That's Why I Don't Buy Blasters - Volume VI - Hank & Nolan

Leaving for vacation tomorrow, hectic day of packing and preparation so here's a quick one.  You know the drill, pretty self-explanatory...

Instead of buying a blaster like this one, I take the $19.99 plus tax and do some collecting damage elsewhere.  The Goudey blaster image above is a bit of foreshadowing, because for this installment I am once again going back to the 1933 Goudey well...

Henry Johnson becomes the third '33 Goudey Red Sox card to fall in my quest for a complete team set.  I like this one the best of the three I've got so far, as the first two contained tightly cropped portrait shots but with Hank we get a little throwing motion.  I am really not sure why this was graded just a 1.5, nor do I care.  There's a little bit of fading in some spots within the background and the corners are rounded, but the visual appeal is still really good and there are no major creases or eyesores.

Here's a better look at the front.  This is a great vintage Red Sox card because it contains about as much red ink as you could possibly put on a baseball card.  I love the pinstripe hat, too.

As a player, Hank Johnson actually came up with the Yankees in the late '20s, and as a result got to pitch with some of the greatest players in the history of the game as teammates (names like Ruth and Gehrig).

Here's a look at the back, a couple of surface wrinkles near the bottom but totally legible and more than enough to pass my quality test!  With this card in hand I've got five more '33 Goudeys to track down to finish a Red Sox team set (a couple of them being Hall-of-Famers).

Because of the poor condition, I was able to land this card for just $14 via Buy-It-Now.  Not too shabby at all, especially given that the seller charged a reasonable $1.40 for shipping.  You know what that means?  $5 left in my "virtual blaster" budget.  I looked over my eBay watch list and it didn't take me long to figure out how to fill the gap:

What a bright-colored beauty!  This is my first '74 Kellogg's card and is one of the nicer cards I've added to my humble little Nolan Ryan collection in quite some time.  I'm sure I could have bargain hunted and maybe landed this one cheaper eventually, but I've done quite a bit of eBay business with the seller in the past so was happy to go with this example.  The card's in really great shape with no signs of cracking or other condition issues on the front...

...and just a touch of discoloration around the borders on the back.  This set me back and even Abe Lincoln with free shipping.

So there you have it, instead of dropping a $20 at Target I've got an 80+ year old Red Sox card and a '70s Nolan Ryan made by a cereal company.  I'd call that a win!