Pitchers and Catchers are Standing By

More cards from @marcbrubaker to help get through this stupidly long offseason. 

 

The Super Bowl is over. We should be talking about Spring Training right now. I read somewhere that pitchers and catchers were supposed to report today. It's too painful to read about baseball right now, but we have cards to fill in the spaces. (At least until that big market crash comes...)

Late in the fall, I received another nice bunch of cards from Marc Brubaker (aka Remember the Astrodome.) Let's check 'em out.

After a stellar, but brief (as all things were) 2020 season, it looked like the KK deal was a huge one for the Cardinals. For whatever reason, he fell out of the starting rotation in 2021 and was reportedly unhappy about it. I had thought they had signed him to a three year deal, but it looks like they made him a free agent back in November, leaving him free to sign with another team or return to the KBO.

Bru sent me two KK cards shot from the same angle but in different lighting. It looks like Panini didn't quite remove all of the logo from his cap on this one.

One of the things I've learned about collecting baseball cards over time is a player's popularity does not necessarily correlate to his collectability, nor his accomplishments or perceived status in the game. People are still crazy about Mark McGwire cards, a player who even without the steroid stink on him would have a tough time meeting certain Hall of Fame credentials. Meanwhile, legendary pitchers continue to get no love. (There has to be some big pitcher collectors out there, just for sheer affordability, right?)

I always love a good framed Allen & Ginter card. This one comes with a piece of McGwire's road gray jersey. We assume it's a Cardinals jersey, but there's no way of knowing. (Hey, with Fanatics owning Topps now, they don't even have to go to a third party to buy replica jerseys to put into cards anymore.)

Bowman Platinum always seems to be the product for out-of-left field card designs. This one is an insert (Precious Elements), but the whole product is always kind of weird looking.

I put the 2020 Turkey Red inserts to bed awhile back, but I still need a number of these Chrome variants for my team collection.

Speaking of variants (and variants of variants), here are a couple of Artist's Proof parallels that will fit in my binders quite nicely. In some years these are called "Artist Proof" and in others they are "Artists Proof". You never know what you're going to get.

Bru also included a solid stack of 2020 Allen & Ginter cards. I chose a few of these famous (?) monuments to capitalism to represent the bunch. They're all conveniently pictured in front of a blue sky background with some nice fluffy clouds. I wonder how Topps pulled that off?