So, when I discovered that Coal City was having a community-wide garage sale day last Saturday, I jumped at the chance. Coal City is the town from which my girlfriend hails and we also needed furniture for our new apartment; win-win.
While the main objective was, of course, to furnish our new abode, I was secretly hoping to find a nice stash of cards to go through and release some of the inevitable stress associated with a move. However, in that regard, I was almost shut out.
We found a nice shelving unit for my record player, a CD tower and some new reading material; but, there were no baseball cards to be found. I was let down to find out that the only binder that even surfaced was filled with Magic: The Gathering cards. I tried to get into those when I was in the Boy Scouts, where it was the cool thing to do, many years ago... no thanks. I almost gave up hope.
But patience is a virtue! At the very last stop before we turned around and headed home, I found a place that was selling boxes of sports cards for $5. Since the boxes themselves usually cost about $4.50, how could I pass up that opportunity?
I grabbed this one, labeled "baseball," and resisted the urge to buy more - after all, I'm still trying to finish organizing the new apartment. That said, while the box was labeled "baseball," it was definitely not leafed through beforehand.
It was mostly America's past time, but some other odds and ends made it in there as well. Today, I want to show off some of these cards. While they certainly didn't fill any of my needs with my Cubs All-Time Roster Collection nor did they technically fit under the subject matter of "Wrigley Roster Jenga," they certainly brought a smile to my face!
Politics aside, these two finds might be the first time my girlfriend was more excited to see cards than I was!
There's that TriStar Obak series again, being all different and exciting (ahem, Topps, pay attention!). I actually featured another card from that set in yesterday's Old as Moses Monday feature. While I was initially disappointed that they weren't "really" baseball cards and set them aside, the lady took them for herself. Hey, I've sucked her in!
Now, as a child of the 90's, this was my absolute favorite show of all-time as I was growing up. I had every action figure, VHS tape and t-shirt; plus, the MMPR movie was the first film I saw in theaters. Therefore, this card definitely pulls on my nostalgic heart strings, even if it doesn't include my favorite ranger...
That's totally not me dressed up as a Power Ranger for Halloween as a full-grown adult...
Ahem... let's get back to cards. Sticking with the 90's theme, the Lion King was also a large part of my childhood.
I'm pretty sure I wore that VHS tape out and the soundtrack album was the first CD I ever claimed as my own. I can probably trace my longstanding appreciation of Elton John back to that development. Another pull at those nostalgic strings...
I'm filing this one under novelties because it isn't a Cubs player and I need to correctly balance the contents for tomorrow's post. Pat Venditte is the only full-blown switch-pitcher in the modern era of baseball. Greg A. Harris once did this in 1995 with Montreal, but he had been in the majors for 10 years at that point and was making his second-to-last appearance; Venditte regularly switches back and forth.
While he's been working his way up the Yankees chain since he was drafted in 2008, MLB was forced to adopt a new rule - The Pat Venditte Rule. So, even if he never reaches the Bigs, he'll have left a lasting impact on the game anyway.
Also, TriStar Obak continues to prove why it is one of the best brands in the last ten years!
Finally, despite my best efforts, I was unable to win tickets to an MLB game... in the year 1996:
There were a million of these things in here and, yes, I scratched them all just to see if I would have been lucky 18 years ago. Oh well.
Outside of a bunch of football and basketball cards I haven't wanted to sort through, the entire rest of this box was made up of actual baseball cards. Thus concludes the odds n' sods portion of this series
I'll be back tomorrow with my Cubby loot and your regularly scheduled Wrigley Roster Jenga programming!
These sorts of treasures are exactly why I love going to rummage sales, garage sales, or pretty much any types of sales.
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to seeing what else that box had in store!
I did not know about the Venditte Rule (or the pitcher, for that matter). A very cool thing to learn. That alone would have made the box worth $5 to me.
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