Yadi is Back!

Celebrating the return of a franchise icon with some excellent baseball cards.

Reader Oren got in touch with me last spring about a potential card swap. Oren has an expansive list of player collections, and I was happy to go digging through boxes to try to find stuff to send out. In exchange, I was rewarded with a heaping helping of cards.

The most significant chunk of Cardinals cards in the package featured #4. Yadi is finally back and catching Adam Wainwright every fifth day in pursuit of their quest to log the most games as a battery in league history. This jumbo-sized card is a box topper from the most recent Topps Heritage set. (Incidentally, I just saw that Topps Heritage High Numbers was pushed back until well into the fall this year. I guess that gives me extra time to work on the regular set.)

The blue parallel version of Yadi's "silver pack" card from last year looks a little strange. I'm not sure that it does the '86 design many favors. There are only 150 copies of this out there, though.

This is, of course, an example of this year's "silver pack" set on the all too familiar 1987 design.

It wasn't all Molinas, however. Oren sent some truly interesting non-Yadi Cardinals cards as well. This is one of those manufactured "patch" cards inserted into the 2017 Topps set. I can't quite place the cap design that Matt Carpenter is wearing, but it's familiar for some reason.

No guesswork is needed on this 2011 Topps Update gold parallel. Matt Holliday is at the 2011 Home Run Derby, which was hosted by Arizona.

This one is another All-Star Game (2015) card, and it even features a jersey swatch. Well, it's a workout jersey, apparently. This one was hosted by Cincinnati.

Oren tossed in some football cards as well, including this 2012 Topps insert of an Oregon Ducks all-time great.

That an Eagle shows up on one of these Color Rush cards is kind of silly, because I feel like the Eagles tend to wear the least amount of "color" in the game. I'm really glad I haven't seen them roll out chartreuse jerseys or anything like that.

I also received a huge stack of Allen & Ginter minis for my A&G binders. I had to include this tape measure for scale, although I'm not entirely sure why there's a tape measure on my desk right now.

This is a Chrome X-Fractor encased rookie card of the one and only John Santor. He was a 35th round pick of the Cardinals in 2000 and unfortunately didn't make it above A-ball. Give him a break, though! They don't even have 35 rounds of the draft these days.

This is probably my favorite card of the whole bunch, however. I'm not the biggest autograph hound out there, but signatures on Allen & Ginter cards always look good to me. There's just so much canvas to deal with, especially on the older designs. I love it.