I love baseball cards. The first thing I look for whenever I go into a thrift store or visit a flea market is a dingy little box that may contain cards. Sometimes they are the two-row “shoebox” version, other times they are the typical boxes that people use to store their complete sets. And sometimes they are random boxes that once held big blocks of cheese or candles. Truthfully, these are the best.

I hit two thrift stores this week and for less than $10 — or about the price of three searched 2009 Upper Deck retail packs — I walked away with two boxes of cards (about 1,500 total) and a unique Bo Jackson advertisement piece that HAD to come home with me. The Jackson piece, which I’ll write about first, cost a whopping 49 cents!

Bo Knows. Yes, Bo Knows when I need a baseball fix. That’s why he made sure to place himself right on top of a stack of toys at one of my favorite thrift stores on Tuesday evening. I am not sure what the heck this is, but I have an idea: This could be an advertisement piece that hung from the ceiling in either a shoe store or a baseball card shop.Take a better look:

Bo stands roughly 18 inches tall and is made mostly of plastic with this image screen printed on the front and back. On this side you can clearly see the Nike, Royals and Franklin logos, but on the reverse most of these are airbrushed out because it’s essentially a reverse negative of the image shown here. There is a small hole near one of Bo’s shoulders, which is what leads me to believe this was hung from the ceiling at some point. Does anyone have any idea what this is? At first I suspected it was a Nike advertisement, but for some reason I am envisioning it hanging over a cash register at a baseball card shop. There are no markings on it, so I don’t even know who produced it, therefore I have no idea where to start my research. For the record, that pink thing on Bo’s shoe is a price tag. I forgot to remove it before snapping this picture.

As a side note, there is an amusing story that goes along with this purchase. After finding Bo, I walked around the store searching for other items. At one point a woman — who is black — looks down to see what I’m carrying. She blurts out: “Oh, you found Barry Bonds!” I quickly corrected her that this was in fact Bo Jackson. She then said, “Oh, I saw the color of his skin …” Jeeeeeez. Did I mention the woman was black?

Two days after finding Bo, I headed to another thrift store where I’d found cards in the past. And as luck would have it, they had more today … and they were on sale! What’s better than finding cards at a thrift store? Finding them on a day where the store is offering 40 percent off!

There were about five boxes total, but three of them contained Hoops brand basketball cards from 1989 through 1991. I’ll pass. I stopped collecting basketball cards when Vince Carter was anointed the hobby’s new king and I’ve not looked back since. But there were two boxes jam packed with baseball cards, a two-row shoe box and a brown box which once contained a 5 pound block of cheese. (Note: I’ll do a separate post on the brown box because this one is getting too long.)

The two-row box intrigued me from the beginning because the cost of the box was $5.50 after the discount. Hell, an empty shoe-box at the hobby shop costs $3 so in some regard I was getting its contents (about 1,100 cards) for about $2.50. From the start I could see the box contained Fleer Ultra, Pinnacle and Score from 1993, which in and of itself is not horribly interesting. BUT, there were a bunch of Select Stat Leaders inserts mixed in, and I remembered that Derek Jeter has a rookie in the Score set. I figured it was worth a shot, at the very least I’d come away with some Red Sox cards for my PC and a bunch of other stuff to send to other team collectors.

It took me about 10 minutes to ransack the box. Here are some examples of what was found:

1993 Ultra cards

1993 Pinnacle

1993 Score

And you knew I was going to find these …

1993 Score Derek Jeter Rookie

As for the second box, stay tuned. I’ll be posting about that shortly.

This entry was posted on March 7, 2009 at 10:24 am and is filed under Thrift Treasures with tags baseball, baseball cards, Bo Jackson, Bo Knows, Cal Ripken Jr., Cardboard Icons, Derek Jeter, Ken Griffey Jr., Nolan Ryan, rookie card, Thrift Treasures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.