Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Grand Cardinals

Grand Cards did a week long "trade away" recently where people could bid on certain baseball card-related items with other baseball card-related items. It was a generous effort for certain, even though I'm convinced the entire thing was some sort of scheme to get rid of mass quantities of unwanted cards quickly. (That sounds like something I should strongly consider.) My lot was a group of non-Topps Cardinals, as I hoped to get some cool oddball-type stuff. Here are some of my favorites.

We did not have Rite Aids in the area until the mid-'90s, when they bought out Payless drug stores. Certainly, we never had Rite Aid baseball cards and I didn't know such a thing existed until I got John Tudor and Jack Clark in this package. Incidentally, Payless's presence in the area meant that Payless ShoeSource went by the name of Volume ShoeSource to avoid confusion.

On first look, I assumed that this was not a legitimate release but instead something that some company doctored with a gold stamp on it to promote whatever it is they were trying to promote. In this case, it was something called the East Coast National. This begs the question: How could something be called the "East Coast National" when it's supposed to be, y'know, national. I looked this up on Beckett, however, and they do have this stuff cataloged.

This set is either Kahn's or Hillshire Farms, whichever you prefer I suppose. The card stock is very thin, but it's apparently a nice little set of Hall of Famers that you could send away for with proofs of purchase (or is that proof of purchases?)

It took me a minute to figure out why I was sent this card in particular, but once I noticed the Cardinals cap I remember Tweety's stint in the Cardinals infield in the early '90s during the dreadful Joe Torre era.

Tweety was always threatening to take away some of Jose Oquendo's "utility" playing time until he just disappeared one day. Huh.

2 comments :

  1. That's exactly what it was ;). Glad you enjoyed the cards, hopefully there are some in there that you can use!

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  2. LaRussa probably would have loved to use Tweety as the 9th place hitter / supersub / relief pitcher / entertainment for those games where he uses 9 pitchers all for so-called matchup issues.

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