bowman

Target and Meijer run

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My wife and I had some errands to run so we stopped by Target and Meijer. Target has a much better baseball card selection than Meijer. I hadn’t bought any Bowman cards for awhile and they had some small packs so I got some of those. I also grabbed some Stadium Club as I wanted something different. Kris Bryant (on the box) kept staring at me, so I picked up a 2017 Topps series 1 hanger pack. (because I don’t have enough Series 1 stuff this year!) My wife picked out the Donruss football cards, but she gave them all to me after pillaging the Colts players. 🙂

2017 Bowman Baseball (4)
2017 Stadium Club Baseball (2)
2017 Topps Baseball Series 1 Hanger (1)
2017 Donruss Football (5)

In the Bowman packs, I landed a Tomoyuki Sugano /499 refractor card.

In the Stadium Club, I found an Anthony Rizzo card with an awesome picture of him standing on the wall to make the catch at Wrigley Field!

As for the Topps Series 1 cards, the only thing I really liked was the Toronto Blue Jays team card. Why a team card? Because this one was blue (well they are the Blue Jays) and has a serial # of 21/50! I’ve never found a blue card like this before so that’s really neat.

As for the 2017 Donruss football cards, it was a mixed bag. I landed my first Mitchell Trubisky card in the form of a Gridiron King which looks pretty snazzy. Not shown is a few other Bears players including a Walter Payton card. There were a lot of duplicates in the packs we picked up, so that was disappointing.

I found a Tony Romo card which didn’t excite me that much until I flipped it over and noticed a mention about my alma mater (Eastern Illinois University) on it.

I attended Eastern Illinois University during the same time that Romo was there in 2000/2001. While visiting the campus on September 11, 2010, I snapped a picture of the retired #17 Romo jersey next to the retired #18 jersey of Saints head coach Sean Payton.

FYI: Did you know that Patriots backup / future quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo played college football at Eastern Illinois University? I’d love to get some of his cards, especially ones showing him in an EIU jersey. 🙂

More Bowman Platinum hits

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Stopped by Meijer late last night for groceries and picked up 5 packs of 2017 Bowman Platinum.

The first pack I opened only had 7 cards (supposed to have 12) but the Aaron Judge RC made up for it. Also picked up a Cody Bellinger RC as well as a Lucius Fox Top Prospects Purple #200/250.

As for the Cubs, I found 5 different cards in the packs. Contreras, Schwarber, Rizzo, Arrieta and Oscar de la Cruz Blue Ice top prospects.

Local card shop in Normal IL

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Since it was my wife’s birthday, I took the day off from work to hang out with her. We like to get out of town for her birthday so we ended up in Bloomington/Normal, IL. After visiting a few places she wanted to go (bookstores), we scoped out the local card shop.

My GPS app on my phone (Waze) usually does a great job getting me to places, but it was really having trouble getting me on the right road for this shop. Luckily we finally spotted it and made our way into the parking lot. Sadly it doesn’t show up on Yelp when you search for baseball cards which is odd since it’s in the same category as other card shops in the area.

The name of the place is Collectible Corner. I believe they just moved here not too long ago as the guy working there told me it was a lot more spacious than their old place. They have tons of tables which I assume are for either playing Magic the Gathering or sorting through cards.

I thumbed through the singles but didn’t see anything that I immediately had to have. They had a few Kris Bryant RCs, but I didn’t want to spend all our money on one card. (wasn’t my birthday!) 2017 Topps Series 2 had just come out so we bought a couple jumbo packs as well as a few Bowman packs. I also bought a couple cardboard boxes (maybe 3000 count?) to put my ever growing singles into. The guy gave us a handful of sleeves and top loaders which was pretty nice.

I didn’t get too much exciting stuff but the Anthony Rizzo Bowman Chrome was pretty neat. I also got a Salvador Perez Memorabilia Relic card which was pretty cool. Sadly it’s so thick it won’t fit into a regular penny sleeve or toploader. (time to order some supplies!)

It was nice to visit another local card shop. Without internet sales, I believe a lot of card shops would not be able to stay in business. I always wanted to open my own card shop but definitely would have to have multiple income streams to make it profitable.