Money Cards from the Dime Boxes

The @dimeboxman delivers! 

Now that we're past the holidays, it's time to reach back into the vaults and talk about what people were sending me back in the fall. That's how backlogged I'm getting here. A disclaimer - there were a few other surprise packages I received last month that extended warm holiday greetings, and they are very appreciated and will be featured here as soon as I can get to them.

The always generous Nick of Dime Boxes fame sent me a big stack of stuff back in September which allowed me to remove a whole bunch of numbers from various lists I keep. Nick is sort of the baseball card version of what you might call a crate digger if we were talking about music, which we're not. It seems that he's always digging deep to find the most interesting cards out there.

Here's an obligatory 2002 Fleer Greats scan, for example. If every post I wrote featured a card from one of the Greats sets, this would be a vastly more interesting blog.

Nick sent a bunch of great oddball stuff, including a whole stack of cards like these. I wasn't able to find a whole lot about this set and it seems to be somewhat poorly cataloged over at TCDB. The cards feature The Gas House Gang and all seem to have numerous variations (including the header that sometimes says 1934 Cardinals and other times says The Gas House Gang.) The backs have a 1974 TCMA copyright. I'm not sure how to check them off any sort of list, but they'll all be headed for my team binders nonetheless.

Many of you are probably familiar with these scratch cards from Topps. These weren't attached or anything -- I just felt like scanning them all together. I do have a want list for these, although it's another complicated set because I believe there are variations on the back. And then, do you want both separated and fully intact cards? Decisions, decisions...

This is a familiar photo of Dizzy Dean and a bunch of baseballs from some sort of (trivia? game?) set from 1989.

When finally putting together my minor league want lists, I was fascinated to learn that, going back a couple of decades, most leagues put out All-Star and "Top Prospects" type sets in addition to all of the team sets for each individual team. Here's one of the All-Star variety of current Cards starter Dakota Hudson.

Justin Williams, one of the players acquired in the Tommy Pham trade, has yet to see the field with St. Louis but looks great here on this Independence Day themed parallel. Or, at least the card looks great. I really like both of what Panini (Donruss) and Topps did with these parallels. I just wish they were easier to pull (especially the Topps ones.)

One half of Keith Hernandez's rookie card is looking pretty psychedelic on this shiny Archives Reserve card that I needed.

Nick also sent a handful of those Baseball Card Magazine cutout cards. I do sort of miss the old Krause Publications magazines and all of the crazy ads in those things, even if I never really took advantage of any of them and probably just bought them for the "cards".

Here's another Fleer Greats card. This one is from 2004 and is a Cardinals themed insert... the best kind of insert, really. It's also numbered (to 1928) which is pretty cool.

There are tons and tons of "Greatest" inserts in the various 2019 Topps flagship releases (including parallels) and I'm afraid that I need many of them. I don't need this one any longer, though!

Nick also sent a ton of needs from a couple of then-fresh releases. I'll just show a few cards here. This poker playing pro seems to have a lot of extra background ink on his card, making it appear quite a bit darker than other base cards in the set. I wonder if all of his cards are like this or if it was some weird printing goof.

Zack Greinke is serious. Always serious.

Nearly half of the package was from the Heritage High Numbers collection. I was happy to get this Duplantier card from the usually elusive Rookie Performers inserts, even if I have no idea who he is. He also looks rather serious. Maybe something was going on there in Arizona that I don't know about.

Thanks again to Nick!