Card Show Pickups: Graded Junk and A Pair Of Relics

It's been a while since I've been to a local card show.  They usually aren't that good.  But I took shot on the wild side and ventured out this morning to see if I could find anything I had to have.

Turns out, it was a really decent show today.  There were a few vendors I'd never seen before, and a couple were blowing out there stuff because they were exiting the hobby.  Unfortunately, my little boy got sick early into the show and I didn't get too far around the tables.  Fortunately, I hit a few good things while I was there. 

First, I came across a table that had a big pile of graded cards, priced a $1 each, or 6 for $5.  I found 6 that I thought were worth it:

I like the looks of Beckett Graded cards, and I'm always happy to add a nice Gwynn to my collection.  Yes, it's graded 8 and it's 1987 Donruss (which I happen to love), but it was under a buck.

I love this Mike Piazza card.  I have a pretty good sized Piazza collection and had never seen this card. 

 This Bagwell card is really cool in hand.  the foil moves in the light and hypnotizes me.

So this is not only a Graded 1989 Donruss Craig Biggio, it's the SECOND graded 1989 Donruss Craig Biggio I've purchased at a local card show.   Actually, once I took a second to look over the card, I realized it's a REPRINT of a 1989 Donruss Craig Biggio.  And it's graded.  7.5.  Don't judge me, I paid $.83 for it.  And Craig Biggio is a bad ass.

This was the last one I got.  I got it for reasons I can't explain.

I was pretty satisfied with this purchase.  I was also very satisfied with the $2 worth of cards I picked up from a dime box.  I've already sorted them and forgot to take a picture.  But I got several good cards for my sampler album.  You'll just have to trust me on that one.

Finally, I found a couple of cool relics for $2 each:

 It looks like someone mixed in some red with the whites on laundry day.

Baxendale is a former Razorback, so this was a great find for me.

Old TTMs- Dedicated To The Lost Collector

I've gone from ignorance, to annoyance, to amusement, to addiction when it comes to Twitter.  I did not get it at first.  Now I'm checking twitter 20 times a day.  I don't tweet much, but I love watching my feed during Rangers games, and I really enjoy watching the little Twitter dust ups that occur periodically.  Sam at the Daily Dimwit, I'm looking at you.

The other night I enjoyed watching the Lost Collector tweet pics of a bunch of random TTM (through the mail) autographs he had collected over the years.  I thought I would outright steal the idea and show some of the TTMs I picked up long ago in my early collector days.  I also thought it would be interesting to see if anyone had any thoughts as to the authenticity of some of these.  I feel pretty secure about some, but others... maybe not:

This is probably my favorite.  I guess I didn't have a Craig Biggio card available to send at the time, so I used the back of one of those Fleer sticker inserts that showed pictures of stadiums.  I hope this is authentic!  If I can reasonably assume it is, I might send it in for PSA/DNA authentication.  It looks pretty close to other autos I've seen of Biggio on eBay.

This looks pretty close too.  I have to say, as a high schooler, I showed pretty good taste in which cards to send for autographs.  If it's real, this is awesome!

I can't tell for sure on this one.  Wonder if Canseco would verify it if I asked him on Twitter?

Wrapping up with another Hall of Famer.  I'd give this one about a 2% chance of being real.  It doesn't look like his signature at all to me.  Maybe I'm wrong.

And be sure to follow me and my non-tweets!  I'm at @napkindoon.  Don't bother following @Lost_Collector or @thedimwit.   They'll just cyber bully you and pollute your feeds with pictures of kittens and quiche recipes.

Baseball Card Sausage

As a steak and potatoes Caucasian,  let me tell you one of the many bonus features of marrying into an Asian family is partaking in the cuisine.  I'm not talking about Benny Hanna/ Panda Express fare you get at the mall.  I'm talking about the stuff that the lovely wife's family serves up that is authentic comfort food from their homeland.  I fancy myself a fairly adventurous eater, and am usually up for what the in-laws are serving when we visit.   We went down for Easter Sunday.  As an appetizer (to some incredible grilled meat) they offered up a plate of this:

Yummy

The terrifying image above is an Asian sausage (already cooked)  involving a lot of different parts of a lot of different animals.  And guess what?  I tried it.  And guess what?  I liked it.  And guess what?  I ate a bunch of it.   The lovely wife is pretty grossed out by this stuff (she is by no means an adventurous eater) and for some reason kept at arm's length from me all weekend after watching me shovel this delicacy down.

Not only did I enjoy eating it, I was inspired by it.  If you can take all of the unwanted parts of dead animals and make something delicious out of it, why can't you do the same for baseball cards?  Naturally, I decided to make my own baseball card sausage. 

This was not as easy as I thought it would be.  I couldn't quite get the idea fully baked in my head.    I narrowed my initial project down to a player who is kind of a sausage/meathead himself:  Jose Canseco.  

Like many of my blog ideas, I quickly realized this was pretty stupid.  However, after going to all the trouble of gluing this mess together, I couldn't bring myself to scrap this post.  

They say that the process of making sausage is something you don't want to see.  Same for the process of me cutting up my junk cards.  Here are the remnants:

It was actually I little liberating, taking scissors to some of my unwanted cards.  I may try to come up with some other uses for them. Or I may try my hand at baseball card sausage one more time.