Spending other people's money at the hotel card show

Ever since I started getting allowance as a young lad, I like to think I've become somewhat adept at saving and rationing money over the years.

That is, with one notable exception: I almost never save holiday cash from relatives. Very little of it, if any, makes it into my bank account. Every Christmas, part of my brain tells me I should really be socking that money away. But every Christmas, I end up earmarking it as found money and treating myself to some frivolity I'm rarely able to afford at other times of the year.

You've probably already guessed what that "frivolity" translated to here at the dawn of the new year: hotel card show!

Yup, it took all of about a week to attend my first show of 2019: a couple weekends ago, Dad and I made the half-hour drive to the hotel where the smaller monthly hotel show is held, and not a single cent I spent came out of my own pocket.

It didn't take long for that Christmas money to start bringing in the goods: in addition to all these stellar 2018 needs (including the Bradys & my first card of Andrew McCutchen as a Yankee!) I finally, finally nabbed the 2018 GQ Javier Baez at the top of this post, a card which sat on my Dime Box Dozen list for the majority of the past year.

The Baez is a) a Cub I collect, b) a mini-collection hit, and c) a card I managed to pull a parallel of without having the base version -- add all that up and wow do you have a real thorn in my backside...until now anyways.

But the Baez was far from the only mini-collection hit waiting for me at the hotel -- in fact, almost all of my themes received at least one new card from the discount boxes last weekend, even the scarcer "Broken Bats" and "Tribute to 42" shots.

I feel like I say this every time I attend one of these hotel gatherings, but it bears repeating: both in terms of my personality and preferred vibe, smaller card shows suit me much better the larger, more glamorous convention hall types.

There were maybe a dozen vendors at this hotel show last weekend, as well as a good amount of customers but not so many as to make the place feel crowded. Many of the sellers recognize my dad and I by now and some even shave a few bucks off the final price for us. It's just a wonderfully communal space. Hobbies can be fun in solitude but only become truly fulfilling when shared with others.

Perhaps best of all, almost everybody there has something I want to buy -- the dime boxes in particular were in full form this time around (bless those vendors' hearts!) and many of my main player collection dudes were well represented.

Dime box shiny has become a staple of my card show posts simply because I love the way they scan.

The dime boxes at this show skew mostly towards recent products, but there's still enough all-over-the-place randomness to keep me satisfied (up to and including Yellow Submarine-era Fabs).

A few other dime box randoms, including a minor league Bumgarner and a Scherzer that caught my eye (pun intended, sorry).

A couple other nifty dime finds here: I'd somehow never been able to track down one of those cool "Clear Vision" inserts before last weekend (probably the only good thing that came out of Panini's Pinnacle revival).

Also, I didn't know this year's Heritage had a Reggie-centric insert set, and that one in particular is fascinating because I've never seen an action shot of him as a Kansas City A, nor any photo at all showing the unfamiliar #31 he wore in his cupacoffee debut in '67.

And now for something completely different: Nolan Ryan in a suit and tie (a former Dime Box Dozen need!) and Ted Williams in his leatherhead days.

One of the regular vendors at this show usually has a couple huge dime boxes filled with exclusively retired players, which I don't think I need to explain how awesome that is.

Needless to say, his table is always a primo stop of mine for that very reason, and his selection never disappoints -- these are just four of the hundred-plus cards I pulled from those dime bins.

Should buybacks be considered vintage?

If so, these were by far the oldest cards I found at this largely vintage-dry show -- I'm not a buyback collector by any means, but semi-new Jose Cardenals and Pilots stuff are easy buys for loose change.

Here's a few of the day's "high-end" pickups: the Matty and Greenberg came out of a 3/$1 box, while the Carew and Banks were actually my most expensive single-card purchases at a buck a piece.

Oddballs rule the world.

Here's some of the most intriguing cards I found all day: Taco Bell oddballs!

If you watched the World Series at all, you probably saw one of the eight thousand commercials for Taco Bell's "Steal a Taco" promotion in which everyone in the history of the universe won a free taco if some dude stole a base. But did you know you could get cards with your taco? I sure didn't: apparently they were only given away at Taco Bells in the host cities of last year's Fall Classic, that is, LA and Boston.

So that means these cards -- which document the chosen speedsters who've won mediocre tacos for America over the years -- traveled from one coast or the other and wound up in a 20-cent box in the Midwest within a few months -- call it fast-food destiny.

This show isn't usually too heavy on the oddballs, which made the scores I found last weekend all the more exciting.

Dig these: a complete set of oversized '87 Smokey the Bear oddballs which kinda creep me out because there's a real-live human being inside that bear costume but who cares because the whole set cost me just two dollars!

One of the hobby's more consistent thrills over the years has been documenting current players on classic designs.

But best I can tell, that trend all started with the advent of these free Baseball Cards Magazine inserts in the late '80s and early '90s, which, a few decades later, provided me with what I can honestly say is one of my personal favorite card show finds of all-time.

That, my friends, is a spread of 46 different three-card Baseball Cards Magazine panels. The vendor I bought them from barely had anything for sale, just these and a few other small items. Eyes wide, I started sifting through them, seeing which ones I might need and which ones I might not before a loud voice in my brain screamed WHY DON'T YOU JUST SEE HOW MUCH HE WANTS FOR ALL OF THEM?! 

So I asked, and then came the reply: gimme ten bucks for the stack.

SOLD SOLD SOLD SOLD SOLD SOLD SOLD SOLD SOLD OH MY GOD SOLD!!!!!!!!!!!!

These hit so many different things I love to see in my baseball cards. Firstly, I love oddballs, of course. Then there's the fact that I enjoy new guys on old designs, and these were truly pioneers in that regard. Then comes my uncanny and unexplainable love for cards that were cut out of larger objects (box bottoms, Hostess panels, etc.). And better yet: I WAS THE ONE WHO GOT TO CUT THEM OUT! 

I mean, I get weirdly excited when I find one of these cards in a dime box. And there I was spending better part of an hour sitting in my room that night, joyously cutting out 46 whole panels of 'em. That's 138 different ones in all, which, divided by the ten bucks I paid for the lot, amounts to about seven cents per(!!!).

Above are just nine of the many, many cards that made up this hotel-show find for the ages.

And here's where I remind both my readers and myself that nothing I just showed in this post -- as well as the hundreds of other finds that didn't make the cut -- was paid for out of my own pocket.

After all, what fun is being a responsible adult if you can't enjoy the frivolities in life?