Friday, December 8, 2017

Black Friday Shopping and Other Men's Wives

All the big online sites had tons of doorbuster deals on hobby boxes for Black Friday...and I didn't buy from any of them.

Instead, I hit up a LCS with my brother-in-law while we each left our children with Grandma.

The LCS in question was MVP Sports Cards in Laguna Hills, CA.  This is a small shop, but they had some good stuff.  My BIL came out of there with a 1968 Mickey Mantle and a 1973 Nolan Ryan.  Needless to say, he spent a little more money than I did.  :-)  But all my digging yielded some great stuff to add to my collection.

I have felt like I need to focus my Royals collecting a little more to make sure that I have team sets of all the major releases in team history (starting in 1969).  This focus helped me pick up 12 cards for the 1969 Topps team set that I still needed.  Here are my 6 favorites -- Joe Keough can't decide on a bat (the Paradox of Choice) while Dave Wickersham is just happy to be here.  I still need #619 and #662 to finish that one off.


I added some oddballs of #5.

  

Bo knows Classic.


Out of the dollar-bin I pulled this 1969 Deckle Edge (#22) of Joe Foy.  Foy was the only Royal in this set during KC's inaugural season.  He's not quite as notable a name as some of the other players on the checklist (Clemente, Carew, Aparicio, Gibson, McCovey, Mays), but I think it's a beautiful card and I was lucky to find it.

 The cards above were all Royals, but let us not forget my affinity for "Randoms," too.  This bad boy caught my eye as I was pawing through some cheaper autographs and he had to go in my pile.


Autographed.  Mascot.  Oddball.  I headed to Google to find out who the Phoenix Firebirds were.  Apparently they were the AAA team for the Giants in the early '90s, but left when the Diamondbacks arrived to become the Tucson Sidewinders (D-Backs AAA Team).  This lead the Tucson Toros to move and become the Fresno Grizzlies.  Mr. Phineas T. Firebird had a few other cards made of him before he rose from the ashes and skipped town.  This one is autographed by a real purple bird, so I'm sure it's worth serious coin.

That's the end of the cards, but I had one other thing that I noticed in this LCS.  The staff here were super-friendly and helpful at letting me know what they had, what was on special, and pulling out boxes from the back for me to look at. It was also pretty obvious that "the staff" were a husband-and-wife team who own the shop.  This is the 3rd shop I have been to with a husband-and-wife running the place (see Valley Sports Cards and Pal's, too), and those shops have always felt more welcoming than the shops I visit who are just run by one guy.  I think the feminine influence helps a lot.  The "lone wolf" shop owners need to get hitched ASAP!  Has anyone else noticed this effect in their LCS?

 

5 comments:

  1. Yes, I would agree with your assessment about the husband wife teams. Not only are they more friendly and helpful, but they seem to be more kid friendly.

    The Joe Foy card is gorgeous. Nice find with that one! The autographed Firebird is a winner, too!

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    1. Good point on the Kid-Friendliness! Will have to see if I observe the same thing.

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  2. I've never been to a husband-wife card shop (my card shop experiences I can probably count on two hands). But it makes sense, because the dudes running the shops I've been to have almost all been miserable.

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    1. The worst is when you ask one of those guys a question and they give you the "Can't you see I'm sorting here?" face, before sighing then maybe helping you.

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  3. Missed this post before. MVP is my old LCS from when I lived in the OC. Greg and Debbie are the owners and they are great. I bought may a box in that shop back in my pre-budget days. I stopped by last summer when we visited CA and had a great time. I also used to hit up their wall of old wax - lots of late 90s/early 00s boxes of the more obscure sets.

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