Greetings From Busch

A big batch of cards from a longtime reader. 

Friend of the blog OhioTim recently sent me a bunch of stuff from nearly all corners of my collection. If you've been around the blogs (and chances are, if you're reading this, you have), you've probably seen or dealt with Tim at some point. In addition to a bunch of great Cardinals stuff, he also sent over some football cards and a couple of other things.

I often end posts with Yadi cards for some reason, so I figured I'd switch it up a bit this time. This insert card from Topps Fire has a very sci-fi feel to it.

This year is finally starting to bring a bit more appreciation of the classic 1985 Topps design. Primarily known for the Mark McGwire Olympic card instead of the main base cards, this is a rare design that Topps hasn't quite overused and abused just yet. The original set was released the year before I started buying baseball cards, so it has a nice nostalgic feel to me, too.

Here's a rare purple parallel of Harrison Bader. I believe that these were exclusive to Meijer stores, something that doesn't exist around where I live.

This 150 Years parallel of a reprinted Bob Gibson rookie card from the Iconic Card Reprints set (whew) is numbered to 150 as well. A nice touch.

I didn't realize until now how much the color purple was going to feature in this post. This is a purple "paper" parallel of Carlos Martinez's 1st Bowman card. I don't think Martinez cards have much value these days, but they have plenty of value to me. This is definitely worth, like, forty-five Cards on Cards bucks.

More purple! It's another rookie, too.

Another Yadi managed to sneak in here. This is a numbered to 2020 "touch of gold" parallel. That's what I'm calling these from now on.

Tim included a couple of Dame cards for my collection, including this classy Court Kings insert. I like that there's multiple photos and multiple uniforms here.

A large portion of the package consisted of Eagles cards. This is an area of my collection that will probably start getting some more attention, soon. Did I ever joke that it would take some sort of global pandemic to get me to organize my Eagles cards? No? In any case, I really like this photo of Alshon Jeffery most likely celebrating a first down.

Miles Sanders was drafted last year and immediately slid into the #1 RB spot. It's easy to see why people are excited about him.

All of these newfangled Eagles are fine, but to me, nothing beats the early '90s kelly green team. Also, Randall is my all-time favorite. I should probably get more of his cards.

This card from 1992 is the earliest example I have seen of a card with "chromium" technology. Even though it's not a refractor, it's very bright and shiny.

It's back to present day Eagles here with a sparkling Carson Wentz insert.

Finally, Tim also included a few Busch Stadium postcards. Having only been there for the first time last summer, it was nice to a few more glimpses at the stadium. This shot is from before Ballpark Village was constructed. The area in left-center field is much more built up now.

Free Stuff Friday: Vol. 5

More free stuff. #FreeStuffFriday  UPDATED 06/28/2020 5:50 PM PDT

You know the drill. Well, if you don't, check out the rules here. Click or tap to enlarge photos. Here are some additional options if you don't like what you see here:

1. There's still some stuff available from previous posts. These are mostly individual cards, including cards from the SI For Kids "legends" sheet that I painstakingly broke apart myself.
2. Twitter followers! I posted a series of images of cards from a huge box of repack things recently. Feel free to claim one of these.
3. Or, you could have this very lovely unopened 1990 Score pack. Looks like there's an Indians player on the top. CLAIMED

I have some 8x10's to purge, like this Dave Stewart card.

I was pretty into the A's during this period, I guess. CLAIMED

The Hoops 8x10's are more card-like in that they have stuff on the back. Stats and/or words. CLAIMED

Some players got multiple photo/cards.

MJ! I finally just finished watching The Last Dance the other day, and it was something. CLAIMED

I have no earthly idea why I own this.

Ditto, but at least Rod was a Blazer for awhile.

