Cardinals, Heritage and Sometimes Both

 

A late spring trade package with some of the usual suspects and a couple of nice surprises.

Since I don't really do many prearranged trades outside of TCDB anymore, it's always nice to find a surprise bubble mailer in or near my mailbox. Make that doubly so if it's from Night Owl Cards, since we've been sending stuff back and forth from coast to coast for many years now. Right around the end of spring one such package landed in my lap and I'm finally ready to show off some of its contents today.

I won't get into my rant about what Fanatics did to my beloved Topps Heritage again, and I genuinely like some of the colored parallels, but the sheer quantity of them is too much. (If it's negative, everyone is blaming Fanatics now, aren't they?) I'd much rather get one of the traditional inserts or, gods forbid, a short printed base card than a parallel in every pack.

I was excited about Matt Carpenter returning to the team last year in part because I knew it could potentially mean more Matt Carpenter Cardinals cards, and I wasn't totally disappointed. I knew it might be a struggle for him at the plate, but he was deployed sparingly. Lance Lynn also returned to St. Louis to finish his career last year and ended up with more Cards cards, while Tommy Pham's brief reappearance last summer also netted him new Cardinals offerings. I was a bit less excited about Pham.

A former Cardinal who hasn't returned is the power hitting and oft-injured Tyler O'Neill, although he's only in his 8th big league season. He's got time yet. This aqua Donruss Optic parallel from his rookie year is numbered to 299. One of these days I have a huge rant brewing about the whole rookie card thing -- and it's not going to be pretty -- but for now I am just calling everything a "card from his rookie year" and leaving it at that.

Here's big surprise number one: my first ever Stan the Man card from his playing days! And it doesn't even look like it was fished out of a latrine or rolled up to smoke something. There are some visible scratches and a small crease, but it looks really nice to my standards. My scanner did not like the lower border for some reason.

There was a pretty decent pile of Heritage for the set build in the pack. I'll let the Christopher Sanchez SP represent the lot as you've likely seen all of these base cards numerous times by now.

The second nice surprise is this Dakota Hudson Allen & Ginter jersey card from 2020. It's not quite on the same level as the Musial card, of course, but it's not like people are backing up truckloads of these to my house every week.

If you do want to back up a truckload of cards to my house someday, make it full of Ozzie Smith cards, like this 2024 Donruss Optic Blue Velocity parallel. I'll never run out of these kinds of parallels to collect, but I'll also probably never stop wanting them.

Thanks again to Night Owl and everyone who has sent little and big surprises in the mail over the years!

Large Mac and Other Stars

The latest and greatest group break Cardinals.

 

One of the packages I've yet to sort from this year was a rare all-Cardinals selection. These cards were from group breaks hosted by Nachos Grande, mainly featuring products released late last year on into the early parts of this year. A lot of these cards are from sets that have been shown off to death in various corners of the internet, so I'm going skim and try to just show some of the best of the best.

I really had no interest in the first two Topps Chrome Platinum Anniversary sets, although the Cardinals cards will always have places in my binders. The first set just seemed like the millionth excuse to pay tribute to the iconic 1952 design, which was a bit boring to me. The second set? Well, it truly looks like it's powered by AI. Fortunately, the most recent edition (2023, but released this year) seems to have done away with the uncanny valley filter most of these '22s had on them, but I still haven't picked up any for myself. Goldie checks in here on a "rose gold" numbered parallel.

Ooh, here are some Tiny Little Diamonds (or whatever Topps calls them.) I was initially excited to finally get my hands on a Cardinals Packy Naughton card as he was featured prominently in the bullpen for a bit, but he hasn't been heard from at the big league level since an injury derailed his 2023 campaign.

There must have been some earlier Donruss Optic sets included, because I landed some interesting colored parallels. This Yadi card from 2021 is numbered to 199.

Dakota Hudson spent his whole career with St. Louis until he switched teams this past offseason, where he's learning the true horrors of being a Colorado Rockies starter. This is some sort of "purple stars" parallel. It's very dreamy.

There were a ton of 2023 Stadium Club parallels, but as I was saying, you've all seen these photos quite a few times by now.

I was very excited about these 2023 Topps Archives inserts featuring some Cardinals legends in their final seasons.

Apparently these are based on the 1954 Tarzan 3-D design. I wouldn't mind a whole set of these, even though they are just printed on regular Heritage-style card stock. It looks like they did attempt a 3D effect at least on this card, as the background shows all the expected signs of double-layering.

