Baseball is Back!

 

Baseball cards are back as well, and they brought a few other sports with them. 

 

Let's hop in the wayback machine and check out some cards that Sportscards From The Dollar Store sent quite a few months ago -- last year, in fact. Yes, that means that I'm quite a bit behind in the blogging show-and-tell here, but I'm not going to explain myself or make any apologies for it. We're here to look forward, and forward we shall look!

Along with a really nice '78 O-Pee-Chee HOFer came a few Cardinals cards, including another one of those "so weird, it must be Panini!" cards that features a silver ink autograph on a leather swatch. If I'm not mistaken, this might be the one year (2019) that they brought typically high end Leather & Lumber brand to retail, which would also mean it was my first dip into the Panini Points realm.

Like many a pitcher with a rocket arm before him, Trevor Rosenthal seemed to burn hot quickly and then more or less disappear. Since departing St. Louis, where he was a full time closer, Rosenthal has logged big league innings for four other organizations but hasn't made it back to the big leagues since the cursed 2020 "season".

Well, I assume you all know all about Stan the Man's story, so let's just take a beat and enjoy a cool looking card. I'm sure that photo has to be colorized, but I don't care.

Moving on to tackle football, buckstorecards always finds me some really fun Oregon cards. Bonus points should be awarded for catching a Duck in Duck gear.

There's no gear here at all, and this weird Panini Day set seems to have a lot of unaccounted inserts in the TCDB files, which can be a bit frustrating. No, I don't really want to figure out my own checklist for this set. Panini can be a real nightmare when it comes to that stuff.

Haloti Ngata is a very large man, so it must have been difficult to fit him in the frame here,. They almost nailed it, but not quite.

I really like the design of this old Topps Finest Donovan McNabb relic. It has a honeycomb thing going on.

This one isn't bad, either. There's no honeycomb, but there's still a hexagonal jersey swatch.

On the other hand, I feel that this design is unspeakably awful. The glittery background almost reminds me of "snow" on an old TV set. This might have looked better with more of a television theme to it, but what do I know? They don't consult me on these things for some reason.

Here's a Turkey Red design that I don't recognize. Did they ever make tobacco cards that looked like this? (I mean, besides the sticker signature, of course.)

I'll always wonder what Joey Harrington's pro career would have looked like if he had started off with a better franchise that didn't rush him to the field because they didn't really have any other options. He was never a big numbers guy, but he was more of a leadership pro. In the right system, I wonder if he could have thrived.

It's the man of many nicknames, FredEx, The People's Champ, etc. (Most of these he gave to himself.) He only really had that one memorable play, but it was definitely a stunner.

Here's another "bonus points" Ducks card.

Here's the first of a pair of fancy looking Dion Jordan "material" cards. Jordan has a ton of cards, and almost all of them are with him wearing Dolphins gear. He didn't really get a chance to make an impact in the pros until he got to Seattle, though.

How long are these rookie photo shoots for the NFL? There are so, so many different cards out there and so many dorky poses that they have to make.

This counts as a little bit of a patch, doesn't it? I can see a little bit of color there that isn't white.

I wish the careers of De'Anthony Thomas and Patrick Mahomes had overlapped a bit more. I could see DAT getting utilized more as a gadget type player once Mahomes started getting more established.

Our last Duck of a very excellent group of Ducks cards is a "Gold Zone" Score parallel of Penei Sewell, numbered to just 50. You can still find some interesting cards in a lower end product.

There's even a basketball card in the mix. Al-Farouq Aminu was a consistent presence in the peak years of the Blazers "Dame Time" era.

Sports cards with no printed name or photo on the front are a bit weird. I can assure you that this is a Brian Elliott card, a longtime goaltender who was still active in the NHL as recently as last year.

I do love a good team photo, even a hockey one. This is apparently from a 1990-91 Kraft Singles set. I'm not sure if it was a regional thing or a wide release, aside from the copyright info on the back telling us it was a Canadian release of sorts.

Cardinals! Blazers! Football Guys!

Three PWEs from @collec_sport run the gamut of the big three sports. 

 

I'm back from an unplanned layoff... nah, let's just call it a short period of inactivity for the blog. I hadn't intended to take the entire holiday week off, but that's how things played out. I may have had a different title for this post if life had gone differently (I'm Thankful for PWEs?) Tonight I'm taking a look at three envelopes of the plain and white kind sent from The Coffee Card Guy (aka Sport Card Collectors aka Cards Over Coffee.) These were some seriously loaded envelopes as you'll see shortly.

