An Original Fake

Nothing fake about this package, however.

I'm all caught up with sending packages out, so it's time to show off some of the stuff I've actually received lately. I do have more things to mail out, but they will be more of the "I feel like sending you cards so I no longer have these cards" variety instead of something I organized. Here's a few cards from the tremendous Christmas package I received from Too Many Verlanders.

Topps made parallels of a lot of their reprint insert sets a few years back to feature the "original back" of the card rather than the text they wrote about those cards. In 2010 we got the so-called Cards Your Mom Threw Out, while in 2011 they duplicated their idea but called it 60 Years of Topps. Somewhere along the line they also decided to make a bunch of "Lost Cards" of Stan Musial's years where he was off serving our country instead of playing a game for a living, and then they decided to create "original back" versions of those cards which never existed in the first place. My head is spinning. Anyway, I'm still missing a lot of these pesky inserts from my Cardinals and player collections, so it was great to get this one crossed off my list... even if it's a fake card.

My favorite base card of 2013 happened to come from my favorite photo of the 2012 baseball season, with Jon Jay making a perfect wall splash next to the newly created Tony La Russa mural in the outfield at Busch Stadium. It seems that Topps also used this photo for a Gypsy Queen insert, but they cropped out much of the lingering specter of TLR for some reason.

This mid-'00s Woody Williams parallel is numbered to 338, in honor of the number of games the junkballer had appeared in to that point in his career. Weird and arbitrary, yes, but I didn't own this and I'm glad I do now.

Thanks again to Dennis, who also passed along some Ducks that you'll see here at some future date, including something I doubt I'll be able to resist putting up on the blog on... say... Monday?