Flea Market Finds #5: 25-card $1 Grab Bag Pack

Here be the first of the two 25-card $1 grab bag pack things.  This be the football version.  Here’s the pack in order (accomplishments via Pro-Football-Reference):

1970 topps Ernie Koy (1x Pro Bowl), Roy Jefferson (3x Pro Bowl; 1x First-Team All-Pro), Dan Abramowicz (1x First-Team All-Pro), Don Herrmann, 1968 topps Gino Cappelletti (5x Pro Bowl; 3 double-letters in one name!), Carl Kammerer, Earl Gros, '70 Tim Rossovich (1x Pro Bowl), Chuck Howley (6x Pro Bowl; 5x First-Team All-Pro; 1x Super Bowl MVP)

Vintage, it’s all vintage!

1970 topps David Lee (1x First-Team All-Pro), Dave Osborn (1x Pro Bowl), Jon Morris (7x Pro Bowl; 1x First-Team All-Pro), Jerry Smith (2x Pro Bowl; 1x First-Team All-Pro), 1968 topps Sam Baker (4x Pro Bowl), ’70 Les Josephson (1x Pro Bowl), ’68 EJ Holub (5x Pro Bowl; 2x First-Team All-Pro), 1971 topps Greg Landry (1x Pro Blowl), ’70 Dennis Partee

1970 topps Bill Munson, 1971 topps Floyd Little (5x Pro Bowl; 1x First-Team All-Pro; Hall of Fame class of 2010), 2010 topps Peyton Manning (11x Pro Bowl; 5x First-Team All-Pro; 1x Super Bowl MVP; 4x NFL MVP; 1x Offensive Player of the Year), 1994 Upper Deck Troy Aikman (6x Pro Bowl; 1x Super Bowl MVP; Hall of Fame Class of 2006), 1990 Fleer All-Pro Joe Montana(8x Pro Bowl;3x First-Team All-Pro; 3x Super Bowl MVP; 2x NFL MVP; 1x Offensive Player of the Year; Hall of Fame class of 2000), Jerry Rice (13x Pro Bowl; 10x First-Team All-Pro; 1x Super Bowl MVP; 2x Offensive Player of the Year; all-time leader in rec/rec. yds/rec. TDs/TDs/yds from scrimmage/all-purpose yds; Hall of Fame class of 2010), Barry Sanders (10x Pro Bowl; 6x First-Team All-Pro; 1x NFL MVP; 2x Offensive Player of the Year; 1989 Offensive Rookie of the Year; Hall of Fame Class of 2004)

Vintage Hall of Famer!  Yes, this was basically the best $1 grab bag pack thing ever.  Pretty much puts that McDonald’s dollar menu commercial to shame, eh?

Also, 1994 Upper Deck football is pretty.

Pretty much everything but the Jerry Rice is available for trade.

That’s it for this one.  So long, and thanks for stopping by!

Until our next…

Flea Market Finds #2: First Binder Page

Heya, card blog homies!  Here is the first binder page from my glorious afternoon at the flea market:

1987 Clemens All-Star, 1987 Bo Jackson, ???? Daryle Lamonica, 1983 topps George Brett, 1983 topps Joe Montana (Record Breaker), 1970 topps Bob Brown, Jackie Smith, 1968 topps John Hadl, 1970 topps Ben Davidson

Why purchased: Very early career Montana (close as I’ll likely get to his rookie anytime soon); Hall of Famer (Jackie Smith); Daryle Lamonica card I have no idea about; Vintage!

Keepers: Just Montana for the time being.  The rest are available.

Notes: I actually already own the Bo and George Brett, both pulled from packs myself, but they are cool cards either way.

It appears Bob Brown is also a Hall of Famer as well.  Very cool. 🙂

All the non-Hall of Fame football players on the page (Davidson, Hadl, Lamonica) made First Team All-Pro at least once (Lamonica twice), and have 14 Pro Bowl selections between them.  Oddly, Hadl and his loonytunes stats has the most Pro Bowls with six.

Seriously, I have no idea what the Lamonica card is supposed to be.  The back is very similar looking to the Deckle Edge baseball cards, so I assume it is from the late-’60s as well, but I dunno.  Also, it is beat to hell.  None of the vintage I picked up was in perfect condition, but very few were that bad.

All the binder pics were taken by my ridiculously expensive webcam.  They didn’t come out perfectly, but pretty nice for any webcam at 800×600, methinks.  Also, I haven’t tinkered with any settings, so it may yet be able to be further improved.

Mind-Blowing Statistics: John Hadl had 33503 career passing yards, but only completed 50.4% of his passes and had more interceptions (268) than touchdowns (244).  Looking at his stats year-by-year is even crazier.  It’s hard to fathom how he was allowed to start long enough to put up such impressive yards and touchdown numbers, while being so… so bad, to put it bluntly.  I’d just chalk it up to different eras and less emphasis on statistics in the past, but it’s pretty hard to ignore those numbers.

