Contest Update!

An update before the Final Four and a bunch of Christmas cards.

We're in the home stretch of the latest edition of the March Radness contest, and it all came crashing down for me on Sunday when Duke was felled by the shocking end to their contest with UConn. Huskies alum (and member of the back-to-back title teams) Donovan Clingan was just about to take the floor at halftime of the Blazers game we were at when he found out about the wild ending. While Jeremy sits in 1st place currently, I'm unsure of a path to victory for him as his predicted winner (Florida) is long gone. It all looks like it will come down to who takes the real title to determine our winner, with Trevor riding high with Michigan, both Brendan and Emily in play (Arizona), and Dominic lurking with his Connecticut pick. (Nobody tell Erin that she has clinched the worst bracket this year.)

Speaking of Michigan, we've got a ton of great cards to show today that came from big Wolverine guy Dennis of Too Many Verlanders over the holidays. Incidentally, the namesake of his blog is back in Tiger Town for what could conceivably be his final stop on his MLB tour.

I am pretty sure I have more "fancy" cards of Jeff Ayres (fka Pendergraph) than any of his normal base cards, but such is the way of the young hooper that doesn't blossom into a starring role in the pros. This one comes with a free mystery substance. I'm not going to forensically analyze this exactly, so let's just call it dirt?

I believe I have a lesser copy of this chunky jersey card of the one-time Cardinals closer. This one is a silver (or gray?) version numbered to just 149 copies, though.

Travis Outlaw was a bridge between the "Jail Blazers" era and the good vibes of the B-Roy/Aldridge days. Fun player! This is a fun card as well.

It's sort of amusing that this is called "Color Guard" when there is a distinct lack of vibrant color on it.

Here's a couple of other significantly more obscure Blazers on a signed card (or signed things affixed to a card, at least.) Portland certainly had some misadventures in the draft before landing Damian Lillard. Williams and Babbitt were a pair that didn't work out so well.

One of the things I like the most about Panini's draft sets is that they show players in the fully licensed college uniforms. This insert idea distorts the coloring and patterns of Franklin's Ducks uniform beyond recognition, unfortunately.

Hey, it's picture time! Encased cards don't scan so well, you see.

Here's a quick six-pack of cards from the various teams that I follow. Pacific really had some goofy designs.

And here's a nine-pack of all Ducks! I think my favorite here is the combo Freeman/Mariota card in their college uniforms.

I was fairly ambivalent about the Diamond Kings brand, but I do miss their framed parallels. This one is numbered to 99.

Blog favorite Ugo Amadi checks in here with a silver Prizm autograph from the much beloved Panini Prizm Draft Picks set.

And now we head all the way back to 1982 for a gander at a Garry Templeton Fleer stamp. I still have a lot of needs in the stickers and stamps areas.

The ticket motif that Panini Contenders is based on doesn't always work, but I like this design. The green foil helps as well. (Does anyone use paper tickets anymore? And they certainly aren't perforated, are they?)

It's baseball season! I hope everyone has been enjoying the first week of the long MLB marathon.

Contest Winners and Cards from Oren

 

If you won something, say something! 

 

As of Monday, another college basketball season is in the books. That also concludes contest season here at Cards on Cards. Here is your big list of winners:

• 1st Place: bivlo (blitmeat)
• 2nd Place: rl16
• 3rd Place (tie): mds2942 (Chaos is a Bracket) and AngelsInOrder
• WoRsT pLaCe: mintxcore and josh.worley (Worley360)
• Championship Game Prediction: Brandon L (UConn 75, SDSU 62 - actual score UConn 76, SDSU 59)

If you are one of the winners (or "winners"), please get in touch with me as soon as possible so I can get your address and discuss your prize(s).

Meanwhile, here's another lovely batch of Cardinals cards from reader Oren. I was able to increase my Topps gold (the real gold) collection by a couple of notches with this package I got back in December.

Jack Flaherty has kept his ERA down over his first two (healthy, we presume) starts of the 2023 season, but he's been walking dudes at an alarming rate. Hopefully that doesn't become a thing.

Along with the tidy J.D. Drew autograph card is this striking blue insert from the 1999 Fleer Mystique set. I like it a lot.

