Stars and Stripes

Set filler needs and patriotic birds from the illustrious @nightowlcardz.bsky.social blog. 

 

I suppose I could have saved this post for a certain holiday that's coming up in a few weeks, but I received this package of cards from Night Owl way back in February, so it probably has sat around long enough. Even though I wouldn't consider myself the biggest flag-waving person around, I've always liked the Independence Day-themed parallel cards, especially the ones that Panini puts out under the Donruss branding. Part of this, I believe, is that the cards usually have more of a heavier "throwback" feel to them, using a different (and likely more expensive) card stock similar to what Topps did with their retail (Target) exclusives from 2009 through 2011.

These two Cardinals Indpendence Day pickups are great, but would you believe that I also have a secret stash of these parallels from players on other teams? I don't usually go out of my way to look for these, but I love it when I pull them from a pack or happen upon one for dirt cheap.

Night Owl sent some red birds on other flavors of cardboard, too, like this interesting insert from the 2022 Topps Gallery set. Arenado's been hitting well of late, but he left today's game after getting hit by a pitch. Injuries always seem to happen to the Cardinals just as soon as someone's bat starts to catch fire -- just look at Willson Contreras, for example. Sheesh.

Mosaic is probably my least favorite Panini brand. I'm not a fan of the way their parallels look at all, and they already have all of the chromium bases covered with Prizm, Optic, Select, and probably some other fringe products that I'm forgetting.

I wish these stamps cards from 2023 Topps Heritage were a super-common, one-per pack type of insert, because it would be really fun to peel these off and stick them on things. Like mail! These count as postage, right?

Among the big names to make their debuts last season with St. Louis, it's Masyn Winn and not Jordan Walker who really feels like the most essential young player in the organization right now. In fact, he already feels like the most important player on the entire team right now. I'm still pretty confident that Walker will put it together at some point, although the Cardinals have been rather dreadful at developing players, particularly outfielders, for quite some time now.

There's a blast from the past. I don't know how I don't have all of these blue Walmart-exclusive parallels yet, but I am sure that I am missing plenty.

Considering that this card (and versions of it like this one) is three years old, I am sure I've mentioned what a weird thing it is that they turned this photo into a horizontal card. Did Flaherty spill some spaghetti on his pants or something?

2022 was such a fun season. I just wish it hadn't ended so abruptly.

We're now onto the set-filler portion of the package. Up first is a pair of high number SPs from the low number portion of the set. Does that make sense? I hope so.

Here's a big block of Allen & Ginter minis. I'm guessing most of these were kicked out of Night Owl's mini binder at some point, although the James McDonald may well have been a Dodgers dupe. Many of these are the slightly rarer A&G back version.

Up next is a pair of cards from the very underrated 2003 Bowman Heritage set. Actually, I feel like Bowman Heritage as a whole is underrated. And no, I'm not talking about the recent Bowman Heritage revival that started with using the modern late '80s/early '90s design templates. These two cards show off three of the base card designs used in the set.

The third 2003 Bowman Heritage card in the package also shows off the third base card design. I believe these were a nod to some old test issues for Bowman that were never officially released. Duke Snider's card is joined by a 2004 Topps Heritage card of Andy Ashby, a name I haven't heard in quite a long time.

A Labor Day Weekend PWE Round-Up

 

A few more PWEs if you please. 

 

Heading into the long weekend, it's time to look at a few more small envelopes that were sent my way earlier this year. First up is a batch from A Penny Sleeve for Your Thoughts. Jon had a series of giveaways awhile back and I ended up claiming one of the cards. A few friends like this fancy card of the Oregon Ducks mascot came along for the ride.

I still don't have all of the various old TCMA sets completely sorted out in my brain, but someday I'll end up with all of my team needs here. Gibby's photo is a bit washed out here, but at least it's not colorized.

The Fleer Greats sets of the '00s are some of my favorites. I am surprised I didn't have this card already, but now it's mine for real.

The Topps Turkey Red offerings for NBA are a bit weird, as the players are drawn with all of these weird backgrounds that are supposed to show them on a neighborhood playground or perhaps a community gym. These are red parallels, of course.

The card I claimed is actually a red parallel from the more familiar baseball Turkey Red counterpart. For a spell, Cliff Lee was one of the best pitchers in baseball.

Next up is a few cards from gcrl that I received back in May when the Big League set was a bit newer. I had trouble finding packs or blasters of the stuff initially, and even resorted to buying a couple of overpriced fat packs at a baseball game to satiate my cravings for a dumb new Topps product.

This is actually the second 1998 Leaf fractal-something-or-other card I've posted in the last week or so, but this is a "Foundations" card instead of the previously shown "Materials" one. I am not sure about what they were trying to do here. It's another glossy, shiny numbered card from the '90s that I needed, though.

I still haven't seen any 2022 or 2021 Bowman Heritage cards, packs or boxes in person since the online exclusives were bundled together and released earlier this year, aside from what I've received in a couple of trades through the mail. I am hoping these end up showing up in future quarter boxes someday down the road.

