The Beaniest

Cardinals and more from @beansbcardblog include a bunch of retail store exclusives.

When I think of the name Bean's Ballcard Blog, it always makes me think of a certain Futurama episode where Leela became a Blernsball (not at all like baseball) player.

This doesn't really have much to with anything, but it serves as an introduction to a post about a bunch of cards I got from Kin of (you guessed it!) Bean's Ballcard Blog.

I always love getting minor league cards, and that goes doubly so for what goes down as my oldest Paul DeJong card, tying it with the one copy of his "paper" 1st Bowman card from the same year. I need more DeJong cards in my life.

Shelby Miller is one of the cursed Cardinals mega prospects of this decade. I hope he figures it out or gets it together or whatever it is that these star athletes can do, someday.

Adron Chambers, the human victory cigar from the Cardinals run to the 2011 World Series is looking absolutely celebratory on this X-Fractor.

My favorite part of this package, however, was the slew of retail exclusive parallels from a three-plus year run where there was a bit of an incentive to buying regular old Topps flagship packs from Target (and the dreaded Walmart).

Kin also sent over a few set needs, like this floating head Chris Carpenter sticker from 2012 Topps Heritage. Good stuff all around.

Enter... The Collector

Baseball isn't fun right now, but collecting cards still is. 

Chris from The Collector (we'll just call him The Collector from now on?) signed up for the Basketball Card Club awhile back. I try to send out stuff periodically for those who are interested, with (generally) no questions asked. It's always a nice cherry on top when someone sends me something back, which is what The Collector did here.

I don't think I'd ever seen or was aware of embossed Topps Finest cards, but I knew as soon as I pulled this Matt Morris card out that something was different. It's definitely embossed, as some sort of parallels. The text and especially the player are raised in a quasi-3D fashion.

Topps did pink parallels in 2015 that were numbered to 50. I haven't seen many of these in the wild, so this was a cool find. Shelby Miller was once a very promising future ace-type pitcher, but he's had nothing but calamitous injury issues for what seems like a long time now.

It's almost time for some football, so I won't cringe so much at posting some football cards. Here is Ducks and NFL legend Dan Fouts towards the end of his career in one of those '80s football action photos. Fleer made entire sets out of these, but I see that they eventually made their way to the Topps NFLPA licensed sets.

Less action here... but more fancy 2017 graphics? The NFL rolled out this weird and usually awful "color rush" uniform thing that was specifically targeted for their little watched Thursday night games. Is it working now? I don't know if it's working. Anyway, it's cool to add another Blount card to my Ducks collection.

Finally, here's a Blazers card. It's a Zach Collins rookie card from the 2017-18 Panini Threads set. Somehow, I managed to completely miss the 2017-18 Threads set as these were totally new to me when they ended up in this package from The Collector. Panini puts out too many sets! I can't even tell you what I've missed from this past season.

Thanks for reading. I'm going to go and be really sad about David Berman now. (And I'll continue to temporarily pretend that baseball doesn't exist, which is what I have to do with the Cardinals current state of play.)

A Derby Night Trade Post

@ShaneKatz73 sends over a heap of Cardinals: vintage, retro and more! 

This season has been a slog for the Cardinals (just ask the recently fired manager!), so it's actually nice to get a little break from baseball and watch the exhibitions. Congrats to Bryce and his hair and all that, but I was actually most impressed with Rhys Hoskins tonight. I hadn't seen him play a ton, but his swing just looked so effortless compared to the rest of the contestants. I doubt the Home Run Derby will screw up that swing.

I'd like to think I'll take advantage of the break to get through my own personal slog of backlogged trade post material, but I try to do this every week and it rarely works out. We soldier on to a quite intimidating pile of Cardinals goodies from Shane from the blog Off The Wall. This was a trade I largely worked out on Twitter, which is a fairly new thing for me.

We kick things off with mins. Minis are the best! I prefer the tobacco card sized minis to the '75 Topps shaped minis, but to each his/her own.

It was fun to see some on-card autos in the mix (TTM? in person?! mysteries!) I wouldn't consider myself an autograph hunter, but I've built up a nice little group of cards like these that would be fun to show off in a display somewhere someday.

