A Sunday Night PWE Round-Up

Cards from assorted envelopes featuring goodies from @vossbrink.bsky.social and more! 

 

Hey, it's spring! And Easter! How did that happen already? Well, before we get completely stuck reflecting on the passage of time, let's check out a few cards from a few envelopes received over the past few months.

First up is a batch from gcrl, which was heavy on the Dylan Carlson content. Just as Carlson was finally starting to show some signs of multi-talented player he was touted to be, a dreadful crash during an exhibition game at the tail end of spring training derailed his efforts to seize control of the starting center field job. (The Cardinals began the season with three CF types all on the IL.)

Along with an insert parallel (or parallel insert?) comes a pair of colored parallels of Carlson's base card from the same 2021 Panini Prizm set. I'm one of those hopeless fools that continued to buy Prizm baseball products, at least until they lost their MLBPA license

Neither green nor purple really suits the Cardinals all that well, but I'd probably go for this one if I had to choose.

We go back to the fully licensed side of things here with a Topps Chrome Prism (not Prizm) refractor of ex-Cards shortshop Paul DeJong. DeJong won a roster spot with the White Sox this spring after struggling mightily with two different teams after leaving St. Louis around the trade deadline last year.

These next few cards were a fairly big surprise. I kept all of the various "Ben Baller" brands off of my want lists intentionally because I just couldn't stand the branding, but if I can manage to block out the annoying logo in the corner, these black bordered Chrome cards actually look really nice. (I hate that!)

I had assumed that this set was released later in the release calendar back in 2022, so I was a bit surprised to see the retired Jon Lester included here. It's basically just a copy of both his regular Chrome and flagship card. I'm guessing they didn't do anything terribly interesting with the checklist for Mr. Baller here.

Harrison Bader is a Met now, which is a bit sad but also makes a ton of sense for some reason. I'm hoping he can hit well enough to stay in the lineup, because he's fun to watch when he's firing on all cylinders.

The next envelope comes from The Lost Collector, who was kind enough to send a few cards my way in order to "test" out my new mailing address. The former Ducks QB Anthony Brown Jr. recently signed up with the Las Vegas Raiders organization. Hey, it's better than one of those wonky spring football leagues that no one cares about.

Royal blue is one of my favorite colors, so there's a part of me that wants to go nuts on trying to seek out all of these parallels. These are one of the few perks of buying retail products, the biggest downfall of which is the horrible collation, of course.

Here's a nice pink refractor parallel of Albert Pujols in the 2009 All-Star game, which his Cardinals hosted. This was the year (2020) that Topps put a ton of cards of past All-Stars into their Update and Chrome Update sets due to the All-Star game itself not being held that year.

This is another nice Chrome parallel, as we see Yadi in sepia tones.

Next up was an envelope with a few Conlon cards in it. This doesn't happen to me too often, but I actually lost track of who this was from. It was from Matthew, and there's a couple of Matthews I can think of that would fit the bill, but I feel bad that I can't give full proper credit here. I'm sure at the time (it was postmarked November 15th) that I was quite confident that I would remember, but... oof.

The last group of cards are from Giants/Stanford fan Nick Vossbrink. He included a pretty excellent TV-shaped card from the 1968 set, commemorating a big World Series win. I would love to see them win another Series soon, but they seem to be in a deep dark funk for the foreseeable future.

I'm glad I kept Nick's envelope, but the whole Giants thing probably would have been a pretty big tip-off. Cueto is one of those dastardly SPs that I'm always needing for some sort of Heritage set or other.

And speaking of Topps Heritage, we end things here in style with the Say Hey Kid Willie McCovey (apparently I was tired after a long weekend) on his Baseball Flashbacks insert from 2019. Not bad!