I'm becoming Rickey Henderson

Sad news from Dime Box HQ: come November, I'll be out of a job again.

My bosses at the bookstore have decided to retire from the book business, justifiably so since they've been selling books for almost as long as I've been alive. Selfishly, I'm bummed because this has been the best job I've ever had by a wide margin, and after three years at the place I never had to think twice about looking for anything else (which is more than I can say about my other jobs). And I figured I wouldn't have to for a while. But alas.

Simply put, I have no idea what I wanna do next, but at least I have a few months to think about it. When you flip over my baseball card, you'll find that I've had five bookish jobs in just about nine years in the book trade. If I were a ballplayer, I'd be safely described as well-traveled. 

If I've become a bookstore nomad, I like to think I'm less of the obscure journeyman and more of the Rickey Henderson variety - Rickey's an all-time great who weirdly played for nine different franchises and switched teams a staggering twelve times (he had four different stints with the A's alone!).

Time will tell at this point - bookstore jobs are hard to come by regardless, and that's not even factoring in the question if I wanna work retail again.

This is all a somber tie-in to a wonderful batch of cardboard I received from blog legend John of "Johnny's Trading Spot" a while back. If you've ever received cards from John in the past, you know he deals in volume, and though there's admittedly a lot of dupes, you'll also find a bunch of stuff you didn't even realize you needed.

John took aim at my autograph mini-collection this time around - with the  much-needed (Angels!) Rickey at the top of this post came a plethora of other new signees.

One thing I like about parallels is that they allow me to enjoy cards I've had forever all over again - the base versions of these have been in my binders for a long while, but you bet I want the Silver Signatures, Gold Parallels, Home Team Advantages, etc.!

I feel like a lot of people have tried to get me to start a bubble-blowing mini-collection, and I've been able to resist that temptation...for now.

I also keep all the bubble cards I get, which is probably a sign that I should just start the darn collection already.

No matter how big my player collections get, I'll probably still need obvious cards for a lot of 'em - how did I not have that '95 Donruss Jim Abbott already?

John is a known connoisseur of Random, and that comes across in his mailings - how often do you see people sending Eddie Grant and Mickey Vernon cards?

(Not sure what that Ruben Sierra is, but it's kinda frightening.)

I haven't been able to find much info on these, but John also sent me a complete reprint set of a neat obscure '40s "Sport Thrills" issue that packed a hefty amount of star power.

More cards that have absolutely nothing in common other than the fact that I need them.

(Not even a loud Star Wars-ish design can ruin a Ron Santo card.)

MLB's not the only one making fun baseball cards - there's an awful lot of Senior League cardboard out there considering the league itself only lasted a little over a year.

(Always love a chance to show anything of Dime Box Favorite Lyle Overbay around here too!)

I've gone on record saying I never quite know what to do with oversized cards, but that doesn't mean I won't welcome them with open arms.

They often end up becoming display pieces in the front pockets of my binders because I've yet to find a way to store them that vibes with my sorting system.

Tying it all together is an oversized card featuring, you guessed it, an autograph shot! (I wonder if that little kid even remembers meeting Jim Edmonds.)

One of the many joys of collecting is the refuge it allows from our uncertainties. It doesn't subtract from the very real stress I'll have about looking for a job in the next few months (please don't ask me to describe my strengths and weaknesses), but I don't know what I'd do without an island for my pleasures and distractions.

In the end, all I can ask out of the time I spend with my cards is to ease the headaches a bit.

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. 

You can't put a price on the things that make you smile

Whenever I'm hemming and hawing about buying something, I often ask myself a very simple question: does it make me smile?

This is probably why I spend so much time and cash on baseball cards - because, of course, a lot of them make me smile. Maybe it's the pessimist in me, but it seems like a lot of the money spent on the hobby these days is done with a lack of joy - it's more about the pure transactional what can I get out of this? or what can I sell this for? credo. That would make me sweat, not smile.

