2023 trade package #29: Dime Boxes

I received a mix of sizes of trade packages over the last couple of months and tonight's definitely falls on the larger side of the scale. Nick of Dime Boxes, who actually just celebrated his 12th year of chronicling dime box diving, by the way, directed a big stack of stuff I collect over my way in response to some set wants and Cubs I found for him. I'm always impressed by what he finds at shows (and on Facebook Marketplace too) and at his request sent him a list of the players whose cards I'd want the most. To say that he delivered in spades is an understatement:

You'll see the occasional Tiger mixed in like the Miggy/Schoop '21 Topps Independence Day parallel (numbered /76, very patriotic!) and a super thick dual relic of former prospect Travis Demeritte /99, which is nice since that balances things out a bit.

Most of the players you'll see tonight arrived in larger quantities, though, like Cronenworth's trio of new adds. Topps' Chrome Anniversary product continues to look quite nice in opposition to most of the rest of what they put out, and the Refractors are extra nice!

Junior Griffey made a few appearances too including the four you see here and a couple more in the next scan.

Panini's Capstone product was kind of an odd one in my eyes, but I think pairing Junior with Trout makes a reasonable amount of sense. Though I tend to think of them as different players I think they're similar enough for the Deja Vu insert.

Next, hey, kids, do you like Tony Gwynn? Because you're gonna see a LOT of him! That was more than ok with me as I'm always thrilled to add new cards of Mr. Padre. While a chunk of these were doubles, the stack of new stuff was larger not to mention varied by year/products/designs. I'd go so far as to say Nick would get a nod of approval from Fuji for these!

The group begins here with some oddball stuff: a mix of unlicensed, Fleer boxed set fodder, and a couple Sportflics, which I'm always happy to see pop out of a package.

There are a few mainstream cards in here like '92 and '95 Bowman base, a Fleer insert, and a Zenith card from '95 as well, but I'm happy to show even more oddball stuff that I also enjoy. There's still so many boxed sets that include cards I need to track down, and the same goes for food and other promotional issues. How cool is that Duracell card, even without any logos?

Now we're right in my wheelhouse with stuff from '96 -'98. I'm glad I ended up with the "single" version of Tony's Collector's Choice You Make the Play game card, because the other, "groundout," just doesn't sound right for a guy in the 3000 hit club. The 1996 Score Gold Stars insert looks fantastic, and so does his Studio base from the same year, possibly my favorite design from the product. Just a bunch of nice looking stuff most of which shows Gwynn's sweet swing.

Here's some more '98s and a couple '99s as well. Remember when we collectors had lots of choices?  I miss products like Fleer Sports Illustrated and Upper Deck Retro, not to mention UD's flagship set. How many of you remember Retro coming in lunchboxes? I loved the base design as well as inserts like Wonder Years.

More late 90s UD? Yes, please! I think I've said before that the 1996-98 run of the flagship design is my favorite, but '99 still looks pretty cool too, plus it kept the foil stamps for notable achievements, so that one's just fine in my book. You'd better believe that I bought into the hype of Upper Deck's 10 year anniversary in 1999! There's a huge variety of other brands here too, especially the out there HoloGrFx and Ionix, the badass Black Diamond and Ovation, and the kid-friendly MVP.

What would a trip through this decade be without my favorite "90s inserts rule" tag? The Finest and Pacific chase cards are especially cool. There's also another great mix of base designs I enjoyed, even from Topps! (like the 20th Century's Best subset). One of Fleer's top Ultra looks makes the cut and UD's foiled up Legends is still a favorite of mine as well.

This scan is a good example of the type of stuff I'd be pulling without any hesitation from dime boxes at a show. 2001 Stadium Club, Studio, and Topps HD are all classic iterations of their brands. Sweet Spot was an outstanding product not just for its well known autographs, but great looking base too. UD successfully turned its familiar Baseball Heroes insert into a nice product of its own. And then we jump forward a bit more to some recent Topps inserts that I'm less likely to have found myself.

Here a few Panini brands, highlighted by Diamond Kings, are mixed in with some Topps shininess. I'd say the Topps card featuring a Gwynn SI cover appearance from 1997 steals the show, though.