Jackie Smith’s best year was in 1967, when he caught 56 passes for 1205 yards, good for 21.5(!) yards-per-catch.  He also had receiving 9 touchdowns, more than doubling any other season of his career.  But forget about that.  He went for 21.5 yards-per-catch.  With over 1200 receiving yards.  As a tight end.  The guys that are specifically paid to be deep threats these days are rarely able to put up numbers like that.  He also put up an impressive by any standard 16.5 YPC for his career on nearly 8000 receiving yards.

That’s it for page one.  Thanks for stopping by!  There’s much more vintage to come, but next time we’ll be making a stop in junk wax country.  But it will be a fun (and rookie-laden) trip, I promise.

Until our next…

Flea Market Finds #1: Overview

Heyas.  Been a long time, huh?  Nothing’s really changed since last we chatted, except for getting a few more of the sketch cards from the previous post finished (and a few new ones drawn up), and a seriously loudass person moving in upstairs pushing me to the end of my rope with this lousy place.  Seriously, if anyone knows of a halfway decent place with no noise problems to speak of that falls within my modest price range, I’m so effing outta here.

Ah, but that’s not why you called.  I happen to have some fun stuff I’m getting prepared to blog about.  For the past several months, they’ve been holding a small monthly flea market at the shell of our once thriving mall.  I asked my dad if they had any cards when the parents made it out there at the beginning of the year, and he said they did, but didn’t elaborate.  So I’ve been wanting to go ever since, to see what was there myself.

On Saturday, I finally made it out there.  I wasn’t expecting much, but I had $23 with me just in case.  And am I ever glad I did.  There was a guy there with cards.  He didn’t bring the whole card shop (of which he apparently owns one nearby, according to the business card), but he had a very nice selection of cards to peruse.  He had cards available ranging from the late ’60s to within the past couple years, in baseball, basketball, and football.

He seemed to be an old school Beckett-adhering type, but his cards were priced to move.  He mentioned to another person there that wandered by that his philosophy was that if a kid saw a cool card they liked, they should be able to afford it, which sounds like an awesome philosophy to me.  As such, the vast majority of his singles were $1, and almost everything on up seemed to be reasonably priced (I think I spotted a Felix Pie auto for $50 in the one little bunch hits behind glass, but that is easily forgivable when pretty much everything else was so reasonable).

He was also willing to deal, as you’ll soon see.  So I picked out a few singles I liked (9 in total, I believe), all but one marked $1 or $1.50 (the two of which he gave me for $1), and two random 25 card grab packs for $1 apiece that had interesting cards showing.  Then I came to the side of the table where he had several binders laid out, each with about a dozen pages full of cards in them.  They were marked $1 per page, or $10 for a whole binder.  As it happened, I managed to find a dozen random pages I like from the various binders.  So he stuck them all in one of the binders, and gave it to me for $7!

So yeah, I spent all $23 I came armed with.  In total, I ended up with about 170 cards, the vast majority of which I very much like.  Needless to say, I completely obliterated the number of cards and enjoyment I would’ve gotten out of your average blaster (+ maybe one $1.59 pack), and will be heading out there again next month.  There were many things I had to leave behind this time.

Anyway, the binder pages will make up the vast majority of the posts to follow in this little series.  I’ll go over them card-by-card, one or two pages at a time, because there is just so much random coolness in each page.

I’ll also be getting a few packages sent out over the course of this month, and a few of the cards from the flea market may even find their way into some of them.

1/3 of of one of the most iconic basketball cards of all time, and a small preview of the craziness to come...

Flea Market > Blaster.  It is a fundamental truth.

The fun has only just begun…

COMC Order #3

Now we segue out of vintage with a little last hurrah and into something a little… smaller, with this here quickie post.

1969 topps Deckle Edge Jim Fregosi, Maury Wills, and Jerry Koosman proving vintage never goes out of style.

Ah, wonderful affordable vintage.  I am slowly putting together this set.  I believe this brings me to five now, with Kessinger and Santo.  It’s a good one to collect if you aren’t concerned about condition.  Even the best players won’t set you back that much, and there are lots of big names of the day and Hall of Famers to be had.  The set is only 33 cards (plus a couple different player-same card number variations, proving topps has been pulling that s*** since at least the late-1960s!), so there isn’t a lot to track down.

Not quite minis in an official sense, but the slightly smaller than average size makes for a handy transition to the minis portion of our program, which we will start to cover in the next Check Out My Cards post.

PS: Still no winner in the contest yet. Go down a few posts and keep guessing!

Until our next…