Like the old days

Friday was a rare day in the office for me, and while I was in the city I was able to take advantage of a rare great Craigslist deal on baseball cards. A decade or so ago, it seems like these kind of deals came up every few months, but they were drying up by the late 2010s thanks to Facebook Marketplace, where everything seems to be more expensive. This is my first time buying cards this way since before COVID.

The deal was $15 for two 1,600-count boxes of cards. All I knew was that they were late 1990s, so I knew that I would likely need a lot of the cards. Here is the seller's photo, since I took out the cards to organize them before I thought to take my own picture.

The cards were almost all late 1990s. A few were earlier, and there was a fair amount of 2023 cards as well. My guess is that someone most likely collected from 1995-1999, stopped, picked it up for a short time in 2023 and lost interest. One box was pretty much all rookie cards, while the other was mostly stars as well as commons. They had likely been weeded out a little bit before I got to them - there were lots of cards of players like Bonds, Gwynn, and Maddux, but no A-Rod, Jeter or Rivera, for example. 

I am still sorting but it's been a lot of fun going through so many cards knowing that I will need many and the rest will be pretty good trade bait. There was a wide variety of brands, and even a fair amount of inserts and parallels.

I did take some pictures of the cards as I was going through them, semi-randomly as a I came across cards that seemed particularly interesting.

An example of some of the randomness - shiny insert, interesting photos, parallels, etc. 

Some shiny Bowman, plus some 1996 Bowman. I very rarely see cards from that set, and there were probably over 100 in the boxes.

I like the shiny foil heads in this set.

Lots of these international map parallels which are a nice concept but not necessarily executed well if you look at the maps closely. They have the Bronx in Brooklyn, for example.

Just a little smattering of older cards. I had all of these already.

Some more shiny randomness. There were hundreds of the 1999 SP Top Prospects set, which I've already completed. All those shiny golden cards do look good in a big stack. And then randomly three Select cards from 2022.

This was a batch of Yankee veterans and stars all grouped together.

Some more shiny eye-catching cards. That UD insert card in the top left is translucent.

No wonder the boxes were so heavy to lug around! These helmet card are massive. The look and texture are cool, though.

Some examples of cards from the star box. There would be three to five in a row from various stars, ranging from all-time greats like Rose and Piazza to stars who shined more briefly like Chavez and Williams.

A lot of Darin Erstad cards together caught my eye. I didn't notice until after I took the photo that one was Tim Salmon.

Some more of the bigger stars.

More eye-catchers, from a shiny insert to a great photo from the Yankees' last World Series win.

There was just a small handful of basketball among the baseball, all from the same UD set, with the back photos generally more interesting than the front. These are all available for trade.

Nice random Gerrit Cole grouping! He's probably quite a bit away from coming back, unfortunately.

Lots of fun shiny cards here.

Another random grouping, but I'm most interested in Gil Meche's card. What is he standing in front of? It looks to me like a giant telescope.

Four random but very cool Sports Illustrated cards.

I'm still going through all the cards but will have a lot to trade. If anyone has any late-90s sets, teams, or players they'd like me to look out for, let me know!