Ten Cards For A Buck

Stopped at the Half-Priced Books close to my work the other day at lunch, searching for more Sports Illustrated For Kids magazines, and discovered three 5000 count boxes of cards marked 10 for a buck.

The boxes were about 90% 80's and 90's baseball, 9% football, and 1% basketball (does that add up to 100%?).  So these were full of junk for the most part.

But the best part about being a team collector, is the random junk you might find your team logo, or a random player on.

I dug in.

I like to think that I'm pretty familiar with my team collection, so as I'm going through the cards I can often pass many up, knowing for sure that I already have it.  But once in a while I'd come across one that doesn't seem familiar to me, like this is the first time I'd seen it.

That's what happened when I saw this 1989 Topps Jack Lazorko card.

Except I found out when I got home that I already had not only it but a handful of dupes.

How could I possibly believe that within the epitome of junk wax there was an Angels card I was lacking.

Not so.

Now this one, it turns out, I was lacking.  Something just didn't click about a horizontal Lance Parrish card.

One great thing about team collecting is checklist cards.  There are a bunch out there that have the cards broken out by teams.  If you look close enough you'll find them.

This 1991 Topps example has the Angels on the back.

Angels on the back of this 1989 Fleer too.

Ah c'mon!  On the back again?

I did acquire a nice stack of ten different 1987 Fleer regular and Update cards I needed for the team set.

This 1994 Donruss checklist featured the Angels Mark Langston.

See?  You gotta look closely when blasting through commons.

I always grab Topps All-Star cards when I find them, and this one was new to me.  I didn't know any of the sets included a team photo.  I imagine there's an American League team card as well?

In all that Digging I found only 1 Tim Salmon, and actually I found two of this same card.

Silver version of the 1998 Collectors Choice.

I also grabbed a nice stack of 1953 Topps Archives cards.  I was hoping that some of these guys were still living, in hopes of getting their autographs.  Unfortunately none are.

So run out and check your local HPB, baseball junk may be awaiting.