Then again, I suppose a lot of people out there might think I'm the weird one, what with the 936 different things I collect and all - a lot of which were neatly packed into yet another COMC order I received a few weeks back.

I'm constantly buying cards on COMC because, simply put, I'm continually finding things that make me smile.

If you've read my blog at all, you probably already know how giddy I get over superstars in weird uniforms (including a rare Tigers Frank Howard sighting!).

Strange uniforms come in other varieties, too - take Cal Ripken Jr. as The Tin Man, or Matt Harvey pitching for my native Team Italia here.

I may tire of seeing guys like Rickey Henderson and Derek Jeter popping up in every single modern set, but the world will never provide me with enough Satchel Paige cards.

In many ways, my obscure player collections make me smile more than the stalwart HOFers and such that I'm always finding new cards of.

It's no accident that a Ben Weber card seems to pop into every COMC post I write - this order continued the trend with the beloved MLB Showdown game I played to death as a kid (a set which, incidentally, is a treasure for obscure player collectors like myself).

But of course I'll never scoff at the chance to add some choice cardboard to my bigger player collections - that strange Tony Gwynn has been on my radar for a while now, and dig a cool new Hoyt!

Show me an oddball, and there's a 99.9 percent chance it'll make me smile. 

(Now that I think of it, I don't think I've ever tried an Oh Henry! bar.)

Japanese cards downright make me grin from ear to ear - and that goes doubly so for a Japanese card of Yu Darvish...hitting!

Still can't believe how affordable Japanese Ichiros can be, and that's my first (of many, I hope) Japanese issue of Cubs ace Shota Imanaga.

I don't do it consciously, but my COMC orders always seem to provide a fun array of minis and otherwise weirdly-shaped cardboard.

It does my heart good knowing I could give a good home to that mangled Milk Duds Brooks Robinson.

I don't love all of the Topps online-exclusive stuff out there, but I'm still aghast at how cheaply I'm able to come by stuff from the ones I do enjoy on COMC.

I remember when people were losing their minds over that Vlad Jr. Topps Now card - here in 2024, I nabbed it for all of $1.75.

Card-Gens don't usually come cheaply - the $3 I paid for that Kimbrel is about the lowest you'll see 'em.

And yes, I finally forked over the cash for one of those stupid ultra-super-mega rare Red Foils (why did you have to ruin Big League, Topps??) - I collect Jacob deGrom, but I especially wanted that one for my "tip of the cap" mini-collection.

Minor league stuff is a joy on many levels, mostly because they provide glimpses of guys like Jim Morris (aka "The Rookie") and switch-pitching Pat Venditte who don't otherwise get a lot of cards.

The gloriously weird mascots don't hurt, either.

A few neat horizontals here, including a neat Heritage "action" variation and a zero-year Michael Young Blue Jays card I'd never seen before. 

(I can't say I know who Alfredo Ortiz is, but I'll never turn down a card of someone giving an ump the business!)

There's not a whole lot of rhyme or reason to the cards that make me smile - sometimes they just have to be shiny, or rip-able, or shaped like a pennant to do the trick.

If you made a list of the things I'm most eager to throw my money at, vintage oddballs would be right near the top - I'm starting to get more into those OPC Deckle Edges (note the black signature instead of the blue on the Topps ones).

Scoring a '79 Hostess Nolan Ryan for $9 was a particularly massive coup since I hadn't seen that one offered at anything near a reasonable price before now.

The Hostess Nolan Ryan was probably my favorite card from this order, but when you buy something from '52 Topps, it's hard not to close with it.

I've mentioned Jackie Jensen often on this blog - he was a star in his time whose cards are super cheap now & thus makes him a Dime Box favorite. I'll never be able to afford '52s of Jackie Robinson or Willie Mays, but I can sure swing $4 for a Jackie Jensen!

When it comes to baseball cards, it doesn't take much to put a smile on my face - and that'll always be true, no matter how mad it may make my wallet.