More 2014 Trade Bait

My first blaster of the year resulted in some good trade pieces.

A good number of you contacted me about my 2014 Topps post on Tuesday. I will get back to everyone after I'm done with this in case there are more cards that you all are looking for. In addition to the usual 5 packs, I also picked up a blaster. As usually, I'm game for trading anything in the box that doesn't fit in my Cardinals collection.

I like the rookie reprint patch cards a little better than the other manupatches, but I noticed that there are no Cardinals on the checklist this time around. I was hoping to pull one of the other patches (Allen Craig or Adam Wainwright?) but landed this Robin Yount rookie reprint instead. It's not bad. I'm sure it would make someone happy.

Awkward draft photos!

Here's my first "red hot foil" card, but my scanner makes it look a little closer to last year's pink parallels. This is probably the same color as a Jolly Rancher flavor, maybe watermelon?

Hammerin' Hank.

This is a nice follow-up to last year's amazing Jon Jay card. By the way, is anyone else sick of The Topps Font? This is the third time they've used some version of this font for player names in the past five years.

More Class.

I trashed on '89 Topps in my early post (and some comments elsewhere). I don't think the die cut minis themselves actually look that bad. I just don't really have any desire to remember 1989 Topps. I would love to see '81 Topps minis, though.

Is Puig the Justin Bieber of baseball? (I'm not totally joking!)

I already entered my code, guys, and I didn't win anything. The card is still available, though.

If the future is indeed Now, that sounds good to me. But apparently the future was not in the playoffs, because Shelby was nowhere to be seen. He was on the roster, sure, but there was just a cardboard cutout of his likeness propped up in the bullpen for the bullpen catcher to keep an eye on for some reason.

Another shocking pink foil.

Are there any Extreme Pitching Face collectors out there? I know some of you are into some pretty weird stuff, like turning double plays and all.

Since this was a Target box, I pulled a bunch of these red parallels - 20 in all. I'll list them here:

314 - Hanley Ramirez
315 - Jose Quintana
154 - Chris Iannetta
125 - Joe Mauer
272 - Carlos Villanueva
196 - Cole Hamels
258 - Jon Lester
10 - Junior Lake
289 - Matt Thornton
102 - Matt Lindstrom
141 - Chris Tillman
251 - Sergio Romo
18 - Jurickson Profar
297 - Max Scherzer
327 - Pablo Sandoval
214 - James Shields
79 - Garrett Jones
186 - Onelki Garcia
199 - Matt Davidson
316 - Mike Minor

My First Baseball Card

I was five years old and breakfast cereal was amazing. I'm not sure where this card came from, exactly. I know it was out of a box of some kind of cereal. For awhile I thought that this was a special cereal card, an oddball, if you will, but I discovered that it wasn't. They apparently inserted regular old 1981 Topps cards into some kind of cereal that I ate decades ago.

I didn't know who Yount was. I remember a particular baseball announcer's call would get stuck in my head, because it rhymed. "Three and two's the count to Robin Yount." It could have been Vin Scully. All of my earliest baseball broadcast memories came from Scully or Al Michaels. The Brewers went onto the World Series in 1982 and I actually rooted for them. I didn't know any better. My favorite team was the Yankees, because of my dad, and he always rooted for the AL if the Yankees weren't in it (they would not be in it again until after he passed away in 1995.) My best friend at the time was pulling hard for the Cardinals and eventually I fell for them by 1985.

The card itself was dog-eared, tattered, creased and generally very round everywhere. And that would be very awesome right now, except that I have no idea where it is. I'm pretty sure it's gone. I threw away a ton of cards that I deemed to be damaged beyond repair at some point in my life, but I'm wishing now that I hung onto the Yount card. I ended up buying a rack pack of '81 Topps on eBay recently because Yount was showing on the front. Typically, it's fairly off-center and has a slightly dinged corner. But in my opinion, it's still worth considerably less than the original Yount was worth to me.

I did a write-up on the entire pack for A Pack A Day if your curiosity has been peaked.