Dime Box Heroes: Proofreading

2006 Just Minors Black Edition #51 Jarrod Saltalamacchia /50

As a dime box connoisseur, I pride myself on soaking in every last detail possible.

For most of my discount bin digs, I absolutely have to look through every single card available. A phenomenon I've discussed before, it's a major reason why my card show trips tend to last for a good three or four hours. (At the least.)

I'm not sure if the rest of the collecting community is as obsessive as I am with such a thing. Maybe it's just me, but I can't bear to think what kind of gems I'd be leaving behind. That's why I have to look through all of it.

But, hey. Nobody's perfect. 

Even after hours of digging, I still tend to miss quite a few things from time to time.

Take Mr. Saltalamacchia there, for instance. I scored that particular card of his from last month's trip to the local flea market.

"Salty" is the basis for one of my many player collections. At the time, I simply thought it'd be cool to land one of his minor league issues.

Without much of a second thought, I threw it into my purchase pile.

Later that night, a good six or seven hours after I'd returned home from my flea market binge, I decided to give my finds a good comb through.

After a while, I came across the very "Salty" card you see above. Interested to soak in some of his minor league stats, I flipped it over.

That's when I found a major detail I'd missed the first time.

My eyes instantly shot to the gaping oversight.

See that little foil sticker on the bottom-left hand corner?

I didn't. Not at first, anyways. That's when I made quite the discovery, in that the stamping reads as follows...

47/50.

Somehow, I'd stumbled upon an extremely scarce minor league issue of one of the game's better backstops. Only 49 other copies of this particular card exist.

In the entire world.

And I scored mine for a dime.

Apparently, all the cards from Just's "Black Edition" sets were limited to 50 copies in 2006. Frankly, I didn't think minor league checklists even had parallels.

As a kid, school teachers always seemed to hammer the idea of proofreading into our heads. Proofread this, proofread that. Proofread everything.

Unwittingly, I guess I've continued that lesson into my collecting travels. Without proofreading my cardboard, I'd be missing out on a lot of the little intricacies that make this hobby so awesome.

Who knows?

Without a little proofreading, maybe I would've never noticed that my dime box "Salty" was one of just fifty in the whole wide world.

I guess my teachers were right. They taught me a valuable lesson. In fact, it's one that I'd like to implore all of you to live by.

Always, always proofread.

Especially when it comes to cardboard.