Too Many Sports

Trying to avoid the end of year sports fatigue. New cards like these will help. 

 

A couple of blog announcements before I get into the good stuff from Too Many Verlanders: 

• If you missed out on the big college bowl contest this year, don't worry. There's still plenty of time to pick a winner of the dumb greasy white condiment bowl game. All you have to do is leave a comment on the original post with your predicted score. Even if you did enter the big contest, you can drop a guess there as well. Winner gets some sort of new pack next year.
• I am no longer active on Twitter for reasons that should be fairly obvious by now. I am on Bluesky, however. Let me know if you need an invite. I don't post tons and tons of content, but you will get a link to any new blog posts as soon as they drop (or as soon as dlvr.it decides to post them.)

 

So, where was I? Oh, yes. Sports. I am suffering from quite a bit of sports fatigue right now. The Eagles seem to be hell bent on pissing away their season. The Ducks made quite a run towards a potential playoff berth but couldn't figure out how to beat Washington... twice. The Blazers are probably going to end up tanking for the third season in a row with an awful head coach. (I can handle a bad Blazers team, but they've never been less fun to watch than under Chauncey Billups.) The Timbers just finished up their second straight playoff-less season in a league where it's increasingly difficult to miss said playoffs. The Cardinals finished the past season with their worst record since 1995, a year where I am quite certain I watched zero baseball games.

And yet, the cards keep rolling on in from great trade pals like Dennis from Too Many Verlanders. Dennis sent tons of great stuff, including cards of lesser known Eagles players like Nate Allen. He also included a bunch of oversized cards, a baseball pin and other great things I can't even fit into this space here. For the sake of brevity (and my sanity), I just chose the cards that I scanned for the TCDB site to show off here.

Fortunately, no current Eagles were harmed in the making of this blog post. I might have had something really grumpy to say about them if they were. To be fair, Miles Sanders would probably rather still be with this trainwreck of a Philly team than his current 2-win Carolina Panthers.

In happier times, there was Donovan McNabb. I did realize the other day that I've seen the Eagles play in 3 Super Bowls (winning 1, though they really should have won all 3.) That's more title opportunities than some teams I root for.

I love the "New Breed" font on this Matt Barkley jersey card. So futuristic!

There was another version of last night's Eagles/Seahawks game that would have had Marcus Mariota starting in place of an ill Jalen Hurts. (And not ill, like '80s cool.) I wonder what that would have looked like.

Hey, it's baseball! Dennis included a few of these Moments & Milestones cards with the package. I'll never have them all, but it's fun to accumulate them.

At some point I may invest in a new scanner. I've had my current one since early 2009 when it was purchased at a Circuit City (!) closing sale. And it still works just as well as it did on day one, but part of me always wants to see if I can solve the "foilboard looks terrible when scanned" conundrum. (It does also tend to wash out certain colors like red, but there's probably a setting or two I could tweak there.)

Clayton Whoson? Apparently he quarterbacked Northwestern, a bit of trivia I would have maybe known if the Oregon Ducks had joined the Big Ten sooner. Erin asked me the other day who all was in the Big 10 now, and I got through maybe half the list before I gave up. I might be able to recite that list from memory by this time next year, but I'm not going to guarantee it.

Here's another of those Moments & Milestones parallel-o-rama cards. This is a rarer black version that is numbered to just 25.

We end things here with Akili Smith, whose son (Akili Smith Jr.) is an Oregon QB recruit for 2025. Of course, with the transfer portal madness, he'll potentially follow in the footsteps of Bo Nix, Dillon Gabriel (Oklahoma transfer for 2024) and Dante Moore (UCLA transfer). Or maybe not? Sometimes these dudes just up and leave.

Thanks again to everyone who has sent me cards this year! I'll try to be less grumpy next time.

Cards from Oren

We've got jerseys! We've got signatures! We've got parallels! 

