10/1/21 card show report: I want Blue to show me the way

With a big Michigan game looming at noon on Saturday (which went quite well for the Maize & Blue, if you hadn't heard), I once again took a Friday off to head to the monthly show in Taylor a couple days ago. Although I was disappointed to see that my favorite seller still had no dime boxes with him, and that most of what was in the $0.50/$1/$2 boxes was as uninteresting as the last couple shows, I did have some fun going through his quarter boxes, pulling out 60 items, mostly for trade bait, for $15. Given how busy his tables were when I got there, though, I started at the table of a guy I don't remember seeing before. He had a shoebox of 2/$3 autos and relics, of which I grabbed eight, plus some quarter cards that were serial numbered. I snagged eight of those as well, dropping another $14.

Again, it was nothing huge to write home (or blog) about, but I still accomplished my goal of adding some trade bait plus new items to my collection--two scans' worth--so I left reasonably satisfied. Here are my scores from this trip:

My baseball pickups all came out of the big quarter boxes. Griffey's is a base from Topps' 2006 Co-Signers product, and while some might call the design "busy" I find it shiny and fun, plus it's a new Junior! I still appreciate Kinsler's time with the Tigers enough that I sometimes collect cards of him with the team for whom he's more well known, the Rangers, such as Bowman Chrome Refractors from 2011 and '13. Maddux was my other baseball twofer thanks to a 2016 Topps Wrigley insert and '96 Collector's Choice Silver Signature parallel. '96 was definitely a good year for UDCC's design. Last up is a 2002 Leaf Rookies & Stars subset issue of Cal Ripken Jr., meaning I have 3/4 of his run in the bunch (missing #251 celebrating his '82 AL ROY). Not a bad little group with three of my big four non-Michigan PCs hit!

Meanwhile the Michigan side of things was a full nine cards strong with the three other sports represented. Coach Juwan Howard stars on one of the two numbered cards I grabbed for myself, a '98-'99 UD AeroDynamics Tier 1 die-cut that was limited to 2000 copies. It's even more enjoyable collecting him since his successful return to Ann Arbor has made some "experts" look foolish for predicting that he'd be a bust.

Of course football was the main attraction and I scored seven cards of six subjects. TE Devin Asiasi transferred out to UCLA but remains in my collection thanks to non-Bruins cards like his 2020 Absolute Retail base, which I'm not sure counts as a RC. I'll decide at time point. Former UM footballer and US president Gerald Ford gets in on the action with a 2015 Topps baseball insert. Quality OL/unquality person Taylor Lewan pops up twice on Score Gold parallels from 2017 and 2020, with the design on the latter much better since it goes all the way around the border. Bengals TE Tony McGee is the subject of a '96 Pro Line parallel that was a staple of the era: a Printer's Proof. Cleveland WR DPJ's partially airbrushed uni/helmet comes courtesy of 2020 Leaf Draft. And top 10 college football player of all time Charles Woodson continues to appear in the base sets of newer Panini products, such as 2020 Mosaic, in this case with his first/final team, the Raiders.

And finally we have one more quarter numbered card, one that I was excited to dig up: a Mike Knuble 2001-02 Pacific Hobby LTD parallel that's numbered 76/99 on the back. I'm a fan for a few reasons: I love Pacific's base designs from the time, their numbered parallels are fun, and Knuble's one of my favorite Michigan Hockey alumni as he also played for the Wings, winning the '97-'98 cup that brought glory back to Hockeytown. There are few ways to spend a quarter better than this!

It's hard to believe that just two more months and their respective shows remain in 2021. Given how bad things were last year (and in some cases continue to be thanks to selfish idiots) I'm grateful to have been able to get back to them this year even if the results aren't always what I hope.

But speaking of results I did hope for, Saturday's destruction of Wisconsin has me in good spirits as I look to have another good week of collecting no matter what it brings. That should include a post showing off another PWE that showed up the other day, one that brings some shine to ward off the recent cloudy weather here in Ann Arbor. Stay tuned and Go Blue!

4/6/19 show report: dime deluge

Now that I've caught up on my 2018 COMC pickups over on TMM, I'm ready to get back to things here.

First, a quick note, speaking of Too Many Manninghams.  I've gotten to the point where I don't feel like working on two blogs since I don't give either enough attention, plus I don't feel like I need the content the two include separated anymore.  This is my original blog and the one that gets the most views, so going forward I'll be posting everything--Michigan stuff included--here.  That way all my posts get the most eyeballs possible, and some of you that are newer readers that didn't venture over to TMM will get a better idea of what I collect!  I reserve the right to change my mind, but for now that's where I'm heading.  I may put in some work over the next week or two getting stuff from over there linked here.

Anyway, on with some cards!

