I can't collect modern archive styles...

…without collecting the original:

Had a very nice visit to my not-that-local card shop (65 mile drive) yesterday. It was the best possible day to visit the LCS.

The day the new cards come in?

Nope. The day the owner of the shop had just purchased a new random collection that no one had looked through yet!

I pulled the above treasure immediately. Two bucks, out the door - though I found some other wonderful treasures to share with you soon, though not the ones I walked in for, as the new Stadium Club was all sold out and the new Update wasn't in yet (in the LCS round of the playoffs….Topps slips more and more on this each passing year). And now as you are reading this, I will be scanning some of the wonderful replacement treasures I found….

As I mentioned the other day, 1972 is one of my favorite designs. Unfortunately, I haven't really collected the originals very seriously and own just a handful of them. I could change that with just a few clicks of a mouse of course, and I might some day. But until that day I'll just pick up 72s when I run across them. I could have just asked my friendly local card shop owner right there on the spot and I'm sure he could have got me started with 100 commons for a carefully calculated price of "ahh, those would book at twenty, so how about eight bucks?" Maybe next time.

The shop I picked this up at hasn't been in my FLCS review series, but it will soon. There is actually a shop ahead of it on my list.

Such a pick-up this card was. When I was young, my first baseball memories are from 1975. Living in the mountains of West Virginia, I pulled for the Pirates in the National League due to their minor league team being the only baseball team in the double-U-V, and the Red Sox because my mom's best-neighbor-lady-friend was from Massachusetts. And she was the only grown-up I knew who had enough of an interest in baseball to comment on the sport, which was good enough for me.

Of course, 1975 is an epic year in Red Sox history, even though it was a bit of an off year for Yaz. I'm sure I'll return to 1975 on this blog plenty. I didn't know or care that Carl didn't produce as normally that year. He was YAZ. Last winner of the Triple Crown, all that.

Right now would be the time to pull out my first Carl Yastrzemski card, but my vintage collection is still locked in it's storage unit prison. (Stupid work).

So I could only show this one. I would have purchased it regardless, and it is definitely now the A #1 1972 baseball card that I own, but it also fits in with another collection I've been occasionally building a little pile of, that I will now add to my blog index: A Tree On My Baseball Card?

This card has a glorious lurking Tree there in the background amidst other miscellaneously dark, threatening shrubbery; a pity that 1971 camera technology didn't dial it into focus the way modern equipment would have. (We are so spoiled these days). I'm thinking a solid specimen of Southern Yellow Pine somewhere there in Winter Haven, though even with a very intimate knowledge of the three Pines that get lumped in to the generic Southern Yellow Pine name, I can't be 100% sure it is actually a Pine.

The one thing I struggle with while making some mini collections is whether a card should go in the set it came from, or only in the mini-collection, or whether I should just set aside an extra copy of it in that little pile.

Hmmmm, looks like I will have to be keeping an eye out for another one of these tell-tale psychedelic green-orange-yellow Sox…...