Cards from the Dark Side

I received a huge stack of Cardinals cards in the mail recently from Cubs fan Chris of On Card Autos. Amazingly, none of the cards appeared to be intentionally damaged in any way. No one had mustaches drawn onto their faces with a Sharpie or had their faces scratched out by ball-point pens. Even Albert Pujols remained unscathed.

One of the first cards to catch my eye was Nathan Southard's 2007 Bowman Heritage Prospects card. Bowman Heritage has been on the backburner as far as stuff I want to collect, but I'm always keeping my eyes peeled for it. I thought I had all or most of the Cardinals already, but I had never seen or heard of this Southard guy. He only logged 65 relatively unsuccessful at-bats in his 2008 season where his stats mysteriously end. I'm guessing he gave up the game, at least professionally. It's always a little sad when you run into guys like this.

I've been working on my want lists, slowly but diligently, nearly every day. (Go check them out - they're on the sidebar!) One of the things I've noticed as I started working my way both forwards from 1979 and backwards from present day a little bit is that there are a lot of holes in my collection where there should be Ken Oberkfell cards. I found that a bit strange, but he's always struck me as a bit of a strange guy.

Chris sent over a bunch of, what I'd guess you'd call, Ultra SE cards from 2007. These are rainbowy foiled instead of the plain old retail versions that I'm used to. If I remember correctly from when I started reading the blogs back in 2007, Ultra was released at some ridiculously high price point in hobby stores while put out at the expected retail price in your big chain stores. What I believe transpired is that hardly anyone bought either version, the former for being outrageously high even though it contained a lot of "hits" and the latter for being... well... and Upper Deck "Fleer" product, I guess. At least, this is what I think happened. Anyway, I'm appreciative of getting a bunch of the hobby versions for the collection as I only had one prior to this trade.

Ah, Documentary, you wonderful idea turned horribly wrong. This card in particular is a sign of dooooom for the Cardinals as you can see Ryan Ludwick grounding out in a game that probably happened three months before the game mentioned on the card. I'm still willing to take on these cards, however. Should I really attempt to collect all 162?

Here's a nice 2007 Co-Signers card of Jim Edmonds and his buddy, the black-and-white ghost of Jim Edmonds Past.

And here's a 2008 Co-Signers Albert Pujols card. Pujols is left without a buddy to play with.

It seems like Donruss did the same thing with the same design for their Elite set year after year. I guess there's something to be said for consistency. It'll be interesting to see what kind of impact McGwire will have on this season's hitting. Now that it's 2010, I feel like I can start saying "this season". In fact, I think pitchers and catchers start reporting in about six weeks. That's awesome!

This a nice looking horizontal Pujols card from a set I not only overlooked but failed to understand its purpose. If this is the "Rookie Edition" of a set, then what is Pujols doing in it in 2007? And if you tell me that they had to include some star players to justify this sets existence and make it easier to sell, I'd have to tell you that it's just a bad idea and shouldn't exist.

I love the Sportflics! They are always welcome here. I also like scanning them to see if I can get cool images like this one. Sportflics!

I also received a bunch of 1994 Pinnacle cards, which is great. The Collective Troll is doing a box break of series 2 from this set, but it doesn't look like he's pulled a ton of Cardinals yet. I have no idea who Lonnie Maclin is, but I assume that because Pinnacle called him a prospect, he went onto great things.

Thanks again to On Card Autos. I promise that no Cubs went to him that were intentionally harmed in any way. I save that for the Yao Mings of the world.