Last night I was deliberating whether of not I wanted to go to the twice-monthly card show here in Nashville. Even though this was the first weekend that 2019 Topps would be at the show, collecting modern has been a joyless endeavor for me for years now. But I didn't have shit else to do this morning, so I went.
There is one dealer at the show who usually opens up a quite a bit of all the baseball releases. Let's call him D1. Great guy with really cheap prices. You have to get there pretty early to hit him up because there are a handful of guys who clean him out pretty quickly. Even though I got to the show at 7:30, I was too late. There was a guy who already had picked out close to a couple hundred inserts. (Insert bloat another topic for another time....) I was able to pick through the left overs and find 6 Tigers inserts for $2 total. (Look for another blog post later in the week about the 2019 Tigers I picked up)
I asked D1 if he had any base I could look through. He was in the middle of trying to come up with a price for the guy in front of me and said that he did but it was going to be a little bit before he could dig them out. The dealer beside him, from now on to be known as D2, piped up and said he had plenty. D2 is a super nice guy too, but his prices are always too high. I usually hit him up AFTER I've picked up what I needed from D1. But I was only looking for base so I figured what the hell?
I was able to find all 10 Tigers base cards, plus a couple of inserts. When I asked him how much he said $5. Only because D2 is a good guy, I was able to stifle down "are you fucking kidding me?!?" That's a $1.50 worth of cards there tops." I didn't want to throw away 20 minutes of time spent standing there though so I handed over the $5.
I circled the rest of the show, finding nothing worth looking through, and headed for the door, still in a foul mood about overpaying. Right in front of the door though, there was a table with a couple of dime boxes that I remembered seeing on my way in. I looked down and the 1983 reprint Dylan Bundy caught my eye. I've been casually working on this set, with everything I've picked up so far coming from dime boxes. So I grabbed a chair and started digging in.
Boy was I glad that I did.
I ended up pulling 20 of the 1983 inserts, including a few decent ones.
I also found cards for several other insert sets that I'm casually working on.
Some older insert sets and parallels. Love the Sosa's and the Bruce Sutter.
Some football, WELCOME BACK KOTTER, and college baseball.
A complete set of these Fleer inserts. With Lee Smith getting in this year they are all HOFers.
A nice little stack of 1975 Topps minis. I'm not working on this set so most of these will be trade bait.
A few vintage cards that are in much too good of shape to be in a dime box.
Oh yeah, there were Tigers too!
And it was much more fun than grocery shopping would turn out to be.
