an insert of a beast like Kershaw wasn't making it past me.

7. Miguel Cabrera - OK, this one was 50 cents I believe, but a nice, thick, strange die cut like this is right up my alley!

8. Adrian Beltre - another weird, thick die cut.

9. Joe DiMaggio - another 50 center, this die cut is as awesome as the others.  I wish they had used a different color in the background, but oh well.

All kinds of oddballs!  All dimes, as you might expect, but well worth it to me.  About half of these are numbered on the back to some number, usually 5000-10000 or so.

I had never seen the sets that the Glavine, Ryan and both Pucketts are from before.  And the others are pretty cool too.

10 cards in a bag for a dime.  Sweet!  As you can see, the set is still sealed in the bag.  I'm considering setting them free.  It's not like this set is going to be worth big bucks any time soon, and I think I would rather just enjoy the cards.  Back in the mid 80s, Clemens was my brother's favorite player, while Gooden was probably mine.  Good nostalgia set!

I've seen this card around, but never had a copy.  Just too cute to pass up.

I probably grabbed about 50 'young guys' cards for cheap just to have them someday when these guys have grown up.  A few highlights:

I know Kyle Tucker has been around for a while, but I threw him in this batch of young guys.  I thought the sepia RC and the relic card of his were steals at a dime!  I believe the Glasnow is #d /99.

And the only card I spent more than 50 cents on...

A Dr. J RC!!  Well, not really his RC, but from his rookie year.  This set me back $3.  Fun card!

Back from Hawaii

 Nine days away from the grind!  I know nobody probably noticed my lack of posts, but a trip to Hawaii with my wife was the reason.  Badly, badly needed too.  Work/life has been a bear recently.

Anyway, I had at least one request for a few pics, and even though I am not much of a photographer, I got a few nice ones.  My wife probably has a lot better ones on her phone, but you are stuck with mine!  I'll only throw out a few, but we took an incredible amount of them.

This was a sunset from the restaurant we were eating at one night.  I wish the power lines weren't in there, but I can photoshop them out if I need to.  Very relaxing...

This and the next one were at the north end of the island.  Very desolate and beautiful.

This is a rainbow I caught in the aftermath of a blowhole spout.  You can see the actual hole if you look hard a little up and to the right from the center of the pic.  Don't know who the lady in the pic is, she photobombed me.

Trees.  Hopefully you have all seen one before.  This one was cool.

More trees.  This picture didn't quite capture the amazing feeling there.  It was pretty awesome.

These last three are all from the same beach.  Extremely rocky, all those lava rocks poking up into the sea.

Love the violent surf...

East side of the island.

Well that's it for pics.  We did a lot of fun things from whale watching to snorkeling.  I ate waay too much.  Good trip!

Now I have to catch up on all my blog reading, missing 9 days left me pretty far behind.

And for those of you who stuck around this long, here is a surprise Flash Freebie.  9 cards below, each commenter can take up to 3 until they are gone!

Short show show and tell

 It's been quite a month here at DK.  As happens from time to time, work decided that my life would be dedicated to it for a while.  Been seriously crazy.  I haven't posted but once since the last card draft, and I really haven't been able to read any blogs either.

I AM going to do more card drafts, as they seem popular.  Not this month though!  And likely not until June, the way things are going...

On to some happier news, my wife and I are taking a long delayed trip!  It was supposed to happen for our 20th anniversary.  But one of our kids ended up having to have some surgeries, and we had to postpone due to lack of $$.  Then we wanted to do it for our 25th, but covid slapped those plans down.  So here we are, finally heading out to Hawaii!  Should be fun.

And finally, what you are probably here for, I found an hour to hit a local card show!  Here are a few of my finds that I found interesting.

These guys were .10 and .25.  Amazing deals for vintage cards of a local standby and a HOFer!  Happy to have them.

Three oddballs.  A very weird 1995 Stouffers Legends of Baseball Pop-Ups Yogi Berra.  Dime.  Some Bo Jackson 'prototype' card I have no idea who made.  And lastly, a sweet Johnny Mize from 1977 Shakey's WASSCA Convention Superstars.  Whatever that is!  And even better, the autograph on the bottom of the card is printed on, but the one on top appears to be an authentic on card signature.  No COA, so can't tell for sure, but it looks legit.  And it was 50 cents, so I'm good either way.

Here are the backs of those three cards...

Now some one offs:

Love the burned look on this die-cut.  Hadn't seen these before.

A 2005 Topps Heritage Flashback Hank Aaron.  Who doesn't like Hank for a dime?

2014 Bowman Chrome 'Bubbles Refractor' Adrian Beltre, #'d /99.  Cool looking card.  I wasn't aware of Bubbles Refractors!

1996 Finest Jeter.  This was a quarter.

I picked up several from this unleashed set, various versions, some serial numbered, some shiny.  I decided to show this one out of the bunch.  I really like the set, but I am not sure about the black and white Ruth pic though.  Kind of incongruous.  

2021 Prizm Ohtani.  I don't know what kind of prizm this is, but out of the 40 variations or so that Panini puts out for every card, this is one of them.  Looks much nicer in person, the scanner didn't play nice with this one.

I recently found that my Topps Machado RC had a stain on the front.  Bummer!  So I grabbed this bright and funky 2012 Bowman Platinum to replace it until I find another.

This was a buck.  You might not be able to tell, but it is badly off center, top to bottom.  Don't care, I will buy that for a buck all day long.

Last card!  I have been having a bit of a hard time with photo variations.  Can't really say I love them, especially when they are not a unique or meaningful pic.  But I like this one!  Pitcher batting is nice (soon to be rare on cards?) and I love Expos unis!!

Thanks for reading, and I hope to post after my trip to the tropics!