On the Road to Pittsburgh : Sports Card Shopping in the Steel City

 

Thomas Wolfe was wrong.

            You can go home again.

            I’m sure I make that joke every single time I go back to Pittsburgh and write about it on here, or elsewhere. I get it that I’m not quite getting what Wolfe was getting at. I’m no Wolfe scholar. I’ve read a bio on him, and visited a few places he lived in New York City…and that’s about it.

            I still can’t make it through one of his novels.

            But I digress.

            You can go home again and the wonderful thing for me is, the older I get, the more I leave the baggage of why I left home in the first place, sitting at someone else’s door. When I was a younger man, I couldn’t wait to leave Pittsburgh. I wanted to leave so badly but had no way to leave. It became a running joke, my desire to flee.

My parents called me George Bailey.

But I did get out. And getting out is hard. Especially moving to somewhere like New York City. Nothing prepares you for the place. It took me six months to even feel like I scratched the surface. Eighteen years later and I’m still sometimes like, what in the hell am I doing here. But leaving helped me appreciate where I came from a great deal more than it ever did when I was living there and dreaming of being somewhere else.

            That is to say, I like Pittsburgh.

I get a little smile when I get off the plane and this guy is waiting to greet me.

And being a sports card collector, coming home to Pittsburgh is a good way for me to stock up on all things, Pirates, Steelers, and Penguins.

The first place I hit was the Baseball Card Castle on Route 19 in Cranberry Township.  

            Cranberry is a sprawling suburb about 21 miles north of the city of Pittsburgh. The Penguins train in Cranberry, for all of you hockey fans out there. I lifetime ago I dated a girl from Cranberry and spent a good deal of time in its fast-food restaurants and strip malls. That was 1994. It amazes me how much the place has built up since then. Commerce is a strong draw toward available land.

But, again, I digress.

I first went to the Baseball Card Castle back in December 2021. I love it. It’s an old school card shop in the truest form, and not lacking in size. Any collector would get a kick out of the Baseball Card Castle, and maybe feel like they’ve been taken for a nostalgia ride back to the heyday of the local LCS. The display cases are stuffed with cards and team sets, especially those of the three big local teams. There are pack and wax boxes galore. The walls are covered with purchasable ephemera, and in the back of the store there are shelved filled with baseball, football, basketball and hockey sets from the 1980s on up to now.

In fact, I bought me a set that I’ve really been digging lately.

I think because I didn't have much access to them, there's still a certain mystique that exists between me and mid-80's Donruss sets. Anything 1984-1986 Donruss and I'm on board.

Also...am I the only one who still thinks it's cool and interesting seeing Charlie Hustle in an Expos uni?

Any good LCS that’s worth it salt will have its share of 25-cent to 1-dollar bins for customers to peruse. Baseball Card Castle was no slouch there. In the limited time I had, I was able to spend some time going through the Pirates and Steelers boxes.

I came up with these gems.

Even grabbed a couple of Pirates team sets from the late 90's and 2000.

            I still can't get over how few cards Topps was putting into their sets during that era. The 25-card team sets that I always looked forward to buying or putting together, were wittled down to maybe a 10-card team set.

To be honest, if I had the money or the gall, I could spend a thousand bucks in the Baseball Card Castle without thinking about it.

Good thing I’m a cheapskate.

The other place I make it a point to visit, is Rossi’s flea market. 

(and,yes, that is a former movie theater)

I’ve mentioned Rossi’s here before, but it bears repeating that it’s a pretty decent flea market in the East suburbs of Pittsburgh. They have three card dealers that I especially like to visit. Again, these guys are pretty local team heavy. But one did have a 25-cent box where I managed to walk away with these guys.

1979 Willie McCovey for a dollar? Okay!

A 1966 Lou Brock that’s a little bit loved for $3. Okay!

One of the other dealers at Rossi’s had a dollar box and I found these guys to add to my PC for each of the players.

(pay no attention to the prices listed on the cards)

I actually have the Tekulve and Candelaria rookies, but I added them to the 1976 Topps set that I’m beyond slowly building. And I mean slowly building. This dealer also had a box of Pirates cards from the 1970s to now that he was selling for 10-cents apiece. So I helped myself out to a few other Buccos I like to collect.

    

            

            Of course, I had to get me a 10-cent Otter!

Can’t beat Pirates team sets for 25-cents.

Or even one for $2.

This team set that I found was of particular interest to me.

The above are cards from the 1989 Very Fine Juice Pittsburgh Pirates team set. This is where memory is tricky. In my head, I remembered this team set being issued in the 1989 Pittsburgh Pirates yearbook. It wasn’t. The 30-card set was actually given away to fans at a Pirates home game on April 23, 1989. And thank you Beckett Marketplace for that information. I don’t know about you, but I like having oddball team sets for my favorite team. Especially one from the era where I was a heavy collector.

Very Fine even does a decent job with the backs of the cards.

Yeah, it’s plain. But it’s informative.

And the yearbook set I was thinking of was issued in 1985. Gotta find that one!

Other than Pirates, he did have some boxes for star-cards from the 1950s on up, which I took a look through. A lot of the cards were reasonably priced. But here’s the thing I hate about being a modern collector. Nearly every card I looked at, I kept saying to myself, could I get that cheaper on ComC? SportLots? Thinking like that caused me to pass up a pretty decent 1968 Ernie Banks and 1968 Willie McCovey card.

But I did snag a 1974 Bob Gibson for two-bucks.

I will say that the Banks and McCovey cards were comparably priced on ComC. But I still should’ve bought them then and there.

I think a problem I have as a collector, especially when it comes to players who played before I was a fan of the game, is that I feel like I should grab as many of their cards as I can when I find them reasonably priced. Like the Gibson or the Lou Brock.

Or even this guy whom I found lurking in the 25-cent bins.

I’ve gotten better at knowing what I want to collect. Especially regarding set-building and collecting Pittsburgh teams. But it’s these individual legends, hall of famers, where I’m still just buying random guys when I find them. Not that there’s anything random about Lou Brock or Bob Gibson. I think I might take a look at the ol’ Hall of Famer box at home and really sit down and decide on a core of maybe five to ten players (not counting Pirates) whom I really want to have as a part of my PC. Then maybe I’ll be better prepared when going through star-card boxes.

But I digress yet again.

Speaking of legends, this isn’t totally card related, but when I was home in Pittsburgh, I finally got to go here courtesy of dear ol’ dad.

It’s the Roberto Clemente Museum!

I had been wanting to go to the Roberto Clemente Museum for a good long while now, so this was a real treat.  The museum is by guided tour only. I won’t go over a ton except to say that they do a pretty great job of discuss Clemente’s life, his playing, and his humanitarian efforts. There is a ton of memorabilia there: bats, uniforms, gold gloves, photos, etc.

There’s even the Pirates bench from Three Rivers Stadium.

Imagine the talent that sat there: Clemente, Mazeroski, Stargell, Dave Parker, Al Oliver, Barry Bonds, Bobby Bonilla, and Andy Van Slyke, just to name a few.

And for the sports card enthusiasts there are these babies.

Yep, that’s the entire Topps (and a '63 Fleer for good measure) base run of Clemente cards. There were others, but I wanted a photo of the base. Nothing is graded below an 8. Opinions on grading aside, that’s pretty impressive.

And one day that 1955 rookie card will be mine!

Thanks for reading! Happy collecting!

 Next Friday: let’s take a deeper look at that 1985 Donruss set and talk about 1985 cards in general.