Today I'm recapping April's card show trip to Taylor.  It's been long enough that I don't remember exactly how everything was distributed, but I do recall having a blast because my favorite seller was blowing out all of his lower-end stuff, some of which would have normally been in $0.25 and $0.50 boxes, for $0.10 each.

That led to me grabbing a huge number of things I would have normally ignored, for both myself and trade bait (some of which already went out in packages).  I also made good use of the guy's $1 and $2 boxes, as you'll see below, especially when it came to the Michigan stuff.  In all, I spent $45 very productively.

Read on to see how I did:

We'll begin with the open trade bait portion.  As I think I mentioned before I've started to grab cheap and interesting stuff here and there with the intention of putting it up for trade on TCDB, but I like showing it off here first because trading through my blog is fun.  A previous show post led to one such envelope, which I'll be posting soon-ish.

Anyway, these hits were either $1 or $2 each:  Borbon is a 2007 Elite Collegiate Patches manupatch auto (#171/250) and Gabbert is from 2012 Playoff National Treasures (#03/49), featuring two prime Jags jersey swatches and a bit of pigskin.  Please claim these in the comments!

Moving on to the baseball portion, here's a couple dime adds of former blog namesake guy Curtis Granderson.  While I prefer Tigers stuff it's nice to find anything new of him, even in the uniform of the hated Yankees.

I went a little Griffey crazy this time, and why not for $0.10 apiece?  The '07 Topps Hit Parade insert is cool, but the 2008 Opening Day insert two spots over is even more interesting.  It's called "Flapper Cards" and folds out in a bunch of directions.  The newer Topps insert designs are boring as usual but I do like the photos of young Kenny Jr.

Here's the rest of the vertical Juniors.  While the pair on the bottom is more standard Topps blandness, the Tribute to the Kid set has grabbed my interest and I'm trying to put it together on the cheap.  The trio you see here gives me six of 30, so I'm on my way.

Here's where things get much more interesting as we venture back into the 90s.  Card #1 is a '93 Stadium Club insert shared with what-if guy Darryl Strawberry:

Denny's holograms are always great, including the '95 version seen above, produced by UD.  Meanwhile, the Pinnacle insert below was a mystery to me until I flipped it over and discovered that it was an exchange card for a pin from the 1995 product:

Sweet!  A couple UD inserts of Ken as a Red give way to more recent Topps appearances.  That's an awesome haul of 22 new cards of one of my favorite PCs, all for the low, low price of a dime per.

Gwynns were harder to find for whatever reason, but I did come home with this pair.  The super cool 2001 UD insert on the left was a bit of an omen for the day since he seemed to be hiding, but there's always next time!

Greg Maddux was kind of in the same boat, but they can't all be like Griffey was that day.  The Finest card is from a 2017 insert called "'94-'95 Recreates", which initially confused me because I thought "That doesn't look like either of those designs!"  Instead these are done up using the '94-'95 Finest basketball look, a pretty reasonable way to change things up.

Cal, like his fellow Junior today, wasn't in such short supply, for which I was grateful.  I got to go all the way back to 2000 and Aurora's Pennant Fever insert, one that I thought was a great value for just a dime.  The 2018 Gold Label Class 2 card looks terrific as well.  And I even went old school with a 1988 Topps Sticker, shared with former Expos P Neal Heaton:

This nine-spot gets me pretty close to 900 Ripkens, a milestone I'll soon be celebrating!

And now we move on to the Wolverines portion, which is a bit smaller in number but in general higher in quality:

The football dime portion comprises this trio.  Rookie year inserts of Amara Darboh and Taylor Lewan go with my seventh (of 21) RC of new Giant Jabrill Peppers.

The $1 and $2 boxes treated me quite well in terms of some new football hits.  The Darboh autograph is my 14th hit of his while PC guy and tackling machine David Harris got his 28th (and just third relic).  The other three were all new to the hits collection.  

Ryan is one of a number of recent walk-on Glasgow brothers to don the Maize and Blue.  The DT was selected in 2017's 4th round by the Bengals, and he's seen here in his Michigan garb on a 2017 Elite Draft picks auto.

Mallett is well-known in college and pro circles, a QB with a million dollar arm and $0.10 brain (appropriate for today!).  He appeared in 11 2007 games for Michigan, often in place of an injured Chad Henne, then transferred to Arkansas when HC Lloyd Carr retired and turned things over to Rich Rodriguez.  Mallett put up some nice numbers in two seasons with the Razorbacks, then was drafted by the Pats in the third round in 2011.  He bounced around for a few pro seasons and has been out of the league since 2017.  I'm currently collecting his non-Arkansas RCs and thought it would be fun to add one or more hits, like this National Treasures dual jersey (same set as the Gabbert above) #d 19/99.

