9/1 and 9/16/23 show reports: Social September

It's showtime! With October's even just a couple days away I thought I should get around to recapping the two I hit up last month.

First up was the usual monthly trip to Taylor on the first of September. With Michigan Football due to open its season the following day I made sure to take Friday off so I could head east and take my time. It's been long enough that I can't remember the exact breakdown but I do know I scored LOTS of dime cards and then a few in the $1 and $2 categories for a total of $40 spent.

I'll get the usual disclaimer out of the way that much of what I picked up is destined for trade packages, but first we'll start with the available trade bait, almost all of which hails from the dime box. When you're like me and you see stacks of numbered cards for $0.10 you don't put 'em back in the box! As always, please claim anything you'd like in a comment below, via email, or on TCDb.

All of these are numbered and all are available as of my posting this.

The Johnson jersey set me back a buck. Most everything else is numbered besides the Butler and Young in the upper-right. Palmer is pending on TCDb.

Here the Westbrook/Galloway, Harrison, and Housh are spoken for or pending.

McKenzie and Rowe are pending a TCDb transaction, everything else is still up for grabs.

Last one! D. Thomas and Ricky Williams are gone.

As for my keepers this time, it was a good mix of baseball, basketball, and football dimes:

Dingler is an interesting catching prospect for the Tigers even if he IS a Buckeye. Big Daddy and Hammerin' Hank show the evolution of Diamond Kings from the early 90s to today. I also went 90s/recent with a couple cool Gwynns. The Palmer First Day Issue was a huge find for me in a dime box. The Diamond Kings inserts like the Ripken you see tend to look ridiculous to me as the players are depicted in an old-timey fashion, but hey, new Cal! And Rogers is the Tigers' catcher of today, doing a solid job as the only player of any value Detroit kept from its deals of players such as Verlander and J.D. Martinez.

While I don't tend to go out of my way for Scherzers I won't turn down some fun ones for a dime each. Logoless or not, old action shots of '84 Tigers like Tram are great! Gallery offers a masterpiece of an image of pitching Maestro Verlander. Pudge and Yadi make for a pretty good pair though the latter's HOF case is much less obvious number-wise, though his many accolades certainly help.

On the court side of things, we go way back to current UM coach Juwan Howard's rookie year, and I  join the UM community in wishing him the best on his recovery from heart surgery. Current guy Caris LeVert looks great on a Red Cracked Ice Prizm, one of the parallels I can actually ID without help.

The football bunch opens with this sweet five pack of '22 Donruss Premium Press Proofs. They're not the numbered Gold versions but they still look terrific in hand, and a stack of them has a pretty impressive heft to it. I was thrilled to find this quintet of Wolverines including Collins, who's finally benefitting from a functional QB in Houston, and Gary and Paye, who are making noise on the defensive side of the ball.

Clark's still a jackass but that Red Score parallel looks good with his Chiefs uni. Collins has popped up a good number of times in those dime boxes recently, much to my benefit, and that acetate Playoff card looks awesome. Like Clark's card, I couldn't have asked for a better Prizm parallel color for Graham. Haskins just had his aggravated assault charge from earlier this year dropped, but he still has plenty to do to repair the rep he damaged. The SAGE card of him does look excellent short of lacking UM's iconic wings that were removed from the helmet. Jabrill was a serious Heisman contender thanks to his do-everything skillset, and I'm glad he's moved on from the disgraceful Giants franchise. He's actually a teammate of the final guy here, Josh Uche (Michigan uni card!), who's got 2.0 sacks in four games this year after piling up 11.5 in 2022.

That's it for Taylor for September, but I wasn't done because buddy of the blog Jeff and his cousin Sluggo (Kevin) were heading up to Kalamazoo on Saturday, the 16th for one of the many shows they do in the northern Indiana/part-of-Michigan-ish area. My previous experience with them earlier this year in Lansing was a very positive one, despite a super rainy day plus it being, you know, Lansing, and it's not like they're in reasonable driving distance from me very often, so I happily made the effort to drive a bit more than an hour and a half west. It also doesn't hurt that fellow buddy of the blog John and his wife would be driving down from nearby Portage. A chance to see that many collecting friends in person? I couldn't miss it! (Also, Michigan would be playing later that evening so I had all day to kill.)

You may have already seen this image recently but that's Jeff, John, me, and Kevin in a picture snapped by John's wife just before we all left. When I say we all had a great time talking cards and baseball for a while, I mean it, and I think you can tell here.

Speaking of John, he brought along a few cards for me, all of which I'm happily adding to a couple PCs:

Despite three of these being some cool Ripkens, my favorite is easily the Fleer/SI Gwynn insert, definitely the "90s inserts rule!" card of the day. Thanks, John!

So I enjoyed talking to the guys while flipping through the $3 and $5 boxes and 2/$1 cards (all sorted by team!) and $10 and up stuff. In the end I put together a stack I was happy with and Jeff gave me a price, then Kevin lowered it a bit based on some Braves stuff I brought him in trade. My total ended up being a very reasonable $50, and some nice cards are heading for trade packages soon!

I also kept these two for myself:

The Stadium Club Gwynn insert (second place for "90s inserts rule!" today) looked too cool to pass up from the $0.50 box. And the Funch jersey, which is bordering on prime/patch territory, was $3, I believe. I was a bit surprised that it got past Jeff's hands, but in the end it worked out because I already had a copy I'd mis-IDed on TCDb, so I corrected that and ended up with an upgrade, and Jeff gets his own copy on my dime!

Thanks again to Jeff and Kevin for another outstanding show at one of the most well-run operations I've seen, and to John and his wife for hanging out and making it a great time as well. If any of you are ever in their area, there's absolutely zero reason not to go see Sluggo's Sports Cards at one of their many shows.

As I mentioned I'll be heading back to Taylor on Friday but before then I may try to recap a couple Facebook-related purchases that left me with a lot of misc. trade bait, though some will surely result from the show as well. Either way, expect double-digit trade packages to be heading out as soon as early next week!