Traveling box loot

White Sox Cards' post on what he picked up from the Traveling Card Box of Awesomeness reminded me that I haven't done my post on that yet. And I was the first one to get the box! I am a bad blogger. What is the Traveling Box? It's a little project Bad Wax put together. A group of collectors all donate some good cards that they don't need and/or want. All the cards get put in a box and shipped around the country to various collectors who take out cards they want and replace them with cards of equal value. There was a ton of great stuff in the box but I limited myself to 5 cards and I let my son pick out one for himself. Here's my loot:

This is actually my son's loot. I allowed him to choose one for himself and he went with the Orioles' hat logo card of Jim Palmer. He almost snagged Steve's Frank Thomas/Jeff Bagwell/Carlos Delgado triple relic but opted for the Manu-Patch instead. I was relieved because I wasn't entirely sure what I could replace that one with.

First pickup out of the box was a 1969 Joe Niekro card I needed for my 'set'. I'm not really working on the 1969 Topps set and I probably never will, but I attacked the vintage in this box with great ferocity. If I didn't have it before, I had it now.

Next up is a 1971 Topps card of Barry's pop. 1971 Topps I will most likely end up collecting in full force as soon as my 1972 set is complete through at least series 4. I'm actually pretty close to completing Series 1.

1960 Topps is another of my favorite sets so I had to pick up the Ashburn. Richie Ashburn on the Cubs is a tad odd. Also odd is that I picked up more Cubs cards out of the box than Braves cards. Yes, I even left Braves in the box. I tried to replace relic with relic, vintage with vintage, etc. but this one I couldn't find a good match so I snuck in a nice Cub card as a replacement.

Ah, now we're in serious card territory. All cards were ranked in tiers, $5-10, $10-15, $15-20 and so on. I don't remember the exact tier of this card but it was in the next to highest tier worth of cards in the box. I have an accidentally good collection of Al Kaline cards as my mother brought me back a 9-pocket page full of vintage Kalines from a business trip when I was a kid. I did not have the '59 already, so this was good luck.

Ok now the doozy:

Amidst the vintage a 2012 card appears! So. I love Yogi Berra. He's right up there with Kurt Vonnegut, Bill Hicks and Pinkie Pie as far as personal spiritual gurus go for me. I also like old coins, especially silver ones. I saw this and thought I MUST HAZ. So I did. I had to pony up a fairly serious card to get it but I think I left the box in better shape than I found it.

I also snagged this custom card of a 1976 Topps Dale Murphy card. There were three custom cards in there but they weren't on the main card list for the box. I left two sketch cards in the box in exchange for this one. One silly, one mostly not silly.

We were instructed not to give away what cards were added to the box so the suspense would be greater. I scanned all of 'em anyway and I'm going to cheat a bit by showing off a little teaser of the stuff I put in the box. I hope I'm not kicked out of the rotation! Two cards I put in the box were picked up in this haul so at least the peeps like my stuff.