Heritage Treasures from Reader Howard

I have to admit that I'm a little bit lazy with making trades with people. If you send me an e-mail and say that I need something, I will generally take it for granted that I need it and probably won't think much of it. I always try to send something back that seems fair and equitable, and at the very least I'll try and throw in what I have from your favorite team to even things out a bit. When reader Howard from GA contacted me awhile back about some 2009 Heritage cards he had for me, it totally didn't register with me as far as what he was planning on sending me.

Included in the packages were some much-needed inserts, including some Flashbacks cards and the retail-exclusive Mayo cards. I still really need a Pujols Mayo card - two, really - but this trade made a nice dent in my list. I think that for some reason the Wal-Mart Mayo cards are a bit more difficult to find around these parts than the Target ones. There were also a small pile of base cards, but there's much more to this deal.

Oddly enough, the first thing I noticed about this card was not that Hanley is not pictured with his expected team, but that it's an All-Star card that does not have the dark "short print" background. It was only after then that I noticed the team variation. I see that they did not change the "National League" designation.

Hey, it's John Smoltz... as a Red Sox player. By this time I'd already accepted Smoltzy as a Cardinal (does he have any 2009 Cardinals cards? I'm guessing he'll have a few in 2010...) so this also didn't have an immediate impact with me. Again, however, as far as I know this is a very difficult card to find.

To be honest, I never even looked at Adrian Gonzalez's card until after I had looked over every card carefully about 3 or 4 times. He gets the Rangers logo like we're back in 2005 again, but the team designation and photos are all your normal Padres affair.

This one was hard to miss, however. "Thom" looks really, really old here. I know that this set is almost a year old now, but I had all but forgotten about the variations in it. There's still a few more of these to chase from the main set, including an Albert Pujols one that I don't think I'd heard about back when the set first came out, and some new ones that have showed up in the High Series.

Thanks again to Howard for the extremely generous trade. I scooped up and sent out about as many halfway-decent Cubs cards as I could find in my collection and will definitely be on the lookout for more to send out in the future.