What I did not expect out of a 2023 Panini product was a Mark McGwire autograph! Sure, Large Mac only signed a sticker, and these stickers have probably been sitting around the Panini vaults for some time, but I certainly can't say I have a ton of his autographs in my collection.

Last, but certainly not least, came this Fan Favorites autograph of good ol' Simba. I feel very fortunate to have seen Ted Simmons along with a number of other Cardinals legends at a game I attended in person. With the passing of what feels like an entire generation of great players over the past five years or so (R.I.P. Willie Mays), I feel that much more fortunate for the ones that we still have around.

Baseball is Back!

 

Baseball cards are back as well, and they brought a few other sports with them. 

 

Let's hop in the wayback machine and check out some cards that Sportscards From The Dollar Store sent quite a few months ago -- last year, in fact. Yes, that means that I'm quite a bit behind in the blogging show-and-tell here, but I'm not going to explain myself or make any apologies for it. We're here to look forward, and forward we shall look!

Along with a really nice '78 O-Pee-Chee HOFer came a few Cardinals cards, including another one of those "so weird, it must be Panini!" cards that features a silver ink autograph on a leather swatch. If I'm not mistaken, this might be the one year (2019) that they brought typically high end Leather & Lumber brand to retail, which would also mean it was my first dip into the Panini Points realm.

Like many a pitcher with a rocket arm before him, Trevor Rosenthal seemed to burn hot quickly and then more or less disappear. Since departing St. Louis, where he was a full time closer, Rosenthal has logged big league innings for four other organizations but hasn't made it back to the big leagues since the cursed 2020 "season".

Well, I assume you all know all about Stan the Man's story, so let's just take a beat and enjoy a cool looking card. I'm sure that photo has to be colorized, but I don't care.

Moving on to tackle football, buckstorecards always finds me some really fun Oregon cards. Bonus points should be awarded for catching a Duck in Duck gear.

There's no gear here at all, and this weird Panini Day set seems to have a lot of unaccounted inserts in the TCDB files, which can be a bit frustrating. No, I don't really want to figure out my own checklist for this set. Panini can be a real nightmare when it comes to that stuff.

Haloti Ngata is a very large man, so it must have been difficult to fit him in the frame here,. They almost nailed it, but not quite.

I really like the design of this old Topps Finest Donovan McNabb relic. It has a honeycomb thing going on.

This one isn't bad, either. There's no honeycomb, but there's still a hexagonal jersey swatch.

On the other hand, I feel that this design is unspeakably awful. The glittery background almost reminds me of "snow" on an old TV set. This might have looked better with more of a television theme to it, but what do I know? They don't consult me on these things for some reason.

Here's a Turkey Red design that I don't recognize. Did they ever make tobacco cards that looked like this? (I mean, besides the sticker signature, of course.)

I'll always wonder what Joey Harrington's pro career would have looked like if he had started off with a better franchise that didn't rush him to the field because they didn't really have any other options. He was never a big numbers guy, but he was more of a leadership pro. In the right system, I wonder if he could have thrived.

It's the man of many nicknames, FredEx, The People's Champ, etc. (Most of these he gave to himself.) He only really had that one memorable play, but it was definitely a stunner.

Here's another "bonus points" Ducks card.

Here's the first of a pair of fancy looking Dion Jordan "material" cards. Jordan has a ton of cards, and almost all of them are with him wearing Dolphins gear. He didn't really get a chance to make an impact in the pros until he got to Seattle, though.

How long are these rookie photo shoots for the NFL? There are so, so many different cards out there and so many dorky poses that they have to make.

This counts as a little bit of a patch, doesn't it? I can see a little bit of color there that isn't white.

I wish the careers of De'Anthony Thomas and Patrick Mahomes had overlapped a bit more. I could see DAT getting utilized more as a gadget type player once Mahomes started getting more established.

Our last Duck of a very excellent group of Ducks cards is a "Gold Zone" Score parallel of Penei Sewell, numbered to just 50. You can still find some interesting cards in a lower end product.

There's even a basketball card in the mix. Al-Farouq Aminu was a consistent presence in the peak years of the Blazers "Dame Time" era.

Sports cards with no printed name or photo on the front are a bit weird. I can assure you that this is a Brian Elliott card, a longtime goaltender who was still active in the NHL as recently as last year.

I do love a good team photo, even a hockey one. This is apparently from a 1990-91 Kraft Singles set. I'm not sure if it was a regional thing or a wide release, aside from the copyright info on the back telling us it was a Canadian release of sorts.

Night Owl is All About the Shiny

Surprisingly shiny stuff from @nightowlcards includes a batch of Redbird parallels. 