For such a weird little signature here, it doesn't actually look like it would be all that quick of a signature. My signature certainly has become more, let's say, efficient over the years.

Growing up the '80s and starting to collect in the '80s means that there aren't a ton of '80s oddballs that I haven't seen. This is one of those, however. This looks sort of like someone pasted another card on top of a 1987 Fleer card.

You've got to love vintage team cards. No, seriously, you do.

Floating Carpenter Head Alert! This was a welcome inclusion in the 2012 Topps Heritage set. I am still lacking some of the floating head stickers.

The next Cardinals manager?! I am interested in seeing how the interim guy does with the rest of the season, and how many times his zero MLB playing experience will be brought up over the course of the dog days of summer.

Here's a fun unlicensed Joe Magrane card. People called cards like these "Broders" back in the day, for a reason that was never quite sufficiently explained to me, at least at the time. (Apparently there was a mythical sports card bootlegger named Rob Broder, who filled the hearts and minds of happy collectors with awesome fake Bo Jackson baseball cards, or whatever.)

Mark McGwire calls BS on this whole Broder thing.

Unlicensed cards make Sad Toothpick Sam Jones even sadder.

(Truthfully, I love weird cards, and that includes some unlicensed things and customs. 2018 Donruss is horrible, though.)

The gem of the lot, and the reason you bothered to scroll (or swipe?) down this far, is this glorious box topper from the 2015 Topps Heritage set. It's a cool patch card modeled after an obscure 1966 release that you can read more about here. As much as I'm starting to question my own interests in set collecting and Topps products in general, I absolutely love the weird nods to the past that they have been included in the Heritage product line. Topps Heritage is great! Everything else is Bootleg Donruss.

Doing It Again

Back in the swing of things.

More so than other sports I pay some attention to, baseball seems to have this cyclical nature about it. Maybe it's because the different seasons signify different stages of baseball life (spring training, fall classic, summer being everything else.) Maybe it's the average fan's belief that things have a way of resetting themselves as their stats reset at the beginning of the season. Maybe this is the year Grady Sizemore doesn't get seriously injured. Maybe Michael Pineda returns to All-Star form. Maybe the Cubs... something something.

I enjoyed the onslaught of baseball on Monday afternoon and I'm back to posting about baseball cards, not that I ever left. I received a bunch of cards from Royals fan Doug back in February, which seems like ages ago. I occasionally run into a Royals fan in my daily goingsabout (goingabouts?) and he always seems really eager to talk about baseball this time of year. The Royals were a sworn enemy of mine back in the Bret Saberhagen days thanks to a certain controversial World Series, but now they are an underdog that I want to see succeed. I'm even feeling the same way about the Astros these days, even though my terrible visits to Minute Maid Park are still fresh in my mind.

Here's a short printed card of Rajah. This was a one-and-done set from Topps, which reminds me of something...

Gypsy Queen has been around for three years now. I am guessing that it's on the release calendar for 2014 as well. What is it about Gypsy Queen that has contributed to its (relative) longevity? I pretty much ignored the 2013 release, which makes cards like this a welcome surprise to me.

I'm hoping Pujols has a rebound season this year. I'm over the bitterness. I got over that pretty quickly. I'll never be a huge Pujols collector, but I have to respect the amazing decade of amazingness that he was responsible for. I'll never get excited about his cards the way I might have in the past, but it was nice to see a Cardinals Pujols card in 2014.

Shelby will get the call to the mound on Friday as the 4th starter in this year's rotation, and I'm pretty excited about it. It feels like it's been forever since he pitched, as he was put on double secret probation and more or less was shelved during the playoffs. It wouldn't be shocking to see him outpitch last fall's darling Michael Wacha this year, but I'm not going to count on anything either way.

2 Games Up, 10 to Go

The season is flying out the window. A trade post will set us straight.

St. Louis has pulled ahead of the Pirates by 2 games, which is the largest lead they've had in the NL Central since July 26th. Yes, the race has been that tight, with the Pirates and the Cards running neck and neck for the entire second half. With 10 games left, it's still anybody's division. Nevertheless, it's time for some cautious optimism, which we'll celebrate with some truly excellent cards from Play at the Plate.

