Another store, another visit

 (The final battle to reach the Cardboard Appreciation Hall of Fame is going on right now! Have you voted? If not, please vote in the poll by copy-and-pasting this link: https://vote.easypolls.net/62e4287f8d4471006256dcda. I probably will be badgering you about this all week). 

 

I went to Buffalo for a couple of days to visit family last week. It's really my favorite place in all of the world and the wife and I actually had the first of what will probably be a few conversations about retiring there someday.

 

There is so much that I want to do there when I go, but I don't get to do even one-quarter of it, because I never have much time and family takes up most of it.

 

But I did manage to stop by Dave & Adam's this time around.

 

Dave & Adam's is a major online card collecting presence and has been for years and years. It was born right in Buffalo with a small card shop in the early 1990s. I had moved out of Buffalo by that point and didn't actually walk into a Dave & Adam's until the early days of this blog. I remember picking up a blaster of 2008 Upper Deck Timeline then.

 

That's what Dave & Adam's looked like in 2008. It was located in a strip-mall on Sheridan Drive, which is the main northern Buffalo shopping strip that extends all the way out into the eastern suburbs.

Three years later I was back at Dave & Adam's, although it had changed locations. It was now located on outer Niagara Falls Boulevard. The building was newer than the previous one but the space inside pretty much the same. You could tell much of their business was online.

I bought some 2011 Lineage there that day, my first sampling of the product, and it sent me on a mission to complete the '75 minis from that set. But outside of maybe an online purchase or two from the store site, that's all the time I had spent on Dave & Adam's until last week.

I knew they had moved into a much larger store about seven years ago. I finally looked it up. They were back on Sheridan Drive again, although much closer to the hub of everything commerce in Buffalo, which is near Transit and Sheridan. The new building (pic of it up top) sits next to the Eastern Hills Mall.

It's very large inside and it's expanded way beyond cards. Like many sports collectible stores now, Dave & Adam's emphasizes the memorabilia and clothing and it's the first thing you see when you walk in.

That's my picture. I wanted to get a shot of the Topps clothing display. Of course, this threw off Twitter folks who thought it was a Topps clothing store and focused immediately on the prices of things. Guys, sweatshirts and hoodies with branding on them will always be overpriced no matter where. Don't buy it. But that's where the money is made because people do buy it.

I wasn't going to purchase anything here -- sports clothing is really not my thing outside of a couple Dodgers items -- but then some worker strode past and mentioned everything was on sale because of their Christmas in July sale ("except anything Josh Allen," he added). I still wasn't going to buy anything but I did look closer and I found something that spoke to me immediately.

 

It's those red T-shirts in the middle of the picture there. Here, let me model one for you:

 

1975 baby!!

I knew I had to have it. This is not an exact replica of the 1975 Topps wax wrapper -- I'm not sure why it's different -- but it's close enough that I knew immediately what it was. Here is the wrapper from that year:

Gets the job done. I put that shirt on the very next day and it's been a long, long, long time since I wore a shirt that I didn't want to take off.

That was the end of my interest in the clothing. The store is packed with Bills and Sabres gear and jerseys and signed jerseys and wall hangings and key chains and games about Buffalo and holy crap, everything. Josh Allen is everywhere in that store. My wife, a native, has become a bit of a Bills nut and she was checking out a bunch of stuff but didn't end up buying anything. But I can see how this section of the store would be wildly popular with the people of Buffalo, collectors or not.

While walking through there I noted a sign that said Rickey Henderson would be signing there next month. My brother had mentioned that the previous day. But he didn't mention that Andre Dawson would be signing there two weeks earlier. I don't stand in line for signatures, but you couldn't pick two better baseball celebrities.