If 2019 was a lost season for Jordan Hicks, 2020 was... well, it was kind of lost for everyone. Hicks was one of the first names to officially opt out of the season, but he was unlikely to pitch regardless of his status considering the combination of factors including his young age, his incredible velocity, and his long road to recovery from Tommy John surgery. I sincerely hope we're talking about him a lot in coming springtime, because he was fun to watch.

I do not have many (if any?) gold Chrome refractors, so it was really cool to land this Marcell Ozuna version from the 2018 Topps Chrome Update set. I haven't heard anything about there being a Chrome Update set for 2020, but considering how underwhelming the regular Update set is, that's probably for the best.

It's Big City time! I actually really like the way these Stat Line parallels scan, compared to some card that have a primarily foil finish.

Closing out the run of Cardinals cards is this Trevor Rosenthal gold parallel from 2015 Topps, the last year that Topps truly created a gold bordered parallel. These parallels have looked pretty unimpressive lately.
 

Each envelope had a theme, and the second one featured Trail Blazers cards. I really like some of the basketball designs that Panini used in the years where they were still figuring things out before they settled in to the mess that they are today. (Granted, it's a mess that clearly makes them tons and tons of cash.)

LaMarcus Aldridge went full Beast Mode in the first two games of the 2014 NBA Playoffs opening round, setting a tone for the Blazers to pull off their first series win in fourteen years. I owned the card from Game 2 of that series against the Rockets and now have a copy of Game 1. Even if we hate how Aldridge left the team, Blazers fans will always have fond memories of him for this.

Ah, more Aldridge. I think I said my piece already. Moving on...

It's back to one of the present stars of the team with this CJ McCollum "Lord" parallel from the 2016-17 Panini Excalibur set. It wasn't too long ago that you could find stuff from this set cheaply, including repack packs. Now, of course, you can't find anything basketball card-related cheaply anymore. (If you can, please tell me about it... and don't tell anyone else! Shh!)

This is a nice card of Sabas, one of my all-time favorites. It's a blue parallel from the 2017-18 Donruss Optic set (powered by Panini!)

Last up is the envelope from the Eagles/football guys envelope. De'Anthony Thomas was never an Eagle, of course, but he is a big part of my Oregon Ducks collection. In case you wondered about my football collecting hierarchy, it goes something like this: 

Oregon Ducks cards ---> Oregon Ducks alums in pro football uniforms ---> pineapple on pizza* ---> certain Eagles cards ---> getting run over by a bus ---> Michael Vick Eagles cards

I'm actually finally organizing my Eagles cards and adding them to my collection on TCDB, so I will have an updated Eagles trading page here shortly. I'm going to keep all of the cards in boxes, though, but at least they will be in some sort of order with the dupes filtered out. Speaking of dupes, let me know if someone out there wants any of my excess Eagles cards. I really don't have room for a lot of football cards in my life.

And speaking of uninspiring Topps gold parallels (I did... really, I did!), these football gold parallels from 2014 are sort of oddly colored. They strike me as more of a yellow/beige than a true gold. Both of these numbered cards are of players (Ertz and Foles) from the Super Bowl winning team, though, so that's a big positive for me. Again, watch this space for more on my NFL collecting quirks if you're interested.

If you had asked me who led the Eagles in rushing in 2018, I would have said, "who?" And if you had said "Jordan Howard", I would have said, "oh, that's weird, I forgot about him." But you would have been wrong, because he didn't lead the Eagles in rushing in 2018. He led the Bears in rushing that year. And now I still don't know who led the Eagles in rushing in 2018. It probably wasn't Darren Sproles because he was a myth.

Kenjon Barner was actually an Eagle for several seasons, but this holds a loftier place in my collection because it's a Ducks card. In fact, it's a Ducks card featuring a throwback uniform from the '90s, giving it several more cool points. Cool points are all that matters in cards. They're way more important to me than "slabs" and "grades" and "pop" and all that nonsense.

I may seem pretty ambivalent about Eagles cards at times, but I definitely need to get my hands on all of the The Champ Is Here inserts from that Super Bowl winning team. That was a fun team and a fun game.

DeJong & More

A football swap with @collec_sport nets some baseball cards. 

Back during the holiday season, I bought into a Black Friday deal from Panini that netted me a couple of their Black Friday packs. I'd never taken advantage of a promotion like this before, and it was pretty much, even if none of the cards fit into my collection. The Saquon Barkley card did, however, fit into a Sport Card Collectors collection, so we arranged a swap where I was able to pick up an autograph of one of my favorite Ducks football players.

