$25 from a 5/$1 box at an LCS. IDENTIFY THIS CARD!

First, let's do just a little bit of math. If I spent $25 at a card shop, with each card being 20 cents each (five for a buck), how much is that?

Very good! 125 cards!

How many cards were in the box that I spent $25 on? Well, much more than 125. Try over 600.

Yup, I pulled cards from a quarter box and paid about a nickel each. Now I know what you're saying: "Ryan, what exactly could you get from a card shop quarter box that the dealer would let you have for a nickel each?"

I'll tell you: a little bit of everything. And it wasn't all commons. In fact, it was a pretty good quarter box, with 90% of the base cards being semistars to stars, and probably 30% of the cards were decent inserts.

Let's see, I added a couple dozen cards to my awards collection, and another dozen cards to my player collection (several Frank Thomas, notably). I found nine Ted Williams Card Company cards with the AAGPBL players on them (missing one card from the 1994 subset now, #93). I wish Topps would issue an AAGPBL set or subset. I guess they can't, with their license. Upper Deck, want to take a stab? Or is the Fritsch set good enough for the world? They claim to have the exclusive license, so I guess it wasn't meant to be.

What else did I find? I pulled out a bunch of singles from Gold Label and E-X sets to assist (or start) with set building. I probably shouldn't be chasing them when I have so many other sets to go after, but they're just so cool!

Speaking of set building, I snagged a few Diamond King singles and other inserts for a smattering of set-building goals.

And that ultimate insane endeavor of accumulation, my Cardboard Zoo collection, topped 20% after cataloging over 50 new cards. There were several great 1990s and early 2000s inserts that really helped me out.

But that's nowhere near 600 cards that went toward my collections. I spent way too long just digging through the quarter box, and didn't have time to then check my lists to verify if I actually needed many of the cards. There are probably 400 extra cards now sitting next to the CLEARANCE stacks, ready to be added in.

If I had been more careful, I could have had a much smaller stack, and thus possibly gotten away with only a $10 purchase, but I still feel I got my money's worth. There were a few gems that I need to properly catalog to add to my collection, which you'll see here.

 First, help me identify this card! As you can see, it was cut from something like a cardboard box. The back is regular gray/brown cardboard, with some basic statistics printed in black. Is has the MLB and MLBPA logos, but no copyright year. The statistics for A-Rod go from 1994-1996, which makes me think it's a 1997 issue. Obviously it was issued by or with Pinnacle, but I can't find a record of any kind of unnumbered Pinnacle box cards. I might be missing something easy, or maybe this is a true mystery. If you have any info, please share in the comments below.

Next, other than the A-Rod, I pulled what were probably the three most oddballish cards from the boxes.

 The Fred Lynn card comes from 2009 Press Pass Fusion, which has 12 baseball players in its base checklist. There is one woman in the multisport issue, Cat Osterman. I want that card. Not obsessively, mind you. But it belongs in my Women In Sports collection, right?

Next, three cards that aren't in the Beckett database.

 The first two are part of a five-card Ralph Kiner set (numbered 3 of 5 and 4 of 5). The horizontal card below is numbered 3 of 5, and is part of a Lou Boudreau set.

 Both sets carry copyrights stating "1994 The Trading Card Company, Inc" or a variation thereof, with the Boudreau card including a small "Official Player Licenses" logo. The logo on the front looks like it might be a backwards F and forwards R, followed by Premium. They were issued by Front Row, and are a big improvement from the first player sets released in 1992. For some reason, Beckett hasn't cataloged them, though SCD has. I'll have to add these in manually!

I still have a treat from this lot to show you a little later today! Random video time!

Are you reading the captions? I hope so.