Weekend PWE Round-Up

Good baseball cards sometimes come in small packages. 

 

Although the bulk of the stuff I receive in the mail these days is from TCDB trades, I still have a few friends of the blog who like to exchange blind letters and packages of cards. And they are still very, very fun. Here's a few fun ones, including this offering from late June by Night Owl Cards.

Night Owl tossed a couple of current Cardinals my way, including a screaming yellow Willson Contreras card and this Jordan Walker Prizm insert. We're at the point where it's difficult to see what the Cardinals will look like come next season, but I'm guessing they're going to try to reestablish themselves around a young core which will likely include Walker.

Along with the current guys came a pair of recently retired legends. Adam Wainwright is now trying to balance full-time dad duties with part-time broadcasting and singing pursuits.

Albert Pujols on a 1989 Topps design is always going to look weird.

Speaking of legends, we go back all the way to 1970 with this one. No Heritage here -- this is the real deal.

Night Owl always has a stash of minis seemingly at his disposal, and he was once again cool enough to help me out with some of these Ginter weirdos. Bill Walton will now have a new patch celebrating his life on the Blazers jerseys this coming season.

Next up is another PWE from another Dodgers fan. If you've been here before, you can probably guess that it's going to be a gcrl/cards as i see them envelope. This Matt Carpenter pink parallel comes from the online exclusive Topps Mini set, which I think they stopped making a couple of years ago. I don't think it was terribly popular (or necessary.)

Inception! That's fun. Cho spent the entire season at the High-A level, and while his bat hasn't seemed to have come around yet, he is very young still.

This is a great collection of Heritage inserts right here. Pong! Hammerin' Hank! A future HOF Cardinal!

Parallels will undoubtedly be the death of any team collector, but it was great to snag a couple more of these yellow things from the mystery envelope.

We end the gcrl envelope with a minor league autograph card. It's Adam Kennedy! A lot of players from sets like these aren't terribly recognizable years after the card has been out, but Kennedy had a nice career that included a World Series ring and ALCS MVP award with the Angels in 2002.

Our third and final envelope comes from the one and only Lost Collector. I've always been a huge fan of these framed Diamond Kings cards from the mid 00's. This Bud Smith card is numbered to just 400.

I've made some good headway this year into collecting all of the various Topps gold parallels (Cardinals) since these became an annual thing back, I want to say, 2001? The less said about this subject, the better, but at least this is one more to tick off the list.

The lone non-baseball card need in these envelopes came in the form of a Sage HIT parallel of Devon Williams, a Ducks receiver who left two years of NCAA eligibility on the table when he opted to enter the 2022 draft. As far as I can tell, he got a look from the Ravens initially but hasn't shown up anywhere prominent in a couple of years.

Thanks, as always, for these fun blind trades!

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.

In Envelopes We Trust

Just one stamp sends cards across the country! Cards from @CardBuzz @breakdowncards and more. 

 

Bryce Harper is a bit of a polarizing player, but I think at this point in his career he's reasonably popular among fans of the game of baseball. Still, I never imagined myself owning cards from a baseball card set that he had his hands in designing. Back in 2018, the online exclusive offerings from Topps were still relatively basic, so this one struck me as odd. Laurens from Card Buzz sent me two cards from the set known as 2018 Topps X Bryce Harper 220 (yes, that's really the name). Despite my misgivings about this set's general nature, I'm always thrilled when someone sends me one of these online exclusives.

Here's what the back looks like. You get a basic quote from the man himself. We also find out that 220 stands for "second to none" because, okay, sure.

There's only fourteen cards in the set, with two of them being Cardinals. I believe Bryce hand-selected the checklist, but I'm not ready to call him a secret Cardinals fan.

The second envelope to check out today is from gcrl / cards as i see them. Topps included scratch-off contest cards in their 2003 Topps Opening Day packs which feature a miniaturized version of the base design on the front. These are confusingly listed online in many places as stickers, but it's pretty clear that they are not. (I'll go ahead and blame Beckett, the source for most checklist disinformation, for this one.) I'm fairly shocked I didn't own this Jim Edmonds cards already considering that I feel like I opened a ton of the stuff early on in this blog's life.

Having dropped out of card collecting after 1993, the mid-90's Topps Traded sets still aren't old hat to me.

At this point I'm just missing one last Topps Traded card set for what I believe to be a complete (Cardinals) team run from the '70s sets, and 1981 through 1995. Of course, it's also from 1995 and features Cal Ripken and Ozzie Smith. (I'm also missing a junk wax era variation, but we're not here to talk about junk wax era variations today.)

Bowman Chrome cards are high on the list of the Topps food chain, so I always appreciate an addition to my collection from this product. Yadi is entering his 18th season with the Cardinals after a prolonged period of free agency.

Speaking of appreciation, I'm always excited to get Pacific cards. They are so wild and often rather hideous. It's great!

Last up to bat is Gavin from Baseball Card Breakdown, who unearthed this odd camo signature featuring Carlos Martinez from the unloved 2015 Panini Prizm set. Prizm-mania may never come to the baseball market considering the license agreement is only with MLBPA and not the league itself, which means that it shouldn't be too costly to pick up inserts and autos from these sets if I'm patient enough. I was definitely happy to get this one, even though Martinez has been mostly frustrating for years.

