1/4/20 and 1/31/20 show reports: January Jonesing

I didn't have to wait very long this year to get to my first shows of 2020, getting east to Taylor on the first Saturday of the month and again on the last Friday.  Things just happened to work out that February's show weekend started in 1/31 and I went that day as I had friends in town the next day.

Because I wanted to get going on getting these posted I decided to just combine them, but I'll give a quick note on how both went.  I didn't want to miss January's event because my usual guy was doing his thing where pretty much everything was half its usual price, and that worked out quite well for me as I dropped $30 on mostly trade bait, some of which has already gone out.  Then at the end of the month I threw down $40 to the same guy for more goodies, many of which were $2 hits for my football collection.  To those I added a nice little bunch of vintage pickups (again, some for trade bait) for another $20, bringing my monthly total to $90.

Here's a look at the combined haul this time:

Trade bait, part 1: baseball.  I believe the last three cards here were $0.50 at the first show while the Ward was $1.  Why would I pick up what appears to be a base card for that much?  It's tough to see the stamp on the front if you're not looking for it, but the back helps:

This is a 2003 Donruss Atlantic City National stamped card /5 that I'm sure someone will want.

And part 2, the football stuff.  I believe a couple of these were just $0.50 too, and at most a buck or two.  As usual, please claim anything you like in the comments or via email and we'll work something out!

Now we can move on to the stuff for me:

You can see how that vintage purchase paid off in this scan, especially in the top row.  The Gehringer is from a 1961 set called Golden Press and I think it looks great, especially for the era, plus it's my oldest of the Mechanical Man so far.  Horton's card is from 1970 Topps (his oldest as well) and I'm kind of slowly working on his vintage stuff.  And the dual Tigers rookie is fun since I mainly needed it for my Fisher collection as he's a Michigan alum, but scoring a RC of excellent Canadian relief dude Hiller is a very nice bonus.

Down the middle we have three guys from some of my biggest PCs in Griffey, Maddux, and Ripken.  The Junior phone card might look a bit familiar since I picked up similar stuff recently from that '95 Classic set.  My fun with Panini's Leather & Lumber continues with a cool die-cut Maddux insert called Benchmarks.  And we head back to the '90s for Fleer's Emotion E-XL and a '96 insert called N-Tense.  The while the front and back "layers" of the card are die-cut those areas in the middle of the letter are paper, though it's still a very cool design.

The bottom row opens with another extremely cool vintage item, a '72 Kellogg's of Wolverines HOFer George Sisler.  These look awesome and I hope to add more of similar guys like Ted Simmons as I find them.  And last up is former Tiger and current Trashtro Justin Verlander on a 2019 Donruss 150th Anniversary parallel (#149/150).  The photo on this one is actually the variation of the regular base, though I'd assume that they have the same odds of being pulled.

Heading over to the gridiron for the non-hit football stuff I came up with this trio.  Shoelace's card is a 2013 Spectra RC (/99), though I didn't realize that when I picked it up, so that was a fun surprise, and leaves me just a couple short of all his first-years.  Bo's card is a Delong Gum insert from 2013 Panini Golden Age, a "baseball" product like A&G, GQ, and Goodwin.  And my favorite of the bunch is the last vintage item of the day, a solid '57 Topps base of former Wolverines DE Len Ford.  It's just my third card of his along with his '55 Bowman RC and a '94 Topps Archives reprint of this very card!

And the hit parade begins on the Y-axis.  Leaf Trinity's Clear autos look amazing, such as Chesson's (eight hits) above.  I picked up three new Braylon (89) items, two of them featuring a second player, and one of those is on display here in the form of a dual jersey with former Lions WR Roy Williams.  Williams was a guy who was fairly productive and then was flipped to Dallas for, among other picks, a first-rounder that Detroit characteristically wasted on TE Brandon Pettigrew.

Getting back on track, it's unfortunately somewhat rare for me to pick up new Hart (69) stuff these days but I did luck out with his rookie year '08 Stadium Club Beam Team auto, a nice throwback to that brand's classic insert.  Lewan (15) gets a jersey swatch from last year's Certified that's about as big as he is a jackass.  Solid CB David Long is today's new player with his first hit, an autograph from '19 Prizm.  Former #1 overall OT Jake Long (86) makes a Michigan quartet from the 2008 UD Icons Rainbow auto set (with Arrington, Hart, and Henne), so I just need Manningham and Shawn Crable.  And probably the best of my trio of Chris Perry (55) items is this '04 Leaf Certified Mirror Blue ball/helmet/jersey relic, a card that's totally up my alley).

Pressing on with the horizontals, Jason Avant (63) gets a new jersey from '06 R&S, though I'd have a bone to pick with whoever would refer to it as "prime" if I IDed it correctly.  TE Jake Butt (6) joins former teammate Chesson with an amazing 2017 Leaf auto of his own out of Metal Draft.  Airbrushed helmet aside, the State Pride cards are super nice, though I wouldn't mind more of Michigan's motto on display.  Braylon's back for his promised third appearance, a Playoff Honors ball/jersey that pairs him with fellow Browns rookie Charlie Frye, a Cleveland QB that busted (go figure) even quicker than Edwards.

His more successful NFL counterpart, Mario Manningham (95) gets a "super" jumbo jersey swatch from '08 Gridiron Gear that I've labeled as "prime" since Panini didn't change the serial numbering (/50) from the non-prime version.  Oh, Panini....  It's a beautiful swatch and I'll put down a few bucks that Matt will have a positive comment about it not long after this gets posted!  Then we're back to Chris Perry's other two hits from 2002 Fleer's Rookie Throwback Threads insert.  The jersey/ball (/50) and leather helmet may be event worn/used but they're still plenty of fun to pick up.

David Terrell (45) didn't even up his hits total with counterpart Anthony Thomas's 53, but this 2001 Fleer Legacy Triple Threads jersey makes for some nice parallels as I now have a card like this for each player, plus they're both at exactly 150 in their PCs.  Michigan's former #1 had the worst career of the three as Gardner did decently well in four-plus years with Washington while Wayne was, uh, pretty good with the Colts, I believe.

Last up is RB Ty Wheatley (6) on a super nice shoe relic from 2001 Absolute Memorabilia.  This was from way back when Donruss/Playoff/whoever included a helpful image on the back showing the actual item the material came from, like-a so:

It's always fun to add something like this among the sea of less interesting relics like jerseys these days.

I think many of you will agree with me that that was a fairly productive pair of shows, especially since you haven't seen all the trade cards I've sent out or will be doing at some point.  Milestone-wise we're coming up on a pretty big one as I'm at 1495 football hits.  With the definition of some of those being a bit iffy in my mind these days (such as unsigned manu-relics) I'll feel a bit more comfortable about the number when I've eclipsed it by a bit, but it'll be worth a celebration no matter what!

Happily I'm just about caught up on in-hand stuff again with an eBay pickup being the only thing left for now, though I'm looking forward to a trade package in the next couple days and another eBay win.  After that I'm hoping to find some time to redo how I'm presenting my PCs, mainly to incorporate TCDB but also cleaning things up generally, plus I have a potential feature that may interest a lot of you, so stay tuned.  Oh, and welcome back, baseball!