Nineties! Nineties! Nineties!

The awesome power of the '90s, unleashed!

I've had a hard time finding any group breaks to join of late, but I did manage to stumble upon a rather unique one back in September. Thorzul has been known to scour the lots of eBay in search of interesting wares, and this time he hosted a group break consisting mostly of '90s baseball inserts. The Cardinals are almost always a hot ticket in group breaks, but the '90s wasn't exactly a great time for the club that everyone seems to hate these days. My collection isn't really brimming with '90s inserts, however, so I didn't hesitate to sign up.

The Legend of Rick Ankiel was more of one of infamy, although his return to the game as an outfielder in 2007 has been known to induce chills among Cards fans. Ankiel was a '90s draft pick, but this card falls just outside of the decade.

Rene Arocha wasn't around long, but he was one of the early Cuban defectors to really make his mark.

1992 was kind of a dead period for me and card collecting. My busiest year of high school fell around this time, and my social calendar must have been pretty booked or something. I came back around for a last hurrah at some point in 1993.

This might be my first serial numbered Cardinals Diamond King. It's strange that a card numbered to 10,000 is harder for me to track down than something numbered to 99 from the last few years, but here we are. Dick Perez seems to have given Brian Jordan an extra tall cap.

Once again falling outside of the '90s, but still honoring the decade's ridiculousness with its design is this 2005 Own The Game insert.

I was able to add a few cards to my Edmonds collection thanks to this lot. I'm now up to 497 in the ol' collection, if anyone was counting. Anyone besides me, that is.

I think I got Bipped here, guys. I ended up with 16 of these. That's a lot.

Black Gold Topps cards were short lived, thank goodness. These were supposed to be the freaky-deaky ultra cool cousin to the Topps Gold parallels, but they ended up being not much to look at. I wish I could tell my '90s self about this so I saved some of my drool for something more worthwhile.

Finally, there was some weirdness that seemed really out of place in this lot. I received a couple of David Freese 2013 Topps Chrome "Connections" Die Cuts that were a little different than the one I already owned. Both of the cards are apparently unsigned certified autograph cards. If you zoom in, you can see the "Topps Certified Autograph Issue" banner on the front, and similar verbiage is on the back. I'm not sure if the QC at Topps is just that bad or if Mr. Freese decided to send a bunch of cards back to Topps HQ stamped "return to sender". Someone on COMC is trying to get $200 a piece for a couple of these sad cards. I'm keeping one and have an extra to do something with, I guess. Something tells me I'm not getting $200.