Camo parallels are not typically my favorite thing, this Panini Prizm rookie card of Kolten Wong from 2014 has such an Atari 2600 look to it that I can't help but love it. I should try to find more of these.

The last little bunch of cards came from The Diamond King. I believe this was another blog giveaway/tradeaway from last spring. I picked up a few Allen & Ginter inserts for my 2020 set build, including this pair of old historic structures.

This is the first card I'd even seen from the 9 Ways to First mini set. The odds for these must be a bit lower than other minis I've seen. I always appreciate when one of these insert concepts is actually baseball themed, even though I do like the sets with weird animals and such.

Speaking of weird animals, who doesn't love a good sea creature? I often flip on the nature shows that they run all day on BBC America on Saturdays to put on in the background when nothing else is going on. That tradition will probably have to end if I can ever finally manage to break away from having a traditional cable subscription. It's way past time to cut the cord.

More Buried Treasure

I found some more cards! 

 

I uncovered another lost pile of cards that was hanging out beneath, well, other cards. This batch of baseball players came from big Orioles fan Ryan H. I believe I reached out to Ryan over the summer because the O's were among a handful of teams where I had a glut of extra cards, and he responded to my offer with some of my needs.

Topps sometimes makes poor choices when selecting photos to be featured on their horizontal cards, and I believe this is one of those times. This is a Prizm Chrome refractor, however, so it's a nice pick-up nonetheless.

Since the Stadium Club Chrome inserts are basically indistinguishable from the Stadium Club Chrome base cards (completely different set), I'm just going to go with this being one of those. If I flipped a coin over this, I might win?

After basing a set on T-206 in 2002, the following year saw Topps release this tribute to T-205. Instead of doing something similar the next year, they seem to have dropped this idea. Eventually, the Turkey Red and Allen & Ginter sets would launch, but these days they seem more focused on cannibalizing their own designs from the past.

It's that time of year once again where I declare my hope for big things out of Jack Flaherty this season. Please, just let this happen! 

Here's one of those old Topps designs that's been beaten into the ground over the years.

Ryan also sent over a bunch of set needs, including this apparently rare People on Bicycles insert from the 2013 Allen & Ginter set. I believe this is the first one of these in my collection, and judging by prices online it might have been a case hit.

I still haven't finished off the 2009 Turkey Red inserts run, but I'm slowly inching closer and closer.

Here's a pair of Hall of Fame sluggers batting from opposing sides of the plate.

This was one of my favorite Allen & Ginter insert sets in recent times, but I felt like they included too many newer players. It's more fun when you see the older players as rookies.

Contest Results and a Ginter-load

There can be only... two? And @Nachos_Grande nearly puts to bed my 2020 Allen & Ginter set.

 

With a wild championship game last night, March Radness has officially come to a close. For what I believe to be the first time in contest history, we had two people tie for first place. But there can only be one winner, so that's what the tiebreaker is for!

Jafronius picked Kansas to win 70-64, while ashbaugh88 predicted a 77-71 win. That means... oh crap. Both predictions were within 7 points of the actual final tally (72-69), which means we will have two winners this year for the first time ever. In third place was Josh W., while James20484 wins the worst place "prize". If your name is in bold, you are due a prize. Please contact me ASAP.

In other news, Nachos Grande dropped a truckload of Allen & Ginter base cards on my porch, which all but finished off the easy portion of the set. I'm only needing card #300 (Andres Munoz), a handful of slightly short printed cards, and assorted inserts and parallels to finish off the 2020 set. You know, no big deal. Considering I didn't even want to collect that year's edition, my want list has come a long way. It's nice to see.

I didn't want to bore you all with tons and tons of unremarkable base cards, so I picked out just a few to scan. We have a couple of TV show stars, including huge Cardinals fan and Bravo talk host Andy Cohen and that guy who passive-aggressively bickers with his wife on one of those house fixin' shows. You know the one I'm talking about.

Of course, Allen & Ginter isn't just about the non-sport subjects. We also get legends like Tony Gwynn in the '80s Padres brown gear.

Speaking of legends, it's Rickey Henderson from one of his stints with Oakland. I'm going to guess this is from his original run, based on the uniform design.

I feel like your young baseball star comes in a couple of different varieties. You have your no-nonsense ball of intensity (every team has one). Think... I don't know... early Bryce Harper. And then there's the guys who just look like they're happy to be there and are loving every minute of it. I prefer the latter kind. I think Vlad Jr. is the latter kind.

2020 was kind of a weird year for Topps rookie cards. You had some strange leftovers who starred the previous season, like 2019's AL ROY Yordan Alvarez. And then there was Gavin Lux and Luis Robert, who still had things to prove on the field. I think there was also a pile of players that were expected to debut in later series, but with the extremely short pandemic fueled season, the 2020 RC class ended up very empty in the end. I guess I don't really have a point to all of this, except that when I think of 2020 rookies I don't think of Yordan. And if I'm tasked with thinking of notable 2020 rookies, I guess there's good ol' Lou Bob and that's about it.

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?