30 Teams in 30 Posts: #1

Warning: The following entry contains images of a particular baseball player that could be deemed not suitable for all audiences. Reader discretion is strongly advised. If you have a weak stomach, sensitivity to light, intolerance towards greed or humans that make more money in a year than a number of countries in the world, please go do something else like watch birds fight over Doritos or something.

I have in the neighborhood of 7500 St. Louis Cardinals cards that I simply do not want. There's no way I'm going to be able to show off a good representation of those cards here. Instead, I simply pulled out a bunch of my doubles of cards that are in my Cardinals shoeboxes. (These aren't actual shoeboxes, of course, but the double-wide storage boxes suited to store cards in top loaders. I have two of these full of Cardinals that I deemed too snobby to be in the regular binders, and a third jammed full of similarly snobby cards that are part of sets that I'm collecting. I don't know why I'm telling you all this. I have a TON of Cardinals doubles. If anyone out there likes Jose DeLeon, Lee Smith, Lonnie Smith, Ozzie Smith, Bud Smith.. all the Smiths(!) or any other Cardinal from the past 40 years or so that I may have overlooked, let me know. I probably have 85 cards of that guy.

This is a "Your Mom" original back, guys. Original back!

See! I told you!

I came to be a Cardinals fan when I rejected the notion that one should always follow the closest geographically located team, even when said team plays ball a couple hundred miles away, and also finally decided to stop picking the same favorites as my father. The Cardinals were an exciting bunch of speedsters in the '80s, and they even had this guy who would run out and do a backflip before games. A backflipping baseball playing wizard! This sounded too good to be true! Furthermore, actually catching a Cardinals game on TV in Oregon in the '80s was akin to trapping the world's largest firefly in a jar and having it make a bunch of firefly babies for all of your friends to see on a cloudless, moonless night. Or something like that. It wasn't until ESPN started carrying MLB games that I got to ever see my favorite team play. That elusive Cardinals game was always out of reach, so the mystery was alluring. I would look at box scores and baseball cards and try to imagine Pedro Guerrero not being terrible at his job.

Favorite current Cardinals player: Chris Carpenter. Sure, Carp is out for the year, but he still gets my vote. As you can probably tell simply by looking at the players that I have singled out on the sidebar of this blog, Carpenter is my favorite. I rarely rank people this way, but Adam Wainwright would have to be second and Matt Holliday a close third.

Is it just me, or is it just as easy to get inserts from this 2006 Fleer Ultra set as it is to get base cards? I have multiples of all of these, not just one or two dupes.

Least favorite current Cardinals player: N/A. I just can't say I dislike anyone on this team. There's no Ryan Theriot this year. There's no Corey Patterson, either. And there, quite possibly, may be no championship this year. That's okay, though. I probably would have picked Tyler Greene simply for how frustrating he's been, but he made one too many boneheaded mistakes and got himself traded to Houston for some stale Wheat Thins and I can't pick him anymore.

The onslaught of mid-'00s inserts of the former first base star continues.

This isn't some specially colored strange version of this MLB 2K6 insert card. It just scanned really oddly. I don't know what's up with my scanner. I guess I probably shouldn't have bought it during a Circuit City fire sale.

This was a 2006 card, but the photo looks like it's from 2002.

I bought this card recently and received another copy of it in the mail the same day. Oops. For some reason that never happens with Cardinals from sets I collect, though. It would be nice, since I always need two of those cards.

Favorite Cardinals player of all-time: Ozzie Smith. I've long since removed all of the anticipation from this post. You just came here for the images, admit it.

Has Topps ever tried doing Heritage minis, aside from these Target exclusive T205 wannabes? Are they going to wait until 2024 Topps Heritage to pull out that gimmick, when it's 1975's turn to shine?

Oh, I have more questions. Did Topps release a 2012 Attax set? What's your favorite color? Is it blue? Do you like pancakes?

Lease favorite Cardinals player of all-time: Jason Marquis. You know, every Cardinal I've ranted and railed against over the years (Kip Wells, Mike Maroth, the aforementioned Patterson, etc.) hasn't really spent much time in the Birds on the Bat, usually due to his own incompetence at playing baseball. Jason Marquis was uniquely talented... unique enough to dazzle one day before four consecutive starts where he gives up 6 runs and walked 6 batters and looks like he'd rather be anywhere else but a baseball field. He was around for awhile. He was on the juggernaut teams of 2004 and 2005 and the team that limped its way to the podium in 2006. That last team opted to throw an unproven rookie into the rotation and left Marquis off the roster altogether.

Thanks to everyone for reading these posts. I still have a bunch of the cards that I've shown here available to trade, so please get in touch if anything looks interesting. I will do a quick "garage sale" type post to wrap things up soon and then this blog heads off on its next adventure. If it's anything like this past adventure, it will be another cheaply disguised ploy to get you to take some cards off my hands.

The St. Louis Cardinals are #1 in my reverse-ranking of favorite teams as of the moment I picked them a long, long time ago on October 4th, 2010. All of these cards are very much up for trade, so please contact me if you're interested.