The talk of Jose Canseco and RBI Memorabilia, reminds me of when I traded my used NES games (Ice Hockey and Mike Tyson's Punch Out) for a 1986 Donruss Jose Canseco rookie card.
The Funny thing is that at the time the values were in the neighborhood of $50 dollars each. Now the games are worth maybe $7 combined and the card $3.
That's pretty funny. Two games for a card. I love childhood trades.
People always wanted to trade me like 50 shitty cards for one good one. I'd usually be like--give me 92 shitty cards and it's a deal.
I used to love trading baseball cards, and got into completing sets. Which made "common" cards oh so valuable. Nothing was better than hitting the Grand Slam USA and picking up 20 1981 Topps cards for a buck...
When I started collecting cards, I decided my goal would be to get as many different Cubs as I could, so whenever they did a card show in town I'd buy early 80's common Cubs (my cards were generally from '88 and later). Coolest find: I've got a card of a guy named Mike Tyson. He's a white guy with a cheesy mustache.
I still have thousands of cards, at one point they had considerable value, in the mid-90's the BBCard market crashed and now they aren't worth much. I haven't even looked at the cards in about 12 years.
I remember Mike Tyson! I think he also played for the Cards...
Quote from: Gantry on 02/25/04, 11:39:34 AM
I remember Mike Tyson! I think he also played for the Cards...
HAHA...this reminds me of the best business transaction I've ever been a part of.
My cousin (crackhead) and I were about 10 or 12, and I went on vacation with him and his family. We ended up driving through Grafton, Illinois, and stopped at this antique store for a few minutes. The owner was an old guy who chewed us out for touching stuff in his store...dick. Anyway, we noticed that he had some interesting pricing practices when it came to baseball cards. He was selling those late '80s All-Star cards for like $5-$10...rediculous.
The next summer we decided to pay the old bastard back and went on a hunt for some shitty cards. We wound up choosing a Mike Tyson (cardinals) card and a Darrel Porter card. We put both of them in hard plastic sleeves, the kind with actual screws, and took them with us on our next trip through Grafton. We somehow conned the old guy into paying $20 for the Mike Tyson card and $15 for the Darrel Porter card. Payback's a bitch I guess.
Quote from: Gantry on 02/25/04, 10:35:14 AM
I used to love trading baseball cards, and got into completing sets. Which made "common" cards oh so valuable. Nothing was better than hitting the Grand Slam USA and picking up 20 1981 Topps cards for a buck...
I actually still collect cards and I used to be really into completing sets. When I was a kid I completed the following sets:
81 fleer, 85 topps, 86, topps, 87 topps, 88 topps, 88 score, 89 score, 90 topps, 91 score, 91 upper deck (including the high series), 91 topps, 92 upper deck (including the high #s), 93 score, 93 upper deck ( with high #s), and the 95 score set (series 1 and 2). I was really into it. I still have those sets in my parents basement, stored in a cool dry place. Sometimes when I am over there I look at them with my parents (they are both baseball fans) and my wife just laughs at us (she is canadian and to her baseball is silly and slow).
I still collect but not as much and in a different way. Now, since I am and always have been a huge A's fan, I collect as many cards as I can of A's players. I went through all of my doubles boxes from when I was a kid and I pulled out all the A's cards, put them in an album (those filled one pretty easly). Since then I go to shops and buy out all of their A's cards out of the common bins. I also look for A's star cards also and I have purchased lots of A's cards on e-bay. I never thought that I would be so excited about finding a Rob Picciolo card from the 1978 Topps set before.
I used to collect as a kid. The best cards I had were Jr Griffey rookies in Donruss and Topps. I also had a Topps Mark McGwire rookie card but on the US Olympic squad. Some fuck swindled me out of it at my parents garage sale.
I think that I have 4 or 5 of that McGwire card. Still in my parents basement. I also have a bunch of bonds cards from 86 and 87.
I used to be a pretty hardcore card collector but I chalked it up in the early 90's when every company had to also come up with their own premium set and charge 2 or 3 bucks a pack. Thankfully, the years I was really into it were 87-90 so I have plenty of RBI memorabilia.
Starting Lineups are a different story though. I still buy them on ebay to this day.
I find that the kind of collecting that I do doesn't cost that much. I can leave a shop with hundreds of cards that I am interested in for only about $5.
QuoteI find that the kind of collecting that I do doesn't cost that much. I can leave a shop with hundreds of cards that I am interested in for only about $5.
I'm the same way now. The cards I like don't have anything to do with monetary value. The last time I went to a card shop, I came away with about 15 cards for something like $4.50
yeah. It is too bad that a lot of cards from the last 10 years or so are made to be marketable and not made to be appealing to collectors. I miss the days of sets having about every player in them and only costing 50 cents a pack. I would go back to less quality cards for that.
I like the design of this year's topps cards but they are still too pricey to really collect.
I think the card companies have priced most kids out of the market. When I was growing up a lot of kids collected baseball cards. Maybe the companies have higher profits now with the expensively made cards, but in 20 years when all the old guys stop buying, there might be no one left to buy because they lost a generation of potential customers.
I remember that Donruss issued the triple play set to be marketed towards kids. Hopefully companies will do more of that.
A couple years ago I lived near a card store that was going out of business. I bought up a whole bunch of their early-to-mid-90's cards. The guy probably thought I was a moron for buying those mostly worthless cards, but I was excited to find packs of '93 Fleer Ultra at 4/$1. I don't think I've bought much of anything since, though - I don't like paying $2-4 for 8 cards when I grew up paying $.50 for 12, especially when I'm not as attached to the players.
I think I remember 15 ct packs of Topps being 25 cents maybe 1983, then they would go up about .05 each year. I'll never forget waiting for the baseball card store to get the first shipment of the new Topps cards, heading over, buy like 8 packs. Get to see what the new borders were going to look like that year.
How about when they actually had gum in them? Remember when the gum would fuck up a card it was nex to?
By the way, that gum sucked.
At that card store, I managed to find a couple of packs of '88 Topps. Unfortunately, I can't tell you how the 13-year-old gum was, as I couldn't work up the nerve to try it.
I remember buying a pack of 83 Topps at a card convention around 1990 or so. Unbelievably the dealer didn't pre-open the pack and reseal, as I got a Tony Gwynn rookie in it...
But I did eat the 6/7/8 year old gum. Don't remember it tasting all that bad...
In the early 90's I purchased a box of 1981 fleer cards (with 36 packs in it, sealed and unopened). It had pete rose's ugly gambling mug on it and there was gum in each pack. Needless to say I tried the gum. It sort of disolved in my mouth I left an aftertaste of sugar that had been peed on by a cat after I spit it out.
I did manage to enough cards to start that set out of the box. The gum could have been used for rat poison though.
I love that gum from Topps. Pink cardboard with powdered sugar and bubble gum fragrance. That's what I call bubble gum.