A Treasure Trove

 

A huge box of needs... I don't even know where to begin with this one. 

 

When I receive such a large box of cards I need at once, it can be very intimidating to try and post about it. Procrastination sets in. I try to post about everything more or less in the order that I receive it, however, which helps me avoid sitting too long on things. Unfortunately, I seem to have skipped over a huge box like the one I described from The Collective Mind and I intend to rectify this immediately. I swear that I wasn't avoiding these cards at all and I just happened to misread a date (off by a month or so). The sheer volume of cool numbered cards and other interesting things from the sweet spot of years that I wasn't in the game (mid-'90s to mid-'00s) made this one much more fruitful than most.

I ended up with seventeen scans here, selected "randomly". I should also point out right away that GCA knocked off another inch-or-so high stack of set needs to supplement this bounty, but I'm going to focus on the sweet, sweet Cardinals goodies here.

Press Proof! You know it's going to be good when it says "Press Proof". It's always kind of weird when a card company stamps something or other on a card and instantly makes it more valuable and sought after, but that's the industry that we live in.

Here's your regular reminder that foilboard cards don't scan well. If I ever get around to replacing my scanner (which, knock on wood, has served me without too much issue since early 2009), I'm going to ask the first salesperson on the floor if it scans foilboard baseball cards well. They'll probably call security.

This is a pretty goofy looking card of the MV3, but I cherish any time you get all three of them together on one card.

These weird Donruss Champions inserts always look like they forgot to finish the card, but there's a whole bunch of them which means there's a whole bunch of them that I still need. I'm glad that a subset of these were knocked off my needs list.

I never knew that Upper Deck had blue parallels of their base set at one point, so this was new to me.

More Mulder here. The Leaf Certified mirror parallels are well documented and sought after, although I don't think the market for Mark Mulder cards is too hot at the moment.

I've spilled a lot of words over my love for those mid-'00s Diamond Kings sets. I still love them. Once again, there are many, many parallels, like this Jason Marquis card that's numbered to just 25.

Alright, Press Proof again! Oh wait, I guess that's Studio Proof? GCA actually sent two versions of this card, one numbered to 25 and one to 100. They're nearly indistinguishable at first glance. Once has silver holo foil and the other has gold holo foil.

This was a bit of an anomaly as it falls outside of the 2000-2005 range. These seem to be a lot harder for me to track down than the other Diamond sparkly parallels from this 2011 Topps Lineage set.

This isn't a severe die cut card, but it's a die cut nonetheless. Any numbered Jim Edmonds card (to 150!) is a very welcome addition to my collection.

Given that only about 10% of the card space is actually dedicated to the player it supposedly features (Dennis Eckersley), I'm not sure how to feel about this one.

This is another thing that I didn't know existed. There has to be at least one of these moments in the baseball card world for me every single day, or at least for all of the days I actually pay attention to the internet. This is a chrome refractor style "retro" card of a rookie... ahhh... my head hurts too much to talk about this. On the back, it has the feel of those Target throwback parallel cards from 2009-2011, but on the front it's all about the shiny.

There were a number of these low numbered Studio Portraits cards in the package, all of which look really nice. It was really hard to figure out where each card fit into which set, but I'm hoping I put them all in the right place in my collection on TCDB.

This is simply another numbered parallel (to 100) of the recently passed legend Lou Brock. I wanted to create a whole post about Lou Brock, but I have a hard time speaking authoritatively about someone who played before my time. What I know of him is awe-inspiring, though.

Here's another one, which uses the same photo in black and white. Did they colorize the original photo or remove all of the color from it?

Here's one more Brock card, just because. I wish they would put another Lou Brock on the other half of the card. It could be like that two Spider-Mans (Spider-Men?) meme that's been going around for like a decade.

But wait... there's more!

GCA also dropped a Fleer Ultra Yadi rookie on me! Because of the weird background, it kind of looks like a gold parallel, but those are more clearly identified and die cut. I didn't have this card and was very excited to add it to my (small) collection of Yadier Molina rookie cards.

Thanks again to GCA! I hope everyone reading gets to experience the fun of getting a huge box of card needs in the mail soon.

A Golden Deal

Glittery gold goodies from the @acrackedbat world. 

Back in May, which may as well be forever ago, Tigers fan Julie of A Cracked Bat sent me some cards of my own team, the one that sat in the opposing dugout in the 2006 World Series. While there weren't many Cardinals cards from that particular team in the package (they've probably all been destroyed by now), there were plenty of oldies and new guys (newies?) to be had.

There were a lot of great cards in the package, and I'm probably not doing it great justice by only showing off as many as would fit in my scanner in one pass. This Allen Craig mini from 2013 is numbered to 99.

Jim Edmonds looks like he's waiting for something to land here. He's been part of the rotation of analysts calling games for the Cardinals regional sports network once again this season, and there was a discussion about all of the various nicknames people have given him over the years. It sounds like he's not super comfortable with any of them... even Jimmy!

I am a little bit more comfortable that John Gast is out of baseball now, as there's absolutely no way I wouldn't constantly get him confused with John Gant. Gant (not Gast, and certainly not Ron) occupies a rotation slot on this year's version of the Cardinals, you see.

John Goodman, striking a pose. This is so good. It's not Jon Hamm, but it'll do.

Next time, Panini needs to snap some photos of various Hall of Famers going through the drive-thru line on their way to the annual induction event.

