A Mega Trade

A big time swap with a Rays & Tigers fan. 

This has already been one of the better years for me in making large swaps. One of my most recent exchanges landed me a huge box of stuff from Jeremy of Topps Cards That Never Were. I always appreciate someone who takes the time to dig through my numerous want lists before sending stuff, as I know it takes a bunch of time. This box was stuffed full of cards primarily from the mid-'90s to the mid-'00s, aka the Lost Era of collecting for me.

There aren't a ton of cards from Dennis Eckersley's late career turn as a Cardinal, where he reunited with Tony La Russa. This is one of the nicer ones I've seen.

At first glance, I thought that I had in my hands a refractor from the 1993 Finest set for the first time, which would have been rather silly for a coupe of reasons. One, you don't just chuck some 1993 Finest refractors in a big of cards to send someone without warning because they're pretty rare and expensive. And two, while Edmonds had his first rookie cards appear in sets in 1993, he wasn't actually in the Finest set. This is some sort of throwback from the 2001 Finest set. In any case, it's a great addition to my Edmonds collection.

Speaking of Edmonds, here's another nice addition, this time in a Cardinals uniform.

At this time I should mention that it was really tough selecting cards for this post. Some time ago, in the interest of making it less intimidating to write about everything I have received in the mail from everyone, I decided to limit scans to about 5 cards per trade... which I have allowed to fluctuate a bit in recent times, especially for larger acquisitions. However, this is never an easy process, and in this case it was entirely driven by cards that I had to scan for TCDB because they were missing images. I'd like to say that I picked my favorite dozen or so cards out of the several hundred I received, but I do think it ended up being a nice selection after all.

There were some tougher to find inserts in the bunch, but this ended up being the one numbered card. What I said about Eckersley (few Cardinals cards for a great player in the twilight of his career) goes doubly so for Larry Walker, so it's always exciting to pick up a new-to-me Cardinals card of his.

This is some sort of red parallel. Pacific was all about the colored parallels, long before Panini came around.

You can't shove your hands into a pile of late '90s to early '00s cards without coming up with some Big Mac cards. This insert from a Topps Chrome set is one of the nicer McGwire cards I've managed to add recently.

What can you say here? It's an early career Pujols card in a very attractive Bowman's Best wrapper. Fantastic.

This is supposedly a box bottom card from the 2005 Topps set, although I don't know if it was actually on the bottom of the box like those Topps sets in the '80s. I don't think Topps made this a regular thing in the '00s.

More Pujols. I just now realized there won't be any kind of All-Star game this year, which is one of the many things that will make for a weird summer. (There probably won't be any MLB at all in 2020, but I don't want to think about that right now.)

More Topps Total Silver, this time featuring Tino Martinez. I still need a bunch of these silver parallels, I am certain.

Great (and numerous!) stuff all around from Topps Cards That Never Were. If you have any spare Rays or Tigers, definitely check out those want lists.