Hooray for the 10 cent box ! Card show treasures and trade bait.

I love card shows. It's probably a good thing they don't have that many around here anymore though. I'd be broke and divorced ! (but I'd have a lot of cards) This show was at Great Northern Mall in North Olmsted. It shows up there about about 3-4 times a year. It wasn't as big as normal, or as I expected, with the new baseball season about to begin. I think some of these shows at medium sized cities are on the way out unless we can get more young people interested in collecting cards instead of spending quite so much time in front of a video game screen or texting on a phone or other device.

I say that as I stare at my wide screen monitor !

Which , the way, I hate. I use an eighteen inch. diagonal monitor at work. I love it. My new PC came with this 18"wide screen, which is probably great for watching sports or movies, but not for general use. Anyway, back to the card show.

When Little League season starts I'm going to try once again to entice some of the young kids to try baseball cards for a hobby.

This is my stack from the 10 cent card boxes. I only went through 3 of about 6, 3200 ct. boxes that were there. They were all mixed sports. The guy probably would have made more money off of me had they been sorted by sport.I wouldn't have wasted so much time passing up football and basketball cards. No offence to all you round ball and gridiron collectors. I'm just not interested,in general, in cards from other sports.

I picked up about 130 cards here.Below I've shown some of the highlights or as least what I think are the highlights!

I'm not going to describe each card, just a few notes here and there. Some of these cards won't be available, but if anyone sees anything you're interested in either leave a comment or send me some mail.

Upper left, 1992 Ultra Award Winners insert. This one for Gold Glove.

Upper right, 1996 Scoreboard Autographed Collection.Game breakers insert.

Johnny Damon and Darin Erstad 1996 Signature Rookies.

A lot of "Juan Gone" cards are real cheap now. 2000 SP Authentic Mid Summer Classic insert.

2002 Topps 206 Frank Chance reprint.

1994 Ted Williams Card Co. Cliff Floyd.

Ted William's card were produced in 1993 and 1994. I do collect these sets.

I had never seen a horizontal Ultra Gold Medallion card like this before!

I lead a very sheltered life. I love this card!

Some of you will, some won't remember the "round" cards from 2003. This one being Upper Deck Standing "O" die-cut parallel to regular set.

Upper right, 2007 Donruss Elite Extra Edition Jennie Finch. Stats on the back state 6' 0"and 174 #'s. Wow ! Doesn't look like the girls I know that weigh 174.

Couple more Juan Gonzalez inserts. 1993 Upper Deck Grand Slam and 2000 Fleer Gamers " Change the Game".

1996 Finest #'s 196,208,210 and 220.My son collects Finest from all years. He needs the 210 and 220.

Chipper Jones, bottom center, really looks like a little kid here. He was 26 or 27 here.

Nice Ozzie Smith from 1990 Score.

The two Metal Universe are Emerald parallels.

2006 Upper Deck Special FX Brian Jordan, upper right. Looks like a lightening bolt going right through his glove!

Vernon Wells, Platinum Portrait, is not nearly as dark as it turned out.

1992 Topps Jeff Torborg is gold version.

I never knew Russell Martin was from Canada.

Shawn Green is Silver Sig.

I know several of you set builders may need some of these, so I grabbed them up!

2009 Topps Target Retro. #'s 59, 64, 84, 96, 133, 157, 163, and 289. Not necessarily in that order !

Troy Glaus 2001 Fleer Game Time "New Order" will probably be a sample for my collection.

Team logo's may be duplicates.

A big stack of Carl Yastrzemski puzzle pieces. I needed two of them.If only I'd known, I could have saved $1.40!

I love anything

that has to with

the history of baseball !!

This was an interesting insert set from 2001 Fleer Platinum.

How I spent my summer vacation after graduation !!

Actually, I was almost on my way to Viet Nam when this took place.

And of course, no card show trip would have been considered successful without some Tribe cards !!!

Well, so much for the ten cent boxes. I got about 25 Tribe cards out of the 130.Plus a lot of nice insert and parallels. So far it's been a decent show.

Next stop, the pack man.

One vendor who is always at this show, and some others in the area, brings a table full of boxes.Some opened to sell packs, some sold unopened.

He also always has a plastic tub of misc. packs at $.50 a piece or 5 for $2.00.Used to be a quarter and 5 for a dollar. Inflation's everywhere.

