Now THAT was a Card Show - Part 2 - Meeting Mark Hoyle!

As impressive as this past weekend's card show was, the highlight for me was getting to meet the man who has probably shipped more vintage cards to bloggers than anyone else out there, Mr. Mark Hoyle.  Getting to meet a fellow collector that I've traded through the mail with in person is an experience I don't get too often.  It was awesome to talk with Mark and find out how he got a lot of his vintage cards, what he's chasing nowadays, etc.

I found Mark to be a genuine, down-to-earth nice guy, which is no surprise given how generous he's been in sending cards to folks.  Just chatting would have been great, but of course Mark hit me up with a huge stack of cards that he brought to the show specifically to pass off to me!  I got my first Rick Porcello Sox card courtesy of this stack.  He looked, well...average again today in the home opener.

Actually, this stack of cards totally wiped out my non-SP team set needs from 2015 Heritage.

Here's a guy who had an impressive home opener, belting a 3-run shot and robbing a home run in right-center field.  The future looks awfully bright for Mookie at this early stage of the season.

My first Pablo Sandoval Red Sox card!

Mark even included one of the four short-printed Red Sox, Hanley Ramirez.  What a huge help this was, just three short prints to track down and I can call this one complete.

The Heritage Red Sox were very thoughtful, but what was inside the other two snap cases really blew me away.  Dozens and dozens of 1972-73 Topps hockey cards in really great condition!  I eyed this very same Gilles Meloche card earlier in the show but felt the price was a little steeper than I wanted to pay, little did I know Mark was going to lay a copy on me just because.

Wow!  Between the cards I bought and the ones Mark gave me I came home with around 200 additions to my collection through this show.  If I had to rank them this Reg Leach would definitely be in the top 10.  Just an awesome card.

There were so many of these that I'm definitely going to get a want list together and try to complete this set in 2015 alongside my '73-74 set.

The lot Mark gave me was far from all commons and no-name players.  There were plenty of HOFers to be found.

I love the in game action shots in this set, look at all those helmet-less players!

Just one letter away from being a Bee Gee.

I've now got a handful of Gary Smith cards, but this is my first depicting him with Chicago.

WHOA!  It's not every day that someone hands you a Bobby Orr card out of left field.

Some definite heavy hitters.  There wasn't really anywhere at the show to open up Mark's packages and sort through things, so I just kind of stuffed them in my backpack with the rest of my haul.  When I got home and really had a chance to look through everything I was utterly floored.

At this point I've just resigned myself to the fact that I'll be sending Mark Red Sox for as long as I collect, and will never be "even".

I can't wait to get these in binder pages and see how the cards look in batches of nine.

Here's another one of my favorite cards from the entire show, an aging Ed Johnston.

I feel like I am saying this more and more nowadays, but this has to be one of the greatest lots of vintage cards anyone has ever given me.

The show might have been mostly baseball, but I can thank Mark for providing a huge boost to my vintage hockey collection.  It was great meeting up with you Mark, and I do hope it will prove to be the first of many encounters!  I've already got my next stack of Red Sox started for you.

Alright, back to the show.  Shortly after Mark and I parted ways I saw a box of discounted graded vintage cards that looked intriguing.  A few cards in, I stumbled upon a card I had been searching out for well over a year now:

I have wanted a copy of this 1949 Bowman Johnny Sain ever since listening to his masterful performance in Game 1 of the 1948 World Series via an old time radio broadcast.  Johnny's '48 season was stellar, in fact he would have been the NL MVP had it not been for Stan Musial winning the Triple Crown that season.  He owned the Indians, and beat Bob Feller, in Game 1 of the Fall Classic, though his team would ultimately lose the series.

I'm really developing a thing for '49 Bowman, and this one is extra sweet as I've been trying to add some more Boston Braves to my collection recently as well.  I still can't believe this card fell into my lap in the exact grade I wanted, well centered, for around half the price of the only decent copy I'd been watching on eBay for months or longer.

There were hundreds of dealers and thousands upon thousands of boxes of cards at this show, for me to happen to find this card in one of the small percentage of boxes I actually looked through was just great.

Had my three hours been up at this point, I would have called this show a huge success.  Luckily I still had some time to kill though!  Part 3 coming soon.  Hey, when you get to shows as infrequently as I do you have to drag it out a bit...