Catching Up?

 

I swear I'm catching up. I swear I'm catching up.

Late last November, a package from Nomo's Sushi Platter landed in my mailbox. Topps Update was still new and, you know, it was still 2013. A lot of this stuff looked pretty fresh at the time.

Brock Peterson's tenure with the Cardinals consisted of 23 games but just 28 plate appearances. The Cardinals didn't really have a job for him going forward, but he's landed with the Nationals. The future of a fringe big leaguer is always uncertain (and Peterson turned 30 after last season), but he's better off right now than he was a year and a half ago. According to the back of the card (you all read those, right?) Peterson lived in a clubhouse storage closet shared by 11 other players while playing independent league ball before he caught on with the Cardinals organization.

These would look so much better if Panini had a license to put logos on them. Otherwise, sometimes I wonder what is the point? As with all things Cardinals, it still will find a place in my binders along with the other Golden Age cards I received.

Short prints bug me. Short prints really bug me when they're Cardinals and are also part of sets that I collect. There's also been a recent trend of putting a disproportionately large amount of star players in the short print portion of these sets. Bugged. Fortunately, I have two of these Matt Holliday buggers now.

There's a lot to like about the Cardinals rotation in 2014, but there are some question marks. Given how Shelby Miller was treated in the playoffs and the rumors about his health, he has to be one of those question marks. He's probably not in Jaime Garcia territory or anything, but there's an air of mystery there.

Finally, here's a card so glorious that I didn't really even want to touch it. I'm afraid I'm going to hand it over to Erin, however. (Does anyone have another one they're not attached to?!)