Thematically Connected?

 

Another stellar batch of goodies from a Canadian friend. 

 

Just as soon as yet another big package of stuff arrived from Sportscards From The Dollar Store, his turn for a mailing sent back in January was up to the front of the queue. As always, this is another fantastic collection of stuff from all four major sports. Yeah, even that sport.

 

 

It's a bit of a strange color clash to see the redbird team on a very green card like this one, which hails from the 2016 Topps Tribute set. I can't say I've seen many high end Topps cards manufactured in the last year or two. I wonder if Topps is still as committed to these products under Fanatics as they once were. I might just be a bit more disengaged with the hobby as a whole these days.

 

 

I really like the canvas feel from the 2008 Triple Threads set. This is a technique that I wish they would do more often, especially if they insist on making cards this chunky.

This is a really nice looking autograph of former Card Stephen Piscotty, who has spent the past couple of seasons in AAA.

(Side note: I'm trying to move from using Chrome primarily as a desktop browser to Firefox, and I'm having a really difficult time formatting these posts. Has anyone else experienced this?)

 

Unlike the Schoendienst card above, this later Triple Threads release just has a smooth card surface, which makes it less exciting to me.

 

This Big Mac card is actually made by Panini (look, no logos!), so it's a bit of an outlier here among its fancy Cardinals companions. It's hard to get excited about anything Panini does these days in the baseball realm, but I've always been a sucker for Chronicles for some weird reason.

I always tend to get Triple Threads and Tribute (and Tier One, for that matter) confused, but this Tribute card from 2010 (blue parallel, I believe) is extra shiny and should stand out in any collection.

From baseball to football we go, with this die-cut Donruss Eagles from 2016.

Dakota Prukop's time at Oregon could be best explained like an answer to a trivia question. He transferred in from Montana State to win the starting job at Oregon, but was replaced after a few games by a freshman named Justin Herbert. I don't think he has many cards, so it was nice to end up with this one.

Jason Maas was best known as Akili Smith's backup at Oregon, but went onto a lengthy career in the CFL as a player and now head coach.

Another Duck (sensing a theme here?), and a very shiny one -- this Kenjon Barner rookie year card is numbered to just 10 copies. Barner can barely even fit on the card here, which is kind of amusing considering that he's not a huge guy.

Buckstorecards is always the best source for me in finding Ducks players who didn't get a lot of cards, with many landing in the CFL like Vernon Adams Jr. A transfer him, Adams was actually the starting quarterback that Prukop replaced and is still going strong in the CFL today, coming off of a career year in 2023.

Just one hoopster to show off today. It's a Bol Bol Revolution!

The Blues haven't quite captured my interest lately as they've not been very good, but it's always fun to get a nice card of a player from the Stanley Cup winning team. Those were good times.

Temporary Title (or is it?)

 

A huge variety pack of Cardinals cards and card-like things. 

Coming up with a blog post title is not typically the easiest thing to do, and I often end up throwing a temporary title in while I work on the other aspects of the post, like the images and the words and what have you. For whatever reason, nothing was really speaking to me today even though this collection of Cardinals cards I received from Tracy's Box Breaks several months back was outstanding.

This Old Judge-inspired card from the 2005 Upper Deck Origins set is a really nice way to kick things off here. This is reminding me once again that I really need to get my hands on some real vintage cards sooner or later.

Cast aside by the Cardinals in the midst of last season when he couldn't hit his way out of a wet paper bag, Edmundo Sosa caught fire with the Phillies and ended up facing his old team in the abbreviated playoff series. This "orange ice" parallel is numbered to 299.

I know that a lot of people are down on vintage buyback cards, but I kind of dig them. I don't know that I would pay more than a buck for any particular one of these, but I enjoy getting them in the mail from time to time.

The Stadium Club would have never had me as a member back in the day, but I am glad to enjoy the perks of its membership from time to time.

Somewhat stunningly, this is actually the second copy I own of this Troy Glaus gold parallel from 2008. (There's only 75 copies in existence, supposedly.)

Panini's Cooperstown sets were a fun idea, and I wish they had stuck around longer. Mostly, I just want more round cards.

This is from one of those Topps online exclusive sets. Blake Jamieson designed this set and presumably drew the portraits of each player, modeled after the 1951 Topps sets, of course.

This is a "Fractal Materials" parallel. That makes it sound like there should be a lot more going on with this card other than it being super shiny/glossy.

Tracy included a couple of these metallic looking things that were modeled after the 1986 Topps set, still in their respective wrappers. I'm not sure of the story behind these, but they will settle nicely into my box of curios that don't easily fit into card binders.

Panini probably has a different name for these parallels besides "green ice", but that's what I'm going to call them for now. Now that the beleaguered card company has no active license with the MLB players association, I wonder what it would take to see Cooperstown make a comeback in the future?

They Almost Brought Back Slurpee Discs

What, no extra fun with your cheap sugary drink?

