Gotta give a hat tip to Chris Olds at Beckett for pointing out that the discount chain Dollar Tree has been selling baseball cards.

About a week and a half ago, Chris announced this threw his Twitter account, and since then I’d been pondering what on earth the store could have for a buck a pack. Well, as you can see from the image, it’s pretty much leftovers from 2008. You’ve got some Donruss Americana,  Upper Deck First Edition baseball and football, UD X baseball, UD Football Heroes, and some random Donruss/Panini football items. These packs looks like they were rifled through as they were strewn everywhere. I guess the pack searches will stop at nothing to find a single-color swatch of some hump.

I hit up a few other Dollar Tree stores in search of UD Timeline — which Chris said others had seen at the store — but I could not find any. But I did find some of this: Cards One “Historic Vintage Collection: Baseball Edition.”

My jaw dropped when I saw this because I knew that it was repackaged commons with some sort of gimmick attached. Here the company is giving you 15 cards in a pack with a “Historic Star Card in Every Pack.”

Also, they give odds for pulling cards as old as 40 years, and there is a redemption program: four wrappers and $3.99 for one autographed card. See the odds HERE.

Well, you know I had to try ONE pack just to see what they considered a star card. So here is the Cards One pack break:

1: 1990 Score George Canale rookie

2: 1990 Score Kelly Gruber

3:1988 Donruss Vicente Palacios Rated Rookie

4: 1990 Fleer Ramon Martinez

5: 1988 Score Phil Niekro (Star Card?)

6: 1988 Topps Dwayne Murphy

7:1988 Topps Jose Guzman

8: 1988 Topps Brad Havens

9: 1987 Topps Garth Iorg

10: 1991 Topps Jim Lefebvre

11: 1987 Topps Gary Ward

12: 1987 Topps Joaquin Andujar

13: 1989 Donruss Ken Hill rookie

14: 1993 Score John Habyan

15: 1991 Upper Deck Deion Sanders (Star Card?)

Comments: Well, that was fun. <insert snicker here.> That was like a throwback to the times when I would grab stacks of cards from my “common” boxes and pull out my semi-stars. In this case, I would have set aside the 1991 Upper Deck Deion Sanders card. I’m not sure what card the company considers the star card here. I’ve made the sacrifice to buy a pack of this stuff so that you don’t have to. Stay Away.

This entry was posted on October 5, 2009 at 9:05 am and is filed under Newspaperman with tags baseball, baseball cards, Dollar Tree, sports, Topps. 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.