More gold! Mooooore gooooold!

Tim Cooney made it to the big club in 2015, but my memory of this has more to do with remembering he has a card in Topps Update that year than of any recollection of seeing him on the field. Memory is weird that way.

Is this still the Players Weekend logo? Was it ever?

This insert from last year's Topps Chrome set leans a little too close to "Ben Baller" territory for me. It's always nice to get another Yadi insert card, though.

Last, but certainly not least, is this fancy encased Alex Reyes auto-patch card from the 2017 Panini National Treasures set. I wonder if Panini will continue to make sets like this in the future as they only have retired players and (apparently) minor leaguers to draw from now.

Thanks again to Oren and everyone who participated in my contests this year!

It Must Be PWE Round-Up Time

Checking in on the plain white envelopes, featuring a fancy one from @breakdowncards and much more. 

 

The contents of my mailbox recently has been inundated with PWE trades from TCDB (if you know, you know), but I still want to make time for the reader/blogger friends who continue to send me stuff. First up tonight is an all-Cardinals offering from gcrl (cards as i see them.) 

The other night, the Dallas Cowboys kicker missed his first four PATs in an opening playoff game, and I saw multiple people mention the name Rick Ankiel in reference to his misdeeds. That made me a bit sad. Those four lost points could have spelled doom for the football team, but the game ultimately was a blowout anyway. Ankiel's meltdown was even more costly, but the Cardinals actually went on to win their playoff game on that fateful day. Ankiel's pitching career never fully recovered, though.

These Artist's Proof parallels are a little too much, if you ask me. I normally can go for the shiny stuff, but I'm not sure about this.

Panini was still trying to perfect their formula when this Prizm design appeared. This red, white, and blue parallel design also contains that "mojo" pattern that certain collectors love these days.

Here we go into the murky depths that is the scanned foilboard card. It's hard to tell what's going on here. Eli would prefer if you just left.

While I wasn't much for the '97 Score Artist's Proof design, I do like this "sunburst" pattern (cool kids call it Dufex, I think) on these '94 Pinnacle Museum Collection cards. I could certainly use more of these.

The next batch of goodies included this two-pack of Red Turkey cards from the All Cardinals All the Time blog.

These rest of this batch must have fit into the unwanted Cardinals dupes category, which is certainly relatable. I am proud to say that I never bought a single pack of this Topps cash grab from last year, the "Platinum Anniversary" Chrome set that was apparently delayed from 2021. The cards will look great in my binders, but the set is massive and features an all too familiar design. (I'm still working on the team set, of course.)

Jordan Hicks seems to be the forgotten man in the Cardinals bullpen because of the injuries that have plagued him. Let's hope that he can put together a nice string of productive outings sometime in the not too distant future.

These early Opening Day sets had large logos on them and were much more identifiable than the most recent offerings. Eventually Topps settled in to making them look like dollar store versions of their flagship set.

I believe this is a black parallel version of one of the Topps insert sets from 2018. I really wish it was somehow illegal to make parallel versions of insert cards.

I'm dead sure I must have needed this Matt Adams card or it wouldn't be appearing in this space here, but if I had seen this in a random card bin at a card show, I would have certainly passed it up.

Matt Carpenter is going to look weird in a Padres uniform.

Last up is an envelope from Baseball Card Breakdown that apparently got lost in USPS purgatory for a stretch. Maybe some lonely mail carrier was tempted by this seriously fancy Stephen Piscotty autograph. (It's really fancy!)

Alex Reyes, the former top prospect who was actually an All-Star as recently as 2021 is still out there looking for work, but I'm guessing he'll catch on somewhere. He's got too much of an arm not to find another chance. This numbered parallel of his Bowman 1st will at least be a nice reminder of what promise he had, but I don't think we can close the books on him just yet.

Word association: Shirt thief. (Sorry, Mike, but that's all I've got.)

Gavin also sent a five-pack of Portland Pickles cards from 2019. I feel like I'm going to have to track down a checklist of this set somehow so I can get it added to TCDB. I'll have to make a point to get out to another one of our local college wood bat team's games again this summer, because they are definitely fun.

Torsos and Such

Catching up on trade recaps with some @breakdowncards Cardinals. 