Amidst the excitement and confusion of another excellent package sent to me by The Junior Junkie, I became fixated one particular object that fell out of the package. There was this round, lenticular thing... almost like a Slurpee disc. But was it? Sadly, it wasn't. It has all the markings of a recent Panini project on it. I almost didn't have the heart to look at the back to see where it actually originated from, wanting to believe in my heart of hearts that we still live in a world where trading cards are still distributed with food projects for free. (I was first hooked on the Slurpee discs in the '80s when I ended up with a bunch of these. Awesome, right?) I suppose I can always dream. In the meantime, I was happy to receive this Shelby Miller disc.

That's not to say that there wasn't a whole lot else to like in this package. This is a very shiny die cut parallel from the 2014 Prizm set. It's numbered just 7 out of 60. I figure I'm going to end up with a bunch of nice Allen Craig cards now that he's been traded, because that's how it goes sometimes.

This is my first official Cardinals card from this year's Allen & Ginter set. I need all of the rest of them. And then the rest of them again, probably.

This here's a super large McGwire card because he was a super large man. Something like that, anyway. Big Mac made a return to the Topps line this year, though I haven't picked up any of his new cards. That's okay with me. He has enough of them from this era alone to fill up a country or two.

I guess all of the cards from the 2002 Fleer Box Score set were serial numbered. That's just a hunch, though, based on the small sample size of me receiving four of them and having numbers printed on the backs of all of them. Neat!

Whoa, it's like, far out... man.

Up For Grabs Cardinalpalooza: Red Schoendienst and Enos Slaughter

Previously on the Cardinalpalooza: Bruce Sutter | Albert Pujols | Ray Lankford | Mark McGwire | J.D. Drew | Colby Rasmus | Yadier Molina | Allen Craig | Stan Musial | Rick Ankiel | David Freese | Keith Hernandez | Steve Carlton | Lance Berkman

Perhaps no other Hall of Famer embodies the team he played for more than Red Schoendienst. At 90 years old, he still participates in team activities to this day. He was a 10-time All-Star and won 5 World Series rings. He's the oldest living person to manage a World Series winner, and he came back to the post twice on an interim basis, bookending the Whitey Herzog era.

Had I planned things better, this would have made a great Veterans Day post.

The list:

1990 Topps Traded Factory Set #113T
1992 Studio (Checklist) #262
1994 Ted Williams Card Company #83
2001 Topps Archives '62 #400
2005 Upper Deck Classics #80
2007 Topps Distinguished Service #DS24 [2 available]
2008 Donruss Threads #47 [5 available]

Like Red, Enos "Country" Slaughter spent some playing years with other organizations. His most prolific years were spent wearing the Birds on the Bat, however. I know embarrassingly little about Slaughter beyond the fact that he was a terrific player with a terrific name who played for a terrific team.

The list:

1993 Ted Williams Card Company #92

1998 Fleer Sports Illustrated Then and Now (Legends of the Game) #31

1998 Fleer Sports Illustrated World Series Fever (Magnificent Moments) #26
2005 Upper Deck Classics #32 [3 available]

I Caught Some Kind of (Hi)Flew

I could make a Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever joke, but I'm not going to. Instead, I'm here today to show off a bunch of cards that came in last month from the very generous hiflew of Cards from the Quarry. Hiflew has very thorough want lists, which I have finally finished up wading through myself. If you have extra Rockies in your household, I suggest that you get to work on checking them out.

The impetus of this trade was to hit up Erin's player collections, which are surprisingly Rockies-oriented for a Cardinals fan. She likes Holliday, Tulo and Larry Walker, and all of those players have played for the Rockies at some point. Even Chone Figgins came up through the Rockies system, though I'm not sure if he has any cards from way back then. According to some program I have, I actually saw Figgins play for a single-A team in Portland back in the day.

Topps Archives? Nah, think again. It's from that Trading Card History insert set that Topps put out in 2008. I had forgotten all about these. I wonder what Topps would do if they somehow lost the ability to use any of their previous designs for anything.

Ah, Topps Tek... so fun and so weird. I bet these aren't environmentally friendly. In fact, I'd have to say that the trading card industry is probably one of the least environmentally sound thing around. So wasteful. So pointless. (I'm such a hypocrite for doing this.)

What is going on behind Larry? Are those ghosts escaping from the ether? Is that a wicked thunderstorm? Is it an x-ray?

This is kind of minimalist. I miss Stadium Club.

Back to the retro theme here, as I think this is a throwback to an earlier Bowman design that I know nothing about.

I know that 1996 was the dawn of the Topps Chrome era, but I never want to see this design again. It is awful.

On the other hand, I almost always like Finest. This looks like it could be on a metal lunchbox.

The package wasn't all Colorado-y, which is good for my own collection. X-Fractors are the Hypnotoad of the baseball card world.

I'll never get tired of this picture!

Usually when you "swing for the fences" the result is not so good.

I like how the colored circles are just a bit off on this card.

I had been looking for this card for awhile. This is the last Cardinals card that I needed from the 2006 Opening Day set.

Finally, here's a very striking card from the 2006 Ultimate Collection set. It doesn't get much better than this.