From the Archives

Tall Boys? More like Skinny Boys. Group Break results from one of the hungriest blogs around.

We're just a week or so away from this year's Allen & Ginter's going live's on us, so I figured that I may as well get my last post about 2013 Topps Archives out of the way. I participated in a group break put on by Nachos Grande back in June and came away with most of the Cardinals team set, plus a few extras. I also have a stack of Pittsburgh Pirates' booty if anyone reading this collects that team and is interested in probably not getting a letter bomb in the mail from me.

The short prints in the Archives set are all supposed to be reprints like last year, so it makes receiving a card like this a bit confusing. This is more certainly not a reprint (or a short print), yet Ozzie Smith definitely had a card in the set this is modeled after (and even one in a Cardinals uniform if you count the Traded set.) It certainly would make trying to explain this set very confusing to the novice collector.

Here's one of the real short prints, and if these follow any particular theme, it's that most of the players that appear are not top tier stars. No Bob Tewksbury card could have ever fetched more than a nickel in 1992, and you have to be a pretty serious baseball fan to know who he is today. That being said, I love that he's a part of this set as he was a seriously underrated player in his day. I do remember him, even his pre-Cardinals career, for reasons I can't really explain.

I was lucky enough to pull a "gold" parallel of Shelby Miller's Archives rookie card. Miller has surpassed my expectations for his rookie year, at least so far. It was barely more than a year ago that many Cardinals fans were worried that he was an overrated head case, and it's nice to see that it looks like a highly touted top draft choice is delivering the goods at the big league level. He probably will lose out to Yasiel Puig for the Rookie of the Year vote and still has this year's playoffs (we can only hope) to pull his best 2000 Rick Ankiel impression (yikes!)

Oh, we've seen this card before, but did you know it has an autographed cousin? It was great to get a "hit" from my team, and I'm even more impressed that Topps has found a way to get hits of bunch of lesser known players into their products by way of the Fan Favorites brand. I'm still not that sold on the current incarnation of Topps Archives as a whole, but I consider this year's product to be a bit of an improvement over last year's.