...Featuring Glossy Tim Conroy

Cards I needed from @nightowlcards 

It's 4th of July Week (?) in MLB right now, and the Cardinals started things off right with a win over the Snakes. Fan of the D-Backs division rival and long-time blogger/package-sender Night Owl sent some more cards my way back in April, and I am finally getting around to showing them off tonight.

This is my first Zac Gallen card, and likely one of the first I've owned from the 2016 draft class. There's already been two more draft classes since, and I'm sure I'll be scratching my head when their names come up years down the road. In looking at his B-Ref page, it looks like Gallen was included in the Marcell Ozuna trade, which means there probably won't be many more of his cards in my collection going forward. This is apparently a "tie-dye" parallel - check the low serial number!

Joe Kelly is one of the more interesting characters of the game, which is great because 99.9% of baseball players are really boring. That's what you get when you focus on something for every waking moment of your life for all of your life, I guess. Here is Kelly, now a Red Sox reliever, on a hockey-style Topps Archives insert.

I've ended up with bucketloads of 2013 Panini Hometown Heroes cards, so I'm quite certain I have the team set multiple times over. However, the parallels are much harder to come by, as expected.

The bulk of the package was made up of a sizable stack of Conlon cards. I don't write about Conlon cards here often because they represent an era I just don't relate to all that well, but I'm always happy to put them in my binders. The photos, if anything, are great to see.

Ronnie Williams was a 2014 2nd round pick, but he's still young and working his way up in the system. I haven't heard of him being on many people's radars, but at the way the parent club is being devoured by the Disabled List monster, I fully expect the entire Palm Beach roster to be sitting on the bench in St. Louis come September.

Finally, as promised -- it's glossy Tim Conroy! You'll have to pretend he's glossy here, because it doesn't translate in the scan. Feel free to run your hands over your screen and pretend it's glossy. (I wouldn't recommend doing this at work, however, unless no one is looking.) Sometimes you just need cards from the '80s, and this is one of many that I needed.