Card Shop Singles

My much-delayed 2020 Topps Heritage hobby box recap will be posted sometime this weekend, but before I get into a more in-depth analysis of this year's product, I thought I'd share a select few singles that I picked up before grabbing the Heritage box on release day just over a week ago.

When your spending money on a hobby box in general, you're not usually too inclined to splurge even more and grab some individual cards, but I figured it couldn't hurt to take a look. I purchased more cards than I actually chose to show, but they only added around $5 to the total cost.

Plus, I can't remember the last time I went on a dime box search: that is, giving myself a $20 budget and scanning through the cards until I reached the limit.

The whole process is wonderful because I end up with 200 new cards for my player collections that I can sort later that day, especially during the Baseball season when the Red Sox are playing.

I might be going off on a tangent and/or getting ahead of myself, but all this talk of dime boxes is inspiring me to get back to the card show and look through the bins. As I mentioned, it's been far too long since I significantly boosted my various PCs.

Moving on, I have a few cards that I specifically chose for today's rather brief post, starting with the one from the 2017 Topps Stadium Club set at the top of this post. No, I don't collect Willson Contreras, and I didn't necessarily choose this card because he plays for the Cubs.

Instead, it was the cameo that Aroldis Chapman made that sold me; 10 cents is well worth it for a parallel of a guy who played in Chicago for just half a season.

The Contreras card with a Chapman cameo didn't spell the end of my Stadium Club pickups. Despite how much 2018 I ripped, this is definitely my first time seeing the Carl Yastrzemski card, and I don't believe I'm familiar with the Ty Cobb either.

Some products end up in the dime boxes a lot more than others, but both Topps Stadium Club and Archives are pretty dependable in that, year after year, I can pick up singles for my player collections a week or 2 after release day.

Come to think of it, I can even wait 8 months and find new cards for my PCs in late February.

The 2 cards above were located directly next to one another in the order of the dime box, so for a quick second, I thought they were from the same set. As I soon found out, one is from Fleer Maximum Impact while the other is from Upper Deck SP Signature Edition.

Overall, Derek Jeter and Harmon Killebrew could not be more different. One was a contact hitter with superb defense while the other would've been a DH had it been implemented and focused on crushing homers rather than upping his batting average.

In my opinion, one of the better parts of specializing in player collecting is that you can find cards of all different players from virtually any era in Baseball history, allowing you to expand your repertoire as a baseball fan and card collector.

Plus, thanks to both Topps and Panini, both current, retired, and future players get their own cards thanks to the extensive range of different products.

As I've said before, there are abundances of cards from various sets/brands depending on when and where you search through the dime bins. In the case of my most recent visit to the card shop, that particular set was 2003 Donruss Team Heroes.

There were a few other cards in the Team Heroes stack, but the majority of them, oddly enough, featured members of the Chicago Cubs.

Though Ron Santo was not included, Jenkins, Sandberg, Banks, and Williams all were, so I'll definitely take this as a victory and an opportunity to enhance player collections from my 2nd favorite team.

I don't really have an effective way to transfer from 2003 Donruss Team Heroes to a "power plaid" parallel from 2019 Panini Prizm, but I wanted to save this card for last because it is a nice addition to my 2019 Panini Prizm project, which I haven't had the chance to add to in a while.

Anyone who follows my blog closely knows that I don't necessarily believe that I can achieve the goal of tracking down all parallels with print runs higher than 25 in a 300-card set, but I'm going to everything in my power to at least try.

Panini is going to release Prizm once again this year on May 13th. As much as I'll be tempted to rip into some packs, I'm going to give it my best effort not to open any of this product. Instead, I plan on saving the money I would've spent on the new release and concentrating on picking up singles for my project.

Whether or not that happens is an entirely different story.