Somewhere in the history of card collecting, a great myth arose: The harder the case, the better protection for your cards.
It’s a simplistic way to look at things. I mean in theory it sounds like it should work. A 1-inch thick lucite case should better protect you against common dropage than a card saver or top loader. And surely a plastic box would provide more protection than your mother’s shoe box, right?
But things are not always as they appear.
Thick screw down cases often put too much pressure on a card, causing the surface and corners to be damaged over the years. And plastic boxes mass generated for a novice collector surely are no way to protect your cardboard icons. They wind up being plastic card coffins.
The beauty, though, is that these coffins can sometimes turn out some nice treasures when they are excavated from the depths of the lowly thrift stores.
At first glance you probably see a bunch of crap. You’ve got a 1993 Score card on the left, a John Kruk 1994 Triple Play base card in the center, a few game cards that most of us don’t care.
But if that is all you see, then you lack vision.
The box has a $5 price tag, and there are roughly 700 cards in the box, so surely there has to be that much fun in here. Plus, the amount of game cards here make it worth while because … people actually do buy these things in bulk lots.
And so for $5, the coffin came with me and I became a tomb raider.
As it turned out, of the 700 cards in the box, there were FIVE HUNDRED MLB Showdown cards from years 2000-2003. Yeah, 500.
And then there were a few pretty neat 2003 Upper Deck Vintage cards. I was never a huge fan of this set — which is a total rip-off of the 1965 Topps design by the way — but I always found the retired stars in the set interesting. Yogi is a classic.
But that was not all. Here is where my location — the San Francisco Bay Area — paid off. There was 80 percent of a 2010 Topps Emerald Nuts San Francisco Giants stadium giveaway team set.
And amazingly the key card to this set was still here and not badly damaged.
That’s World Champion Catcher Buster Posey. Love it.
You can see additional Thrift Treasures posts HERE.
