Jo-Jo and Dizzy: eBaying for Vintage

I lucked into some swell vintage on eBay recently, and for a decent price. First off, another addition to the vintage Bowman Tigers team sets.

Dizzy Trout is looking pretty nerdy here, and this may be one of the worst backgrounds for a posed card ever. It looks like they caught Dizzy just turning away from the bathroom urinal. And all that awkwardness makes this card all the better. I got it for around $2 shipped, and it's not in terrible shape, despite the tape marks.

Pretty typical Bowman card back here. Some crammed stats. Signature Bowman sentence fragment.

The other vintage card I recently picked up I'm even more excited about.

This one ran me $6 shipped, which is a hell of a deal for an original Diamond Stars card in this kind of condition. I found this as a Buy It Now, and that took me about a minute to make my decision to click. I absolutely love the design of this set, the art deco backgrounds, the primary colors, the comic book-looking players. I'd love to go after the Tigers team for this set, but there are some cards in there I'll probably never be able to justify spending.

One of the coolest elements of this set is the card back. Rather than stats, Diamond Stars opted for mini-lessons on playing baseball, geared toward children. Remember when cards were for kids? They still are for me. Collecting brings out the twelve-year-old inside of me. Here we get a lesson on sliding, discussing Jo-Jo's "kicking slide." And Jo-Jo was pretty successful at stealing in his career, being top ten in the league for steals three different seasons. I love what they say about the kicking slide: "This is not recommended to boys, for the reason that even ordinary types of sliding are dangerous unless carefully practiced." You can tell they were a little worried about liability here. They didn't want little Timmy's mom to sue them after he snapped his shin.

So, pretty nice work on the eBay vintage here, eh? Has anyone else snagged any Diamond Stars deals online? It's such a great set, but hard to not break the bank collecting it.