My Broadway baseball card hook-up

It's funny that I posted recently mentioning how there are virtually no baseball card stores in Manhattan. Just this week I came across a street vendor on 37th Street and Broadway selling baseball cards! He has lots of packs of current stuff, and lots of vintage cards in plastics, neither of which is really what I look for. I asked the vendor, Al, if he had any big boxes of recent commons, and he said he could put something together for me. I wasn't expecting much, just a lot of junk wax that I would probably have to say "no, thank you" to. Instead he put together a box that definitely exceeded my expectations. There were easily a thousand cards, pretty evenly split between baseball, football and basketball, and very few of the baseball were common cards. Most of it was late 90s early 00s, exactly the area where my collection is weakest, and it was spread among all kinds of cards. He asked for $3 for the box, and there are probably 300 cards in there that I need just for my baseball card collection, so definitely a real good buy.

Even better, Al says he could probably put together nine more boxes like this one. With no car (and nowhere to park anyway) he can't carry too many cards at once. At $3 a box I'll gladly come by his table over the next two weeks and scoop up more boxes, assuming they are all like this one.

It's funny because I had just finished sorting cards for the Trade-A-Thon and told everyone I was ready to ship. Now that's obviously going to wait as there are going to be some more cards to add to everyone's packages (especially those of you getting basketball cards!). This will probably benefit team collectors most but I'll mention if there are certain sets that I might be able to help set-builders with. From this box the cards with the most to trade will be 1994, 1995 and 2007 Topps baseball, and 2002-2003 Fleer Tradition basketball.

Here are a few of the highlights from this first box:

Looks like Neifi Perez was an early proponent of Wallet Card!

 Sure, there were some junk wax-era cards, but even then there were occasional parallels, like 1993 Topps Gold Yankees!

 

A neat Aaron Boone card from Upper Deck.

As well as his card from the infamous Skybox thunder set with it's terrible raps on the back.

That "street" style of language for 1998 Skybox was also prominent in their football set, which included a Super Bowl subset which featured beautiful, full-bleed photography on the front...

 And ridiculous wannabe street slang on the back. If I had been a Bronco fan those backs would have definitely annoyed me.