 

Reader Oren contacted me for the first time last year and we worked out a really nice trade. Oren was back for round 2 last fall with another generous batch of cards from the various sports that I collect. Let's take a look at some of those in no particular order. I'm going to drift from sport to sport here.

Carmelo Anthony's career as a Trail Blazer was brief, but thanks to Panini's parallel madness, he leaves a legacy of a ton of cards in the red and black. I have no problem with this really, but you would think that a player who was on the team for less than two full seasons wouldn't occupy such a large space in the binders.

I don't recall Earl Wolff's time with the Eagles, but after a few keyboard clicks it starts to make sense. His most significant playing time came in his rookie season, which was Chip Kelly's first with the team but also overlapped with Michael Vick's last season in Philly. I refused to watch any games with Vick on the field, so I might have just missed him.

Matt Holliday is one of the main players I collect, so it was great to see this All-Star jersey pop up. I don't have a lot of blue swatches in my collection, of course, so this is something a bit different. Holliday was set to be the Cardinals bench coach this year, but it was just announced today that he isn't going to be doing the job after all. Instead, Joe McEwing is joining the team.

Relative to my fairly small Eagles collection, I feel like I have a lot of Jordan Matthews cards. He left the team after a few seasons but came back during their Super Bowl run, which was fun.

Speaking of Super Bowl runs, do the Eagles have another one in them? If so, Kenneth Gainwell might have something to say about it. He's part of the Philadelphia backfield that includes 1000 yard club guy Miles Sanders and Boston Scott, who returned some kicks in that last big playoff run.

Mike Golic may best be known as a broadcaster these days, but he was a monster on the field in the '80s. I'm also not entirely convinced that he's not the same person as Jeff Garlin.

I bet you didn't think you were going to see two Nelson Agholor cards in today's post, did you? This rookie year card is an orange Chrome parallel.

Nolan Smith was a big star at Duke, but his skills did not translate to the pro game. At all. Fortunately, another rookie showed up in 2012-13 to take the point guard reigns for the next decade and beyond.

We end things on the best possible note with another Cardinals card. This is an always-appreciated gold parallel from the classic Gold Parallel Era of 2006 NLCS MVP Jeff Suppan. Nice!

Card Show Odds 'n Sods

The odd stuff. 

The monthly card show was a week ago, but I'm finally getting the chance to sort through some of the stuff I bought. I was even in more of hurry than usual, spending the bulk of my time at just one table that had several boxes of what could be considered mostly "oddballs" for a dime a piece. I am still kicking myself for not trying to make an offer on the contents of a box from another table where everything was just two cents, but I am just not great at haggling. Plus, I think Erin would have killed me for bringing even more cards home than is absolutely necessary to keep this racket going.

Oh well, maybe next time.

I am just showing a few of the ten cent offerings, like this serial numbered Nat Borchers card from a few years ago. I rarely buy Portland Timbers stuff, but Borchers is a happy reminder of the team's MLB Cup win. Plus, the price was more than right.

One of these days, I will get my Randall Cunningham collection (aka P.C.) off to a proper start. None of my football cards are sorted in any way, as the sport continues to take a backseat... a way backseat... like those seats in an old station wagon that faced the rear of the car... to the other sports that are more interesting to me. Still, Randall is awesome, and always will be awesome -- even in other uniforms (excluding the Cowboys, of course.)

This is the ultimate oddball card. I like everything about this.

Going all the way back to the year this blog was introduced to the world, there were even a handful of 2008 Stadium Club 1st Day Issue cards in one of the boxes. These were the hobby versions, which were thicker than the normal cards and actually numbered. Topps really screwed up this set and wouldn't bring it back out of hiding for another 6 years. Still, it was nice to get another serial numbered Matt Holliday card for my collection for the price of practically nothing.

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.

2016 Topps Flops

My first and last look at 2016 Topps Series One. 

I've made a little noise about giving up on buying Topps flagship products for the foreseeable future, but you can't honestly judge something until it's right in front of your face. I'm not giving up on being a team collector, so I went in on the Cardinals from a jumbo group break hosted by Nachos Grande.

