Heroes in the Baseball Card World

Cardinals stuff and a huge chunk of set needs from the @dimeboxman 

Another excellent bunch of cards found their way to me from Nick of the Dime Boxes blog. Many packages I get only contain Cardinals or only contain stuff from the teams I collect, but I think the most common configuration is the Cardinals-plus-set needs like this one I received from Nick. With middle of the night KBO action being the only live baseball I've seen in nearly three months, I'm starting to feel less and less connected to the game even as I keep acquiring cards. (For instance, who is playing left field for the Cardinals this season? I have no idea.)

Nevertheless, the slow climb to 20,000 continues with this ultra shiny Topps Archives Reserve Bob Gibson. I never got to see Gibby pitch live, but it's not like I'm going to forget what he accomplished.

Seven years later, Panini's lone Hometown Heroes set seems like it's everywhere, but those pesky parallels certainly are not. This is the one with the state stamped on the card. Incidentally, the state does not represent the hometown of these players, just the team that plays there.

I never cared much for the "gold sparkle" parallels that spanned the flagship releases from Topps in 2012 as they seemed to be vastly inferior to the previous year's excellent offerings (the diamond anniversary stuff). That was just an excellent set all the way around. The nice thing about the 2012 sets, however, is that they show off all the newly crowned champion Cardinals players like World Series superhero (and actual Hometown Hero) David Freese.

I have no idea anymore if these 1992 Score The Franchise cards were rare pack inserts or just factory set bonuses, but I needed this card and now have this card. I didn't buy a lot of Score cards in 1992. It was sort of an off year for me for cards in general. I rebounded for a short bit in 1993 and then was done for the next decade-plus.

The majority of this package was actually a thick stack of 2020 Heritage cards, including several short prints (nice!) Being that it's now June, you're all probably sick of the base cards, so I thought I'd show a couple of inserts including the rarely seen Bazooka throwbacks.

Heritage inserts in general seem to be a tougher find these days, so it was great to get ahold of this New Age Performers version of the grandson of Yaz.

Finally, the Dime Boxes (or maybe some packs, who knows?) provided yet more help in my quest to collect all of the Turkey Red inserts from 2020. (I still need some of the inserts from way back in 2009, but we won't talk about that here.)

The true hero in the baseball card world, at least, is Nick for continuing to send out these excellent packages. Thanks again!