A bit of sobering news: Matt Adams left the game early tonight with soreness in his elbow, the same elbow that he had surgery on late last year. Let's hope that it isn't a big deal, because with Allen Craig likely out until the playoffs (at least), losing his capable replacement and team's top pinch hitter (when everyone else is healthy) is the kind of thing that could tank a division race. Who knew that we'd be saying this about Matt Adams, say, a year ago?

Seth Maness has been a pretty solid option out of the bullpen, a pen that has been completely reworked even since the early part of the season. The Cardinals have already faced their former setup man and would-be replacement closer Mitchell Boggs in this series. Boggs fizzled out and the Rockies picked him up on the cheap. Maness has effectively been his replacement, emphasis on the word "effectively".

I'll never get tired of Topps framed relics. I don't know what it is. They make me just a little bit excited about a bit of jersey that I'm not supposed to be excited at all about anymore.

Speaking of excitement, PATP sent over this neat insert card of the Future Excitement, Oscar Taveras. Taveras didn't play a whole lot this year and injuries cost him a shot at a late season call-up. The organization is counting on a strong offseason and spring from Taveras, especially if they opt not to resign Carlos Beltran.

Shelby's been a little shaky lately, but he's stayed in the rotation. He never returned to the levels of his early season dominance, but I think we'll still look back favorably at his rookie year on the whole. Hopefully, this season serves as a building block for better things to come. Like in the playoffs. Yeah!

PATP also sent over a few set building needs, and I selected a couple of 1985 Fleer cards to show here. I remember this Shawon Dunston card fetching a little bit of coin back when I was a kid. Dunston didn't exactly become the next Ernie Banks, but he carved himself out a pretty solid career. I love getting cards like this that I could probably snap up for a quarter now but couldn't afford back in the day.

Sometimes you're just not sure how to end things, and Pete Rose storms in and starts signing autographs and demanding stacks of cash from all of his onlookers. Awkward. I'm just going to back away from this post, slowly...

From the Archives

Tall Boys? More like Skinny Boys. Group Break results from one of the hungriest blogs around.

We're just a week or so away from this year's Allen & Ginter's going live's on us, so I figured that I may as well get my last post about 2013 Topps Archives out of the way. I participated in a group break put on by Nachos Grande back in June and came away with most of the Cardinals team set, plus a few extras. I also have a stack of Pittsburgh Pirates' booty if anyone reading this collects that team and is interested in probably not getting a letter bomb in the mail from me.

The short prints in the Archives set are all supposed to be reprints like last year, so it makes receiving a card like this a bit confusing. This is more certainly not a reprint (or a short print), yet Ozzie Smith definitely had a card in the set this is modeled after (and even one in a Cardinals uniform if you count the Traded set.) It certainly would make trying to explain this set very confusing to the novice collector.

Here's one of the real short prints, and if these follow any particular theme, it's that most of the players that appear are not top tier stars. No Bob Tewksbury card could have ever fetched more than a nickel in 1992, and you have to be a pretty serious baseball fan to know who he is today. That being said, I love that he's a part of this set as he was a seriously underrated player in his day. I do remember him, even his pre-Cardinals career, for reasons I can't really explain.

I was lucky enough to pull a "gold" parallel of Shelby Miller's Archives rookie card. Miller has surpassed my expectations for his rookie year, at least so far. It was barely more than a year ago that many Cardinals fans were worried that he was an overrated head case, and it's nice to see that it looks like a highly touted top draft choice is delivering the goods at the big league level. He probably will lose out to Yasiel Puig for the Rookie of the Year vote and still has this year's playoffs (we can only hope) to pull his best 2000 Rick Ankiel impression (yikes!)

Oh, we've seen this card before, but did you know it has an autographed cousin? It was great to get a "hit" from my team, and I'm even more impressed that Topps has found a way to get hits of bunch of lesser known players into their products by way of the Fan Favorites brand. I'm still not that sold on the current incarnation of Topps Archives as a whole, but I consider this year's product to be a bit of an improvement over last year's.