A Derby Night Trade Post

@ShaneKatz73 sends over a heap of Cardinals: vintage, retro and more! 

This season has been a slog for the Cardinals (just ask the recently fired manager!), so it's actually nice to get a little break from baseball and watch the exhibitions. Congrats to Bryce and his hair and all that, but I was actually most impressed with Rhys Hoskins tonight. I hadn't seen him play a ton, but his swing just looked so effortless compared to the rest of the contestants. I doubt the Home Run Derby will screw up that swing.

I'd like to think I'll take advantage of the break to get through my own personal slog of backlogged trade post material, but I try to do this every week and it rarely works out. We soldier on to a quite intimidating pile of Cardinals goodies from Shane from the blog Off The Wall. This was a trade I largely worked out on Twitter, which is a fairly new thing for me.

We kick things off with mins. Minis are the best! I prefer the tobacco card sized minis to the '75 Topps shaped minis, but to each his/her own.

It was fun to see some on-card autos in the mix (TTM? in person?! mysteries!) I wouldn't consider myself an autograph hunter, but I've built up a nice little group of cards like these that would be fun to show off in a display somewhere someday.

For such a weird little signature here, it doesn't actually look like it would be all that quick of a signature. My signature certainly has become more, let's say, efficient over the years.

Growing up the '80s and starting to collect in the '80s means that there aren't a ton of '80s oddballs that I haven't seen. This is one of those, however. This looks sort of like someone pasted another card on top of a 1987 Fleer card.

You've got to love vintage team cards. No, seriously, you do.

Floating Carpenter Head Alert! This was a welcome inclusion in the 2012 Topps Heritage set. I am still lacking some of the floating head stickers.

The next Cardinals manager?! I am interested in seeing how the interim guy does with the rest of the season, and how many times his zero MLB playing experience will be brought up over the course of the dog days of summer.

Here's a fun unlicensed Joe Magrane card. People called cards like these "Broders" back in the day, for a reason that was never quite sufficiently explained to me, at least at the time. (Apparently there was a mythical sports card bootlegger named Rob Broder, who filled the hearts and minds of happy collectors with awesome fake Bo Jackson baseball cards, or whatever.)

Mark McGwire calls BS on this whole Broder thing.

Unlicensed cards make Sad Toothpick Sam Jones even sadder.

(Truthfully, I love weird cards, and that includes some unlicensed things and customs. 2018 Donruss is horrible, though.)

The gem of the lot, and the reason you bothered to scroll (or swipe?) down this far, is this glorious box topper from the 2015 Topps Heritage set. It's a cool patch card modeled after an obscure 1966 release that you can read more about here. As much as I'm starting to question my own interests in set collecting and Topps products in general, I absolutely love the weird nods to the past that they have been included in the Heritage product line. Topps Heritage is great! Everything else is Bootleg Donruss.