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.