Last night I went to the Sun-Times Card Show in Rosemont. I've been to enough of these things in the last 2+ years that I've gotten to know a handful of dealers who are some good guys, so it's always fun to visit and say hello, and then dive into searching for Tigers cards! Last night was a rousing success!!!
I picked up 21 '60 Topps Tigers cards, bringing me 5 short of finishing the team set. I'm not really familiar with the gray back vs. white back story, but I did notice that some players had both. Does anybody know if there's a checklist out there detailing which ones are which?
I found the last two cards I needed to finish the '69 team set, Dick McAuliffe and and Bill Freehan. At 42 cards, this has to be one of the largest Tiger team sets ever (I'm including the All-Star cards, World Series cards, League Leaders cards, etc.) I'm going to guess that maybe the 2007 Topps set is larger. (Which should not qualify since they made two cards of Gary Sheffield and Mike Rabelo.....)
I found 12 of the '70 cards, including nice ones of Willie Horton, Norm Cash, and Mickey Stanley. I'm only 6 short of that set now, but one of them is a Kaline high number. I'll be poking around ebay for that one.
I found a few more cards from the 70's that I needed, with the highlight of the night being the '78 Lou Whitaker RC to finish out that set. This was the first year I collected cards so it's pretty cool to finally finish this set with one of my all-time favorite Tigers.
Rounding out the vintage edition of the night were a handful of early 80's cards including '81 Topps and '82 Topps of Jack Morris and a bunch of '83 Fleer including a Howard Johnson RC. I collected a ton of '83 Fleer when I was a kid and I'm amazed that I'm missing so many of these. Even after last night I'm still 6 cards short.
That was it for the older cards. By my count I'm only about 50 cards away from finishing all my 70's Tigers sets, with the bulk being '71 and '72. Oh well, that'll give me something to shoot for next time!
