Oddballs and Vintage

Normally, this would be the post where I would detail my adventures in the yearly community yard sale. However, this year, aside from an old baseball calendar I bought for 50 cents (post on that coming in due time) and a board game I bought for a dollar for my son, this year was a bust. I knew it was coming, I'd been too lucky the past few years with giant hauls and scores of vintage. I could have kept looking but in the back of my mind, I knew that I still had cards from the haul my mom brought me in March to organize and write about. So, that's what this will be.

Normally, when I'm digging through mega-hauls, I'm expecting card from the mid to late '70s, so imagine my surprise when this 1955 Bowman surfaced. It's not exactly Ernie Banks or Mickey Mantle but any 1955 Bowman is good in my book. 

This is more like what I expected to find. A nice handful of 1978 Topps. This isn't all of them but I'd say these were probably the highlights. Check out that afro on Jose Cardenal!

More late 70s vintage .... some notable names here in Jerry Koosman, Ron Cey, Ray Fosse, Garry Templeton, and Steve Yeager.

More random vintage, a few 1974 Topps Traded, and 1973 Topps Bill Hands, and a 1976 Topps Lou Brock. I find the Bill Hands card to be interesting. He's listed as a member of the Twins, the uniform looks kind of like an early Rangers home uniform, and he's pitching in Wrigley Field.

Along with 1955 Bowman, another unexpected treasure were these 1982 Kellogg's cards. The Fisk card is a little beat up but I don't mind. 

On to the oddities now, there were gobs of these 1987 Hygrade Baseball's All Time Greats cards. Again, I didn't scan them all, just a handful to give a sample. 

More Cap'n Crunch cards. I now have four cards from this set. Maybe the cardboard gods are telling me I should put this set together.

Some Starline Long John Silver's cards. The background on the Glenn Davis card is old Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati.

A couple of Don Mattingly oddballs. The Kaybee Kings card is just wonderful and fits in well with my defunct retail chain collection.

Here's a weird one. This is a promo card from the 1989 CMC Babe Ruth set. Since there were no other cards from the set in this collection, I'm curious now as to how this card ended up in here. According to the back, this was part of a 20-card set that came complete with binder, pages, a hanger box of the set, and a bio pamphlet of the Bambino. All that could be yours for the meager sum of $12.99 apparently.

And I'll close this out with a pair of random oddballs. I've never had a Topps Magazine card before so this will slot nicely into the Indians binder (once I finish purging what I don't want from there). The Revco card is another nice one to add to the defunct retail collection.

Even though the community yard sales were a bust, I still managed to find a few nice cards in my mom's mega haul. And it will keep on giving as there are some treasures I haven't shared yet.

The Yard Sale Cards: Oddballs

I swear, this yard sale collection is the gift that keeps on giving. I've shown the vintage cards and the junk wax but now, since that stuff is out of the way, I'll move on to the fun stuff ... oddballs! And let me tell you, there were some odd things that showed up.

First off, we have two interesting specimens ... Andre Dawson from the 1988 Topps Revco League Leaders set. Revco was a discount drug store chain throughout the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and Southeast but, like all drug store chains from that time, was eventually taken over by a bigger chain (Rite-Aid). This was the only set produced by Topps for Revco and was sold in complete 33-card sets throughout the chain. As for the other card pictured, a 1984 Topps Cereal Dale Murphy, I've never head of "Topps Cereal" but I'm guessing maybe they were distributed in cereal boxes? Not sure. The banner claims its the "1st Annual Collectors Edition" but there was never a second set.

The last time I walked into a K-Mart it was like going straight back in time. The outdated yellowing floor tiles, signage that hasn't been updated since the mid-90s, merchandise shelves with things scattered everywhere, walking up and down aisles of things that just feel "old" You know, everything you could imagine. I'd say the closest thing these days to a K-Mart would be a Big Lots or a Wal-Mart that isn't a super center (if those even still exist). Anyway, the 20th Anniversary cards I've always found pretty neat since they have the card from the players MVP year incorporated into the card itself. K-Mart came back with cards in 1987 and produced cards through 1990, pretty much the boom of the junk wax era. They did come back in 2008 as Topps made a 30-card set of gold cards, but they looked to be just a different version of cards from the base set.

This Rafael Landestoy card is from a regional set issued by Coca-Cola in 1982. The Reds and Red Sox were the only team to receive this treatment. The sets were 23 cards (including a no numbered title card) and the Reds set is notable for featuring the only card of Clint Hurdle in a Reds uniform, at least to my knowledge. Von Hayes is from the 1990 Post Cereal set, which was included in packs of three in Post branded cereal. Admittedly, I don't know much about Von Hayes but I would have to venture a guess he was probably included in this set because he made the 1989 All-Star team.

I remember having a subscription to SI for Kids in the 90s and eagerly anticipating the time of the month where I would get a new issue in the mail (is that even still a thing anymore?). Anyway, one of the highlights for me were the tear out cards that featured tons of different players and sports. It was probably the only way I would ever get a snowboarding or skiing card, not that I was really looking for them. Anyway, I'd kind of forgotten about these cards for a long time but when I found this Cal Ripken card in one of the boxes, I was like "wow, cool!" It's honestly not every day that you come across these at a flea market, yard sale, or even a card show for that matter.

These Swell Baseball Greats cards are from the 1991 issue, which was the final issue of Swell cards. For a set that is called "Baseball Greats" it's pretty interesting to see some of the people like Davey Johnson, Mudcat Grant, and Julio Cruz included with Enos Slaughter, Robin Roberts and the like.

There were a whole bunch of these Pacific Legends cards and most of them were from the 1989 issue.  The cool thing about these is that I got cards of players in unrecognizable uniforms such as Enos Slaughter and Johnny Mize with the Yankees. Also, there are cards of the old school, turn of the century players like Honus Wagner and Rogers Hornsby. The only problem with those cards, at least in my opinion, are that the drawings look a little creepy in person. I probably would've been better off with just maybe a black and white photo from their playing days but I can see why they did the colorized illustrations.

Now I'm going to start getting into some more obscure stuff, such as these. Upon first glance, these appear to be just a standard issue card from some second tier manufacturer. However, these are actually card from Long John Silvers of all places. I'm not sure how one would have acquired these cards back in 1990, maybe they came with the purchase of a value meal? Not sure. Regardless, these are the first fast food issues I have. 

The majority of the oddballs in the box were of the TCMA variety and when I say variety, I mean variety. So much variety that I'll just briefly hit on each bit. First there were these Play Ball reprints, which I think are pretty neat.

Then these, which are part of the TCMA "1960s" series from 1978 and 1981. I really thought it was cool to dig out two Hall of Famers in Al Kaline and Billy Williams.

I've never seen these cards before but apparently they also belong to TCMA and were part of the 1986 All-Time sets. I'm guessing that these were done in sets by team instead of an overall combined set. My favorite of these has to be the Rollie Fingers Padres card as I really don't have any cards of Fingers in a Padres uniform.

And the final batch of TCMA cards, on which I couldn't find much information on. Gathering what info I could from the back of the cards it looks like these are part of a set on each players career. 

There were a ton more oddball cards that I did take pictures of but didn't end up making the final cut here. As I mentioned earlier, there was definitely variety from Revco and K-Mart to random TCMA stuff. It just goes to show you never know what you'll find in a yard sale lot.