 

I haven't been keeping up with the card blogs all that well lately, and trade package exchanges have been a bit sparse. Still, I've found some time to send some stuff out and have seen some things trickle in. It hasn't just been all box breaks around here, folks. That can get expensive. Let's check out some Redbirds from fellow Portland resident Gavin of Baseball Card Breakdown.

Alex Reyes has one of those pitcher's curses that so many are afflicted with. He has tons of talent and physical ability, but he can't seem to stay healthy. After an All-Star season where he lost his grip on the closer's job by season's end due to lack of control, he is back on the shelf in '22. (Where is this so-called shelf, by the way, and where did it come from?)

Continuing with the Reyes theme, along with the low numbered 1990-ish Topps On-Demand card at the top of the post and a Bowman Platinum insert from 2016, this one might be my favorite. Reyes is wearing a throwback uniform, and one of my favorite recent Stadium Club designs gets the Chrome treatment.

There isn't an easy way to segue from three shiny modern cards to a beat up 1960 card. Here it is: beat up George Crowe! The scanner even gave up hope on this card before it finished.

I'm pretty sure I've expressed my disdain for disembodied torso cards, but that seems to be a pretty common feature of on-card autographs.

Rob Kaminsky was a Cardinals first round pick at one point, but spent most of his career in the Cleveland system before finally making it to the big leagues with the Cardinals in the 2020 pseudo-season. He hasn't been back since his 5 appearance stint. It looks like he's bounced around a bit and dealt with injuries.

Oscar Mercado is another former Cardinal pick (2nd round, 2013) that ended up with Cleveland, but he has stayed there as a regular outfielder since 2019. It's another torso auto!

Well, I don't even need to talk about who this guy is or what he has accomplished. It looks like Yadi's final season will consist of less playing time than he's used to, but the hope is that he'll be healthy for any pivotal games down the stretch as well as the playoffs. I've always loved the Allen & Ginter framed minis and am glad they are still making them, even though they've reduced in number over the years.

A Thursday PWE Round-Up

The latest batch of PWE's includes a @nightowlcards variety pack. 

 

It's Thursday night, which means we're already well into the preweekend if you're into that sort of thing. I have a few more envelopes of the plain and white variety to go through, so let's get it going.

First up is a pair of gems from gcrl. It feels like Alex Reyes is entering some sort of make-or-break season to determine what kind of career he's going to have, which makes it less than ideal that he's going to begin the season on the IL, an unfortunately familiar place for him. The blue Chrome rookie refractor card of his (numbered to 150) is really nice looking, though. I like the way the triangular patterns in the background were used on the 2017 Chrome cards, even if I never liked the design itself.

The other aforementioned gem is one of those heavy metal cards from 1996 Leaf Preferred. This Eckersley card is actually a gold parallel, which might well be a first for my collection. At the very least, I haven't seen many of these.

Next up is small pile of things from Night Owl. The rookie variations from last year's Allen & Ginter set just serve as a reminder of how much better the designs from the first few A&G sets from Topps were.

Randal Grichuk just got traded to the Rockies today, so this one is a bit timely. It's a gold parallel card of the always classic Arch-in-the-background shot.

Here's a new(er) one for my meager George Springer collection. I don't feel like I saw a lot of new Donruss Optic cards last year.

The end of the lockout means that Yadier Molina will actually get a shot at a full season in what is planned to be his final one. I don't know how pink became such a go-to color for Topps Chrome refractors, but I'm not complaining.

This is the first time I've added a card from the 2009 Topps Update Propaganda inserts set in quite a long while. This is right about when Manny Ramirez's career started taking a dark turn.

Night Owl also sent this nice six pack o' Turkeys from the first Topps version of the old cabinet cards.

Last up is a few (American) footballers from Trevor P. This is a really nice shiny 2005 Bowman Chrome refractor from the former Ducks star QB Joey Harrington.

I could have sworn I had this Dion Jordan rookie card already, but I must have been thinking of some parallels. It looks like Jordan is wearing Ducks gear here, but Topps Photoshopped it out of recognition.

Jason Fife only got one full season in as Oregon's starting QB after backing up Harrington before giving way to Kellen Clemens. I don't think he ever saw any regular season action in the NFL.