3 Weeks in a Row

Saturday, I did something I had never been able to do since I started collecting baseball cards about 40 years ago.  I attended a card show for the third straight week.  I did not plan on this happening.  For the first show, I traveled about 40 minutes.  It was the only one I planned to attend.  The second show happened to take place on parent's weekend in the city where my daughter attends college.  That was about a 1.5 hour drive.  Perfect timing.  The third show was about 2 hours away in Champaign, IL.  My wife and I had tickets to the Illini basketball game Saturday night.  As luck would have it, there was a small 50-table show in town.  

I spent a combined $30 at the first two shows, so I still had plenty of money left in my monthly card budget for show number three.  I only had about 45 minutes of free time to take a quick lap around the show.  I bought cards from two different dealers.  The first one had a couple of boxes of recent cards that were not marked.  Usually, I do not like to buy from dealers who do not price cards, but he made two sales while I was looking through the boxes, which seemed fair, so I pulled out a small stack of Cardinals.

He had a lot of 2024 Prizm cards, which included many parallels.  The top row are base cards, while the bottom Chase Davis cards include a silver prism and a pulsar prizm numbered to 499.

I found some 2023 Select Cardinals I needed.

The boxes were loaded with 2024 Panini inserts.  As much as I love Ozzie, the Cho Crusade is the best card in this bunch.

The dealer did not have very many Topps brands.  I did manage to find these purple refractors from the 2022 Chrome Update.  I also pulled four refractors from 2024 Bowman's Best for trade bait that included Judge, Soto, and Freeman.  My total was $10.

The second dealer was an older husband and wife team that had two display cases of cards from the 1950s and 1960s.  Most were in near-mint shape and ungraded.  It is getting harder to find nice vintage that is not graded.  This gentleman collected Cardinal vintage sets and was selling off his duplicates.  He had quite a few I needed, but I settled on four for $67.

1958 was the first year Musial had a Topps card.  Besides being off-center from top to bottom, this one is in perfect condition.

I also added 1962 and 1959 Musial highlight cards.  Both in great shape.

Finishing up with a 1965 Topps Bob Gibson highlights card.  This one would easily grade an 8 or higher.  I exchanged contact information with this dealer and hope to work more deals out with him in the future.  Show number three was by far the best.