Here's a refractor of a former Cardinal who had two plate appearances with the Cubs last year that must have been easy to miss. It looks like he signed with the Cubs again this offseason. Maybe he can increase his plate appearances this time to around a dozen or so?

Once again, I want to extend a big thanks to everyone who has sent me PWEs over the years. They are truly appreciated.

Series 2, I See You!

A @CrackinWax #CrackinWaxMailDay times two: bringing in the goods from Series 2 and a few other things. 

After much consternation, I was finally able to find some 2020 Topps Series 2 in the wild.

Just kidding, of course. I had to make the virtual walk of shame to eBay to pick up a couple of blasters. Fortunately, while I had to pay a bit over retail for the blasters, after shipping costs there's no way the seller came out ahead on this transaction unless they picked up the blasters at a wholesale price. Nothing super notable came out of the blasters, but one of my two promised "medallion" cards was Yadier Molina (yes!) and I also acquired my first 14 Turkey Red cards from the second series.

My first cards from Series 2 actually came to me earlier in the week from Crackin' Wax. I was able to pick up a slot for my team in a half case break at a decent prize, and knocked off the team set with plenty of extras. I won't bore you with all of the base cards, but they're a mix of nice photography with just one bad Photoshop (Kwang-Hyun Kim) in the Cardinals mix. There are plenty of other bad Photoshopped cards in the set overall. I guess they were saving the spring training photos for Update or something?

It's nice to see Harrison Bader get some more insert love a couple of seasons after his rookie card year. It seems that most players get forgotten after their RC year, when every set explodes with guys you may never hear from again. This is especially prevalent in basketball, where people only care about rookies and maybe two other players.

The Decades' Best cards are back for this series, and a bunch of them feature the Cards. Here's a look at those rare jerseys only used in the 1956 season, the ones that didn't feature any birds on any bats.

It would have been cooler if the '80s Cardinals were all climbing out of DeLoreans or something.

Some of these feature only a single player, like Bruce Sutter here.

The low numbered gods favored me with this break, as I snagged a black parallel of Carlos Martinez numbered to just 69. I won't make my frequent complaint that these don't look nearly as cool as the black parallels used to. I just won't.

Hobby flagship boxes usually mean silver pack promos, and I was lucky enough to hit one here with the longtime Cardinals catcher. Like most refractor designs, this looks a lot cooler in hand than in my scanner bed.

I also entered a Bowman Mega Box "mixer", which consisted of boxes from the last three years. I didn't pull anything of note aside from another Shohei Ohtani base rookie card (I already had a few.)

Last week's breaks landed in my mailbox earlier this week. I bought into yet another Panini Prizm break, and knocked a couple more cards off of my team set needs.

One of those needs was a silver Prizm (i.e. refractor) variation of Dakota Hudson's second year card. The silver Prizms are made in increasingly rare quantities compared to past sets, but I don't think they've really caught on yet. Something about those logo-less cards really keeps a lot of people away.

I'm always up for a Heritage break, and I'm always up for minor league cards as well. Why not combine the two? The only complaint I have with this card is that I have no idea what sort of "fantastic feat" it was that Nolan Gorman pulled off. (According to the back of the card, it was "extra-base hitfest", whatever that means.)

Aw, well, I think I missed out on my chance to be a Trash Panda for a day.

Chasing Flaherty Again

Another week of @CrackinWax #CrackinWaxMailDay cards. 

I bought into a few more Crackin' Wax breaks, which should come as no surprise to recent readers of the blog. In my new found focus to go after all things Jack Flaherty, I wound up buying something I would normally avoid like the plague - one of those non-MLB college/draft sets. The box was a 2014 Panini Elite Extra Edition one, and while Flaherty isn't in the base set for some reason, he has autographs in this one. He seems to be more prominently featured in the Prizm Draft set from the same year.

I didn't land one of the coveted autos, but I ended up with 75% of the base team set, and did at least wind up with a Flaherty (Elite Expectations insert) as a consolation prize.

Next up were some Panini Chronicles boxes, which are always intriguing to me for their sheer weirdness and variety of designs. From the 2018 box, I ended up with a numbered Harrison Bader Donruss card.

I also finally finished off the 2017 base team set and added this Luke Weaver Donruss card. This confusing insert picks up the card numbering where the regular 2017 Donruss release left off, which threw me for a loop when I first acquired another card (Paul DeJong) from this in a trade. I couldn't find it on the Donruss checklist, you see. It was a weird moment.

My random team in the Chronicles break was the Orioles, which landed me this sticker auto that is headed for the trade box.

Not headed for the trade box is this Carlos Martinez Heritage Chrome card, my lone Cardinals need from a 2017 Topps Heritage High Numbers break. These aren't quite as nice as the refractor versions, but it's still a fairly tough pull.

Finally, there was a free box of 2013 Topps Museum Collection where the spots were distributed randomly to various participants from the week. I ended up with a spot and this Clayton Kershaw card was pulled. I'm sure I'll have no problem finding a home for this card along with all of the other Dodgers cards I seem to constantly pull.

Meanwhile, if you've got any Jack Flaherty cards I need (as in, something not on this list), feel free to reach out! Thanks.