Off We Go

Highlighting some Cards cards as the 2018 season begins in earnest. 

With the Cardinals pulling their record up to .500 today in the very young season, it's time to show off some more Cardinals cards. That's what we do here! Diamondbacks fan JayP of CMMDTO sent over an excellent bunch of St. Louis players (well, not literally the players) in exchange for some guys from his squad. Excellent.

I am very light on cards of the 21 year old pitching prospect Junior Fernandez, so this was a welcome sight. Even more so, I have very few Bowman Platinum cards from the past two seasons because... well... Walmart. (I will point out that I slipped and did actually go into a Walmart as recently as last baseball season, probably to look for stupid Bowman Platinum, only to find that the store's card aisle had apparently been replaced with fidget spinners. So 2017 of them.)

Ozzie Smith, Legend! It's always at the top of my list to add to my collection of The Wizard. This is apparently a base card from the 2001 Donruss Classics set, but it's serial numbered (/1755) because the early 2000s were weird, man.

Stephen Piscotty is one of quite a few former Cardinals who earned a 25-man roster spot and regular playing time with another club in 2018. His trade to Oakland which helped him return closer to home and be around his ailing mother is a cool story, and I hope he does well there. I believe that I once owned an A's cap, an A's batting helmet and a Jose Canseco 40/40 A's poster (but not at the same time), so there's that.

Ahh, refractors are the best. Fernando Vina reminds me of the early '00s, of course, a time where I was finally able to watch Cardinals games on TV with somewhat regularity for the first time in my life. (Thanks, Albert!)

I don't really know what I think of the Topps Chrome sepia refractors. One of the more attractive things about Chrome refractors are their bright colors and overall shininess, so the sepia look kind of sucks out a lot of that fun.

Finally, here's a Cub throwing to a Cardinal. It's not just any Cardinal, of course, but Jim Edmonds! I always find these cards where rivals have to share space to be a bit dubious, but at least it's not Carlos Zambrano. I don't even have negative things to say about Kerry Wood. And no, that's not even April Fool's me talking. It helps that there's only one jersey piece here and it's... (checking the back one more time to make sure)... actually Jim Edmonds. Nice! Of course, now I'm a bit nervous that there's a Kerry Wood version of this card that I am missing. Not nice.

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!