7/7/18 show report: feeling lucky on 7/7

Last Saturday a holiday and extra couple days off led into another fun weekend show.  I ended up being able to get a good look through just about every one of my favorite seller's quarter boxes (5/$1) and come up with 150 cards.  To those I added 13 from his $2 to spend a year-high $55 on some new stuff for me plus lots and lots of trade bait.

Check out a couple scans worth of Michigan stuff over on TMM after you read this post!

Here's the goods you came to see:

I came home with this trio of Griffey cards I liked from the late 90s/early aughts.  That includes a '97 UD Predictor (unscratched!), 1998 Mariners Score team card (peep the stamp near the lower left corner), and a shiny Reds insert from 2000 Fleer Mystique called Diamond Dominators.  Junior certainly dominated in 1999, his final season in his first stint with Seattle, with 48 bombs and 134 RBI, Gold Glove and Silver Slugger awards, yet another All-Star nod, and 4.9 bWAR.  His debut with the Reds in 2000 went pretty well too, including 40 dingers and an improvement to a 5.5 bWAR.

Speaking of All-Stars I left the show as the man with the golden Gwynn after snagging this '96 Ultra Gold Medallion of Mr. Padre.  This one parallels his Series II card and hails from the only Ultra version I know of that went with this cool gold foil/embossed design.

The show was an above-average day in terms of coming up with some new Barry Larkin fodder, all from a pretty tight window.  Up top are the foily 1997 Collector's Choice Toast of the Town and more laid back 1999 Paramount Team Checklists (Paramount was a great brand).  The bottom starts with an out-of-order and much more Pacific-like 1998 Topps Tek Pattern 58 (I totally need to do a post on confusing set ideas) and then moves on to the much more fun 1998 SPx Finite (#1794/9000), a fine looking horizontal card.  These additions give me a fun little milestone of 700+ Larkins!  His 702 are second only to another SS PC that you'll get to see in a minute.

Greg Maddux, star of my recent COMC big finish post, gets to be the marquee PC guy again thanks to a whopping eight new cards I scored on Saturday.  The top row is all 90s stuff:  a '95 Donruss Diamond King (fantastic as always), a die-cut 1997 Upper Deck Star Attractions, and one of Greg's appearances in UD's 1998 Prime Nine set.  As a reminder I have all of the Griffeys and Ripkens from that set and showed them off a while ago.

Down the middle is a trio of early aughts stuf:  2001 Fleer Tradition Grass Roots, 2002 Fleer Focus JE (Jersey Edition) K Corps, and 2004 Leaf Home/Away (obviously an "Away" card).

Then I have a couple horizontals for the bottom row:  another 1998 SPx Finite issue, this time the Radiance version (#1847/4500) that's rarer, and a variation of his 1999 Pacific Invincible Sandlot Heroes insert.  Not a bad little haul!

It's pretty rare these days that I can come home from the show with a new card for one of my many supercollections, and yet here we are.  I grabbed this Matheny 2004 Topps Gold parallel (#0713/2004) figuring I probably had it but could toss it in a trade package to Kerry otherwise, then looked at my checklist and found that I hadn't added it yet.  You'd think I'd have tracked down something this simple already but for some reason collecting him just isn't that easy.  This is card #91 (out of 217) I have of the Cards manager (who's probably a dead man walking).

Let's finish up this post with a pair of cards starring current PC leader Cal Ripken Jr.  Like Griffey the Iron Man features on another team set--this one from 1997 Donruss--with a design I like, and he joins Maddux from 1999 Pacific Invincible Sandlot Heroes with a great fielding shot.  He continues his assault of yet another milestone with a new total of 797 items (and counting!).

None of the trade bait items have been sent out yet as I'm currently putting together some 11 trade packages that'll join a half dozen PWEs I did send out last week, some of which I know have arrived.

As for the Sportlots stuff I keep promising to send out, I swear I'll get to them while I wait for one last package from a seller that I forgot was notoriously slow about shipping (as in it still hasn't shipped yet!).