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.

Dollar Days

Trophies from the card show dollar bin. 

Even though Google Maps tells me I am more than two thousand miles (31 hours of travel time!) away from Busch Stadium, Cardinals cards seem to be in somewhat short supply around these parts. Recently, I took advantage of a $1 bin at the monthly card show that actually had some things of interest for me. I came away with 12 things (for $10 if you bought 12), some of which will end up in future trade packages. Here's what I kept for myself.

This Sweet Spot Update Chris Duncan card, circa 2006, boasts of "game-used swatches". There's absolutely no reason that's not just one big piece of cloth behind the scenes now, is there? This seems silly. All of the pieces are the same color and the threads are running in the same direction.

Josh Pearce is a local guy who got into a few games for a few seasons, but I don't really have any recollection of him. It's always fun to get bat relics of pitchers, though. (ABOLISH THE DH!) This one is numbered to 150.

I was about 80 to 90 percent sure I had one of these, and now that I've scanned it I am 100% sure.

I also have one of these Mulders, something I wasn't really prepared for. Both cards were acquired in 2010 according to my image date stamps, so I guess my excuse is going to be that it was eight years ago?

Here's a fun card of two guys who would be traded straight up for each other about five years later. This is an odd one, of course, in that only Troy Glaus (and not Scott Rolen) gets a jersey piece here.

There often aren't a lot of autograph cards of players who actually played Major League Baseball in these bins, so I was happy to get this 1996 Tom Urbani signature, even though it notes that he had moved on to the Angels at this point. Urbani is a guy who I first heard of when I started playing Triple Play 97 on my PC. I doubt I had any idea he had already been traded when I dragged him out of my bullpen when Mike Timlin inevitably ran out of ammo.

Like the weird Rolen/Glaus mash-up, Upper Deck's Ballpark Collection was notable for pitting a lot of different players together, sometimes with strange results. This is a strange pair indeed. Wood's 2008 would be the year he was reinvented as a reliever and made his second All-Star appearance, while Mulder was more than two years deep into his nightmare of not being able to figure out where he should put his arm to release a baseball. This isn't the first card to incidentally feature a Cubs player relic in my collection, and it almost certainly won't be my last. Thanks, baseball cards!

The Power of Chris Duncan Compels You

C'mon Redbirds, quit messing around. Now everyone can see why I feared the final series with dreadful Astros and Minute Maid Park so much. I hope the Cards can go out and do it for Chris Duncan, who succumbed to a freakish neck injury. He was the roving corner outfielder for the last World Series winning Cardinals team, but he's been relegated to the TV studio recently.

Thanks to Section 36 for the Duncan jersey card. I can only surmise that he's going through a similar emotion roller coaster right now. Meanwhile, I realized that I haven't put my end of this trade in the mail yet. I'm a terrible person. But not as terrible as the Astros... or... you know... the Cardinals fundamentals this season. Yikes.

The Quest for Series 2...

It was a big failure. I set out this past weekend to see if I could find some Topps or Upper Deck Series 2 stuff. Here's what I bought instead:

• 1 retail pack of 2009 Goudey
• 3 Target packs of 2009 Topps Heritage
• 1 pack of 2009 Upper Deck First Edition
  
• 1 Fairfield repack box ($9.99) with a rather intriguing 2008 Allen & Ginter pack showing on the front
• 2 2003 Topps HTA jumbo packs ($2 each) where most of the cards ended up being stuck together
• 1 hobby pack of 2007-2008 Topps basketball ($1)
• 3 "grab bags" - team bags full of random baseball cards, each with a Cardinals cards showing on the front (50 cents each)
• 1 hobby pack of 2009 Bowman ($4)
• 1 pack of 2002 Upper Deck World Series Heroes ($1)
• 4 Cardinals cards from the mid-'70s with terrible airbrushing (25 cents each)
• 6 Blazers cards of ex-Blazers (10-to-25 cents each)
  
• ... and one 2008 Upper Deck Ballpark Collection dual jersey card of Albert Pujols and Chris Duncan. I was just thinking to myself the other day that I didn't have a single Pujols jersey card, not that I have many jersey cards at all. I don't think people like to give those up easily for some reason. This one was marked down to $6.