Nobody Feels Sorry for Cardinals Fans

The season is over, but there are still more cards. 

I was reflecting on the Cardinals sudden exit from the postseason and the 2019 season as a whole the other morning when a thought occurred to me. No one feels sorry for Cardinals fans. (No, that was not the thought. This has been obvious for quite some time.) My thought was - why should I feel sorry for anyone else's fanbase? I'm not going to resort to openly mocking other teams and fans of those teams unprovoked, but I think it's time that I stopped being so empathetic when it comes to sports. October is a time when baseball on televisions in public places suddenly stops being invisible to the masses, and random people start talking to random people about their rooting interests. If you don't like the team I root for, that's cool, but I feel like I have to stop putting myself in other people's shoes and try to consider all sides when it comes to these things. Sports are crazy. They make no sense. A lot of things are left to chance, especially in baseball. Humanity is best left to other aspects of life that are vastly more important than this stuff. (Okay, I might feel a little bad for Mariners fans. I cannot believe they are the last team left standing that hasn't gone to the World Series.)

Well, on to the cards. Fellow Cardinals fan (and commiserator) All Cardinals All The Time sent me a huge stack of doubles. This is often the most fruitful way to trade as a team collector. Find someone who also collects your team, swap your extras and both parties are thrilled.

Look at all these Cardinals cards! As is the norm with a stack of cards this big, it was quite a bit of work to get these all added to my collection. That's done now, and I've selected just a handful to show off here.

Most of the cards were from the late '90s to mid '00s, including this Ultimate Victory card of ultimate pro Ray Lankford.

Here's one from the old Upper Deck 40-Man (or is that F O R T Y M A N) set. I didn't know these sets had All-Star cards in them. Here we get a look at very Brewers looking ASG logo.

I picked out this card because it's... well... terrible. For some reason, they used a very closely cropped blurry photo of Scott Rolen on a card from a time when I assume photo editing software was readily available to for profit companies. Yeesh. Rolen deserves better than this. It does look like he's wearing a throwback with some sort of commemorative patch on it, which makes this picture all the more frustrating. Were other cards in this set like this?

He's a better shot of Rolen. These "Sweet Sigs" cards have a glossy finish.

So Taguchi. Rookie (MLB) year. Batting cage. Gold Label. Nice.

Fleer Greats is one of my favorites of the '00s, and I've always really liked the embossed framed look to the 2004 set.

Finally, the Topps Archives Reserve set brought old vintage cards from from the dead in a blindingly shiny way. This is pretty much the same look as the Chrome Refractors that we've seen from year to year in Topps Heritage, but they managed to create a whole standalone set of these.

And no, I'm not about to fight a dude over a sportsball game. That's ridiculous.