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!

Too Many Sports

Trying to avoid the end of year sports fatigue. New cards like these will help. 

 

A couple of blog announcements before I get into the good stuff from Too Many Verlanders: 

• If you missed out on the big college bowl contest this year, don't worry. There's still plenty of time to pick a winner of the dumb greasy white condiment bowl game. All you have to do is leave a comment on the original post with your predicted score. Even if you did enter the big contest, you can drop a guess there as well. Winner gets some sort of new pack next year.
• I am no longer active on Twitter for reasons that should be fairly obvious by now. I am on Bluesky, however. Let me know if you need an invite. I don't post tons and tons of content, but you will get a link to any new blog posts as soon as they drop (or as soon as dlvr.it decides to post them.)

 

So, where was I? Oh, yes. Sports. I am suffering from quite a bit of sports fatigue right now. The Eagles seem to be hell bent on pissing away their season. The Ducks made quite a run towards a potential playoff berth but couldn't figure out how to beat Washington... twice. The Blazers are probably going to end up tanking for the third season in a row with an awful head coach. (I can handle a bad Blazers team, but they've never been less fun to watch than under Chauncey Billups.) The Timbers just finished up their second straight playoff-less season in a league where it's increasingly difficult to miss said playoffs. The Cardinals finished the past season with their worst record since 1995, a year where I am quite certain I watched zero baseball games.

And yet, the cards keep rolling on in from great trade pals like Dennis from Too Many Verlanders. Dennis sent tons of great stuff, including cards of lesser known Eagles players like Nate Allen. He also included a bunch of oversized cards, a baseball pin and other great things I can't even fit into this space here. For the sake of brevity (and my sanity), I just chose the cards that I scanned for the TCDB site to show off here.

Fortunately, no current Eagles were harmed in the making of this blog post. I might have had something really grumpy to say about them if they were. To be fair, Miles Sanders would probably rather still be with this trainwreck of a Philly team than his current 2-win Carolina Panthers.

In happier times, there was Donovan McNabb. I did realize the other day that I've seen the Eagles play in 3 Super Bowls (winning 1, though they really should have won all 3.) That's more title opportunities than some teams I root for.

I love the "New Breed" font on this Matt Barkley jersey card. So futuristic!

There was another version of last night's Eagles/Seahawks game that would have had Marcus Mariota starting in place of an ill Jalen Hurts. (And not ill, like '80s cool.) I wonder what that would have looked like.

Hey, it's baseball! Dennis included a few of these Moments & Milestones cards with the package. I'll never have them all, but it's fun to accumulate them.

At some point I may invest in a new scanner. I've had my current one since early 2009 when it was purchased at a Circuit City (!) closing sale. And it still works just as well as it did on day one, but part of me always wants to see if I can solve the "foilboard looks terrible when scanned" conundrum. (It does also tend to wash out certain colors like red, but there's probably a setting or two I could tweak there.)

Clayton Whoson? Apparently he quarterbacked Northwestern, a bit of trivia I would have maybe known if the Oregon Ducks had joined the Big Ten sooner. Erin asked me the other day who all was in the Big 10 now, and I got through maybe half the list before I gave up. I might be able to recite that list from memory by this time next year, but I'm not going to guarantee it.

Here's another of those Moments & Milestones parallel-o-rama cards. This is a rarer black version that is numbered to just 25.

We end things here with Akili Smith, whose son (Akili Smith Jr.) is an Oregon QB recruit for 2025. Of course, with the transfer portal madness, he'll potentially follow in the footsteps of Bo Nix, Dillon Gabriel (Oklahoma transfer for 2024) and Dante Moore (UCLA transfer). Or maybe not? Sometimes these dudes just up and leave.

Thanks again to everyone who has sent me cards this year! I'll try to be less grumpy next time.

Bird-Themed Teams

Bird cards from @forgotaboutblay because apparently that's all I collect. 

 

A comment someone Erin* made to me the other day made me start thinking about sports teams and their mascots. A lot of sports teams have animal mascots and nicknames. A lot of NFL teams do not. For whatever reason, I've ended up mostly gravitating towards bird teams (Cardinals, Eagles, Ducks -- not pictured). Dennis from Too Many Verlanders sent me another stellar batch of cards back in June that happened to feature those bird teams.

It's always exciting to add another Jim Edmonds card to my collection. I'm guessing somewhere out there is a version of this where all three players have their own memorabilia piece. Maybe there's one that just has Edmonds? Or just Rolen?

