All Clear

I've finally waded my way through all of the piles of cards affected by The Big Spill. These cards are from the last two trades whose contents all literally fell all over each other like some out of control cardboard game of Twister.

I received another fun package from All Trade Bait, All The Time. It contained a bunch of the Cardinals that I needed from the 1986 Donruss Action All-Stars set. For some reason I have enough of the Ozzie Smith stand-ups that I could build my own fort out of them, but I was missing this Tommy Herr stand up and many of the jumbo cards that comprise the main set.

It's always nice to get a Willie that I didn't own. It would be a fun project to figure out which Willie McGee Cardinals cards I still need to own, because he kind of slipped out of the consciousness around the peak era of cardboard excess. I think a master Willie McGee collection might actually be somewhat manageable. Aside from a cameo in the Topps Rookie Cup set from a number of years ago, I think he's mostly been left out of post-retirement releases.

I know I already had a copy of this Ozzie card, but it was probably in worse shape overall. It's really hard to store oversized cards, guys! Really hard!

TheBrooklynMet, whose blog has been awfully quiet of late, sent over some stuff as well. I officially need only two more copies of this Yadier Molina Opening Day Stars to attain completeness, as this copy is going to Erin. I (hint hint) am collecting all of the Opening Day Stars inserts from the last three years and I also (hint hint) collect the Cardinals in case you didn't know.

TheBrooklynMet also included an unopened National Baseball Hall of Fame pack that I completely failed to find out any information about, but I thoroughly enjoyed looking at its contents. The cards themselves were vastly more informative than anything I was able to pull up in a few cursory Google searches.

A couple of cards were Cardinals-related, which is awesome for me. Dizzy Dean is seen showing off his broadcasting chops. He didn't spend his entire career with the Cardinals and the team isn't mentioned on the card anywhere, so I guess it doesn't qualify for my binders. Still cool, though.

Here's a prime binder card if I ever saw one. Of course, with Ozzie it wouldn't matter because he's one of my player collection guys anyway. The 'SS' must stand for Super Science!

On the backs of the cards, you get some quality book learnin'. The National Baseball Hall of Fame missed a golden opportunity to explain the physics of backflips, unfortunately.