Takin' Some Shorts (Prints)

Cardinals and Heritage needs, including a stupidly elusive card. 

 

The latest (well, as of November) mailer from the one and only Night Owl Cards was heavy on some harder to get cards from a certain set that I collect. Before we get into that, however, it's to give the Cardinals some due. I don't know who invented the X-Fractor, but that particular shiny Chrome design still amuses and delights all these many years later. Chrome was the first and easiest thing for me to make fun of when I started collecting cards again almost twenty years ago, but it didn't take me long to get suckered into liking these, at least when they suit my team collecting interest.

I ended my quest to collect all things Allen & Ginter with the 2022 set, but that didn't stop me from buying a couple of blasters of the most recent product. They make decent trade bait, after all. This year's design is fine, but it's not at all what drew me to A&G in the first place. This black bordered Ozzie Smith mini isn't a bad look, but it's just not Ginter to me. (I am still collecting those sets from 2006-2022, by the way. I rarely give up on anything, to a fault.)

This one is a regular bordered mini, with the A&G logo thing on the back. You'll just have to imagine what it looks like, or do a Google search or something.

This is one of those cards that I could have sworn I owned at least five copies of, but apparently I did not. The 2009 Bowman design was pretty far away from what Bowman sets look like these days. I mean, these had black borders. Black! Can you imagine?

This is certainly an oddball, which means I totally love it. It comes from some sort of Willie Mays Story set from 1983, which means it was probably pretty far off of my radar. I don't usually comb through checklists of sets that feature a player that isn't from the team that I follow, so this was a really cool find.

Topps did a boneheaded thing (can you imagine?!) with the 2024 Heritage set, where they decided to make the first 100 cards of the set short printed instead of the usual last 100 cards. Well, almost. There's a Nathan Eovaldi card in the first 100 that is actually not short printed (but is often listed as such), while Leody Taveras (card #407) is actually short printed. The most annoying thing is that this is typically one of the most expensive cards in the whole set. My theory is that this card isn't any more rare than the other 99 SPs and just received extra attention from people who couldn't fill that hole in their base set, but the current (low) population of the card on sites like COMC would suggest otherwise.

Night Owl ended up having a bunch of extra Heritage SPs to trade off, as he is the '75 guy and ended up with a lot of extras in set build, so I was more than happy to be one of the lucky recipients of a pile of these pesky cards. Short printed cards from newer Heritage sets are still pretty affordable (Leody Taveras notwithstanding), so I am tempted to fully put this thing away before time gets away from me. Alas, almost immediately after I put what I have of this set into a reasonably sized binder, I heard the ugly rumors that a High Number series is still forthcoming. If that does come to fruition, at least it should be cheap!