Rick Ankiel gets two memorabilia chunks of his own, both a bat and a snippet of his clothing. The default background for these cards show a row of batting helmets. I wonder if there are any embedded helmet piece cards.

Here's another card with multiple opportunities for jersey chunks, but only the white portion is real. Were these card companies toying with us?

This might be my favorite card of the lot. It's an on-card autograph from Topps Total on a design I'd never seen before. The "Signatures" script has a very '80s cafe look to it.

The NFL portion of the package contained this card of Michigan alum Jason Avant. Dennis probably has a few extra cards of Michigan players in the same way that I often end up with more dupes of the teams that I collect than anything else.

Finally, here's an interesting design concept. This "Freeze Frame" insert card contains something that looks like a slide in the middle. I would love to see more of these cards.

*A certain someone called me out for referring to her as "someone", so I have adjusted the post accordingly.

Another Treasure Trove

Another fantastic assortment of eclectic Cardinals cards (and a few Blazers!) 

 

I've been doing this thing, whatever you want to call it, for more than a dozen years now. It's getting tough to pick out new titles for posts and new superlatives to describe bundles of cards. I try to switch up the verbiage every so often. It's the least I can do, especially when you're getting hammered with "trade post" this and "trade post" that.

This latest batch of truly exceptional cards came to the Pacific Northwest (which is not entirely on fire at this point) from Bob of The Best Bubble. Bob really likes his fun oddball cards and bubble gum-related photos, and I encourage you to send some stuff his way if you have anything like that. I often struggle to find things for collectors who have collections that extend beyond the tradition team, player or set territory, but I will try to find what I can.

Most of the cards in the package were of the Redbird variety, but there were a few nice Trail Blazers cards as well. For some reason I like these weird Donruss starburst green and yellow parallels (not the official name, of course.) They do clash with the Blazers color scheme quite a bit, but that's okay.

Inserts and numbered cards from the '00s are almost always a success with me, and this Timeless Treasures Scott Rolen card certainly fits that caterogry. I just wish they could have dedicated a little more retail space for the photo here.

Wacha Wacha Wacha! I've... got nothin'.

Bob sent some interesting unlicensed Todd Zeile cards that I'd never seen before. The prospect hype was pretty big with Zeile at the time, though not in the same category as Todd Van Poppel or Ben McDonald. These days, graded Bowman Zeile cards would be tearing up the online auctions before he ever played a meaningful game. Back in 1990, we got what they used to call "Broders". They would usually cost something like a dollar a pop.
 

Also in the package was a healthy chunk of the 1989 Star St. Petersburg Cardinals team set. I decided to pick this guy to scan, because he's kind of goofy looking. I think I might have seen him at one of my dad's company picnics back in the day.

Soup's on, Suppan! This is from the short-lived (?) Upper Deck Epic set.

Back to the Blazers here with a die cut Scottie Pippen insert. I think Pippen's cards got a bit of a bump over the summer from the whole Jordan documentary thing, but I doubt that did anything to his non-Bulls cards. That's okay, though. You can give them all to me. Except the Rockets ones. Nobody wants those.

This set is always one of the best examples of where to pick up a signed card on a budget. It's also a great example of how well autographs work on matte finish cards.

This one is even better looking than the plain white/grey look of that previous Leaf set. I think they may have even instructed the players to sign in a certain place on the card. What do you think? I am pretty certain this is my first signed card of Ray Lankford, one of the Cardinals biggest stars of the '90s. It was a nice little shock to see this one.

I always appreciate the vintage cards that come my way, no matter what the condition may be. I love how you can still see remants of his original Cincinnati cap behind the weird airbrushing there. Even weirder is the fact that Grammas didn't play in the majors with the Redlegs until after he was traded back to Cincinnati the year this card was issued. I'm not sure if this is some weird scouting photo or what, but he had already completed two seasons with St. Louis at this point. (Feel free to let me know if I'm missing something here.)

Before the Memphis Redbirds were the long term Cardinals AAA affiliate, there was the Louisville Redbirds. Unsurprisingly, the uniform is pretty similar to their then-parent club.

Here's another one of those numbered cards from that Epic set, this time featuring an even more familiar face in the former Cy Young Award winner Chris Carpenter.

Note to self: Chrome cards from this set do not scan all that well.

We finish things up with a couple of signed cards from Signature Rookies. I wonder how many signed cards Brian Barber himself owns.

