Centennial Owl

Night Owl and I swapped reading materials and baseball cards recently. You can see his end of the deal over here. For my part, Erin and I were in a used bookstore in our neighborhood recently when we (okay, she) happened across a Dodgers item that a baseball card collector would enjoy. Unbeknownst to me, Night Owl had an awesome Cardinals centennial celebration souvenir waiting for me. This thing is full of '70s beer ads, as well as some fun documents from a time where the Cardinals were pretty laughable. I will feature some of the pages at a later time as there are some choice pages to be shown off.

And yes, there were cards, too. There's always cards. As I've mentioned a couple of times, I'm really enjoying this year's Bowman set for some strange reason. I've already managed to put a good dent in the Cardinals portion of the set, but there's always more to be had.

Bowman brought back their International parallels recently, and as far as parallels go it's not a bad idea. The Dominican flag is big and bright and full of primary colors.

It's rare nowadays for me to run across a post-1980 Cardinals player that I've never heard of, but some guy named Carl Dale fits the bill here. He will get his own brand new spot in the Cardinal binders.

Dale was a second round pick in the 1994 draft. As you can see, the Cardinals were miserable failures in the '90s until Walt Jocketty and Tony La Russa came along and started building the team like a major market franchise. That whole failure thing had crossed into their draft strategies, apparently. Just look at this partial list of 2nd Round winners.

Who says baseball players aren't photogenic? Er...

Here's a glorious insert from the 2012 Heritage set. I don't use the word glorious lightly!

It's nice to get Freese rookie cards, now that he's the first true Cardinals collectible commodity not named Pujols in the last decade or so.

Erin just ran across this jersey card at a card show this month and opted to pass on it. So, look what shows up in my mailbox! One of Night Owl's "favorite" players!