A couple from the quarter box

I hit the card shop with the quarter box again today, vintage lists in hand. Unfortunately, I bragged too much about how I found a quarter box with early '70s cards in it.

The '70s cards were almost completely wiped out.

Luckily, I had already gotten all the semi-high numbered cards and as many '72s off my wantlist that I could find before the vintage goodness evaporated. I am nothing if not flexible in my card-scrounging skills and I still managed to walk out of the shop with a large pile of swag. There was quite a bit of 2010 short prints, inserts and parallels in the box and I managed to get some quarter goodies. Here are a couple that fit a theme.

Here's a 1954 Topps Yo Momma of Al Kaline. Al's rookie card is the second best card from the '54 set and is pretty iconic in its own right. I've always liked Al and not just because my nerdy sciencey self snickered a bit at his name when I was a kid. One time when my mom was out on a business trip, she came home with a couple of pages of baseball cards for me that she found at an antique shop. Two pages of vintage Al Kaline cards. The '54 wasn't in there but there was a really nice 1960 card of Al that I still cherish. That card is the exact opposite of a card Yo Momma threw out. I found a nice pile of these in the box and nabbed them all. I also found this:

Here's a National Chicle short print of Reid Gorecki. Reid made his debut with the Braves last year and played in 31 games mostly as a defensive replacement and pinch runner. He was released after the season and is now in the Yankees' minor league system. I'm kind of bummed about that now, after appearing in just about every early 2010 set as a Brave, he finally gets a really cool card and is now a Yankee. Them's the breaks.

What a Hall of Fame Tiger and a journeyman rookie have in common, I don't know. The '54 Topps design ties them together at least on a couple of quarter cards.