Topps Tribute is always so delectable, so excessive... if Hedonismbot from Futurama collected baseball cards, this is what he'd be into for sure.

This is more of my jam. A "retail relic" card that most assuredly came as a "bonus" in a blaster somewhere. Wait, does that say pants?

Finally, here's Xavier Scruggs, who played a little bit in 2015 after a September call-up the season before. If you suit up at the right time, Topps might end up including you in their products for a full calendar year, and Scruggs is proof of that. This is actually a parallel from the online-only Topps Mini set. I'd never seen the even-lower numbered black parallels before, only the golds (which I think are number to 50?)

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!

This Week in Plain White Envelopes

Single card joy from @SafeAtHomeShop @pksteinberg and @thedimwit to peruse.

I'm still starting to get settled into the groove of the week, so it's time for a quick blast about a few cards received recently in individually wrapped packages. First up, thanks to Tracy's Box Breaks, I won a Yadier Molina photo variation from last year's Topps Update set in a Twitter giveaway by Safe At Home Shop. This is one of the more interesting photo variations I've seen, as it captures a weird moment that happened during last year's All-Star Game. It was great to see Yadi have good humor about a situation that supposedly wasn't pre-planned by Nelson Cruz.

Thanks again to Peter of Baseball Every Night, I have inched closer to team set completion with the fledgling 2018 Topps series. Seven down and four to go! Everyone is crossing their fingers that Waino will be a contributor to the Cardinals 2018 run, but no one really knows for sure what's going to happen.

Finally, I may have stretched the truth a little bit when talking about "this week" with regards to the card I received from The Daily Dimwit... over a month ago. Well, time flies and all, but that doesn't diminish the intrigue of this card. Upper Deck surely loved their multiple player swatch cards, which sometimes brought together a unique combination of players. Other times, you get a fan favorite (and Cy Young Award winner) in Carpenter paired up with a guy that's mostly a trivia answer (Barton) and the frustrating end of Mark Mulder's career. Still, it's super cool that I own this, and as I get further on in my collecting years, it can be more fun to own weird cards than normal ones.

Happy New Year! And a Contest Update

And a Merry Christmas to you all as well.

We are deep in the thick of the college bowl pick 'em contest now, with 29 of the 35 games already in the books. As of today's results, The Prowling Cat has taken a slim lead. However, LetsGoPitt4 has the most Possible Points right now, which is usually the strongest indicator of who is really in the driver's seat. And Cardboard Hogs had the closest Belk Bowl score prediction and has won the very special Belk prize.

For those of you who didn't just come here to hear me talk, I did get a rare baseball card-related present for Christmas this year. There was a repack box in my stocking this time, one of those little boxes with 3 packs and a memorabilia card. Last time I tangled with one of these, I ended up with a very shiny Marlon Byrd card. And as you have probably guessed, this time around I got something I can actually add to my collection. While Mark Mulder's 2005 Upper Deck ESPN SportsCenter Swatches card has nothing to do with the Cardinals aside from the logo slapped on to it, it's good enough to find a home here. Mulder, incidentally, is trying to make a comeback after being out of the game for something like 6 years. The Angels are going to take a flier on him on one of those low risk, high incentive contracts that pitchers tend to get when their arms can't stay attached to their bodies. I wish him well!

The first pack I found was a 2007 Upper Deck Future Stars pack, which contained no inserts or any noteworthy base cards. The less said, the better. Ditto for the 2008 Upper Deck First Edition Update, though I was nice and decided to show the now former Cardinal Carlos Beltran's one-per-pack Starquest insert.

The final pack was, thank goodness, not a Pete Rose Leaf Special. It ended up being a Target exclusive 2012 Topps Series 1 pack, and it even included one of the Target parallels.

I don't get many Matt Kemp cards, so this was a nice surprise. It'll be interesting to see if Kemp regains his form.

This is simply a Matt Moore base rookie card. I probably have a few of these.

Finally, here's a Giancarlo (Mike) Stanton Gold Futures insert. I didn't see many of these. I'm guessing this wasn't one of the insert concepts that was carried over from series to series.

Airbrushed Fridays: 2005 Topps Finest #103

I just found out yesterday that the 7-11 store that is partly responsible for me getting back into collecting suddenly shuttered. Very strange. (Also strange is a single 7-11 store having its own Twitter account and Facebook page, but whatever.)

Who is this week's victim, and why do we care? Mark Mulder was one of the top lefties in baseball once upon a time, a centerpiece of the dream rotation that Oakland had going along side Barry Zito and Tim Hudson. Why does it feel like this story has a sad ending?

Why is this a thing? First of all, this card is a disaster, much like Mulder's post-Oakland career. Though he had a solid first season after a high stakes trade sent him to St. Louis for a budding Dan Haren and others, his shoulder was a rotten mess and he would never be effective again after 2005. You can find him on Baseball Tonight these days during the season. As for the card, somehow the Photoshop work was so bad that they didn't even bother to remove the A's logo from his cap. The weird red shade is probably some strange blend of what happens when you put red on top of green. If you hold up the card to the light at a certain angle, you see his Cardinals cap logo. If you don't, you get the A's logo. It's very, very strange and I doubt the scan does it much justice.

Airbrushed Fridays is a regular, weekly feature as the name seems to imply. If you know of a card with an altered photograph that you'd like to see featured, please contact me. You probably won't win anything other than a hyperlink and a night on the town with Manti Te'o's girlfriend, but you never know!