Card Show Brewers & Carters

My usual plan of attack at the card show I go to is to find the cheap boxes, dig through them, buy what I find and can afford, and then leave. Normally, I don't dig too much in the relic/hit boxes that some of the vendors put out.  

A couple of weeks ago, though, I decided to plow through some of those -- both to load up for war and to see if I had missed out on any cards.  One of the people whose table I try to stop at all the time is an older woman who usually has a great assortment of dime boxes on her table.  This time, she also had a great deal on inserts and autographs that I could not pass up.  From that box, I yanked out these cards:

First off, I found these two autographs from the Upper Deck Origins Baseball set that go into player collections of mine -- Rickie Weeks and Ben Sheets.

When I found this Upper Deck Spectrum jersey insert for Ben Sheets, I thought it was super cool and grabbed it without looking at my collection list for Sheets.  When I got home, I realized that I had thought it was super cool the first time I got it too.

Let that be a lesson to everyone, kids: when you put in the work to list out your player collection cards, you should be smart enough to consult those lists before you purchase the relic.  But, then again, these were very reasonably priced so this one will go into the team collection.

Two more autographs from the same box -- one from Lyle Overbay "Etched in Time" (and, let's be clear, his first go-round with the team was not bad) and the other from baseball hipster Carlos Villanueva.  On this card, he is clean shaven and young.  Last year, with the Cubs...well, he channeled his inner Rollie Fingers:

He's a Cardinal now, and, at age 31, he still has time to play for the Pirates and Reds to complete the NL Central slam -- and, to be a completist, he should also sign on with the Astros too.

Finally, to close out the reasonably price relics and autographs, we have a Jean Segura blue swatch for my team collection and a Kevin Mench autographs.  I'd forgotten the Brewers had Mench play for them.  Then I realized that Mench was part of the "return" for trading Nelson Cruz to Texas.  Ugh.

The same vendor had gotten "stuck" with the Brewers in a Gypsy Queen case break, so, for $8, she sold me all of the following cards:

 

And, actually, those are just the player collections for me.  I got nearly a complete master team set.  I got all the normal-sized cards, I think, and most of the minis for the team set -- just missing a photo variation or two.  I didn't get any autographs, but I don't know if there are any.  Sadly, I haven't had the chance to get to the 2015 cards to create my want lists or, indeed, my checklists yet.  I'm still trying to figure out 2004.

Anyway, the final card I found at this table was a little more expensive, though not much:

There is one Brewer that I found from the vendor from whom I got all the vintage.  It was a 1971 high-number card for my team set, and yet it only cost me $0.50:

The first manager of the Milwaukee Brewers -- after Joe "Pound Them Budweisers" Schultz did not make the trip with the team to Milwaukee -- was Dave Bristol. Bristol came over from the Cincinnati Reds organization for the 1970 season and made it 30 games into the 1972 season before being fired and getting replaced (after a two-game interim stint by Roy McMillan) by former Milwaukee Braves Catcher Del Crandall.

Down the aisle from the vendor who had all the relics was another of my favorites.  He graduated from Vanderbilt the year after I did (though I don't remember him from there). His method of filling cheap-card boxes is to grab handfuls of star cards that he has gotten cheap himself.  So, he says, he doesn't have much more idea than the people looking through the cards as to what will show up.  For me, that meant finding some Younts and Molitors:

O-Pee-Chee from the early 1990s -- when OPC was in its last gasps as a card issuer and tried issuing its own sets -- thrown in with some Pinnacle, a couple of Fleer Star Stickers, and a Leaf.  All for a dime a piece!  Gotta love that. 

In those same boxes, I found four Gary Carters I needed as well:

How I missed a card with Carter and Charlie Lea I don't know, but I did.  Add in the 1988 Donruss Baseball's Best and the 1981 and 1986 Fleer Star Stickers -- again, at 10 cents a piece....it's impossible to go wrong at those prices.

Those were definitely the highlights. Once I get through the Winds of War here, I'll probably wait a bit before going back to a show.  I am guessing that I will have a lot of cards to sort through once the Six Monsters make their way here, so I'll have to catch up more on what I have and don't have.  

Have a great Saturday!