5/31/24 card show report: May the June be with you

Hi, friends! I've had a pretty busy September largely thanks to work (with the calendar indicating it's time for the new semester) and a bunch of non-blogging card stuff. The latter has mainly included my monthly show, yet another fun Facebook pickup, and some marathon packaging and shipping sessions that should result in some happy traders!

Speaking of shows, I did get out to Taylor for the June event, though the first day of three-day show was actually the 31st of May. Whatever, I'm still counting it as June for posting purposes.

Anyway, I spent $95, though it's been more than three months so I don't remember what the breakdown was. I didn't come home with any unassigned trade bait so let's just take a quick look at my keepers:

The baseball stuff begins with a six-pack of future HOFer Miggy, and technically he appears on one more card you'll see below. The first five cards being Marlins issues made me curious what the team breakdown is of my Cabrera collection. It looks like that works out to 62 Florida cards and 431 with Detroit. Not bad!

A stray Cobb then gives way to two many Grandersons! I still don't have nearly enough of him, just 276, which is less than half my Verlander count and not even in the top 10 of my MLB PCs.

Check out that oddball Griffey! Inge and AJax are a couple other Tigers favorites I was happy to see here. Jobe just got called up to AAA and could be in the mix for a rotation spot next year. I captured Maddux on three of his four MLB clubs (only the Dodgers are left out here) over four cards. Magglio's another guy I'm happy to snag cards of if I see them, even if they're White Sox issues.

Cal continues his PC dominance with three newbies up here and two more you'll see in the next scan, and I'm easily swayed by shininess. Leaf's Passing Through Time subset was a fun feature of mid-2000s Leaf (as in the REAL Leaf, not the sketchy imposter these days) and I have Pudge's 2003 and 2005 versions, the latter of which you see above. You could hardly call Skubal "Up & Coming" at this point as he's got a great shot at the AL Cy Young this season. And Torkelson's thankfully looked a bit better since returning from the minors.

Mickey Cochrane is yet another Tiger who's often seen wearing another team's uniform on cards, but that's never stopped me. Griffey, Maddux, and Ripken all make encore appearances, as does Miggy on a Topps Opening Day insert. And the first of the day's three big pickups is a cool bat card of Alan Trammell, which is my seventh relic (out of 12 hits) of the HOF SS. I own the full 10-card set of Fleer's 2006 Greats of the Game Tigers Greats insert, and now I have my third of the nine Memorabilia versions (Bill Freehan and Kirk Gibson are the others). Hopefully I can track down the rest at some point.

The basketball side of things is sparse as usual but I did track down a pair of numbered Jamal Crawfords to go with my second signature of ex-Wolverine/Piston Isaiah Livers. The shininess plus Rated Rookie logo made it a must-get combo for me, and I think I paid just $5 (likely less with my discount) for the autograph, which is numbered /99.

We'll close things out tonight with a perfect nine-card page of football. Funchess's Stained Glass Prizm insert looks quite cool, even if it doesn't live up to the acetate versions from previous decades. Haskins' green Prizm parallel reminds me that he got picked up by his former coach Jim Harbaugh's Chargers. I was surprised to find the three-spot of Ojabo cards you see above, two of which definitely have a Ravens purple theme going on, though my favorite is naturally the Legacy card of him with the Wolverines. By the way, he picked up a sack in week 1 against KC. A shiny pair of Schoonmakers reminds me that I read the TE might get some playing time this weekend against the Saints. GOAT CB Woodson can be seen on a poorly-scanned Silver parallel from 2023 Panini Mosaic that makes it hard to tell it's got the usual Refractor-ish finish.

And last up is my final big pickup of the show: a 2022 Score Signatures autograph of stud Texans WR Nico Collins. I'd say I landed my fifth auto (nine hits total) of the breakout receiver at a good time--a few months before the start of the season--because he could be on his way to an even better campaign after accumulating almost 1300 yards on 80 receptions with 8 TDs last season. Last week at Indy he went scoreless but did pop for six catches for a whopping 117 yards! Go figure his team ditched their dead weight at QB for the one competent ex-Buckeye QB in the league.

And that's it for this show. I'm thinking my next post will be a look at my big June Facebook purchase, though I'll have to decide how much I want to photograph/scan/write about since it was a LOT. Either way, I hope to have that up soon.