This is the last of my SI For Kids sheets. I'd prefer to leave it intact because the Tony Hawk card is his de facto rookie card, I guess, and can fetch a little money apparently. I don't want to mess it up. CLAIMED

2020 Turkey Red dupes, plus a pair of Rangers Ginter X minis. CLAIMED: All Turkey Red cards

9 cards that I got Erin to pick out of a box at random. The Kim card is a gold foil (hobby) parallel. The Shields card is a foil retail exclusive. CLAIMED: Padilla, Gallen

An actor of yesteryear, a bunch of unloved autos and a couple of gold numbered parallels round out the bunch. CLAIMED: Rhonda Fleming, Dave Menne, Mahesh Bhupathis, Tony Zych, Ryan Braun, Sean West

Please keep in mind that if you pick out anything larger than a standard sized card, it may take some time to ship. I have shipping supplies supposedly coming to me that I've been waiting on for a couple of weeks now.

Look Into My Eyes

A #CrackinWaxMailDay from @CrackinWax delivers the art. 

I'll preface this with a couple of disclaimers. One, I cannot, for the life of me, draw. I certainly can't draw humans any better than the most amateur random person you can find on the internet. My other disclaimer is that I bought into some group breaks and have no regrets (would do it again!) from the always excellent Crackin' Wax.

My gripes are with the dreadful Topps Gallery set. It's just not for me. It employs various artists, and some of the portraits are just face-meltingly evil. The rest are even worse! (Okay, fine, I'm half-kidding here.) So with my apologies to the probably completely normal and talented and nice gentleman who was responsible for the art on these cards, I just can't handle some of these. They're just shy of 2010 National Chicle levels of badness.

I'll direct some of my venom at Topps here (and Walmart by proxy). In what world would Paul Goldschmidt, a player who came to St. Louis a fully formed All-Star and perennial MVP candidate, become an apprentice of Stan the Man? That's now how this works. Also... I cringe at this.

Here's one that's up for grabs. It's a different artist. It looks a little cartoonish, but I don't immediately want to douse it in lighter fluid. It's also numbered to 25 and is a player I don't collect, so it ends up in the trade box.

Now I can relax and take a deep breath and look at something good. I also bought into another Ginter X break and knocked a few more Cardinals off my team want list. I still need a few more, but it's probably time to go hunting for singles.

The Heritage High Numbers break from last year also landed me this short printed Ryan Helsley rookie. Will Helsley figure prominently in the Cardinals plans this season, especially now that John Brebbia is going under the knife? Will there be a this season for real? (I am still skeptical.)

Big Ones

A big bunch of big cards from my favorite fellow Cardinals collector. 

Welcome back to Late Night Cards on Cards! I used to publish nearly all of my posts around this time of night. That's how you get the page views, people.

Ray of All Cardinals All The Time sent over a stack of oversized cards. I've never really figured out how to make these things translate well to the blog, but I know you can always click or tap on them to zoom in. The bulk of the stack came from a regional Cardinals Smokey the Bear set from 1987. These sorts of things are my favorite, considering that I have never lived near St. Louis and haven't seen a lot of this stuff.

I threw in a Steve Smith Trail Blazers card I got from a Listia auction today for comparison. See? They're big! It was also cool to get cards of guys like Ray Soff and Mike Laga that aren't their ubiquitous '87 Topps issues.

Here's the veteran Cardinals broadcaster from his pitching days.

A really friendly looking Tony Pena is all about wildfire prevention.

The backs of the cards have cartoons on them, like all of the best cards out there. I guess the bear hotel is out of business because the forest burned down?

I'll definitely have to see if I need to order more 4-pocket pages for these cards. On such a large card, the oval frame actually looks pretty cool.

Fitting in snugly with the Smokey the Bear cards were some same-sized Donruss Action All-Stars cards that I didn't have. This is hard proof that the Cardinals blue uniforms of the '80s were much more... blue... than their current retreads.

I had completely forgotten about the horizontal design of these cards from 1983. I think I bought a bunch of packs from several years of these as a kid (they were cheap) but didn't manage to hang on to them because of their bulk.

The 1984 set has the most simple red bordered design. I like it. The blur in the background looks so much more interesting than the digital processing effects applied to photos in current (Topps) cards these days.

