Missing My Old LCS

In July, my family and I took a trip back to Southern California to visit some family and friends and beach time.  Being in the center of the country is pretty nice but having never been more than 2 hours from the beach my entire life, the sand and surf was a definite need.

Another need was a visit to my South Orange County former LCS, MVP Sports Cards.  In my decade plus in South OC, I built up a strong friendship with the husband and wife owner team and was looking forward to the visit and hoped I might be lucky enough to find a few cards to add to my collection.  I was able to accomplish both.

They had helped me immensely on my 1970 set build and the first thing I asked to see was the 1972 Topps box.  I am down to needing cards from mostly the final 2 series and I was able to knock off 24 cards from my want list at a pretty reasonable price.  This is the biggest chunk of the higher series I have been able to knock off at one time.

Not a ton of star power but a few well known names to go with this Expos team card.  Sorry for the upside down In Action card, I am usually not that sloppy.

Some cool photography in this grouping, with a nice bat barrel on the Reese card, a great posed shot with awesome A's uniform on the Bando card and quite a few cool spring training backgrounds.

I nice final grouping of high numbers with some good backgrounds, nice A's unis and a pair of rookie (non) stars.

Next up they pulled up their eBay page and I did a quick search for Giants.  I was able to pick up this nice looking 1951 Bowman Bill Rigney card that I needed for my team set.  Not a grading expert but this looks better than a 5 to me.

I am not a massive collector of graded cards but a few years back a guy brought in 2 big boxes of Reggie Bush graded rookie cards he had invested in during 2006.  Most were PSA 10s with a couple 9s mixed in.  I decided to pick out 4 cards and built a nice Reggie PSA 10 rookie collection for $15.  The owner said he picked them up for $3-7 each, imagine the loss the original guy took on these.

The final two purchases came from a large box of Star and HOF autos they pulled out.  I had never seen this Orlando Cepeda card and really like the design, photo and inscription so I pulled the trigger.

And the final card is a big one for me, a brand new Willie McCovey auto numbered 17/25.  I had the other version /45 already in my collection but this one was new. I am very glad to have want lists on my blog page as I wasn't quite sure if this was a card I had or not.  Now it resides nicely in my Volume 3 (of 4) McCovey binder with the other cards from around 2007.

I spied a couple other cards I really wanted to get but wasn't ready to spend that much as my vacation wasn't cheap.  I plan on reaching out in the next month or two to see if the cards I had my eye on are still around.  MVP Sportscards has been my favorite LCS by far and I was glad to get back for a visit.