There's Gems In Those Old Beckett Magazines

I spotted a stack of old Beckett, and a few other, price guides at my local Half Price Books.

I started thumbing through them with the intention of finding baseball card ads for the sets I'm collecting: 1991 Upper Deck, 1995 Emotion, 2008 Fleer Tradition....

I like to include a card wrapper, maybe a box, magazine ads, promo cards/sheets and such with each set.  Kinda make it a mini well-rounded collection.

Or I'll look for pictures or an ad featuring a player I collect.

I picked up this February 1994 Beckett with Paul Molitor on the cover and flipped it over to find this:

Nice.

Tim Salmon on the back cover with an inset of a Tim Salmon card I haven't seen, and don't have and will now have to go purchase.

This page will get separated from the magazine and put in the Tim Salmon binder.

That's a nice start.  I saw maybe a dozen or so price guides in the slot so I started thumbing through.

I'm collecting the 1991 Upper Deck set like I mentioned, just about completed it actually, so this ad I found for the high number series from a 1991 Beckett will go with the set.

I wanted to see what some of the cards were going for initially in 1991.  I always loved looking to see whether a card had an up or down arrow.  Up being good, an increase in value, and very exciting to see next to a card you had in your collection.  I haven't used or seen a Beckett in a very long time so I don't know if they use this system anymore.  But to me that was one of the highlights of getting a new Beckett.

Hard to believe that Todd Van Poppels rookie card card was one of the more desirable cards in that set.

I'll keep these pages in the binder for the set as well.  Nice little snapshot of the hot players and hot cards when this set first came out.

I bought a lot of 1991 Line Drive back then, not in an attempt to complete a set (they are very large sets) but just to get a nice stash of minor league cards to use for autographs someday.  Someday came and now I typically send out a Line Drive AAA or AA card with the a 1991 Upper Deck card to get autographed since a lot of the players are in both sets.

Another ad featuring Tim Salmon, this one for the 1994 Fleer baseball set.

Salmon was all over the place in subsets for 1994 since he had won the AL Rookie of the Year Award the previous year.  And of all the card companies, I think Fleer outnumbered the others 3-1 in Salmon issues.

If you look at the right side of the ad, you can see about 12 different subsets for that year.

Had I known, I would have jumped all over this offer back in 1994.

I wasn't collecting much those years, or at least not collecting much of the more expensive packs, which if I recall, Fleer was by then.

Good stuff in those old card magazines.