A Monday PWE Roundup

Good things, small packages, etc. 

I've got quite a backlog of plain white envelopes of cards to show off here, so I thought I'd knock a few out each Monday for awhile, until I either completely forget I was planning on doing this or until the envelopes stop coming. (Don't stop the envelopes from coming!)

First up is my prize from The Big (!) Fun (!) Game (!) over at Johnny's Trading Spot (extra exclamations added by me.) I tend to have a hard time keeping up in real time with all of the games and prizes going on over there, and elsewhere as it turns out, but I was able to focus enough on this particular Friday to claim a prize.

It was a stolen prize, in fact -- a nice little stack of Allen & Ginter minis. While I am still holding out secret hope that this set is cancelled this year, there's always a special place in my collection for minis, even though I'll never have them all. And the set is probably not going to get cancelled, considering how Topp$ is raking in the $$$$ right now with no baseball going on.

Batting second is an envelope from Matt at Diamond Jesters. Matt is a big Red Sox fan and you should definitely check out his blog if you have any extra Boston cards... or even if you don't!

He sent a couple of really nice inserts of Cardinals faves and PC guys (Flaherty is still unofficial right now, but it's just a matter of time at this point.)

Fellow PNWer Cardboard Jones is just one of the latest to help me out in my Turkey Red 2020 quest.

I'm now down to just 11 cards needed for the Series 1 set, with this envelope knocking down the list by another 5 pegs.

Thanks to all of you reading and keeping the Postal Service in business.

A Cardinals Bounty

The motherlode of Cardinals cards from @ShaneSalmonson hit my mailbox this spring. 

About 90% of my trading card wheelings and dealings happen through this blog, but occasionally I'll venture out into some other sort of website or social media platform and roll the dice. In late April, Shane Salmonson -- who does the weekly Cheap Wax Wednesdays feature for Beckett, mentioned that he had a bunch of team lots to dispose of in an attempt to reduce inventory. (We've all been there.) I reached out and sent back some Red Sox cards (though not nearly as many!)

This was, to put things lightly, a very quality bunch of cards. I ended up with around 1500 Cardinals cards packed tightly away boxes inside a larger box, and it took me several days to go through them all. It was, as you can probably imagine for a team collector, a ton of fun. While I ended up with only around 100+ cards to add to my own collection (this is what happens when you have around 20,000 cards in your team collection), I was able to find good homes for some of the excess extras.

The sheer variety of the cards was very impressive. I'm only showing a dozen or so cards here that were "randomly" selected, but it was quite an adventurous group. Any chance to add a 2008 Upper Deck Documentary Gold card to my binders is a rare one, so that was certainly nice.

I complain about my scanner somewhat regularly around here, but this is just funny. This card is actually supposed to be a glow-in-the-dark orange color. Instead, it looks like an early spring cherry blossom border.

The scanner does handle gold bordered cards much better, fortunately. The annual numbered parallel from the flagship Topps set has changed a bit over the years, and in 2001 it was quite a bit shinier. This is a good looking card of Matty Mo.

I could make a comment about this buyback Reggie Cleveland card and playing in mostly empty stands these days, but I'm not... well, crap, I guess I already did.

His name is T.J. Mathews. I can't really complain about my scanner here, because no scanners seem to like these kinds of foil cards.

Minis are great, but this is just an ordinary Felipe Lopez mini card from the 2010 Allen & Ginter set, right?

Ha! It's a no numbered version! So sneaky.

You could still blow people's minds in 1998 when you told them you were online. Dude, I was online tonight. For several hours!

I'm not sure why this particular year's Gold Label design had to use so much of the card space for the player's name, but it still looks nice. I sometimes wish that all cards were Gold Label, but if they were... would we really appreciate them, or would we take them for granted?

I hate to end things on a down note considering all of the great cards I received in this box of boxes, but this card of the ill-fated Oscar Taveras is at least impressively die-cut. You could probably hurt yourself if you did something ill-advised with this card is what I'm saying.