More Affordable Breaks

Catching up with another bunch of @flywheels group break cards. 

 

My card purchases have nosedived in 2023, but I still have a cache of previously received piles of cards to go through before I'm all caught up. This latest bunch is from some Cardboard Collections Affordable Group Breaks that I signed up for late last year.

Panini used an awkward time to debut a brand new baseball product, Capstone, with their MLBPA license expiring at the end of last year. It's possible there will be another Capstone baseball release someday in the future, but I'm expecting Panini to scale back their baseball release calendar significantly now that they can no longer use active MLB players in their sets. (Minor league prospects, apparently, are still fair game for now.)

This was my first look at Capstone (I've since bought a blaster of it), and it's... well, it's okay. All of the cards are thick, and the most commonly found cards from the base set has this extra glossy sheen on them that actually clouds up the scanned images. (See the Nootbaar card for comparison, which doesn't use the extra gloss and instead uses an etched background.)

I really enjoyed receiving this card from last year's Panini Chronicles set. Obsidian is typically a high end brand for Panini in other sports, but it doesn't have its own separate baseball release.

I signed up for a few football breaks (go Birds!) as well. It surely must have been football season. This Wendell Smallwood parallel from the 2016 Donruss set made me wonder what Smallwood has been up to recently. He was last scene a couple of years ago on Washington's roster according to the internet.

The 1999 Fleer Tradition set adds the conference logo to each card for some reason. I received a bunch of these Eagles cards that were new to me, and picked and old favorite of mine (the Duce is loose!) for the scan.

It's back to baseball with the 2003 Fleer Tradition Update set. Again, I was able to fill a number of team collection needs with this one. This Eduardo Perez card is actually a glossy parallel numbered to 100, which is nice. Perez was a key bench guy for four seasons in St. Louis but is perhaps best known these days for being part of ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball announcing booth. (I rarely praise ESPN, but I really miss them having more baseball coverage. Now all we get are Sunday nights.)

This one has an insert-y look to it, but it's just part of the Update base set. I have so many Pujols cards, but I'm never surprised when I find one more.

I also believe I won some sort of giveaway during the breaks, as Colbey included a few extras. It's somewhat interesting that Bo's Topps football rookie card is significantly more expensive than his older baseball counterpart, but I think the general consensus is that there were vastly more Topps baseball cards produced than football cards in the same era. (Either that, or it's because the Raiders are cooler than the Royals?)

I was also gifted this Clint Frazier jersey card from the 2020 Topps Holiday set. I'll end up finding a new home for this one, I'm sure.

Nothin' But Bangers

A-sides, hit singles, chart toppers, etc. 

When you deal with Baseball Card Breakdown, you know you're gonna get the good stuff. We completed a trade all the way back in the fall of 2016 involving a George Brett relic that I pulled, as well as some other items in my trade box, and Gavin responded in kind with a whole mess of shiny Cardinals.

Jack Flaherty is, the internet assures me, a starting pitcher and not a base burning infielder as his photo might suggest. He just completed his third season of pro ball at the age of 20, so it may be awhile yet before we know what kind of player he is.

David Freese, former World Series Hero and the pride of St. Louis, appears here on this gold plated Triple Threads card numbered to 99.

I'm not sure that I'd ever seen one of these gold parallels from the inaugural Bowman Platinum set from way back in 2010. This one features... sigh... former Cardinal Matt Holliday. That's going to take some getting used to.

Another one of my favorites of the bunch is this snazzy blue Prizm Matt Carpenter from 2015. Does everyone else work "snazzy" into your casual conversation at least once a day? No? Well, you should.

Adam Ottavino, when healthy, has been a surprisingly effective reliever with the Rockies after washing out as a Cardinal. Of course, it's that whole health thing that he needs to work on now.

Hopefully this is the year that Michael Wacha rebounds and can show some more of what he previewed back in 2013 when he was the NLCS MVP, but I am afraid my brain is copy-pasting these same words from another post from a year ago, and another one from two years ago, and probably another one from three years ago. We'll see.

I thought that Eduardo Perez was a really strange choice for the 2016 Archives Fan Favorites autographs set. He spent a number of years with the Cardinals, but mostly served as a backup/pinch hitting type. His most prominent playing time with the Redbirds came in replace of an ailing Scott Rolen as I recally. I can only assume he's in here because of his post-playing career broadcast work with ESPN.

Finally, Gavin is known for his inventive custom cards, and this is as good as it gets if you ask me. Here's 1990 Donruss-style Ozzie Smith, from the beloved Homer at the Bat episode of the Simpsons.