Here's a card I finally welcomed into my collection after damn near (I kid you not) a decade of searching. One has big ideas for cards they've been wanting for a healthy portion of their adult lives. But this isn't a Roberto Clemente rookie. It's not a '53 Satchel Paige. It's a...1995 Upper Deck Willie McGee? Look it up in your Beckett (if you must) and you'll find it books for a whopping $1.50. I secured my copy on Sportlots for a quarter - I just happened to log on one day and notice that oh my god someone listed one! It's been a chase card for me because it's one of the extreme few to f ..read more

I used to wonder why in heavens anyone would ever downsize their collection. As I've grown older, and started to realize the very real concerns of finding space for all these pieces of cardboard, I get it. I'm not really in a place now where I could imagine downsizing my own collection, but every once in a while I'll look around my room and go where did all this stuff come from? And I never have a great answer. A lot of you probably know by now that our longtime friend Kenny (aka "Zippy Zappy") of "Torren' Up Cards" drastically slashed the scope of his collection recently, and he's bombard ..read more

Walking through a card show can often feel like something out of a dream. Dad and I attended the big convention hall gathering in our neck of the woods last week, and walking through those aisles and aisles of cardboard gets to be downright hypnotic. It's literally wall-to-wall action of people selling, talking, and breathing the thing you love. Sometimes you have to pinch yourself to believe it. I can say that I've had actual dreams about baseball cards before, and somehow none of them measure up to the actual reality of the things I continue to find at shows over the years. Take this '84 ..read more

Nick's Dad here... Nick loves his "oddball" cards and I love seeing his posts here and going through his cards, amazing the amount of cool stuff! I collected the '70s Kiss and Elvis cards, as well as vintage Beatles, Monkees, etc, that were in obtainable mass-produced retail packs, but I also really dig musical oddballs...the apple didn't fall far from the tree!  Here are some of my favorites... Amazingly, at one of Nick's old bookstore jobs, he grabbed me a bag of about 40 of these 1957 Hit Stars trading cards that they were THROWING AWAY!  The set was about half movie ..read more

I've grown a bit more comfortable with haggling over the years. I try not to take it to extremes - seeing people trying to negotiate over dime and quarter cards at shows drives me insane - but I like to think there's nothing wrong with trying to get a dealer to shave a few bucks off a card I otherwise might not touch. I give huge points to card sellers here, because I can't imagine the number of negotiations they have to deal with in a single day. This is one of the many reasons why I continue to use COMC for my card-addict activities - you can make offers, and from my experience, they're ..read more

Baseball cards have made me do weird things over the years. There's been many a Topps release day where I've traveled far and wide across suburbia, scouring the Targets and Wal-Marts for any trace of the new cards. I've been to parts of town I didn't know existed in search of these tiny pieces of cardboard. It gets to be an obsession that really brings out the darker side of my collecting personality. I don't do the retail tour anymore - when did I have the time or energy? - but that doesn't mean the prospect of new cards doesn't still trigger the obsessive in me. One of the benefits of ha ..read more

Well, it finally happened: I got scammed on a baseball card. Earlier this week, I thought I had a deal in place on Twitter to secure my '53 Topps Satchel(l) Paige dream card. But after a little back and forth with payments and such, things seemed a bit fishy, and I ultimately declined. Then another user stepped forward and said that he had a Paige for the same price. Things looked to be a bit more kosher this time, and we agreed on a deal. Or so I believed. To put it shortly, there was a chain of events (including said user blocking me) that made it clearly obvious I'd been taken. Admitted ..read more

I know the last thing I need is yet another cardboard obsession, but here I am about to post about a new one. It began rather morbidly, following the far-too-soon passing of knuckleball legend Tim Wakefield. I knew Wake had started his professional career as a position player, and had a few cards issued as such, but I thought they were unattainable. That is, until I checked Ebay and found a rather fairly-priced regional issue from Wakefield's minor-league days that listed him as a third baseman(!).  I couldn't hit BUY IT NOW fast enough, and before I knew it, an obsession was born ..read more

I've really never had a budget when it comes to baseball cards. Part of this is because I don't collect the seismic kind of stuff that requires a budget in fear of having to sell a kidney. But that's not to say I can't overspend on cards - lately I've been worried that I'm plopping a bit too much of my paychecks down on cardboard, in fact. It's easy to trick myself into thinking I'm a light spender since a lot of what I buy tends to fall into the "loose change" category. But a few Sportlots orders here, a couple infusions of cash into my COMC account there, and before you know it, there go ..read more

"Dime Boxes" turned twelve yesterday. I admittedly don't post a whole lot these days, but that's not at all an indictment of my love of the blogosphere (more of me not having as much time/energy). This is still my favorite corner of the cardboard universe, and I'm forever grateful for the support so many of you have always showed to that teenager who started yammering on and on about how much he loved 1995 Fleer all those years ago (I STILL DO!).  I've given away cards for my last few blog-versaries, and since I really can't think of a better way to thank all you fantastic readers, I ..read more