More Check Out My Cards Cards
January 29th, 2010 by slangon

Back around the holidays I had made my first checkoutmycards.com purchase. Shortly after that, I tried my luck with sportlots.com. Then I wrote a post comparing and contrasting the two experiences. My initial verdict was that Check Out My Cards seemed a bit more suited to scoring relics and refractors and autographs and fancy cards like that, whereas Sport Lots might be better for picking up them vintage cards that’ve been staring back at you from whatever checklist you go by.

After thinking about it, I felt a little half-assed making that statement just because I didn’t really look too much for vintage cards on Check Out My Cards. Yeah, I got a few older things, but it was all mixed up with other stuff. I figured if I was going to make a statement like that, I’d better know what I was talking about, so I decided to head back and buy only vintage cards, you know, just for the sake of fairness.

Everything I got was 1960’s era Mets cards.


1962 Topps #365. As I said before, it’s always a little weird looking at these 1962 Mets cards because there is no indication that any of these guys (Don Zimmer excluded) play for any specific team. I also wonder about Mr. Neals choice of a collared shirt and/or jacket underneath his jersey. I further wonder about that thing on his right cheeck. Is it a scar? A bulging vein? A worm underneath his skin? A weird looking printing error? Judging by the look on his face, I’d say Charlie is wondering about it as well.

1963 Topps #68. This is by far one of my favorite Mets cards ever and I’m really glad I was able to add it to my collection at a reasonable price. As you can see, it’s a little bit dinged up, but nothing too bad. Besides, I’ve never been much of a condition snob. I find it funny that Topps decided to use that particular photo on a card they were calling “Friendly Foes”. You couldn’t find a picture of Duke and Gil yucking it up? For some reason I also always envisioned Duke Snider to be much bigger than Gil Hodges.

1964 Bazooka Stamps S10. These things were put out in boxes of Bazooka gum in full sheets of 10 stamps. This one came off of sheet #10. At one time Ron shared digs with the likes of Sandy Koufax, Camilo Pascual, Willie McCovey, Al Kaline, Ray Culp, Eddie Mathews, Dick Farrell, Lee Thomas and Vic Davalillo.

1964 Topps #95 and 129. I’m not sure if every one’s collecting brain works like this, but whenever I think of a specific set, there’s always one particular card that pops into my head first, almost acting like a visual place holder for that set. For me, 1983 Topps is represented by Gary Carter. 1988 Topps belongs to Eddie Murray’s Record Breaker and so on. I don’t really know why, but that Amado Samuel card has always been the representative of the 1964 set, which is weird since ’64 Topps are one of the few vintage sets that I’ve actually owned examples of since I was a kid, and none of those example are Amado Samuel.

1965 Topps #227. For whatever reason, the 1965 Mets team set has been growing the slowest. Pretty much every other team set has at least spilled over onto a second page, but this is only the 5th card from 1965 that I’ve gotten. It seems strange to me that this set would grow so much slower since it’s not like the commons from this set cost any more than any of the sets I’ve had more luck with, and it’s not like the Mets were chock full of stars that year to drive up the prices of their cards. I guess the Casey Stengel, Yogi Berra and Warren Spahn cards might not be had for pennies, and there’s the Tug McGraw / Ron Swoboda rookie card that might be a bit more. Just one of those things, I guess.

1965 Topps Embossed #6, 35 and #44 . Another weird, but cool Topps insert set from the ’60’s. Being as these are all Mets, therefore National Leaguers, they have red borders. Had they been of the American League variety, they would’ve had blue borders. I like them because they look like little mini HOF plaques. Now I can pretend that there’s more than one Met in the Hall. With all these weird 1960’s-1970’s insert cards I’ve been getting recently, I wonder what the odds of pulling these were.

1966 Topps #124, 191, 302 and 443. This particular set is quickly becoming the anti-1965 set for me. I’m not sure where exactly the short prints start in this set, but I think I only need 4 regular cards and 7 short prints. Actually, that still seems like a lot of cards. Never mind.

1967 Topps #91, 121, 165, 217, 287, 348 and 522. This will put a nice little dent in my ’67 team set. Actually, this more than doubles my ’67 Mets. My favorites out of the bunch? The Cleon is awesome. I guess, outside of Kranepool, he’s one of the first home grown stars for the Mets. I also think that All-Star Rookie trophy is so much cooler than any of the other versions they used. The Rookie Stars card is cool, because if I squint real hard, I can pretend it’s Tom Seavers rookie. I also like Tugs card. He looks intense.

1968 Topps #292, 313, 345, 386, 421, 437 and 521. Another big blow to another ’60’s checklist. This batch happens to be nobody spectacular, but that’s okay. Oh, wait, I did get someone pretty good from the ’68 Topps set…

1968 Topps #45. This was my one big splurge. It was pretty reasonable to begin with, probably due to it off-center-ness, and I was able to knock off another few bucks with the Make an Offer feature. Still, it was the most I’ve spent on one card that wasn’t a certified auto or relic of anything like that. Being able to score this card got me thinking about being a team collector and how inevitably, you’re going to run into certain cards that are just going to kill you when it comes time to buy them. Fortunately, for me as a Mets collector things aren’t so bad. They’re relatively young as far as teams go, so I needn’t worry about anything earlier than 1962. They have relatively few home grown super-stars, so there aren’t a whole bunch of crazy expensive rookie cards. Unfortunately, two of the home grown super-stars they do have are two of the greatest pitchers in the history of the game, so I’d say those two guys are going to cause a bit of a problem. Generally, it seems like Nolan Ryans cards are much more expensive than Seavers, but George Thomas is no joke either. Either way, at least I was able to get this card out of the way pretty reasonably.

So now that I did an all-vintage spree at Check Out My cards, I think I’m sticking to my original verdict. Maybe getting that Seaver threw off the balance, but I don’t think so. All those more common cards could’ve been had cheaper on Sport Lots. What actually saved this haul for me was that Seaver and the Snider/Hodges card. Both of those were much cheaper than anything I saw on Sport Lots at the time, or at least after I got done making offers they were.

2 Responses to “More Check Out My Cards Cards”

  1. Wow, that’s a whole lot of vintage. I need to go on a vintage spree soon. You even went for the stamps and embossed cards. I always forget about that stuff when I’m aiming for ’60s items.

  2. […] to the blog Condition Poor for unwittingly lending us the image of the 1964 Topps Amado Samuel […]

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