Here is the entire team set from Series One. At only 9 cards, this likely leaves a lot more players for Series Two, though the Cardinals probably won't be as highly represented in this year's products as they have in the past now that everyone is in love with the Cubs. Kolten Wong, Trevor Rosenthal, Randal Grichuk and whoever our first baseman is going to be this year are among the missing.

I'm going to try to contain my rant here and just hit some key points.

1. I was already getting worn out on the flagship set long before this. I'm just tired of the thin white glossy cards that they churn out year after year. Buying the packs started feeling like more of an obligation than an intrigue.
2. Specifically, I strongly dislike this year's design because they have done away with the backgrounds. Half of the fun of baseball cards is that they become some sort of historical record. There's stats on the back of how that player was doing and a photo on the front. It could be a night game, a day game, some awkward photo shoot or an early spring training moment. It was only three years ago that we got the amazing Jon Jay card from a key moment captured on film (and card) from late in the 2012 season. All of the players on these cards are lost in a fog. I realize that sets like Allen & Ginter remove the background completely from the equation, but expectations are different for that set.
3. The success of Topps's digital trading card products seems to have bled into their decision making process for the physical flagship set. There's been a lot of chatter on Twitter about this where some folks with ties to Topps have defended the process and denied that there's any relation between the decision making process across both the physical and digital teams. It makes sense that they'd say that, but I suspect that Topps BUNT is making the company a lot more than they expected (with the crossover success of the Star Wars digital cards) and money usually drives decision making processes more than anything. It seems impossible that scalability to the digital product had no impact, since they effectively share the same design. Even if this is truly not the case and that BUNT had no impact on what design was chosen, I don't like the direction that Topps is heading in.

On to the rest of the cards. This is one of the rainbow foil parallels, although it's not evident by the scan as is usually the case. These are similar to last year's parallels.

I landed a short printed photo variation of Jhonny Peralta in a camo jersey. There are two more of these to track down, including a so-called SSP Yadi card.

Similar to reprint style inserts from the 2010 and 2011 sets, Topps is honoring the designer of the legendary 1952 Topps set Sy Berger with a reprint insert set. I'm not sure why Carlton's 1967 card was chosen over his rookie card. Maybe there are licensing issues with the "other guy" on the card, Fritz Ackley?

It's not the most expensive card in the world, but this is probably the closest I'll come to owning a Pujols 2001 Topps Traded card unless I happen upon a generous trader or find an absolute steal on one.

I have a few of these originals, though.

I don't even know what to say about this. Who would want these? No one wants these.

This was a neat idea for an insert set, but there's no reason for Stan's inclusion here since they clearly don't have a photo of him actually pitching. Instead, we get a photo we've seen used a million times before, which is an unfortunate problem with certain HOFers that's never going to go away.

Does this mean they're going to start having insert sets for other stadium anniversaries?

We've seen Topps do the combo insert thing nearly every year, but it doesn't work as well when the cards aren't landscape (horizontal) in my opinion.

I had already read quite a bit of backlash about these Perspectives inserts, and with good reason. Here, Topps takes some nice photos (hint, hint, your base set design SUCKS and needs more photos like this) and completely ruins them by throwing in this weird 3D rendered lettering that look like it's straight out of a Windows 95 screensaver.

WHY?!

These would have looked so much better with a player name in small writing, out of the way... in the bottom corner or something.

I landed a buyback in the form of a 1974 Rich Folkers. The stamps are color-coded this year according to rarity, and this is apparently a "rare" one. I don't think 1974 Rich Folkers cards are exceptionally rare, though. Just to be clear, the foil stamp itself is the true rarity.

The game-used cards look nice. I have no complaints here. I need to track down Michael Wacha and Yadier Molina's cards at some point.

My 2016 want list is up to date. I'm only missing some retail-only inserts, parallels and rare stuff. If you have anything like that, let me know. Also, if you need a Cardinals team set for some reason, I have several extras.