A Wide Range of PC Pickups; Card Show Recap #21

Let me preface the next few posts by declaring that today's Memorial Day Baseball card show was one of the most bizarre shows that I've ever attended, and I mean this in the best way possible. 

Although the cards featured in today's post aren't anything out of the ordinary for me (mostly player collection pickups), the Baseball card show, as a whole, was insane.

Looking back at my goals for today's show, I definitely departed from the objectives that I set for myself. Rather than searching through the dime bins and chasing down specific cards, I went for quality over quantity.

While I certainly wanted to adhere to my goals, I have no regrets about any of the purchases that I made. As you'll see in the following days, I went in a few different directions earlier today, including picking up a couple of players whose autographs I've been thinking about purchasing for over a year now.

Later this week, I'll get into my autograph pickups and the packs that I opened. For now, I'll start things off with a look at the group of player collection additions that I gradually purchased throughout today's show.

As I mentioned, today was one of the few shows that I've ever attended in which I avoided the dime bins altogether. I'm not always going to have this quality over quantity mentality, but it was a departure from my usual visits to the show.

Across the 2ish hours that my Dad and I passed at the show, we continuously added new cards to our player collections, both together and separately. While I was walking around the show at the beginning of the day, unsure as to what to purchase, my Dad grabbed a stack of cards that were priced 4/$1.

The cards that he ended up with consisted primarily of retired players' cards from the early 2000s, just like the 4 Mike Schmidt cards above. Although I have a ton of cards from this era, the 4 major card companies (Donruss, Fleer, Topps, and Upper Deck), produced an unprecedented number of sets, resulting in a huge volume of cards like the 4 above.

Greg Maddux is an example of a player who benefited tremendously from the significant production of cards in the 90s and early 2000s. His superstar status allowed for an insane number of Maddux cards to produced. 

Maddux has always been one of my favorite players to collect, and the cards above symbolize exactly why this is the case. Despite the 250+ cards that I have of the 4-time Cy Young award winner, we're constantly finding new ones to add to his player collection.

The affordable prices and the wide availability of these cards is what allows me to grow my player collections up to gold and even platinum tier status. Even on the rare occasions when I opt not to go through the dime bins, a Baseball card show hasn't passed in which I haven't picked up new cards for my PCs.

The Nolan Ryan card in the top left corner is from an oddball set called Starline from 1990. It may be the sole card of Ryan's that I picked up today, but it will, nevertheless, help me towards achieving my goal of 500 cards of the all-time strikeouts leader by the end of 2019.

Since 2017, Topps Inception has produced some of the most beautiful base cards out of any high-end set. The white backgrounds with a gorgeous splash of color resemble a more lavish version of Allen & Ginter.

The boxes, although not outrageously expensive, deliver just 7-8 cards for around $60-70. Because of the significant price per card, I'll likely never buy a box of Inception, but that won't stop me from keeping an eye out for the base cards from this beautiful set for some of my top tier PCs.

Up until 2015, I typically avoided new releases in favor of trips to the Baseball card show, so I never collected the Diamond Anniversary and Cognac parallels from 2011 Topps. 

Years later, I'm making up for the lost time by occasionally adding one of these beautiful parallels to my collection. Today, it was "Mike" Stanton and his 2011 Topps rookie cup card that I picked up for short money towards the end of my time at the show. 

Even though I didn't see all of my goals for today's show to fruition, I got my desired sampling of the parallels from 2019 Panini Prizm from the show's case breaker. I didn't want to go too crazy with these cards, so I limited myself to only a few parallels that piqued my interest.

Among the cards that I chose were 2 red mojo refractors, numbered to 299, of George Springer and Andrew McCutchen. Prior to the show, Collecting Cutch asked me to keep my eyes open for any low-numbered McCutchen cards, a request that I was more than happy to abide by.

If you haven't bought the red mojo card already, I'd be pleased to send it your way.

In addition to the 2 red mojo parallels, I was captivated by 1 additional parallel of a guy that I collect from 2019 Panini Prizm; a snakeskin parallel of Kris Bryant numbered to just 50 copies. 

Panini, especially with Prizm, Chronicles, and all of their Basketball and Football products, are insanely creative when it comes to parallels. Seeing this bizarre snakeskin parallel only makes me wish that they'd have the MLB license, for I cannot imagine how much these cards would improve if only Panini could use Baseball logos.

After directing most of my focus towards modern cards from the post-2000s, I gravitated towards a couple of vintage cards as the show came to an end. Specifically, I picked up 2 base cards of Johnny Bench that I'd yet to acquire for his player collection, one of them being his 1973 Topps card.

Most of my viewers know my feelings on the 1973 Topps set; I love the photography but feel that the base design is far too boring. However, the product is home to a surplus of unique images and angles that separates the photos of '73 Topps from that of virtually every other Topps Flagship product.

For a few dollars, the '73 Bench card was an easy choice and a fabulous pickup. Then, I stumbled upon another card of the HOF catcher that, even taking the condition into account, was priced at a bargain.

For far less than the price of a blaster box, I acquired Bench's 1969 Topps All-Star rookie card that, aside from the surface, is in excellent condition. For whatever reason, vintage rookie cup cards have evaded me, for I don't have all that many of them in my player collections.

Now, I have a fabulous new rookie cup card for my Johnny Bench player collection, thus becoming the oldest card in my Bench PC. I've seen reprints of this iconic card before, but I never thought about owning this beauty myself. 

That all changed today, thanks to an unusual visit to the Mansfield Baseball card show.

To be continued...