The last one is another signed card. It's the lesser known Benes brother. If I had to sign 2100 cards, I would lose my mind. I don't know how these guys do it. (Of course, some of them don't... do it.) Was Brian Barber's playing career shortened because he signed nearly ten thousand cards and his hand nearly fell off?

A Different Kind of Group Break

Get ready. 

I teased this on Twitter recently, but I have purchased some boxes of cards in preparation for a group break here on the blog that will correspond with a certain major milestone around here. The important points to note are that the break will essentially be free and will be minor league baseball focused (with other opportunities to snag stuff for other sports/interests). Aside from opening some product, I am hoping to put lots of cards in the hands of others who have read this blog over the years. There will be the usual team slots, and some other slots to grab that will be a little more fluid in what cards they could contain. We could also just call this a giveaway, if it's easier to think like that.

In other news, I bought in on a break over at Tracy's Box Breaks several months back, and for whatever reason the cards got buried under piles of other cards that I haven't gotten around to writing about. I have neglected my duties here. I apologize.

The break was for a 2017 Topps factory set (the big draw being a randomly assigned numbered Derek Jeter relic that came with the set), 2016 Topps Archives Snapshot, and 2014 Topps Mini. I struck out on the first two and already owned all of the base cards from the Mini set, but did land this excellent gold parallel of PC guy Matt Carpenter. The gold cards are numbered to just 63 in this online-only product, so I ended up content here.

Tracy always throws in nice bonuses, too. This Rick Ankiel card from the thick 2001 E-X set somehow wasn't among the hundreds of early '00s Ankiel cards I've collected over the years, thanks mostly to this blog.

Alex Reyes is coming back and he's heading to the rotation! This is crazy exciting news. My MLB At-Bat app is going to be bursting with no-hitter alerts in no time. (I am deadly serious here.)

2005 was the first year I opened a baseball card pack since the '90s, so it seems appropriate to be told to "rediscover" a card from that year. Or does it? In actuality, I am pleased to get any kind of buyback card of a guy who I actually actively collect.

Still, hands down, this has to be the best of the bunch. Food cards are the best cards.

It's Baseball Season!

Cards from @pennysleeves to soothe those playoff blues. 

Unfortunately, things have taken a bit of a turn since my enthusiastic post over the weekend. The Trail Blazers dropped both of their first two games at home, and now face a 2-0 deficit to a New Orleans team that's being carved up by Jrue Holiday and a guy named Rondo, someone it feels like hasn't been relevant in almost a decade.

Still, there are always cards from around the country to drown my sorrows in, like this fine J.D. Drew Piece of the Game bat chunk sent over from Jon of A Penny Sleeve For Your Thoughts. This is a solid reminder that it's truly baseball season now, and... wait... did the Cards game just get cancelled again? Between an outbreak of injuries and a plague of PPD's, it's been really hard to get into the 2018 MLB season so far. Fortunately, we're just three weeks in, and I'm starting to see a lot of sunny icons in my weather app... in Portland, who doesn't have a team... yet?

Jon sent a ton of other non-baseball cards, which I'd like to show off here. Brandon Roy reminds us of that wonderful playoff 4th quarter against the Dallas Mavericks, bringing the Blazers back from the brink of elimination against the eventual champs. It would prove to be his last NBA hurrah, unfortunately.

Former Ducks star QB looks great on this mid-'90s refractor. Mid-'90s refractors don't exactly grow on trees, so this was especially cool to see.

I think this crazy laser (?) etched 1995 Stadium Club card of vintage Randall Cunningham currently holds the top spot in my theoretical list of Best Cards Received in 2018. I am actually afraid to touch this card, given how fragile the little notches in the card appear to be.

From tiny laser-etched notches to clear acetate, here's a card from Jim Jackson's brief turn in a Blazers uniform. "Trader Bob" Whitsitt caught a lot of flack for some of the players he put in Portland, but it sure made for some interesting basketball cards from the many years that I never looked at cards.

Ty Detmer may not have been the best Eagle, but he was a college star. This is an interesting photo choice, with the QB becoming the receiver, I guess.

Finally, here's an urgent Wesley Matthews, ready to bail me out of this sports funk. If only he was still in a Blazers uniform right now! I have no doubt he could pull this spiraling group together to pull of a win down in Louisiana.

Anyway, Cards/Cubs is supposedly happening tomorrow around the lunch hour. I'll be at work, listening to baseball, hopefully.