Cardinals, Heritage and Sometimes Both

 

A late spring trade package with some of the usual suspects and a couple of nice surprises.

Since I don't really do many prearranged trades outside of TCDB anymore, it's always nice to find a surprise bubble mailer in or near my mailbox. Make that doubly so if it's from Night Owl Cards, since we've been sending stuff back and forth from coast to coast for many years now. Right around the end of spring one such package landed in my lap and I'm finally ready to show off some of its contents today.

I won't get into my rant about what Fanatics did to my beloved Topps Heritage again, and I genuinely like some of the colored parallels, but the sheer quantity of them is too much. (If it's negative, everyone is blaming Fanatics now, aren't they?) I'd much rather get one of the traditional inserts or, gods forbid, a short printed base card than a parallel in every pack.

I was excited about Matt Carpenter returning to the team last year in part because I knew it could potentially mean more Matt Carpenter Cardinals cards, and I wasn't totally disappointed. I knew it might be a struggle for him at the plate, but he was deployed sparingly. Lance Lynn also returned to St. Louis to finish his career last year and ended up with more Cards cards, while Tommy Pham's brief reappearance last summer also netted him new Cardinals offerings. I was a bit less excited about Pham.

A former Cardinal who hasn't returned is the power hitting and oft-injured Tyler O'Neill, although he's only in his 8th big league season. He's got time yet. This aqua Donruss Optic parallel from his rookie year is numbered to 299. One of these days I have a huge rant brewing about the whole rookie card thing -- and it's not going to be pretty -- but for now I am just calling everything a "card from his rookie year" and leaving it at that.

Here's big surprise number one: my first ever Stan the Man card from his playing days! And it doesn't even look like it was fished out of a latrine or rolled up to smoke something. There are some visible scratches and a small crease, but it looks really nice to my standards. My scanner did not like the lower border for some reason.

There was a pretty decent pile of Heritage for the set build in the pack. I'll let the Christopher Sanchez SP represent the lot as you've likely seen all of these base cards numerous times by now.

The second nice surprise is this Dakota Hudson Allen & Ginter jersey card from 2020. It's not quite on the same level as the Musial card, of course, but it's not like people are backing up truckloads of these to my house every week.

If you do want to back up a truckload of cards to my house someday, make it full of Ozzie Smith cards, like this 2024 Donruss Optic Blue Velocity parallel. I'll never run out of these kinds of parallels to collect, but I'll also probably never stop wanting them.

Thanks again to Night Owl and everyone who has sent little and big surprises in the mail over the years!

Bootleggin' with Panini: Baseball Edition

 

A look at the new Donruss baseball set from a @nightcapcards box break. 

 

The latest, and apparently last Donruss baseball set from Panini dropped recently, offering another somewhat affordable alternative to the usual churn from Topps. The cards are always a mix of cringe/tacky and fun, and this year is no exception.

This year's set features loose tributes to the original 1988 set. The blue bordered "holo" parallels (see Wainwright at the top) look a bit more like the original, but the font used and the always jarring lack of team logos makes these feel like they were produced in some dark alley.

The Diamond Kings subset design varies from year to year, and I feel like this is one of the better ones in recent sets.

Here's the actual base design for the set. It has a bit of a '90s science class feel to it.

And here's the Rated Rookie design. It's not exactly iconic, but it works within the framework of the base design.

The red bordered cards are serial numbered to 2022. Given that I picked up three of these in this break (and added a fourth in another break), I have to assume that these are much easier to come by than the Topps gold bordered base cards that are similarly numbered. If someone wanted to crunch the numbers, I think it would be fairly simple to discover that the print run for this set is much, much smaller than Topps Series 1 (with good reason.)

The red bordered "Retro 1988" cards don't look as good as their blue bordered counterparts.

Here's the third of those red numbered cards.

Hobby inserts are all numbered as far as I can tell. There's a lot happening on this card.

I was also able to snag a "Retro 1988" jersey card in this break. There's a whopping 97 cards on this checklist, so I feel very fortunate that the one pulled was a Cardinal.

Variety Pack

On the latest #CrackinWaxMailDay, a few @CrackinWax box breaks add some cards to my collection and some trade bait as well. 

 

Since Crackin' Wax brought back their "break of the day" feature (basically smaller breaks with a daily discount), I've started picking up a few more spots here and there. Results have been mixed, of course. For this latest mail day, I cards from some random team breaks as well as one where I did get to buy my team.

First up is a couple of "silver pack" inserts from 2022 Topps that feature the much loved but overused 1987 design. At some point these shifted from being promotional packs handed out by affiliated card shops to being "box loader" packs in hobby boxes. In either case, they're kind of like the prize at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box. The Luis Robert card heads to my trade box.

The prize card of the break, if not the whole mailer, is this Tyler O'Neill card from 2022 Topps Heritage.

