Retail Therapy at the LCS

It's been a pretty stressful week for a Mooss, and I woke up this morning feeling off.  Usually I'll kill time on a Saturday with a movie or video games, but nothing like that sounded interesting.  And then a random thought hit me.

Let's check out the LCS!

I don't head to my LCS often since my needs/wants are so specific and dated in time.  If I've searched a place once for the cards I'm looking for, it's reaaaaally not worth looking again most of the time.

But I'm helping my Dad look for some cards as I mentioned in a previous post.  And I could always find some Dedunos or Mike Jameses I suppose.  Plus it's just fun to look at cards and memorabilia.  So I was off!

Now my local has a large amount of singles in boxes...we're talking tons.  Of course it's rarely refreshed, but there's plenty to find if you like to dig.  Boxes are roughly sorted - there's a vintage area sorted by year, baseball and football areas sorted by team, there's a few areas sorted by specific players (I laughed because there's TWO Ken Griffey Jr. sections - guy just never consolidated them), and then just random boxes filled with whatever a customer left after a case break.  When I say roughly sorted, I mean fairly roughly...years of no one keeping up on the cards meant there's a lot of crossover.  I also  briefly wandered over to the autos/relics boxes for $3 or 7 for $21 and found the cards I almost bought from a purchase I posted on Reddit 250 days ago...so cards rarely enter or leave these boxes.  So it was time to search!

I started with the Colorado Rockies area, since I figured that might be where Dedunos ended up if he had any.  And I found a Deduno!  But one from...the Twins?

Halfway through the Rockies, someone dumped a bunch of cards from a set break, and this Deduno was in that mix.  This card then started a Twins run within the Rockies area - like I said, roughly organized!

I had the black parallel of this card, but not the base version.  And as much as I don't consider myself a Samuel Deduno collector - just a 2006 Bowman Samuel Deduno collector - it's hard to turn down a card I'm missing of a guy I like when I know it's gonna be like 10 cents.  So into the pile it went.  Great start!

From there I went over to the random basketball area, in hopes of some Mike James.  In retrospect, I probably should've gone over to the Angels section to look for Mike James too, but streetballer NBA player Mike James is probably my favorite Mike James, so he won out for the moment.  I was going through set break after set break, and ended up finding no Mike James but lots of Tobias Harris, Jeremy Lin, Ricky Rubio, and Topps Gold serial #'d cards.  I started making piles of those guys with the idea of picking my favorite of each while combing through boxes.

At that point this dude came in who the owner knew as a fellow seller.  I wasn't sure if that meant a store further away or online, but this guy immediately inquired on the prices of the $3 or 7/$21 auto/relics.  He wanted to buy like...all of them.  So the owner quoted him $2 a card and the guy got to thinking.

Which scrambled my brain a bit.  $2 and auto relic!  I could bite on that if the dude passed on it!  But I knew I wasn't going to spend like $700 today, and I didn't want to mess up that deal for the LCS owner, so I had to kill time while they made their decisions.  I lost all track of the NBA cards and wandered over to the memorabilia section, closer to the autos/relics boxes, to snoop.

As they're chatting, I was looking through some Star Wars cards.  I almost put a few bounty hunter cards (Bossk, IG-88, Dengar) in my stack as well as a Liam Neeson and a fiiine looking Carrie Fisher, but those felt like purchases that were way too random for even my randomness.  So of course then I find out that Parks and Rec has cards (LOVVVVE THAT SHOW) and after a little digging I found my two next cards to purchase.

Perd Hapley is just one of the most joyous characters in a sitcom I've seen.  You can straight up call be a Perdvert, because his charisma and goofy sayings get me every time.

As for Adam Scott, I was a decent fan for a while but became a massive fan when I found the podcast that he cohosts with Scott Auckerman, "R U Talkin U2 2 Me?"  On it's face it's a band podcasts where they go album by album, but it's so silly and dumb and smart/dumb that it just always makes me laugh.  I kept listening as they covered REM ("R U Talkin REM Re: Me") and Talking Heads (R U Talkin Talking Heads to my talking head?") and RHCP and Staind and branched out into other Earwolf podcasts as a result.  It's basically what got me into Podcasts in general I suppose.  My wife and I even debated starting an Adam Scott career retrospective podcast during quarantine.  So now that I'm something of an Adam Scott megafan (HOW GOOD WAS SEVERANCE?) the possibility of owning a card of him was just too good to pass up.  Into the collection it goes!

At this point my brains just a total mess of different thoughts, and the auto/relic guy is calling his bank to put enough money into his account to make this giant purchase.  So I need to kill more time and remember my Dad!  I couldn't find either 1959 card he needed, but they had a lot of other older vintage, so I texted him asking for more wants.  He sent me his needs from 1971, and I found two binders and a whole 200 card box worth of cards to look at.  As with most vintage needs, they were all high numbers, so I was only able to find one card...but it's a goody!  Lou Brock!

Definitely feels good to buy a card for my Dad for once since he's purchased them for me for decades, whether in packs as a kid or singles as an adult.  Generational collecting is cool!

As I'm going through the 1971 binders, the other seller finalizes his bank dealings and makes his purchase.  He's getting every auto/relic box.  DANG IT!  So as I flip through pages, I watch him take like 6 giant boxes out of the store to his car.  Ah to be able to spend that much on random wax...

So I realize it's about time for me to finish up, since I'd been there roughly 2 hours by now just browsing.  A random box on the wall caught my eye, and it looked like it maybe used to be for serial #'d cards...so I checked it out.  Loved it enough to grab these two.

As I've been recollecting God Shammgod and Wonderful Monds, it's hit me just how much those weird parallels from the late 90s have drastically increased in price from when I started recollecting around 2009.  So it felt right to purchase a few of these in case they might similarly see a major value jump someday - and they're also cool cards of solid dudes.  The Sharpe is /299, and I loved that 2000 Ravens team so it's fun to have a card from that era.  The Faulk is a card I'll probably keep, given his role in Patriots lore, and I'm beginning to love some of these parallels for the sake of parallels that Pacific put out around 2000.  Yes I'm that much of a sucker for artificial scarcity!

I headed towards the counter to pay, but realized there was ONE box of auto/relics left.  I thought the guy had grabbed them all, but nope...one box remained.  It's supposed to be sorted basketball, baseball, football in three rows, but was basically just one row after years of disorganization.  So the random auto/relic lover in me met with the organization lover in me to do a quick sort and see if there was anything worth keeping.  I found one card worth it.

Graham is definitely the definition of journeyman kicker, playing for 14 teams over 9 seasons.  Of course he also spent 7 years with a 15th team, the Bengals, which is where this autograph comes from.  He was actually pretty decent in Cincinnati, and went to the Pro Bowl on the strength of the stats on the back of this card.  But a few missed FGs in the playoffs got his released a year later, and the meandering life was Graham's from that point forward.  Still, a pretty cool and rare card of a kicker with some longevity isn't a bad grab.  I've got it for sale on Ebay right now, but if it never sells I'll add it to the autograph collection so a win either way.

And so ended my retail therapy at the LCS.  I spent almost three hours at the shop and bought seven cards for $13.88, and came out feeling a little better about the world.  Job well done LCS!