Some 2018 Cardinals

And former Cardinals. 

Thanks to @pksteinberg of Baseball Every Night, I now have roughly 55% of the brand new Topps Series 1 set. Unfortunately, there are only a paltry 11 Cardinals cards in the entire series. I know that this has long been a problem for certain teams, and now we've reached the point where St. Louis is officially out of the limelight, having missed the playoffs in consecutive years.

Of those 11 players featured on a card, 3 of them are already getting ready to put on another uniform later this week. Aledmys Diaz, his 2016 All-Star appearance already a distant memory, was shipped off to the Blue Jays for a prospect. He'll join Randal (with one L) Grichuk in Toronto. (I still need Grichuk's card.)

The Cardinals did hang on to rookies Jack Flaherty and Harrison Bader, and both figure to be factors this season with the big league club in some capacity. It would be a bit surprising to see Flaherty win a spot in the rotation, but it would also be surprising to not see him make some starts at some point if he isn't moved to the bullpen.

I haven't really talked about the new flagship design yet. It's better. And this is a really solid photo.

I think I am still going to pass on buying packs of this stuff, as I have for the previous two sets. The lack of stats on the back is what upsets me the most now. One of the biggest reasons I got interested in baseball as a kid was from poring over box scores in the local newspaper. It was the stats, man! So the allure of baseball cards at an early age was really just a natural progression from the back pages of the Sports section to the annual document of record for each ballplayer. I realize it's easy to pull all of the stats up on B-R (and I often do), but not having full stats for a player really kills the appeal for me. (This was why I strongly preferred Fleer to Donruss in the '80s, even though they occasionally cheated for some long time veterans.)

It kind of looks like Stephen Piscotty (now in Oakland) is caught between bases and doesn't know what to do. I do like the photo choice. Let's check out the source image, because we haven't done that in awhile.

Embed from Getty Images

(If you check out the caption, he was totally caught stealing.)

All in all, this new Topps set beats last year, but it was a very low bar to clear. About as low as the space between Kolten Wong's hands.