From the front of the store we ventured into the middle area, which is the card section. It's much more primitive, no carpeting and few bells and whistles. There are display islands and counters everywhere. Some contain the latest brands in blaster and box form. Some contain rows and rows and rows of singles. There was an awful lot of football and basketball singles -- stuff that I whisk right past. There was some hockey, too. I wandered over to where the supply displays were and instantly wished I had a store like this near me. I looked to the back of the store and noted a bunch of cafeteria style tables and chairs, which I assumed were there for gaming nights at the store.

 

Then I wandered back and took a look at an island that contained mostly baseball singles -- all recent stuff -- and noted that everything there was half price.

Over at the main display area, which looks like a jewelry counter, the employee who mentioned the sale was occupied by the usual card dudes, some beefy guy with a backward baseball cap and another general dude and a hyperactive kid. I noticed at my display island about 12 feet away that there was a fancy Mookie Betts and Clayton Kershaw that would be nice to have. But there was no way the employee would notice me and I didn't feel like interrupting a conversation that was sure to be about Bowman's Best or Panini Whatever.

But the employee spotted me right away and asked if I needed help. I was impressed and said so. "I don't know why it's busy," he answered. "Maybe because it rained earlier."  But there were probably 20 customers in the store.

 

I bought these two cards for half price:

 

How about that? A Bowman card and a Panini card. Heh.

The Betts is from last year and is numbered to 250. The Kershaw is from 2020 and the "neon green" parallel and numbered to 99. Fifteen bucks for the two, not a steal but not too bad.

The card area was a little bit empty although hardly lacking. I got the impression that a lot of inventory and employees were in Atlantic City at the National. This is what the card area looks like usually:

I will say that the jewelry counter display over to the left was NOT empty when I was there.

Dave & Adam's usually deals in current stuff at its brick-and-mortar places and that's not really my scene. But I get a kick out of visiting it and it's totally cool that one of the main online sites in the entire card world is based in Buffalo. And three visits now -- at three different store sites -- and almost no complaints.

(This is where someone will comment with "I ordered a box from them one time and it arrived dented and they wouldn't refund my order. One star" ... You get that every time you discuss a well-known business).

We then took a stroll through the nearby mall -- which was half-closed what with the limited hours all stores seem to be moving toward these days -- and I found a fantastic antique place that I could have wandered through for another two hours. It had plenty of cards, too (money was tight though). "If we lived here I'd be stopping here every week," I told my wife. A few days earlier, we had taken a visit through four antique places where I live and the only cards I found were overpriced junk wax.

After that, we made the sad trip back home, where there is no Dave & Adam's or wonderful antique shop or Bills fans everywhere, just people who look at you blankly when you say how fantastic Buffalo is and how much there is to do there. But we did stop on the way home to watch a Syracuse Mets game that evening.

It was a pretty standard experience, a brief rain storm delayed things a half hour. I like to spot the former major leaguers on the roster. There was one notable on the Mets' opponent, the Omaha Storm Chasers, who was there on a rehab assignment.

That's the Royals' Salvador Perez at the plate. He was taken out of the game after two at-bats and I didn't realize it was because he could be in the Royals' lineup in New York the next day. I'm watching the Yankees-Royals game the following day and there he is! (He hit a three-run homer, too).

Anyway, the Syracuse game ended in dramatic fashion with a Mets victory, 5-3. I thought for sure we'd be in for extra innings (normally I'm totally up for that, but I was really tired). Then the Storm Chasers changed their pitcher after one out in the bottom of the ninth (why?). The first Mets batter to face the new pitcher tripled. Up next, Francisco Alvarez, the Mets' top prospect, hit a two-run walk-off homer off the light tower.

Amazingly that was the first walk-off home run I have ever seen in person in all my viewings of professional baseball games. I guess they're quite rare -- despite the many I've seen watching TV -- or I'm quite unlucky.

There's the wet celebration.

 

So that was my couple days away with, fortunately, quite a bit of sports. No, it wasn't the National. But it was much more my kind of scene -- even if there wasn't a vintage card in sight. 

You know, National, you could put one of those things in Buffalo one of these times.