I'm just a modern guy (or, a day at the hotel card show)

For the first time since before the pandemic, Dad and I made it to a hotel card show this past Sunday - and I walked out with exactly one vintage card.

I'm inverting my usual best-for-last card show structure by showing my '58 Hank Aaron right off the bat here (I'm grinning from ear to ear just looking at it). Even in rough shape, it wasn't a bad buy for $50, and it was far and away the best thing I bought all day. It also has the honors of being the oldest Hank I now own.

Truth be told, it was actually one of the extreme few pieces of vintage I saw at all - I was so desperate for something old that it probably could've been priced double what it was & I still would've bought it. 

The vast majority of what I saw on Sunday was modern, modern, and more modern.

I've noticed this trend at smaller shows lately - they tend to skew toward newer cards and a younger crowd. For the first time in my card show life, I was probably older than the median age of attendees (lots of teens hawking PSA slabs and Pokémon cards). I ended up only buying cards from maybe a half-dozen tables throughout the day because most of them simply didn't have anything I was interested in.

Normally, this isn't a huge deal, but newer cards tend to bring out the seedier sides of the hobby - another first for this show was that I overheard heated arguments break out over asking prices at a couple tables (a fistfight is the last thing I want to see at a card show).

It's not a bad thing for a show to be hell-bent on newer stuff - it just shifts my expectations a bit since I'm probably not gonna be finding that '67 Topps high-number I need or anything like that.

It doesn't get much more modern than 2024 Topps Chrome, which was just released last week & already in the wild at this show. I was shocked when a few vendors told me they paid something in the range of $250-300 for boxes of this stuff (to which my reply is: why would anyone do that??). 

Luckily, most of them cast off their base and inserts into the cheapie bins (those All-Etch cards are not, in fact, etched) - so I'll pass on a $300 box, thank you very much.

One good thing about being in a room with slab-hungry and generally profit-minded vendors is they tend to treat anything that isn't big money like the plague.

All of these were dime box finds except the fun Bob Ross Alvarez (a quarter) - the Cabrera is a "New Era" insert given out with hat purchases, and dig a new version of the Hallowed Egg Card!

One vendor had a quarter box loaded with recent inserts and parallels - try as I might, I couldn't restrain myself from a huge helping of shiny.

I didn't see many familiar faces at this show, with the notable exception of one vendor I know who makes the local rounds & had at least a half-dozen of his famous dime boxes on display.

Needless to say, I spent the vast majority of my time and money at his table on Sunday - in a room packed with slabs, quirky '90s fun feels like a water spout in the desert.

I dug through each and every dime card he had in those boxes, and I can proudly say that I ended up buying over 400 cards in that time because do you know the name of this blog?

Found a bunch of neat oddballs for my troubles, including a long run of '88 Topps Tiffany and a Mickey Mantle with an RFK cameo!

Ten cent mini madness!

(I was especially thrilled to find that Lofton since those Blue Cracker Jack minis are a real pain.)

I usually pass at looking through anything modern that's more than a quarter, but with a good amount of time on the clock at this show I figured what the hell.

I'm glad I did, since I ended up scoring a nice heap of stuff for my bigger player collections - Gwynn was 50 cents, Vlad & Konerko were a buck, and that excellent Ichiro was a whopping $2!

A modern card has to be really cool if I'm gonna spend a whole buck on it, but these two definitely qualified - not quite sure what that Cepeda is, but it's thick, metallic, and numbered to a mere 135 copies.

A few for the horizontal files - I collect a lot of '70s dudes, but Thurman Munson cards make me smile more than most.

I've been slowly cataloging my collection lately, and one unexpected result is that it's actually been more helpful in documenting the cards I need rather than the ones I already have.

Case in point: I thought I already had almost everything from that Pacific Nolan Ryan set I seem to see in every dime box. So imagine my surprise when I was cataloging last week and discovered, nope, there's actually dozens of these things I don't have! Thankfully, this show stayed on script, and I found a huge stack of 'em in a dime box to whittle down the want list.

Couple that with a nice batch of other scattered randoms (including a new Teke!), and you have a fun trip through the cheapies.

With lots of time remaining and a good amount of cash left in my wallet, Dad and I plopped down at a 50-cent box (offered by the same vendor with the aforementioned half-dozen dime boxes) at the end of the day.

The guy offered a deal on these cards: 50 cents each or 100/$40. If time isn't a factor, I take stuff like this as a challenge, and with the kind of stuff I found in those boxes (Sweet Spot Klu!), you better believe I reached that 100-card plateau.

Actually, that's a lie...because after the dust settled, I found (not really to my surprise) that I'd amassed 140 cards in my stack!

I didn't have to balk at paying 50 cents (check that, 40 cents) for much of what was in these boxes, what with Mantle/Musial combos and TCMA legends and all.

That Ted Williams Ted Williams (I always love saying that) is actually a promo card from a set I devoured as a kid, one that really helped created my current love for collecting older ballplayers.

Finally from the 50-cent depths came an '86 Donruss Ripken that was somehow the second-oldest card I bought all day - and more importantly, a former "Dime Box Dozen" need!

'58 Hank aside, I don't know that my haul this time around packed as much as a punch as some of the card show treasures I've boasted about in the past around here. A modern show tends to be more of an effort of accumulation over jump-for-joy white-whale deals.

Still, I don't mean to imply that I was at all disappointed in the slightest with the bag of (mostly) modern cardboard I brought home - no matter what form it takes, no fun can match the thrill of card show fun.