Quick Hobby Shop Haul

I don't have a lot of material pre-scanned for the blog at the moment, but I do have my small haul from a stop at my local hobby shop earlier this summer all ready to go.  Let's begin with the quarter boxes and see what I scrounged up for twenty five cents a piece...

Shiny Flair card, possibly the best pitcher of my generation, the Montreal Expos, and a jheri curl all on one piece of cardboard.  Glorious!

Here's a very odd looking card from 1997 Topps Gallery.  I usually think of the Gallery sets as having more of a painting/canvas feel, so the metallic border looks weird on this one.

While they look absolutely terrible in my scans, these Cyclone Squad inserts are awesome.

I grabbed another trio that I was fairly certain I didn't have.

I definitely need to make an effort to track down the remainder of these...

I picked up this Bowman Platinum rookie of Joey Gallo because he had just made his impressive MLB debut at the time.  He definitely leveled out, but this one will always remind me of those great first couple of weeks he had.

Bradley Jr. X-Fractor for a quarter?  Sign me up!  One of the bright young players that I'm looking forward to watching again in 2016.

Given the monster year that he enjoyed in Toronto in 2015, I felt this Gold parallel of Josh Donaldson was a steal.

It was a good day to be an A's fan on this particular quarter box dig, as this Emerald Derek Norris came from the same box as the Gold Donaldson above.

I had never seen these Panini Cooperstown "Field Generals" inserts before, but they are fantastic.  I grabbed the only two I could scrounge from the boxes, Mickey Cochrane...

...and Roger Bresnahan.  I can't think of many better subjects for an insert set than old-timey catchers.  I'll be searching out the rest of these at some point for sure.

These next few cards were not quarter box finds, but were plucked off the counter and set me back anywhere between fifty cents and a buck each.  I know the Moments & Milestones sets, with their seemingly endless runs of serial-numbered cards, are the height of Topps gimmickry, but I still can't help but feel that I'm getting a good deal when I land a Pedro card "limited" to just 150 copies for so cheap.

Yes, I'm a sucker.  Moving on...

I've stated this numerous times now, but I'll pick up virtually any Museum Collection parallel from the '94 or '95 Pinnacle sets if the price is right.  On this particular day Albert Belle...

...and this Frank Thomas checklist, both from the '95 set, came home in my stack.  These will always be some of the greatest parallels of the '90s in this collector's humble opinion!

I shelled out a buck for this Tim Wakefield Donruss Press Proof parallel.  I don't even like the card all that much, the giant foil block really ruined the design of this set for me, but it was cheap enough and a parallel I hadn't seen all to often.  What can I say, these kind of things happen when you try to be a team collector I guess.

Last, but certainly not least, I was able to land a pretty significant card towards my beat up '59 Topps set.  I've been somewhat neglecting this set in recent months, but this Drysdale was in great shape (and pretty well centered, too) and looks better than many of my other '59s.  If memory serves the owner only wanted $10 or slightly less for this card, which seemed more than reasonable to me.

Not a bad day at the hobby shop for well under $20 total.  Now, if I could only find the time to actually get back there for another round of digging...