Trade with Cards from the Quarry

 I recently completed a trade with Johnny of Cards from the Quarry. We hammered out a trade involving some 2020 Donruss parallels and various inserts going his way and some nice Rays and Tigers parallels coming mine.

 There were so many nice cards. I've always admired Jeff Niemann, even though I don't officially collect him. I've seen him so many times (2006 or 2007 in AA ball, 2008 and Spring Training, and many times after that in the Trop), and each time, he was always nice enough to stop and sign autographs. Wish I would've had this 2007 Bowman Blue card to get signed back then. I always thought Matt Moore was going to be an ace, and I was sad to see the Rays trade him, but I guess they knew what they were doing. It's nice to grab a numbered parallel of him to add to my growing number of Rays cards of Matt. The next 2 are Gold paralells from more recent Topps sets, and the last Rays card is a Mike Zunino Green Gypsy Queen parallel. For the Tigers, we start off with a 2005 Donruss Team Heroes Showdown Bronze parallel #d to 100 of Jeremy Bonderman. I busted maybe 10 packs of that set in 2005, and always seemed to pull a blue Showdown parallel or autograph from it. I know for sure I pulled a Johan Santana and Jason Kubel autograph, as well as a Blue Doug Mientkiewicz Showdown. I was lucky enough to get 2 Black parallels in the trade, a 2013 Matt Tuiasosopo and a 2017 Ian Kinsler. I have only been lucky enough to pull one black parallel from a pack, a Joe Borowski from a box of 2005 Topps, which I immediately sent ttm to get signed. Fortunatly, Joe signed it and sent it back, but I ended up losing it when I sold a bunch of autographed cards in 2013 or so. Now I have not only 1 black parallel, but 2. The 2014 Gold parallel is of Andy Dirks. I saw Andy play a few times in low-A ball, and he was scrappy. The last 2 cards are refractors, a green one of Zac Reininger from 2015, and a regular one of Joe Jimenez from the 2017 set (somehow I correctly guessed the correct years and then confirmed it afterwards). Thanks, Johnny, for the nice additions for my 2 favorite teams.

I officially start vacation as soon as I get off work on Friday the 9th, and I'm already to leave now. The next 4 days at work are (probably) going to be hellish, with my evil manager back for all 4, a full moon trying to hang on, and all of the excessive volume of production and customers that come with working at a bakery during a major holiday. Someone get me a time machine. I do have a few pick-me-ups coming between now and the 9th. I ordered a hanging box of 2021 Donruss online, and that should get delivered before we leave. I can't remember, but wasn't the going rate on hanging boxes 9.99 before the flippers started their reign of terror? If so, then I overpayed, but who isn't these days?  I also ordered 2 cards of Clark, the Cubs mascot from the 2021 Topps Opening Day set. That seems kind of random, but the other day, my wife informed me that the Rays were opening the Trop starting in May, and that immediately got us thinking if Detroit would be open during our vacation. Of course, they were away the whole week, but then we thought of going to Chicago on the way home. The Cubs and Braves are playing at Wrigley the last Friday-Sunday that we would be away, so if we can get lucky enough to purchase tickets when they start selling them, I might be able to cross another iconic ballpark off of my list of ones that I've been to, and even though I probably won't get any players autographs, maybe one of the mascot. FYI, the MLB owners are thieves. I could normally get into a Rays game for about 20 bucks a pop, and the cheapest seats we could find were over 100 dollars. You can't tell me that these owners aren't still living a great life even with no fans attending games in 2020. They still had media contracts giving them money and still got money off of merchandising (and baseball card) deals. The players didn't get 100% of their paychecks in 2020, so they didn't loose as much money as they want you to think. Corporate greed exists, and the fact that MLB teams are upping ticket prices and Topps is doubling the volume of their Series 1 production are examples 1 and 1a.

I also plan on trying to go to a card shop in Grand Rapids when we are there. That leads me to a question. About a year ago, we were planning on going on vacation when the pandemic hit. We basically wanted to do the same trip we are doing now, and had already done a little research. I had found on some baseball card blog that there was a mom & pop store in either North or South Carolina that had a bunch of unopened baseball card boxes. I can't remember for the life of me the name of the store/blog/or what city it was in. Does any of this sound familiar to anyone? If I can find the name of the store, I might check it out if it's not too far and try to see what they have. I remember it had a good assortment of old/new and higher and lower end stuff.

Here's hoping the next 10 days fly by. 

Thanks for checking out my latest post.

-Jeremy