Back to the LCS house

I don't know what to call my former LCS owner's house.  Wonderland.  Candy store.

Whatever you call it, it's one of my favorite places to spend a couple of hours.  I usually go on Thursdays, about noon.  It gives me two hours to spend looking through cards, talking baseball, reliving the glory days of collecting through my friend.  The only sacrifice is two hours of sleep and around $20.

A fair trade off if you ask me.  Not that you asked.

Last Thursday I went without a game plan.  That's the norm for me so I just figure I'll come away with something worthwhile.  Of course, there's always the Nolan Ryan Binder to fall back on if I don't find anything else.

This time I ended up with about 55 singles.  Only half were Rangers.  The other half will end up in trade packages along the way.  Total cost for those 55 singles was $1.

Chan Ho Park is and will always be "THE WORST FREE AGENT SIGNING IN THE HISTORY OF THE TEXAS RANGERS". Period.  Still, like Arod and Mark Teixeira, I need his cards to fill my lists.

I was going through a 5000 count box of cards and ran across a ton of these 1998 Fleer Sports Illustrated cards.  I have to say, great photography.  I think I may try to pick out the whole set from him.  It'll be cheap.

You can't tell, but this is a 1997 Donruss Studio 8X10 of Greg Maddux.  It's going to Jon at Community Cards if he needs it.  I owe him.  He didn't even charge me for this.  He just gave it to me.

I picked up a couple of random vintage cards including this well loved Ferris Fain.   You have to love vintage cards.  No...you're not listening...you HAVE TO love vintage.  I said so.

My teaser post from last week showed that I bought three binders.  After a little poking around Ebay, I discovered that I got a good deal on two of them.  The other was a wash.

One of the binders had a complete set of 1998 Mark McGwire Chase for 62 cards.  That's only 30 cards, but it also had this oversized 62 HR card.   Hey, I'm king of the world...for now.

I wasn't going to get this, but he said $2 so I thought Cards on Cards might want it.  I could always use the little binder and the 4 sheets that came with it.

He started pulling out little binders and offering them up really cheap.  He had this complete 2001 Upper Deck Legends set and offered it to me for $3.  I couldn't pass it up.  90 cards, 10 pages and binder for $3 was too good to pass up.  I do question some of the cards in this set.  Kevin Brown and Jeff Kent.  Legends they are not.  I saw completed listings for this set on Ebay ranging from $3.59-$7.99.

My 2nd favorite pickup of the day was a complete set of 1998 Skybox Metal cards.  It's 220 cards and is mind-blowingly fantastic.  The backgrounds on these cards, which my STUPID scanner will not pick up, are the best ever. I'm going to post the whole set if I can figure out how to do it.  The complete set, 25 pages and the binder set me back $6.  I couldn't find any listings for this set so I don't know if that was a good deal, but for these cards, I'm happy with the price.  

Here we go.   Up to this point, I'd spent a total of $12.  I asked him to get the Nolan binder and he pulled this 1971 Topps Nolan Ryan out.  He asked for $13 just to get it to $25 and even though I could have negotiated, I was happy to pay it.  That gives me the 1968, 1969, 1970 and now 1971 Topps Nolan Ryan cards.

I didn't crop it too close so you could see the borders.  Not too shabby for a 1971 card.

Don't forget to read my morning post and follow directions and you might just get some cards from his house yourself.