card show pick up

Work ended at 11 for me today. Right after I left there, I went to the post office, as I had to get there before noon. Packages are sent, so if you are waiting on a giveaway box from me, it should arrive shortly! After the post office, I hit up the second card show of the month, the Plainville VFW show. I wasn't looking for anything in particular, I just wanted to see what was out in the local marketplace. Well, I ended up with 2 Vernon Wells relics for 3 bucks each, some random Jays and HOFers I collect. Then I ended up with these:

I got most of the vintage from one guy. I actually got five 1952s, six 53s a couple of 56 and 57s and some 60s stuff too. These vintage cards were to fill up my Topps 1952-2010 binder I have going. Its a page of 9 (or 8 in the case of 52-56) cards to represent each year of Topps. The 1950s stuff is tough to come by at a good price, especially 1952s. The Mathews card isn't perfect but at 10 bucks I really can't complain. The Jordan card is actually a basketball card, but I felt it justified the quarter the guy wanted for it. The guy who sold me most of the vintage had some bins of random packs, 3 for a buck. I picked out three 1989 Fleer packs, hoping to get one card, the Griffey rookie. Well, I opened one pack, and didn't get much past a Dave Stieb that I may need and a Dodgers sticker, I left one pack still sealed up, for my unopened pack collection (yeah, I know, junk wax yay!) but I opened up the third pack, and this is what was in it:

Right behind the Rangers sticker that I was able to see at the top of the pack, was the Kid. I couldn't believe it, what are the odds? Seriously? Not only did I leave one pack unopened, and I swear there had to be like 20 packs in that bin of 89 Fleer. Maybe just luck, I don't have his 89 Fleer yet, so it worked out great. The back of the pack was the Mattingly, so he has a lil wax on him. Some other good cards too, Will Clark, Steve Sax, this would have been one hell of a pack to open in 1989. Too bad everyone overproduced their cards because maybe these would actually be worth something right now. Oh and sorry about the sideways rest of the pack, but its tough to fit it all on my scanner in one pass. Good stuff all around.

stickers!

Fleer stickers are a nice treat. It was always great getting these in mid to late eighties packs of Fleer. I stuck these damn things everywhere when I got them. It didn't matter who the teams were, they got stuck somewhere. Upper Deck came out with their fancy holograms but I always stuck by these (pun intended). Topps should consider doing something like this for their Opening Day set. They did temporary tattoos in 2008, why not stickers in 2011? New updated logos, stickers for teams that started after Fleer stopped with the stickers. I know I'd like to have new stickers to put on my plain white monster boxes. Just saying...


Bring on the stickers Topps!

factory fourth (fleer edition)

I am mainly a Topps collector. I have many cards from other sets, years, etc. We all do. None of us have exclusively one company's cards. Its not as much fun that way. Fleer has had a long history in not only the card business, but in the candy business as well. from their humble beginnings in 1959 with their Ted Williams set, and vintage players the following two years, to their first annual set in 1981. Fleer ran into some financial trouble and was bought by Upper Deck in (I think) 2005. 2007 was their final year as a baseball card manufacturer, and now with Upper Deck out of the picture, it seems very unlikely that we will ever see the likes of Fleer again in the card biz. I feel the 2007 set, besides being a very nice issue, has some great historical element in our hobby, as much as 2010 Upper Deck does. The final issues of two of the 'big four' seem significant as a point of where the hobby changed forever. Never again were we to see Fleer packs sitting next to the Topps and Upper Deck, giving us a nice healthy choice of product to sift through. Yes it all became too much eventually, but the choice was certainly there. I ended up with some of this set from some random packs I picked up at Target one day. I liked them from the start. It felt just like the Fleer of old, back when I collected as a kid. Except my Fleers were bright yellow (1991 for those who chose to forget :) ). Nice set, and once I saw that there was a factory set, I knew I wanted it. Much like I would want a factory issue of 2010 Upper Deck (that we will never see), for that significance I explained above. Its sad to see a respected company leave the hobby, but sometimes shelves run out of room for the glut of product, or the collectors leave due to their own personal reasons. Whatever the reason may be, we can still look back at the previous years and see how they fared, what they did right, wrong and everything inbetween, and just remember then fun of collecting.