Saturday, January 16, 2010

I didn't need to know that

I went into my new local card shop just to kill some time and ran into an old friend that collected cards back in the 90s before I took my leave of absence. I hadn’t seen him in lots of years. I had heard he now lived in St Louis but that was about it. Turns out he lives in downtown St Louis and you can see Bush stadium from his apartment window. Not only that but he lives in the same apartment building as Ryan Ludwig and Rick Ankiel (or at least did live in the same building).


We talked for a little while and then he decided to open a few packs. I said you know if this was 12-13 years ago you wouldn’t be opening packs by yourself we would all be playing High Card. Now Joey the shop owner thought that was a great idea and was all for it. (High Card is where everybody opens a pack, and the person with the single best card gets everybody’s packs) I said I was just making a comment and there was no way I was going to play. (It’s fun but gets expensive REAL FAST) Even though I didn’t play they did. They went through 2 boxes of some kind of Razor Signature Series that have an auto per pack.  Evidently it was a really good thing I didn’t play because they were pretty bummed when they got finished. I however ended up with a few Red Sox farm hand base cards for free.

While we were talking I found out something that I wish I had never heard. Long ago there were 5 of us that really spent a lot at the card shop. Joey (the new card store owner), T (guy that lives in St Louis now), W (now our local state representative), B (a high school buddy), and myself. Years ago T got a Vince Carter 98-99 Finest graded a 10. He traded it to Joey for 2 Kobe rookies. Joey turned around and traded it to W for a McGwire rookie. Right after that Vince won the slam-dunk contest and W dumped it on eBay for a little over a $1000. He always gave the two of them hell cause they traded it off for so little. Unfortunately I just found out where T got the card. Yep you guessed it, me. One day we were playing High Card with 98-99 Finest Basketball and I pulled the Carter. When we finished the box off it was the only one that got pulled. (Actually it was probably more than one box we went through) T offered to buy a whole new box in trade for the Carter. I figured there was a good chance I got another one in a box and I didn’t really think it was in very good shape to begin with. On the back side the corners were kind of flaking off so I let him pay my debt and I gave him the card. It was that card I pulled that he sent in with 9 other cards (the more cards you send PSA the better scores you get) that got a 10. So basically I gave a $1000 card to him for whatever the price of a box of Finest was at the time. That was something that they didn’t ever really need to tell me.  Funny thing is the state Rep. used his $1000 to buy a Babe Ruth auto that turned out fake.  So while I traded it off for nothing in th eend the guy got the same thing.
The names are not really only one letter I changed them just because.**

Now that you have read all the blah,blah,blah I'm going to show you the cards I got for free.


The only only one of these guys I have even heard of is Kelly.  He is the guy that can play SS and pitch but is about to start pitching full time this spring.

1 comment:

Roy said...

Lin is a solid prospect but seems to be pretty far away, but he can mash.