Like Mallett, Ritchie played a bit for the Wolverines and then transferred.  In his case he got some playing time at RB in '93 and '94, then headed west to an equally excellent school, Stanford.  Jon was taken by Oakland in the third round in '98 and carved out a respectable seven-year career with the Raiders and Eagles.  I'm looking for his non-college uni RCs as well and was happy to pick up a surprise hit of him as well, a 2000 Fleer Tradition Autographics auto.  Man was that a great looking set, and filled with Wolverines too!

The three new guys give me a total of 218 different subjects in that football collection.

Last up is $0.50 worth of hockey that was absolutely worth it.  In general I may have ignored some of these before, but now that I'm logging a lot of my stuff into TCDB and actually keeping track of what I have, I'm glad to pick them up as well.  The pair of Pacioretty inserts are nice, plus I came up with two recent Wolverines in Motte and Werenski.  But most productive was my latest Marty Turco addition, a 2007-08 Upper Deck insert called Hometown Heroes.  I was actually just down in (or at least near) Dallas a couple weeks ago so this is fairly relevant, plus it just flat out looks great:

That's it for this show, but I still have May's appearance to get to (which included a double blogger meet-up!) and something like seven trades to cover.  Maybe you can look forward to slightly more frequent posting as I'll be able to focus on just one blog!

2014 Upper Deck football retail fat packs (x5)

Back on Sunday I showed off a break of a box of last year's 2013 Upper Deck football, which I was quite happy with.  Fast forward to today and I have some news that bookends that set.  For one thing, I recently grabbed a few more racks of 2012 UD football that were on sale, and if you'd like to see my wantlist, head right here; I also have lots to trade if you're still working on that set.

Also, while I was out today I used more of my Meijer discount magic to score the last five racks of 2014 UD football in the minuscule card section there.  They were $4.99 a pop for 32 cards, which is pretty standard with them right now.  I'd been looking forward to busting these because of my love for Upper Deck and its gorgeous college-heavy flagship set.  Here's how I did:

Here's what the fronts look like.  I really, really like the design once again this year while at the same time appreciating how it's different from past releases.  The full bleed photos are typical UD A+ quality (more on that in a minute), and I love how they worked in the team colors in the name/team area.  Here I went with four QBs who may or may not go in the first round in a couple weeks; for my part I'm not sold on any of them as quality pros, including "Football Jesus but not an overrated preachy dumbass like Tebow" Johnny Manziel, who may find the transition to the NFL tough!

And here's the back of Bridgewater's card.  Once again, the vets take up #s 1-50 and are hobby exclusives while the non-SPed Star Rookies go from 51-150.  We get a good rundown of career stats and a brief writeup, both of which probably could have been larger if things were thought out better.

In addition to the group of QBs above, I made several custom subsets out of the rest that I like to call:

Super catches!

Players that are excited and/or happy to be here, you guys!

Players that eschew gravity like Matthew Stafford eschews non-stupid throwing motions

Players that just wanna give you a hug, you guys!

WOLVERINES!  Under the lights!

Hmmm...ummm...guy slowly being devoured by several octopi and guy literally carrying a Big Stick!

Those really do look great, don't they?  Speaking of the base set, how'd I do on collation?  Couldn't have been that great, right?  I mean I literally just grabbed the last five racks they had.  Even with upwards of 30 base cards times five packs and a 100-card set, I must need at least a couple to complete the set, naturally.

NOPE!

From these five racks I pulled exactly 100% of the base set, 47 doubles, and just one triple.  That's simply incredible, and my hat's off to UD for this perfect experience.  I'll note what's for trade below in a minute, and rest assured some of these are already set aside for those of you who collect college teams.

Finally, here's my inserts:

The Luck Heroes are Fat Pack exclusives and come two-per-pack.  Out of the set of 10 I pulled eight different ones, with dupes of #s 4 and 9, and was missing only #s 1 and 8.  Meanwhile, the Tomlinson as a '94 UD Tribute insert, which is done in the style of--you guessed it--1994 Upper Deck.

What's for trade?

All of the inserts above, including the dupes of Luck, plus these base cards:

52 55 61 64 66 67 71 76 77 80 81 82 83 84 85 91 92 93 96 97 99 105 106 107 108 116 117 120 121 122 123 126(x2) 127 129 131 135 140 141 142 144 146 150

Overall:

Go grab these if you see them!  I won't promise you'll have the same outstanding collation I did, but you can clearly see the potential is there.  I was happy that many of the better players weren't shuffled off to obscurity in SP land this year as I studiously ignore those.  When prices come down I'm sure the hobby boxes will be a nice deal too, though I said before I'm not quite as high on the Lettermen designs this year.  Anyway, I landed a complete set from retail packs plus some non-terrible inserts and plenty of dupes to trade, all for under $25 before my discounts.  Buy buy buy!