don mattingly

National Baseball Card Day

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So today, August 12, 2017, was proclaimed national baseball card day by Topps. We don’t have any local card shops in town so I wasn’t planning on being able to participate in this event. I did contact a local card shop in Normal, IL to inquire about this event, but unfortunately they were not participating. I didn’t discover until the event was over that there were several places I could have visited to get free cards.

We were out of town for most of the day and decided to hit Target in Normal, IL on the way home. I was hoping to find more Topps Chrome or at least some 72 card hanging packs, but they didn’t have any. I haven’t been very impressed with Topps Series 2 so far, so we got 4 packs of Topps Series 1. (maybe another Judge RC?)

Clayton Kershaw showed up with a base as well as a Then and Now Bowman card which is pretty neat. I also got the Don Mattingly and George Brett Rediscover Topps cards. The Jeff Robinson 1987 card has the Rediscover Topps stamped on the card.

The only gold card I found was Brian McCann. Then there are the rookie cards including: Alex Bregman, Yoan Moncada, Andrew Benintendi and there he is, Aaron Judge.

Cubs were plentiful in these packs. For some reason I really like the Cubs team card and World Series highlights card. The W flag in the background of the team card along with the fans makes it a great picture! The Kris Bryant Then and Now Bowman card is nice.

So no local card shop visits today, but still was happy to pick up some cards at Target. Supposedly there was a hobby shop in Champaign that had them, but I have yet to confirm. (they were on the Topps list anyway!)

For more info on the event, check out the Topps website:

https://www.topps.com/blog/in-stadium-giveaway-dates-for-national-baseball-card-day/

Garage sale find

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My wife and I occasionally go to a few local garage sales on Saturday mornings. We mainly do it to get out of the house and get a little exercise. I looked online and just happened to see a garage/moving sale a few miles away that listed baseball, basketball, football and hockey cards at their sale.

We headed over to the sale and I immediately see this table full of several 5000 count card boxes stuffed to the gills with singles. I try to thumb through them but a lot of them aren’t sorted very well so it’s hard to tell what is there.

We start talking to the guy and he names a price for like one full box of cards. I think he was asking $20 or $30 for a 5000 count box of cards. My wife then asked him how much he’d take for all of them. I figured he would come back with $100 or so. He said he would take $60 for all of them. I only had $40 on me, so I handed it to him and told him we’d be back with the other $20 once we hit an ATM.

I found a few older cards including 2 – Don Mattingly RCs!

Anyone need any Robin Ventura cards? There must be hundreds of them in the various boxes!

I’d say we ended up with 20,000-25,000 cards altogether. It’s almost overwhelming to get that many cards at one time. I’ve sorted the big stuff into years/sets but there’s a lot of cards mixed in that are sorted by player. I’d like to eventually get them all in a database, but think that may take awhile. I think it was a good purchase as it’ll give me something to do and maybe I can even sell a few of them. Sure a lot of them were from the late 80s/early 90s but there’s some early 80s in there too.