After one last vertical Gwynn we finally make it to other players! I was very happy with Larkin's four-card cameo, especially that 1992 oddball. The Stadium Club base is also a perfect example of the brilliance of the brand's photography. You'll see more of Maddux in a minute but first let's admire his appearance on the previously mentioned Fleer/SI collaboration. Nick didn't leave out this blog's namesake either as you'll also see in the last two scans (yep, we're almost done!).

Many Gwynns beget a mini Gwynn! One more Larkin joins him from that set. Greene and Manning are still part of the Tigers' future even if the oxymoronic tall Short isn't. And even more Gwynn? Yes! A big shoutout goes to Upper Deck's fantastic UD3 which had multiple cool subset designs.

Final scan alert! Pacific was known for some fun inserts but they also made their reputation partly on beautiful die-cuts like the higher-end Crown Royale product. (Here's another reminder to check out Mike Cramer's book, by the way.) Maddux gets a few more added to his total including the love-it-or-hate-it '95 Studio (Gold) credit card set, plus a very "90s inserts rule" example, Donruss' Mound Marvels. And then we end things on a perfect note with two many Verlanders.

Nick, thanks so much for this embarrassment of riches when it comes to cards of some of my absolute favorite player collections! I hope you had an excellent holiday season and I hope we can get back to trading again in 2024.

Will I get one more trade post done before the year ends? I dunno, we'll see!

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!

2021 Baseballcardstore.ca purchases: frugal football

After seeing lots of other folks showing off some fun purchases from Baseballcardstore.ca I finally decided to make one of my own last month, picking up 250 cards from the "Online Dime Box" for $25 (imagine that) plus their flat $4.99 shipping. (Side note: you can use a coupon code on each transaction to have them hold onto your cards until you want them all shipped.)

A few weeks later I received a very well packed and protected box that contained everything I'd ordered (nothing missing!) plus even what I think was a freebie since I ended up with 251 items.

I'm going to break this down into at least two posts--football and baseball--and may even split up the baseball stuff since there's a lot. We'll see.

So tonight I'm showing off the football stuff. My strategy here was simply to search by name and grab everything I could find of each player I collect. And why not, with cards costing just a dime each, not to mention wanting to get good value for the flat shipping cost. Though there's nothing extremely exciting here it was definitely fun adding a bunch of new items to my football PCs on the cheap as a replacement for digging through dime boxes in-person.

Here's what I got:

I like starting out strong with a college uni card, even if it's the only one of the bunch. Former #1 WR Derrick Alexander led the way with nine new cards four of which you see here in vertical format, including Action Packed, a Pro Line set you'll see a few more times, and a shiny Prestige base. A beautiful Black Diamond Biakabutuka is one of three you'll see of the Buckeye-killing RB. And Calloway returns us to the WR position in a bunch of cards that was very offensive (in the best way!).

Carter, a star WR himself, joined the 1000 yard club for three straight seasons, 1988-90, including a career high 1225 in '88. QB Collins' Pacific Invincible base is definitely one of the highlights of the purchase, a fun dime box gem. "Jumbo" Elliott had a very nice 14-year career with the Giants and Jets, so tracking down four new cards of him was a plus. And Funchess's cards (you'll see one more in the next scan) from 2017 were definitely the most recent in the group.

It only feels like I bought the entire '97 Pro Line set. Grbac joins Collins as ex-Wolverine journeyman QBs with awesome cards today, in his case the beautiful 2000 Bowman's Best design. Coach Harbaugh ups the QB count and gets a nice shiny Prestige addition of his own. HOF former Badger/Wolverine "Crazy Legs" Hirsch comes to us from a "baseball" product, Panini's Golden Age, that's about as baseball as A&G and GQ, but that's fine since he's awesome. Heisman winner Howard joins him to continue the run on receivers, and that Classic Images card is so 90s I just did a kickflip on a skateboard while yelling "radical!" and I don't even own a skateboard!

McGee and Riemersma would form a TE pair any Michigan coach would die for. A-Train and Toomer hail from the nice to look at if especially curly 2002 Topps Chrome set. Wheatley's athleticism was certainly a work of art and is captured well on a Pacific Impressions card from 2001. And Super Bowl Champ Woodley doesn't look very happy to be one of just two defenders I could find this time.

