Buzzin' Cardinals

A pack of Cardinals cards from @CardBuzz includes a buyback, a messy signature and more. 

 

With more and more news coming out about the Fanatics deal and what seems to be the imminent end of card collecting as we know it, it's nice to look back at some cards that were sent to me through the mail earlier this year. It's becoming increasingly doubtful that I'll continue to collect cards beyond next year (if that long), but that doesn't mean we can't appreciate what's right in front of us. This latest bunch came to me from Card Buzz back in May.

That is quite the autograph from the former infielder turned reliever Sam Tuivailala. He does have an interesting set of letters to work with in his last name, but that just looks a bit goofy.

Topps killed off the old Topps Total set a long time ago, before recently bringing it back in a more understated (and more expensive!) online-exclusive form. This, of course, removed insert cards from the equation. The inserts were never a big part of the set, but there were some interesting looking "Award Winner" cards.

I think the old Topps gold parallels look nicer than any Bowman Sapphire madness you want to throw at me.

There are a lot of memorabilia cards from the 2000s, so it's impossible to be familiar with every design. Still, this was one I'd never seen before. It's from the 2003 Flair set.

People sure seem to like their dufex technology, which made it intriguing when Panini briefly brought it back with their one-off Pinnacle set from 2013. It still doesn't scan well, though.

There's one glaring error with this manupatch card commemorating the 1967 World Series. Can anyone spot it?

I'm guessing Fanatics will focus more on creating card sets like Museum Collection and less on something like Topps Total, which is really too bad. High end cards look nice, but most people can't afford to have more than a few of them. I guess we'll all free up some space in our homes if we don't have piles of cards laying around anymore, though.

So Close You Can Taste It

Baseball is almost back! @daniel24303 with the Cardinals hookup. 

 

First off, here's a reminder about the big contest going on this month. I erroneously mentioned that the games would start on Thursday (because they always start on Thursday), but due to what I can only assume are health and safety reasons, Friday is the big day. You have a little extra time to get your bracket filled out.

Back in December, Daniel from It's Like Having My Own Card Shop sent over a really nice batch of Cardinals goods. Let's check out some of those cards.

Die cut cards are always appreciated. This 2004 Donruss Jim Edmonds card comes from the land of plentiful numbered inserts. I wish Topps would serial number their inserts, but they don't want a lot of people figuring out their print runs I'm sure. (They print a lot of cards, especially in 2021!)

A white Chrome refractor? How cool is that? The all-black base design of the 2007 set afforded Topps some room to play with their colored parallels.

Luke Weaver was on one end of a swap between my team and Daniel's team. I'm guessing if Weaver was in a D-Backs uniform here, he would have been less inclined to trade this.

Here's a really nice low numbered (18!) Matt Carpenter jersey piece from the 2017 Topps Triple Theads set. Most cards with larger memorabilia pieces tend to relegate the player to secondary status on the card, but I think the photo placement here works well.

My wallet really can't afford to get in on the '90s refractor game, so it's always nice when someone has a spare one to trade to me. I doubt a Scott Cooper card of any kind will set you back much, but some of these refractors can get really spendy.
 

I wonder what exactly happened to Sam Tuiavailala. He was a solid reliever for Mariners and put up good numbers for a couple of seasons after starting out with the Cardinals, but I haven't heard of him connected to baseball in any way since he was released out of the blue a year ago. I can't blame anyone for not wanting to play sports competitively in the current environment, but it still seems strange.

Night Owl Service

I'm a subscriber.

With this post, I am officially caught up with all incoming card-related packages for the first time in what has to be years. It seems like years, anyway. And what better way to commemorate this occasion than with some cards from my most frequent mailbox visitor, Night Owl Cards. One of these days I'm going to compile a list of links to everything he's sent. One day... maybe the next time I'm caught up?

Night Owl sent a healthy stack of this year's Heritage cards, which is great as this is the time of year that I start getting tired of looking for Heritage to open. Altuve is a short print in the set as well as one of Erin's guys to collect, but this one I'm going to keep (shh!) since it's hard enough as it is to get ahold of Heritage SPs. Also, Altuve has about a million different cards in this set when you consider all the inserts and variations.

Here's a much loved 1975 Lou Brock Hostess card. I understand there are Twinkie and non-Twinkie versions of this card. I don't see a Twinkie logo anywhere, so I'm gonna go with non-Twinkie.

I kind of miss the old Target red parallel cards now that they're gone. I know that they're just another annoying side distraction that you're never going to collect all of before you die, but the red look always looks good on Redbirds.

I'm a little disappointed that Topps used the same photo for this card as the Pujols 1st Home Run card, but I bet they have to pay some sort of per-photo fee for archival photos. (Side note: does anyone know when they started completely outsourcing their photography to Getty Images? They used to employ their own photographers at one point, didn't they?)

Ah, Kolten Wong's golden home run trot.

And here's a shiny gold low-numbered autograph of the Cardinals young reliever with the funky name. We saw bits and pieces of Tuivailala this past season, but I am guessing he will figure more prominently into the team's bullpen plans in the future.

As a bonus, Night Owl included some laminated lanyard/credentials/backstage passes/whatever from some prominent sports card conventions of the past. I haven't been to any such things before. My card shows are usually very local and homely, if you ask me.

So they used to have a night owl service for our public transit bus system back when I was a kid. I'm not sure why it went away... perhaps things are just too dangerous on the streets of Portland these days, or maybe drivers were falling asleep at the wheel. Whatever the reason, I feel like there's no excuse good enough to shut down something that keeps potential drunk drivers off the road. Bring it back, TriMet!