The Diamond King Delivers

Cards. On Cards. With Numbers.

Last month I received a pile of cards from The Diamond King. He believes in card collecting projects, something I find rather admirable, and his latest one is called SCAM. The cleverly coined acronym basically means '90s PED users, and there was a fairly big named one who wore the Birds on the Bat. I'll come back to that later, however.

A bunch of the cards in the package were serial numbered Cardinals goodies, including this mid-oughts Donruss Jim Edmonds card. Like many cards from 1995 to roughly 2005, it didn't scan well. Someday, card companies will produce cards with scanners in mind... sure.

This card isn't technically serial numbered, but the back of this Gregg Jefferies insert claims that it is a mere 1 of 10,000. So limited!

Matt Lemanczyk, a former 10th round pick, is virtually unknown to me outside of baseball cards. Apparently he was quite the speedster in the minors, but his B-Ref.com page doesn't list any stats beyond 2005.

Chrome parallels seemed to be rather hard to come by in this year's version of Topps Heritage, but there were several of them in this package. This is the slightly more rare refractor version.

And this is the basic version. This year, the basic chrome parallels were numbered to just 999 instead of the year that the main set was aping (i.e. /999 instead of /1964). That probably doesn't make these cards worth a ton more than they otherwise would have, but I found it interesting.

Ludwick has had horrendous luck throughout his career with injuries. It seems that he's a free agent now, so it will be interesting to see if he can catch on with another team after spending most of last year hurt/ineffective.

The world needs more Larry Walker Cardinals cards.

There were other gems besides the serial-numbered cards, including this Matt Holliday 2013 Topps Heritage black retail parallel.

I know very little about TCMA cards, and have very few of them as well. I'm always excited when I see them, because I rarely consider the alternatives to Topps cards prior to the '80s.

He looks so weird in a non-Cardinals uni.

Speaking of weird, I generally just don't go for the unlicensed stuff. Panini Prizm looks like a perfectly reasonable Chrome-ish product, but I can't bring myself to care about it. Fortunately, generous people willing to trade with me sometimes send stuff like this, which is nice.

Finally, the King unloaded a bunch of Big Mac cards on me. He probably had lots of doubles leftover from the SCAM project thing.

Unfortunately, that isn't Cooperstown calling for Mr. McGwire. It's just a telemarketer.

That's some awfully sparkly tape.

Well, he did lead the league in something. I guess that can't really be taken away, no matter what he took to do what he did.