I'm not going to show that off today, however. As you might have guessed, I'm holding it back for a future Good Luck Ducks post (hopefully those will be a thing again someday.) Instead, I wanted to take a look at a few of other goodies I received.

This is a really tough card to look at, in all honesty. Some '90s inserts really work, and others are just... what were they thinking here?! Still, I had never seen this card from the 1999 Sports Illustrated set, and it will slide into a nice spot in my binders, in the "Mc" section of course.

I'm not sure why, but whenever I see or hear the name Trevor, the phrase "whatever's clever, Trevor" pops into my head. I don't even know if I'd actually said that out loud before, or even heard anyone else say it. Someone probably did.

I'm always appreciative of people that send me Bowman Platinum stuff as well as other Walmart exclusives. I don't go to those stores and the one sort of around here doesn't stock cards, anyway. (I can't even imagine what a Walmart must be like this week.)

Thanks again to SCC/The Card Guy! If you have any interesting New York Giants cards, think about sending 'em that direction.

The Anticipation

Mostly Cardinals, some of the time. 

I've been rewatching the 2006 and 2011 World Series games in anticipation of the coming season. I have some serious questions about the current group, but I'm hoping they can put together one last run for Yadi and Waino, and it's always awesome to remember the championship teams. This is especially true considering that there aren't a lot of titles in my lifetime for the other teams that I follow.

Ray from All Cardinals All The Time have been pretty productive of late in swapping doubles. I thought I'd show off a few from a mailer I got around the beginning of the year.

Here's another group of fabulous minis. In the middle, we see both versions of Allen Craig's 2013 Gypsy Queen offering. In watching the 2011 Series, it's been nice to go back in time and see Craig at the start of his short run as a very productive offensive player.

This one reminds me of spring, and youth! It's the gold plated edition, die cut, baby!

Well, once again I've done an injustice to a foilboard card, thanks to my scanner. That's too bad. Scott Rolen inserts are cool.

I'll end things here with a numbered (to 75!) Chrome Blue Wave Refractor version of ex-closer Trevor Rosenthal's 2016 card. Rosenthal has been through the pro baseball ringer over the past couple of years, but he's looking to (hopefully) find a place in Mike Matheny's Royals bullpen this season. Doesn't that sound a bit strange?

Where the Redbirds Roam

So many Cardinals cards, so little computer time. 

I've been sitting on this for far too long for reasons I can't really determine. A huge, huge package of cards came my way this past June from super Giants fan ARPSmith, and I've only managed now to scan some of the cards and write about it. I think sometimes I just get intimated by the thought of writing about trade dealings when I could easily go on for days about a hundred of these cards. Perhaps it was because of this weekend's Cards/Giants series that served as a reminder, but I finally managed to whittle it down to a near dozen or so things to post about.

Remember these? Chipz?! I still like them. A few different years (2013, 2014, 2015) are represented here, and someday I'd like to look over some checklists and figure out which ones I still need. Wacha glows, just so you know.

Any time I get a Fleer Greats card, I feel like I have to throw it up on the blog.

Here's a red 2004 Bazooka parallel for my Jimmy Edmonds collection. My scanner seems to unfortunately forget what red looks like sometimes, as I've noticed a lot of my scans are turning out a shade that resembles something you'd see at a gelato shop.

Sometimes those All-Star blister sets are the only thing in the card aisle that looks like it could have a card that would fit in my collection, but I've never convinced myself to buy one. Usually our shelves have Mariners team sets and at least one of the All-Star sets. Of course, if my team was available, I would buy one every single season no matter how much I despise the Topps flagship design.

I do like buybacks that are older than me. I don't need 1992 Topps checklists with a special stamp, though.

There were lots of Big Mac insert cards in this package, but I somehow knew that this one would look the best in the scanner. There's been a little bit of chatter about McGwire getting a manager job someday, but I would be really surprised if that happened to be in St. Louis.

Oh man... food issues are the best. Circular food issues? Even better. King-B produces a Quality Meat Snack, and I kind of love that this sat at the bottom of a puck of dried meat before it was set free to the wild.

Wait... are these pogs? I've never owned a pog in my life. This is awesome! Thank you, Ted Williams Card Company (and ARPSmith, of course.)

With Trevor Rosenthal's Tommy John surgery confirmed last week, it looks like his Cardinals career has come to an end. It's bittersweet, of course, that it was just starting to look like he'd found whatever was missing from his game for more than a season as he'd struggled, lost, and finally regained the closer role since the beginning of the 2016 season.

Red Yadi rookie? Red Yadi rookie! Say it thirty times fast.