Dime Box Heroes: More odds and ends

1996 SP #180 Ivan Rodriguez

In today's installment of this theme, I'll be showing off a few of my other miscellaneous dime box "finds" from Saturday's show.

I know I've already written quite a bit about my card show experience, but I think these last few will finally get it all out of my system.

In a way, the group of cards I'm about to show do a nice job of quantifying what I look for in a good dime box.

Lately, I've found myself buying more and more cards that feature players wearing throwback uniforms.

Trouble is, I'm not quite sure what kind of jersey "Pudge" Rodriguez is wearing in his '96 SP issue.

I've seen that old-English Texas logo before, but I never really thought too hard about it until this afternoon.

To my knowledge, the Rangers never wore anything like that in their pre-1996 history. A quick search confirmed that.

So, what the heck is that strange old-English Texas logo, anyways?

To tell you the truth, I'm not exactly sure. My best guess is that the Rangers introduced them as "faux-throwbacks", much like the Rays did in 2012.

If the "Pudge" is any indication, I'm always up for a good dime box mystery.

I like to think that I've picked up a good amount of knowledge about this hobby in the dozen or so years I've collected.

A lot of that can be attributed to dime boxes.

The sheer variety of the dime cards I've seen continues to keep me on my toes. They're like melting pots of cardboard.

Mind you, I'm a far, far cry away from becoming an "expert" on these things.

Dime boxes still continue to stump me. 

I don't know about you, but I had no idea that Sunkist once issued a line of baseball cards. The orange borders are quite appropriate.

I can't help but wonder what else dime boxes hold in store for me.

For a dime, I have a hard time passing up any "pitcher at the plate" cards.

However, this card of "Doc" Gooden manages to one-up a simple "hitting pitcher". It's an example of the ever-so-rare "pitcher on the basepaths" shot.

It's cards like these that have me praying that the NL never adopts the designated hitter.

With the universal DH, we'd never see these "masterpieces" again.

That would be a crying shame.

As I always say, you just never know what you'll find in dime boxes.

With this awesome 12/$1 reprint, I have now found a card of Germany Schaefer at two consecutive shows.

That's got to be some sort of record.

As usual, I managed to score a whole bunch of great additions to my myriad of player collections.

Everyone from Christy Mathewson to Vida Blue to Coco Crisp found their way into my "finds".

I even decided to take up a brand-new player collection during the course of Saturday's show as well.

Given my utter fascination with the knuckleball, I found it odd that I never got heavy into collecting Tim Wakefield. 

Because of the "unfamiliarity" factor, I'd always collected his Pirates cards. But I'd pretty much ignored everything from his Red Sox days.

Come Saturday, I figured enough was enough.

Mr. Wakefield needed to be a prominent member of my binders.

Thankfully, Saturday's dime boxes netted me a couple shiny new cards for my newest player collection.

That's all I could ever ask for.

Judging from how much I've blogged about it these last few days, I think it's easy to see just how much fun I had at last week's show.

I'm already looking forward to the next one.