Now I have to see if I can find anything worth 4 bits!

As I search through the tub, which is mostly junk wax (of course, I guess that depends on what you're looking for) I find this. 1990 Topps Baseball Coins. Once again, it's the oddball stuff I like! Now what else is hiding.

Well, here's a pack I've never seen before ! I was familiar with the old Pacific cards but never saw them in a pack before. There's that shelter again! That makes 2 Still gotta' find 3 more.

Ah, Topps Traded. I already have one of these wrappers but the cards are interesting.

Here's number 4. It was just a clear cello wrapper with no markings at all. The puzzle piece on the other side was what caught my eye. As it turned out, I didn't need the puzzle piece but at least I got a Tribe card.

For lack of anything else more interesting, I settled on this 1991 OPC pack. Nothing too exciting here but all in all it was a good day.

I got to spend some time with our oldest son Josh and my wife got to look around the mall for a dress to wear to Andy's, our youngest son, wedding in June.

It was still early, 5:30-6:00, when we left the mall so we decided to go to one of my favorite sports collectibles store. Goodwill !!

I may have gotten the best buy of the day there.

My son actually spotted this plastic box, but he didn't want it.

Into the cart it went ! It was one of those nice plastic card containers with a slide on lid. Inside were 99 1998 Skybox Metal baseball cards.

There was several stars and 3-4 Indians so I was more than happy to give them $3.00.

I especially like the Ryne Sandberg with the rhino "chasing" him !

Well, that was the last stop and we headed for home.

It did turn out to be a good day !

Yes Virginia, the Indians DO sparkle !

Had to go to work in Sandusky this morning.

My wife wanted me to pick up some lawn chairs that were on sale at Target.

Foolish woman !!

Can't pass up the card aisle. But you know what ? I did !

Of course, I did stop at Walmart in Norwalk on my way home, to check on an umbrella for our outdoor table.

One pack of Topps later I had my first Cleveland Indian Diamond Anniversary sparkle card !

The pack also included my second copy of this :

I already sent one to Marie Bay so this one will go to my sample card collection.

No way, not even in a million years !!

I do have a little Irish in me, from my Father's side, but it never seemed to have much effect on things in general. Maybe it was the nice weather today. I don't know.

My wife had to work late tonight so I stopped at Target and Walmart.

Let's start with Opening Day.

Walmart had a 24 card cello pack that I had not seen before. Well, I had to have one of those for my wrapper collection ! Opening day is fun set anyway. It brings out the little kid in me. ( my wife keeps looking for something to bring out the adult ! )

Here we have a couple great action shots of two great shortstops. Andrus, up and coming, and Jeter, one of the best ever. Next to Omar of course !

The mascot set is one of the fun sides of OD. I love these.

I picked up two packs of Heritage at Target.

Chris Perez, the Tribe closer was the high point of both. As far as the rest of the Heritage cards,

borrrrrring !

Now for the 2011 Topps.

I got one pack at Target and one at Walmart. The cards got all mixed up so I really don't know which ones came from where. Except for two.More on them later.

I did get two more Tribe cards. Santana should become a big star and hopefully we won't trade him away in a few years ! And Shin-Soo Choo is coming off of a breakout year where he opened a lot of eyes.

Then there was one Diamond Anniversary insert for all you sparkly fans.

A couple more Opening Day inserts here.

I love the presidential first-pitch set. I really want to get all of these.

The Stadium Lights cards are also a neat set.


These last two are the ones you can trace to their origin.

The Heyward Red Diamond is a Target exclusive, while the Braun Blue Diamond only comes from Walmart packs.

These inserts aren't that rare, but,what are the odds of buying one pack at each store and getting a diamond insert in each one ?

But even that wasn't the luck that I fell into tonight.

Oh, there is one more.

Tonight, while I was sorting the Topps base cards to put them in proper order in their 2011 box, one card seemed different.

It had a silver border ! I thought to myself, now what the heck is this !?

So I turned it over and .....

..... OMG !! A platinum 1/1 ! And I didn't have to open 27,000 packs as the back of the wrapper indicates. Only two others on ebay right now. This has to be the most unique card I have ever pulled from a retail pack, or any other pack as far as that goes!

Out comes the little kid again !