Majors & Minors

Big leaguers and aspiring leaguers in the Cardinals system. 

Bob from The Best Bubble sent along another intriguing package of cards recently, which included a bunch of Cardinals cards and minor league affiliated Cardinals. Let's check out a few on this Thursday night.

Here I have Paul Goldschmidt's awkwardly Photoshopped picture in another version. X-Fractors are fun and were pretty much my introduction to what Topps Chrome actually is. I remember buying a Skip Schumaker 2006 Topps Chrome card around the time I started the blog, after passing up on some much more expensive refractor checkerboard looking things like this one.

Okay, fine, that's some revisionist history. It turns out I bought a pack of the stuff on eBay (?!) before my much more clear memory of paying something like $1 for the Schumaker card at a semi-local card shop. I'm starting to have a hard time remembering what life was like before all of the restaurants and bars closed down, so I guess it's not surprising that I don't remember something from twelve years ago.

This may not look like much, but it's actually an extremely rare insert from an extremely common 1989 Topps set. Apparently these were K-Mart jumbo pack exclusives, and I have no recollection of this whatsoever. I don't think I made many trips to K-Mart stores as a teen or else I would have been all over these.

Now it's on to the minor league portion of the package, which is always fun. Rene Arocha was one of the early Cuban players to come over to MLB, and was pretty good for his brief career in the States.

I'm just fond of the uniform and cap, I have to say. Steve doesn't really look like a ballplayer, but he looks very happy to be a ballplayer nonetheless.

Rick Ankiel is more of a household name, and this was a nice capper to the whole package. As you can see, it's a pretty low numbered card from the 2000 SP Prospect set. Not bad!