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?

 

Dime-Boxing at Valley Sports Cards

The day before Thanksgiving I was going to travel from my house in Ventura County down to my in-laws house in Orange County.  However, it seemed like everyone else in the state had the same idea.  The freeways were PACKED.  I would either have to suck it up and sit in traffic going through LA, or find some way to kill time until the roads were less busy.  Kill time?  How about a card shop!

Valley Sports Cards in Tarzana is technically my "Local" card shop since there aren't any closer, but even on a good day, it's still 30 minutes away, so I don't get there often.  I think it had been about a year and a half since my last trip there.  However, it's right off the 101, so it made a perfect pit stop while I waited out my fellow travelers.

This is not a big shop...and part of their space is used-up by their picture framing business, but one thing that I knew they had in abundance last time I was there was DIME BOXES, and that was my goal when I walked in.   As I entered the shop, the place where the dime boxes had been before was now a basketball cards display.  Not to fear, the dime boxes had been relocated to the back corner.  There were probably twenty of the 3,200-count boxes packed to the gills with baseball, football, basketball, and some assorted sports (hockey, golf, MMA, etc.).  

So was I able to kill time here?  Yep.  Three hours.  The end result of that was 225 dime-box cards, plus a few from the quarter and dollar boxes.  Take a look:

There is my stack of cards that I was keeping for myself....that's not the whole 225, since many of them were to trade away.

As part of my quest to collect guys with great mustaches, I felt I had to go for these Craig Stadler cards.  Ian Woosnam had some neat plaid pants, so I grabbed that one, too.

Here are some vintage Kickers and Punters that were no-brainers for ten cents.

A few other vintage goodies.  There were six Chuck Muncie cards in a row in one of the boxes.  He and I essentially wear the same style of glasses.  So I knew I would need to grab my spectacle-buddy.

Here's three for my "Spoiled Wide Receivers" collection.

And three more for my PC...Kurt Warner and Troy Davis (Iowa State alum).

Two of the 3,200-count boxes were full of old Allen and Ginter commons, going back to 2006-2012.  As you can see from the middle, I grabbed a big stack of them, and am showing some of my favorites here.  I FINALLY got my paws on the Revolving Door card -- which is probably my favorite Ginter card ever.  I had never seen the Groundhog card before, but could not resist a face like that.

Here's a sampling of the Royals that I picked up.  I loved the Gaylord Perry in a KC uniform, and another copy of the Sluggerrr card (even though I had it already).

I mentioned that several of the dime boxes were basketball.  I only collect a FEW basketball players...mostly Kyle Korver and guys who went to Iowa State.  Because of this, I wasn't going to waste my time on the basketball boxes.  However, as I was putting away one of the football boxes, my arm brushed across the top of a row of basketball, and it opened up to this card:

That's a rookie of my favorite Cyclone player from my early youth.  That I didn't have.  In a dime box I didn't want to look through.   :-)  It's just so freakin' cool to me.

Here's several stacks of miscellaneous cards I pulled out for other traders and friends/relatives of mine.  The Carolina Panthers stack is large enough to cast its own shadow. 

After the dimeboxes were done, I looked through the quarter and dollar boxes.  Here were two of my favorite pulls from there.  The George Brett was only a quarter for a Panini Black Friday exclusive from last year.  I'll take that!  The Bo Jackson was a little weird...mostly because I had never seen one, so was asking myself WHAT IN THE WORLD IS THIS CARD?  Apparently "Ames" was a discount/department store in the Northeast, and this card was part of a boxed set that was made exclusively for them.  I didn't know if a dollar was a good price for it, but if I have learned anything from "American Pickers" it's that the time to buy something unusual is when you see it!

Mike and Frank approve of me buying the Bo.

As they were getting ready to close up the store (yes...I was closing them down), I noticed they had boxes behind the counter of various years from the '50s, '60s, and '70s.  I figured this would be a good chance to make a dent in my "vintage Royals" (only going back to 1969...is that vintage?) needs, and asked for the '69 box.  I was able to quickly pull out 12 that I needed before the clock struck 7:00 PM:

All of those, plus some more quarter-box stuff I didn't show, plus a discount for paying cash means I got everything for $30 even.  I was a happy camper!  And by the time I left, traffic was smooth sailing all the way down to the OC.  :-)

What say you -- have you ever stopped at a card shop to avoid traffic?  What about to avoid your family?  :-)