Long Live the Streak

Some brief comments on the Cardinals season, plus a PWE round-up and @coffeebreaks40 nets me a stylish Bob Gibson card. 

 

Admittedly, I never addressed the Cardinals unprecedented seventeen game winning streak that launched them into Wild Card position because I didn't want to jinx it. I'm not that superstitious, but things seemed to be going along pretty well for awhile without me talking about it, so I just... didn't. In truth, this 2021 team never felt like it was worth talking about much. I see their big streak as sort of... regressing to the mean in reverse? (progressing to the mean?) This is a good team with good players that were just performing badly for a long stretch of time. Maybe it was due to continuing adjustments to barely playing anything that resembled baseball for all of last year or maybe it was something else. In any case, in the solidification of their 2-3-4 punch of Goldy, O'Neill and Arenado, the other bats started to come around as well, as they often do. Other pitchers were pulled off the scrap heap to put a stop to the endless parade of free passes. Suddenly, we have a team in a Wild Card play-in game. Let's check back in a couple of days before we get excited about the playoffs.

Here's the man that at age 40 will take the hill against the Dodgers. These cards come courtesy of cards as i see them, a fan of the team that has unlimited resources. When you already have the highest payroll in the game and then you go out and grab two of the biggest stars (Trea Turner and Max Scherzer), well that's... I don't know, some people like the Dodgers for some reason. I don't!

I won't throw too much shade, though, because I get great cards from this Dodger fan all the time, including a low numbered Mother's Day parallel of the Cards starting centerfielder. Harrison Bader is pretty ridiculous, and I mean that in a good way.

I also ended up with a nice assortment of old Heritage set filling needs. Many of these seem like Dodgers doubles. I think at this point, more than half of all of the expendable cards in my collection are Cardinals cards, so I know how this is.

Here's more Heritage cards from 2001 and 2002, including a guy I redacted (mostly because I didn't realize I'd scanned one of his cards until it was already done, and I thought it was funny to do this) and one David Jonathan Drew. Yes, that's right: J.D. Drew's initials are actually D.J.

Next up is an envelope stuffed with more Heritage cards and a needed Tommy Edman Holiday base card from Diamond Jesters. Matt is a big Red Sox fan, and his team faces the Yankees tonight in the AL Wild Card game. After all of the excitement this past weekend, I couldn't think of a more boring outcome than a Yankees/Red Sox game (and nothing else?), but I don't make the rules. I'm sure it's exciting for Red Sox fans, whose team wasn't expected to do a whole lot this year.

Here's a few cards for my 2021 set build. I've actually made some headway into all of these Heritage sets recently, but the cards are tied up in my COMC account and I haven't pulled the trigger on a shipment yet.

Of these six, only Aaron Judge advanced to the postseason.

Finally, because I didn't know where else to fit this, I recently participated in my first Coffee Breaks break, which was a baseball "mixer". (This essentially means that there's boxes from a variety of products rather than one specific set.) I didn't do so well, as is often the case with these things, but I didn't land this shiny Bob Gibson insert parallel from the 2021 Panini Prizm set. It's numbered to 99.

Enjoy the playoffs and Go Cards!