High-End Dime Boxing

Nick over at Dime Boxes -- The Low-End Baseball Card Collector's Journey (Click on the link. Click it.) is in a very enviable position, in that he finds interest in the cards most of us don't look twice at. Good photography and extreme oddballness take precedence over star power. Lucky for me, this means a trade package will be rife with goodness that is usually neglected and hard to find. Let's see what chafed out of the dime bag...

We'll start with some vintage photography sets. I had a few from the 1989 Pacific Legends set. Now I have three more. It's always nice to see fan favorites who weren't necessarily superstars make it onto cards post-retirement. Topps has been on the ball with this lately, but maybe it's because they're just running out of photos of Johnny Bench and Frank Robinson so they're forced to feature Hal Morris and Ray Knight. They can only reuse pics so often. I also have a small stack of Conlon, but didn't have these four. And I had never seen the Eight Men Out line before. It's kind of forgotten that my Reds were on the other side of the Black Sox scandal, sneaking into a World Series title in 1919. I need to find the rest of these.

DB-TLEBCCJ had four recent parallels he felt would make a better home over here. I have a bunch of 2012 Gold Sparkle, a bunch of 2012 Blue, and a bunch of 2013 Red. So the odds I'd need these were low. I hit the lottery, however, and needed all four. Boom. It's nice to embrace the little victories of life, eh?

Here's three randoms I needed. The short-lived O-Pee-Chee comeback offered some black border parallels, which seem like they should have been the base design. This is only the second one I have. Nice. That Austin Kearns in the middle is from the Topps Rookie Cup set where they reprinted rookie cards, with just enough difference in foiling to throw you off a little. In fact, I had a Rookie Cup Adam Dunn mistakingly sitting in the Topps 2002 pages for about a year until I noticed the green stripe on the back indicating what card I really had. Now I know better.

Here's a few vintage. I of course had all of these, but a few were welcome upgrades. A lot of my vintage is beat up, which I don't mind. Still, I embrace upgrades.

Aaaand the rest of the goodness. Tons of good Redlegs that I can't have too many of. An eclectic mix. Nice.

Thanks, Nick. Don't study too hard.