Cardinal Clinchers

I know I'm a little bit late on this, but a hearty congrats is due for the 2009 St. Louis Cardinals, who clinched the NL Central title Saturday night with a win over Colorado. I thought I would also take this time to show off a few random cards that I picked up at a card show earlier this month. I picked up some stuff to top off some trades that were in the works, but I also found some time to buy a few things for myself.

By the way, is 2009 O-Pee-Chee supposed to be funny? Is this set the baseball card equivalent of a B-movie?

One table had stacks and stacks of 2007 UD Masterpieces Captured on Canvas cards, of which I bought 3. This is the only one I kept. Chris Carpenter has had a tremendous season. He's been nearly unhittable for stretches and he should be a strong candidate for Comeback Player of the Year.

I grabbed a whole stack of 2009 Allen & Ginter cards, most of which are Cardinals. As with the other sets that I collect, I feel the need to get at least two copies of each Cardinals card. I'm sure there are other team collectors who do this. Colby Rasmus has not the kind of rookie season that, for example, Ryan Braun had in 2007, but he's shown plenty of the reasons why he was such a highly touted prospect and should man center field at Busch III for years to come. Plus, he plays much better defense than Ryan Braun could even dream about.

Ho hum, another year, another MVP-caliber season for Albert Pujols. His amount of errors has jumped a little bit this season, but everything else he's done has been an improvement over his 2008... when he won the MVP. This Goudey red back mini was in a $1 bin, which is a pretty decent bargain if you ask me. I have no idea why Blogger decided to make it look bigger than the rest of the cards.

Yadier Molina had a down year, by his standards, behind the plate last year. He was promptly rewarded with a Gold Glove award, probably because he had perhaps his best season to date behind the plate. This year his fielding numbers are way up, so I fully expect the morons who pick people for this award to give it to someone else. The 2009 Cardinals have the fewest number of stolen base attempts against, and it's not even a close race. This rookie card is the first I've seen of the 2004 Bazooka set and was a nice find in a 10 cent bin. According to Beckett, there's a "w/ bat" version of this card out there that probably features a different photo.

Co-Signers is kind of a silly set. I'll leave it at that.

I found a number of 1998 Fleer Sports Illustrated "World Series Fever" cards at the show as well.

These full bleed cards are pretty nice looking, although I could do without the gigantic player name font.

This Lou Brock card uses what I assume to be an an actual SI magazine cover. You can see the World Series bunting in the background, which is cool.

Enos Slaughter predates Sports Illustrated, so it looks like they chose to capture him in a different kind of subset. I'm glad they didn't colorize the photo like they seem to do now.

Finally, here's Jason Marquis. I actually took a bit of ribbing from one of the dealers for buying this card. At least, I assume that's what was going on. The guy said something like "hey, you took my Marquis" and I wasn't sure if he was being serious. Marquis has the rare distinction of having made the postseason in every season he's played in the majors. However, he was left off of the NLCS and World Series rosters in 2006 as he was completely useless in the second half of the season and wound up with an ERA north of 6.00. He's had a pretty solid season for the Rockies this year, and it appears that they have a decent chance of making the postseason once again as Colorado is trying to hold off Atlanta for the NL wild card spot.

I've received six packages in the past couple of days, so I'll have some more trade posts up here soon. Here's to hoping the Cardinals have an injury-free final week and bring some good momentum with them into the playoffs.