Three Shiny Cards and NBCD

A quick wrap on a #CrackinWaxMailDay from @CrackinWax and a brand new card. 

Last week's package-o'-mail from Crackin' Wax was a fairly light one as I sat out many of the breaks because they weren't a good fit for me. I did jump all over a 2018 Finest break, because it's tough for me to stay away from anything with Jack Flaherty in it.

It's just a base card, but the odds came down in my favor, as I landed another Flaherty rookie that I didn't already own. I haven't officially added him to my list of PCs yet, but I'm on high alert for his cards, especially in 2014 and 2018.

One of the boxes was one of those Donruss Optic megawhatevers, where this "Shock" parallel of Carlos Martinez was pulled. I like the solidly colored parallels in Optic a lot better than these, to be honest.

I also picked up, not from Crackin' Wax but from good ol' eBay, this Yadier Molina from this year's National Baseball Card Day giveaway. Of course, this wasn't a giveaway to me, because I live a million miles away from the nearest card shop and everything is closed anyway. Let's just say the price was right (ugh, I guess?) The design is kind of loud and looks more like a Topps flagship insert thing from around a decade or so ago. Unlike previous years, there's not going to be any stadium giveaway team sets with this design for obvious reasons, so I can consider my 2020 National Baseball Card Day situation to be completely resolved now.

Full stats! You've gotta love that. There's really no bio information at all here, though.

National Baseball Card Day, 2017 Style

How do I get the other two Cardinals cards? 

I've recently lifted myself from a decade-plus self-imposed somewhat serious eBay ban, allowing myself to make certain targeted purchases of things that aren't the easiest to find in the world. The keyboard fingers led me to looking up the Cardinals 2017 National Baseball Card Day set, a stadium giveaway that used the same design (more or less) as the hobby shop giveaway, but was wholly comprised of stuff you could only get at the stadium.

The cards came in two unopened packs of four, but the team set has ten cards. This means I am missing two (Randal Grichuk and Stephen Piscotty). I have no idea how this works. You would think that they would give away the entire set or a portion of the set, but not most of the set. Are the packs randomly sorted? That would be weird.

Aledmys Diaz was the sole Cards representative in the hobby store promotion, and he had already lost his job to Paul DeJong and was demoted to AAA by the time this stuff came out. It was nice to see that Diaz's card photo was different in the team set.

The back design is different, too. It's horizontal instead of vertical. Still no stats, though.

Dexter Fowler's embattled situation with the current Cardinals club is perhaps a topic for another day, but I am rooting for the guy. He has always seemed like a great guy and a great teammate.

Even though the design is maybe a bit too busy in the horizontal orientation, this is still an interesting Matt Carpenter card.

The Final Boss didn't quite live up to his name in St. Louis, but his first season was pretty good.

It's always nice to add a new card of the Wizard. This photo choice is strangely zoomed and a bit blurry, though.

Waino! I think we may see Wainwright on the field again at some point this season, but it might be his swan song.

On the other hand, I think Yadi still has some good years left in him. How many more he wants to put up with are going to be up to him, especially considering the horrific injury he suffered this season.

I Missed National Baseball Card Day

I had other, not necessarily better things to do. 

I sat National Baseball Card Day out this year, as I've done every single year since its inception. This was probably the first time I was actually aware of the date ahead of time, and I even went so far as to look into finding out if there were any participating shops in the Portland metro area. This was mostly because there aren't really any card shops, period, in Portland anymore. I did discover a new place I might check out someday near Washington Square, but I didn't have time for that kind of trip on this particular day.

I picked up the lone Cardinal card off of eBay for 99 cents plus PWE shipping. Aledmys Diaz kind of got the short shrift from the Cardinals this season, the one struggling player over the past couple of seasons who has been exiled to AAA and never recalled. Having a red hot rookie and superior option in Paul DeJong at short certainly helped these matters along.

There's also an autographed version of the Diaz card, which would be nice to get someday but is definitely not a priority at the moment. What I'd really love to get my hands on is the stadium giveaway Cardinals set of this same design. I believe each team did something like this, with 10 cards in the checklist including one former star. I really want that set, but I don't really want to pay $25 for some crazy reason.