Epic Trade with Chris from OH

I try to limit my use of the word "epic" to describe anything, lest I feel like I'm part of a Bill and Ted's Excellent movie. But I'm not sure how else to describe a trade I went through with awhile back with reader Chris from OH. Chris has a robust want list and trade list set up at his website, which I literally spent nearly a week's worth of after-work time poring over until I figured out what I wanted and what I could send him. I seem to get rather intimidated by these large packages when I receive them, but then I have to realize that the posts that are primarily about Cardinals cards are some of the easiest (least time consuming, anyway) for me to write. Of course, to keep things relatively brief, I hand-picked some favorites to show here.

I'm not sure where you get "Jeff" when you mean "Terry". It's not like this is a typo. This is Pendleton's rookie card, and there's also a corrected version. I'm not certain that either card is significantly more difficult to find than the other. I did not own either (I'm very lacking on a lot of key Cardinals '80s rookies for whatever reason) so I'm very happy to see this one.

This is an absolutely perfect card of Yadi laying down a bunt. The ball looks like it's glued to the bat.

Here's Willie McGee in late career mode. The photo is a perfectly framed close-up shot. You don't see this a lot anymore.

I scanned this Ken Hill Topps Finest card mostly just to see how it would scan. I love getting gaudy high-end cards like this, knowing that it probably came out of a really expensive pack at one time but is now worth no more than a nickel or so because it's just Ken Hill.

I'm starting to go through my collection to pull out the non-Cardinals Darryl Kile cards so that I can add them to my binders for actual keeping. I need a lot more of his cards.

HoloGRFX is apparently the actual name of a real baseball card set. This card looks like a cut scene from a video game.

I really like the dark black & gold look of this set. This is one of 3 cards I got from 2007 SP Legendary Cuts. Very classy. It's like the fine wine of baseball card sets that many make a huge fuss about but I tend to just smile and nod and look at from afar.

I only chose to show this Yadi card because it's from 2007 and he's wearing #74 like he is a AA fringe prospect playing spring ball. Molina has worn #4 since 2006 when Braden Looper came back to the team and took Yadi's old #41. I would guess that this photo is from 2004 or earlier, which is rather moronic. You can even look back to a card from an earlier Upper Deck produced set that captured Yadi in his current uniform.

This is an Albert Pujols card from 2009 "A Piece of History". I'm not sure why anyone would bother with a set like this. The photo only barely takes up about half of the card space.

Here's a candidate for most boring Pujols card of all-time. This is from 2005 Upper Deck, which is not a design I can get behind. However, I didn't have the card previously, so it's a good one nonetheless.

Brendan Ryan has been playing some exemplary baseball of late as he's finally getting regular playing time at the major league level. This was a nice card to get as it's supposedly a first year "rookie" card.

It turns out that I already own this Ozzie Sportflics card, but I felt like I needed to scan it anyway just to see how the image turned out. I need more Sportflics.

In the waning days of Fleer, before Upper Deck tookover and killed it, it seems that they used to like to recycle designs of their '80s glory days. These cards are pretty faithful to the '87 design, but the glossy coating on the cards ruins it a bit for me.

This shows why Stadium Club cards are awesome. Lankford is nowhere near hitting the baseball, which is funny.

I'm not sure what this set is ("E-XL"?) but it's a pretty cool looking framed card. I wouldn't mind more of these.

This isn't the best looking design, but it's "Chrome" and it's Skip Schumaker's "first year" so that counts for something.

I also got a stack of 2008 Topps Heritage cards from Chris. I have a feeling that I'll be working on that set long after computers and "the internet" are deemed completely useless and obsolete. There were also several other Jim Edmonds, Darryl Kile and Chris Carpenter cards that I picked out for the trade even though they were pictured in previous team's uniforms. That's perfectly okay, though, because I've decided that I want to collect DK and Carp no matter what team they're pictured with. I had already decided long ago to do this with Edmonds. If anyone out there has any cards of these guys that you want to part with, please let me know. In the meantime, I picked out my favorite non-Cardinal photo of the lot. I definitely need to update my Edmonds Zistle collection.