 

When most of us think of Night Owl Cards and baseball cards, the '70s immediately jump to mind. (Specifically 1975 and minis.) Imagine my surprise, then, when a bunch of sparkly new Cardinals fell out of an envelope I received back from the Dodgers enthusiast back in February.

I've never been one to desire to "chase the rainbow" (we should really call this "Skittlesing") because I consider myself a team collector before a player collector. The conundrum is that a team collector like me still feels the need to hoard every version of every card of every player in that certain uniform.

These red ice (or whatever... actually, Cardboard Connection lists these as "red foilboard" for some reason) cards are serial numbered to just 199 copies. I'm not sure if I've ever pulled one personally.

Topps uses that "ice" effect on their base cards and a similar effect on their fancy Chrome Sapphire sets (see below), but the way they name these parallel designs is maddeningly inconsistent. Panini also does a version of this, and a version of the same pattern you see on X-Fractor cards like Jon Lester here (Panini calls these "building blocks" at times.) It makes me wonder if anyone has any original ideas anymore.

Acquiring a Chrome Sapphire card is a fairly rare achievement these days. I'm always appreciative when someone sends me one out of the blue. Otherwise, I seem to end up with a few of the cheapest ones whenever possible, similar to how I've treated Topps Now cards over the years. I really have a hard time bringing myself to spend more than one dollar on any single card.

I don't think I've seen this particular parallel pattern out of Topps before, but it looks like something Panini has used quite a bit on certain Chronicles and Revolution cards. (Go back to Pacific Revolution to see its origins, I think.) I'm not sure if this was pack pulled or one of those factory set parallels that must drive rainbow chasers closer to the brink of card madness.
 

Of course, we also have the familiar Stadium Club parallels to contend with. At least these are usually easy to identify, with mostly a foil color change here (red, in this case) or a chromium finish there. I'm glad we got one last card of Adam Wainwright as a batter, now that pitchers mostly don't bat anymore.

We're finally back to familiar Night Owl ground here with this four-pack of Allen & Ginter minis. My stack of unsorted A&G minis is getting disturbingly big at the moment, which means it's probably time to do some more of that dreaded organizing soon.

Thanks again to Night Owl and everyone else who has sent me some interesting parallels over the years.

The Weeks are Blending Together

A couple of weeks worth of #CrackinWaxMailday box breaks from @crackinwax -- the highlights!

What day is it today? There used to be a corny joke attached to that question, but right now it's something legitimate to ask yourself when you wake up in the morning. Crackin' Wax has been hosting near-daily group breaks for the past month(?) or so. I'm losing track of time. Speaking of time... well, in the interest of time at least, I just grabbed ten of the cards from breaks over the past couple of weeks to show here. Let's check them out.

I'm still at the point in the year where if it's Heritage, I'm all in for it. I've made decent progress on the set, but I still have quite a ways to go. I did buy a "mega box" of the stuff online today, so my purchases there could eventually be slowing down. This Dakota Hudson Chrome card doesn't help out my set at all, but it slides into my team collection quite nicely.

I've seen a lot of surprising praise for the 2020 Donruss set. Is that some kind of crazy talk? I'll admit, the fun factor is high, and that's not because there are cards with emoji-ridden borders.

I've always liked the stat line parallels tied to a player's career or season performance numbers. I was surprised to get such a low numbered card of Jack Flaherty, though.

I first saw this card in a Topps digital app, so I was really excited when it was pulled in one of the box breaks. Heritage relics always look nice, and this year's Astros-style look is a good one.

I believe I bought into at least two more 2019 Prizm breaks, so a good chunk of the cards that I needed came from this set. CW apparently found a really good deal on boxes of the jumbo/rack packs, which carry the exclusive red, white and blue parallels in them.

Here's another one of those patriotic parallels, featuring a Spring Training shot of Paul Goldschmidt.

There are red, white and blue autographs as well. This one is numbered to just 50. Justin Williams is part of a way too deep Cardinals outfield picture, but I would say that his chances are still good that he'll see some action at some point, even if he's not expected to make the final roster at the start of the season.

This was a good couple of weeks for "hits", as another auto was pulled in cup-of-coffee guy Xavier Scruggs. These silver autographs from 2015 Topps Chrome have a really nice look to them.

I also had a little bit of box topper luck as I landed this Waino from the 2011 Allen & Ginter set. It's an N43 card, which is slightly longer on one side and shorter on the other from a regular card. I'll have to figure out how to store this, since it's probably only the second or third N43 in my entire collection.