This one will be rather brief.  I heard about this show a mere two days before it took place.  My buddy Stuart said I needed to go, but I was hesitant since I had been spending a lot at the previous shows and other purchases recently.  (He would still go if he was dead broke and there was only one junk wax table among a hundred Pokèmon dealers).  But I actually had the time free and it was only a ten minute drive, so I gave in and went. It was a smaller show in one of the ballrooms at the Eisenhower Hotel in Gettysburg.  It's situated right along the main road into t ..read more

Two weeks after the Ephrata show, I attended the first of three yearly exhibits at the Expo Center in Chantilly, Virginia.  This is the biggest show in my local-ish area.  It's about an hour's drive, and almost always worth it. After dropping off my second submission to the guys at the COMC table (which was mostly from that storage hoard that I showed earlier), I dove in to shopping. Here's the overall look at all my stacks - sorted by sport, sets, PCs, etc.  The two stacks on the left end will appear in other more famous blogs than mine.   The first thing I attacke ..read more

Well, it's been another long pause between posts, and now I have a backlog of show loot and a Bat-Around to catch up on.   The first of the three shows was on March 23.  It's the once-a-year affair in Ephrata, which sits between Lancaster and Reading.  It's a good show for vintage, as a lot of the dealers are old school and only do this show. One of my favorite dealers there always has bindered starter lots of vintage sets in more than just baseball.  These were two of the best offerings this time.  I did NOT bring either one of these home, however.   ..read more

As I returned home from the annual Ephrata, PA card show Saturday (more on that in a later post), I was greeted with a package from Night Owl in my mailbox. The banner item was this 4½" x 7" Claude Osteen Ticketron photo.  On the back in the 1971 Dodgers schedule.  This will go well with the other oversize things of him in my PC. Man, if you could go back and be there for the Sunday autographs sessions...   Also included were these two Cal Ripkens.  The A&G is the shiny flavor, and the left one must be from Archives or something, it has the '69 design on the back. T ..read more

I did it again. I let a month go by without posting a thing.  I've had a few ideas, and still haven't written my definitive grading rant, but never sat down to put anything on screen.  Granted, I've been sick off and on and had my third (although painless) kidney stone migration all in the last month.   But that's not what I meant... The CDs were already there I brought in another cardboard hoard.  Filled another floor of my townhouse with cards.  Now two out of three floors are stacked to the gills.  I'll be on Hoarders soon.  OK, maybe not - I ..read more

A couple weeks ago, while I was browsing the forums on the TCDB, I stumbled upon a thread that asked where some collectors get their minor league cards from.  As a player collector of about 60 different guys, I have a significant list of minor league issues - mostly managers for the guys I'm looking for.  I see them on COMC and a few other places, but a lot of them are prohibitively expensive.  Sometimes you have to buy a whole team set to get one card, but I'm not doing that. One respondent listed a couple sites that he had found.  It included GoSportsCards.com.  I ch ..read more

Made a rather spontaneous purchase this past week.  As you know if you've read me more than twice, I gave up most new products a couple years ago.  On top of that, my baseball game viewing dropped to practically zero as well.  I couldn't justify the rising costs of building sets of players that I no longer recognize.  Especially when the price of a box calculates to more than a dollar a card when divided evenly. Well, I threw a lot of that out the window when I came across the listing for 2023 Stadium Club on my favorite dealer's website.  There were Hobby boxes for ..read more

A co-worker gave me a factory set of 1991 Classic Best minor league cards a while ago.  It's a 450 card set that comes in a custom box with each block of 100 cards wrapped in cellophane.  This set had sort of a defect in that two of the blocks were of the 200 numbers, so I was missing the 100's.  I put them on the Trading Card database and they've come rolling in. There are many players who went on to have significant major league careers.  Like these two: But some of the others who didn't quite make it have similar names to those that did.  Though not all of the s ..read more

I finally finished entering all my recent baseball extras into the TCDB.  (Ok, full disclosure, I still have a couple piles of recently processed dupes that I have to sort yet, but the majority is DONE!) Do you ever notice that the same guy keeps popping up either when you open packs or buy bulk lots or sort out your monster boxes of extra stuff?  (What? doesn't everyone have multiple monster boxes of trade bait? ?) While entering my last box - 2017 thru 2021, this guy kept showing up.  Not only on base cards, which wouldn't be anything special, (since a major percentage of my e ..read more

Hopefully those hints were enough to tell you that I'm 57 today. But you know, it's never really about me.  It's about those who are much more attractive and also celebrating today... Kate Middleton is 42.       And Nina Dobrev is 35.     ..read more