From Gold to Goold

Set needs from @nightowlcards (and one Cardinal card!) 

As I gear up to watch some playoff baseball tonight, let's check out some set fillers from Night Owl. Most of the cards from this envelope received back in June were from an Allen & Ginter set of some sort. There were also a few other interesting things to be found as well, of course.

I chose longtime Cardinals beat writer Derrick Goold to represent the stack of 2020 Ginter needs for reasons that should be pretty obvious. It was cool to see Goold, whose work I've been reading on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch website for years, actually get his own baseball card. I'm sure there are plenty of MLB beat writers who do not have their own baseball cards at this point, but the back of his card tells the tale of Goold helping to save a videographer's life at a game at Busch Stadium in 2019. (I'm sure there are other heroic beat writers out there that don't have their own card, but...)

This one was on my "10 Most Wanted" list for a long time... possibly since 2013 or whenever I first created the list! I've never been too certain how rare this card is, but I know it's usually been a bit out of my price range when I did stumble across one. I don't know if that's due to the general lack of availability of mainstream cards of the soccer legend Pele or if this particular variation is actually somewhat rare.

 

I pulled the "no text" version of this card back when the set was new, but I finally have my hands on the version with regular text. I have some work to do on the "10 Most Wanted" list as it's not visible if you're on a mobile app, and Google stopped making the little sidebar widgets easy to edit. (I think there's only 9 current "wants" on this list for this very reason.)

Here's the requisite array of A&G minis. I believe Night Owl ends up with a lot of duplicate or unwanted minis due to others sending him stuff that he doesn't really need. I can't recall if he still has a "Frankenset" project or not. While a seemingly cool idea, I could never get into making my own Frankenset because it goes completely against the grain of how I collect. (I'm never going to tell other people how to collect, though!) One of these cards is an Allen & Ginter back variation. Can you guess which one? (A hint: it features good ol' Old Planter.)

Night Owl also found a couple of needs from the somehow still unfinished 2003 Topps want list, including the legendary Frank Robinson and former star starting pitcher Cliff Lee on his 1st Year Topps card. (If you're new to collecting, 1st Year cards did not used to be confined to the boring Bowman sets.)

Here's that promised Cardinals card! Dizzy has a banner showing the year 1953 on his card, but his photo is looking straight out of the 1930s. The flag, of course, represents the year of Dizzy's Hall of Fame induction.