Yep, Derrick Alexander definitely had a good day, and here he adds an Ultra insert, Black Diamond base, and a couple of Crown Royales to boot (and he's still not done!). Grbac also got the Crown treatment, and we're not quite done with the die-cut beauties yet. Howard was the #2 player here with five cards including this trio that brought an Ultra Gold Medallion and a somewhat rare Lions appearance.

There's TE McGee again, joining WR alum Howard above in a cool Flair set. Transfer RB Ritchie looks ready to kill a dude on both of his cards. Toomer gets the die-cut treatment from Pacific Atomic and Crown Royale, and the previously seen Wheatley can also be seen on a different version of the latter. Between the two I'm more of a fan of the team die-cuts of Atomic, but you're getting something cool either way!

Last up is the oddly sized stuff. I snagged four players from Fleer's '97 Goudey II throwback product. Collins is by himself near the top of the set while the other three are consecutive, which I thought was cool. Looks like I need to track down Harbaugh, Toomer, and Howard to achieve the team set.

After the Funchess cards you saw earlier, the 2015 Panini stickers you see here at the bottom of Shoelace and Woodson (the day's other defensive representative) were the next most recent. The Robinson foil was a fun throwback to when I'd chase those special stickers to put in Panini's baseball books.

And last up is a trio of cards that both look and scanned better than I'd expected. Those horizontal minis on the right are Open Field holograms from 1996 Playoff Contenders. The one-per-pack insert was broken up into Green, Purple, and Red (which you can discern based on what you see around the player's name), with Green both the most plentiful and easy to pull and Red being the rarest. All three of my players here are Green, as you might imagine since they were a dime each.

I'll be back in the near-ish future with the baseball stuff but first I have a sweet new trade package to dig into, so you'll probably see that next. In the meantime, if you haven't yet I'd recommend giving Baseballcardstore.ca a look! Browsing's not as nice as I'd like but the prices, accuracy, and shipping are excellent, so if you've been on the fence I'd say go for it.

2013 trade package #18: a dime bag from Dime Box Nick!

Have you ever read a trade post...

ONNNNN WEEEEEEEEEEEEED?

Anyway, I apologize for the lack of posts recently--I've been pretty busy with other fun stuff, and I've just kind of fallen out of the habit.  The weather's getting nicer (the last 48 hours very much excepted) and there's been lots to do, but I'm still trying to keep up with a few posts here and there.

Such as today's, which features a trade package from yet another new 2013 trade partner!  Nick from Dime Boxes recently put out an APB for some extra pages.  I happened to have a bunch chilling in my card closet because I don't really put my cards in binders anymore.  I stuffed a USPS medium flat rate box full of what I had (plus a Bowman Ryan Dempster RC) and sent it his way.  Soon after, I received a great package in return, featuring what you see here:

Tigers new and old!  I still love picking up anything new of Dean-o, and the Showcase is an extra-nice addition to his PC.  I hope Mariners fans don't cringe too much when I post stuff of Fister.  The AJax (A&G back) reminds me that he was just sent to the DL, but at least that means Avisail Garcia was called up, and maybe if he performs well we'll finally see the last of Don "The New Gerald Laird" Kelly.  The Magglios (including a Topps Rookie Cup reprint) depict him with the White Sox, but I think he'll be most remembered for his Tigers heroics.

Tigers most certainly of the past, but no less memorable.  The pair of Fidrych cards adds to my too-small PC of a team favorite.  The Cochrane, Tanana (rock that 'stache, bro!) and a Morris below feature Tigers in different uniforms, but I certainly don't mind that.  Kaline and Greenberg are two of Detroit's absolute legends as well and are most welcome.

Two Tigers legends kick things off here, including the Newhouser.  The rest are of the oddball variety but still feature mostly familiar names.  The Coleman pairs up nicely with a Freehan you can see over on TMM.  By the way, I've now got a growing collection of those '87 Coke cards.

Lastly, this pair of '02 Topps Total commons puts a small dent in my wantlist for that set, which now sits at a manageable 42.

Nick, thanks for an outstanding first trade, and here's to many more!  Readers, please check out my accompanying post over on TMM, and head over to Dime Boxes for some cheap thrills!