Accomplishing Goals at the Mansfield Show

Monday's baseball card show allowed me to accomplish 4 out of the 5 goals that I created for myself before I attended the show. I wanted to follow these goals to the best of my ability to ensure a successful trip to the baseball card show. 

The first goal that I accomplished was a fairly simple goal, buy something special. Much to my surprise, this ended up being the final 2 1993 McDonalds/MLB glasses that I needed to complete the set. The same vendor that sold them to my dad at the previous show had the Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig glasses available for $5 each and even told my dad he'd keep his eyes open for the short-printed glass of Carl Yastrzemski that was sold exclusively in the Boston area. 

The next goal that I was able to accomplish us adding to the Jackie Bradley super-collection that my dad started. I added on to what I already have of his 2012 1st Bowman card by picking up 2 parallels. One is the flag variation background which is one of my favorite card variations ever made, and the other is a nice purple parallel. These each cost me a few dollars each, which was a bit pricey for non-numbered parallels. However, they are parallels of his 1st Bowman card, so I understand why it was priced a bit high. 

Continuing with the theme of Bowman parallels, I found a couple from 2013 Bowman Draft, Bradley's rookie season. The card on the right is the chrome parallel while the blue is numbered out of 500. It was nice to be able to add on to what I had of both of the base cards. Plus, they're both either rookie cards or 1st Bowman cards which definitely makes it worth what I paid.

I continued looking through this vendor's JBJ cards, and it turns out he had a bunch of different cards I needed. Like this 2014 Heritage High Number card from one of my favorite Topps sets of all-time.

Speaking of Heritage, I also found this 2017 Topps Heritage Purple Refractor for a dollar, the same price as the High Number card from 2014. 

Also costing me just a buck was the gold parallel of one of my favorite Bradley cards I have, his 2014 Topps Update base card. The card shows him sliding into home plate at Fenway Park which is an awesome picture to include on a card. I already had the base card like I had the 2012 Bowman and 2013 Bowman Draft, so I picked up the gold parallel numbered to 2014.

All in all, I found 8 new Jackie Bradley Jr. cards for my dad's super-collection today, which brings the total to around 30 cards. This includes an insert from 2013 Bowman. It's called Cream of the Crop, and the card I picked up is the blue wave mini refractor. I've never seen these cards before, and they look very similar to the base set. However, the blue wave looks pretty cool and it's numbered out of 250, the lowest numbered Bradley card I purchased. 

After accomplishing 2 of my 5 goals, I moved on to my most important goal which was to find 3 cards of Craig Kimbrel to bring the total number of cards up to 100. I knew I had 1 more Sportlots package with 4 Kimbrels (which arrived yesterday), so that meant finding 3 cards at the show on Monday was all I needed to find.

One of the cards was from 2016 Topps Museum and is my very first card from 2016 Museum as well as my first Museum card of Kimbrel. I've always liked what Topps has done with the Museum base set, and since the base cards are relatively cheap, I should be able to acquire them pretty easily for the Kimbrel Collection.

The 3rd Kimbrel card that brought the total to 100 cards was an image variation from 2017 Topps Update, a card that should be rare but is instead currently going for less than the base card on COMC. Still, it's a pretty dope card because it gives us a type of picture that we don't usually see. He looks incredibly happy to be at the All-Star game and while the card might not be as valuable as it should be considering it is a variation, I probably wouldn't be able to get the card at all if it was truly short-printed, and I'd be at 99 Kimbrel's right now instead of 100.

At this point, I had accomplished 3/5 goals and had quite some time left at the show, so I decided to regroup with my dad and see what he got. He found some nice vintage cards from 1969 Topps, like this Frank Howard for a very good price. Each card was from 2-6 dollars and it pretty good condition.

He paid close attention to condition, cost, and player when determining which of the 1969 Topps cards were worth it. He decided that this Tony Perez card was worth it for $6, a decision I agreed with. The card is in excellent condition aside from the centering not being perfect. 

The next card he showed me was one that he got at an unbelievable price. This Willie McCovey All-Star card was just $2, which made choosing to get the card or not an easy decision. Acquiring this card of McCovey from 1969 makes me excited to collect 2018 Topps Heritage, a set that's checklist was just released today.

But it was the Ted Williams cards as a manager of the Senators that I was astonished to see included in the stack of 1969 Topps cards. The first is a dual-player card showing Williams teaching Mike Epstein some of his various hitting techniques. I would have been very happy with just 1 Ted Williams card, however, my dad didn't just choose one card...

He chose 2, the 2nd of them being Williams' manager base card. These 2 cards of the greatest hitter to ever play cost a total of $10 all-together, and show off his brief stint as manager of the Senators. These cards will be fantastic new additions to the Ted Williams player collection which is surprisingly at around 50 different cards.

And to think, these weren't the last cards of Williams that we would get at the show...

To be continued.