The O'Neill card is far from ordinary. It's a "French text" variation, numbered to 73. It's quite fitting for the Canadian-born slugger. (Just don't call it O-Pee-Chee!)

I ended up with a few Heritage short prints, which must have beaten the odds. I'm not super wild about legends popping up in the regular checklist this year, but I still suppose it's a fitting tribute to the original set.

The real problem with the Tris Speaker card presents itself on the back. In the fine print, his team name is: St. Louis Cardinals(?!) Of course, Speaker never played with the Cardinals, so this mistake get this card sorted into the wrong team piles. The original 1973 Topps #476 card is a Walter Johnson All-Time Shutout Leaders card (Speaker doesn't appear in the set.) Also, note how Topps is apparently legally unable to spell out Pete Rose's full name.

These two Dodgers cards came from some kind of Bowman break. I didn't do so well in this one, but I never have a problem getting rid of Dodgers cards.

A Donruss Optic break was also not particularly fruitful, but I did end up with an insert card of this young hitting monster.

I felt compelled to jump into an NBA Hoops break even though I've opened a fair amount of it for myself. I just wanted to encourage more basketball breaking. Here we have one of the best players in the league and a dude named Bones.

Here's a couple of purple parallels. I believe these are typically found in hobby boxes, while retail has a similar blue parallel counterpart.

The new NBA Play-In tournament is currently in progress, although I'm trying to ignore it. There is a Blazers lottery pick on the line, however. (Go... Clippers? Ugh.) The Hawks are also in this Play-In thing, which is a bit of a drop-off after winning their division last season. This numbered Trae Young insert also gets added to my trade bait stuff.

The Breaker's Club Has Benefits

Looking at some cards from the @Nachos_Grande breaker's club. 

 

Over at Nachos Grande, there's a new sign-up for this year's first Breaker's Club that might sound enticing to team collectors who are interested in adding a variety of cards for their team to their collection. You can read the post for details, but the way this works, basically, is that you pay in advance for a bunch of box breaks with your team of choice already locked in. It served me well last year as I was able to add a ton of interesting cards to my collection. Let's check out a few of those cards, which were primarily pulled in breaks from late last summer.

I'm not sure what the people at Topps were thinking with this weird 3D design on this Pristine set from 2004. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it, though, so at least it has that going for it.

Leaping forward in time to the 2021 Topps flagship set, I believe this is what you'd call a "green ice" parallel of slugger Tyler O'Neill. I'm not sure that this looks much like ice, however, but maybe the name "green shards of glass" was a no-go.

I'm always excited to be part of a Pacific box break, because I have completed very few team sets from those products over the years. Private Stock is the one that had T-206 sized minis, long before Topps made them cool again.

Brad Miller was impressive enough at the plate in the abbreviated 2020 season to get his own insert card. He won't have many Cardinals cards, but he has this one.

Another thing that I like about Pacific sets is that there are several of them with larger checklists, like the one-off Online set from 1998. Larger checklists mean more obscure players get included, like David Howard. My only other two Howard cards are from regionally produced police sets.

From the "every rookie card is numbered" era comes this Dan Haren card from 2004 Donruss Classics. I'm glad they're not doing this anymore. These are numbered to 1999, which doesn't exactly make it rare, but does make it annoying for anyone who wants to build a complete set.

I do like the idea of having numbered inserts, however, because it's a better way to keep track of rarity than putting dubious odds on a pack wrapper. This one is numbered to 1250.

With Panini apparently owning all of the old Pacific brands, the Vanguard design gets trotted out every now and then. I don't think it's ever appeared on its own in a Panini set, though. The player photo sticks out in a way that reminds me of those life-sized wall vinyl sticker things (Fatheads?)

Here is something interest. Well, first of all -- check it out! It's even-worn Albert Pujols pants! I took a long look at this card and first wondered if maybe Donruss did not have the rights to the Home Run Derby name. I also wondered if, possibly, what we know to be the Home Run Derby wasn't always called that by name. Neither of these things are correct, however. It turns out that this was from a non-MLB sanctioned event that actually was called the Big League Home Run Challenge. It was organized by MLBPA and I'm thinking the lack of logos should have been a big tip-off here that something was amiss. In any case, this is a very cool and rather strange card to add to my collection. I wonder if Pujols signed any of those jerseys that has his own name on the front.

It's hard to top the Albert Pujols strange pants card, but this one does it -- at least for me! Prior to this, I only had a single Jim Edmonds autograph in my collection, despite him being one of my favorite players of all-time. And that card is from one of the cheaper mid-'90s sets, depicting Edmonds with the Angels.

I'm not sure that I can do much better than this, but I did sign up for the newest breaker's club. It's definitely worth checking out, and as more teams are taken more boxes may get added to the pile.

Wong Gone

 

Cards from the @dimeboxman help say goodbye to Kolten Wong, plus more players that are sticking around. 

 

Every off season generally sees players leaving your favorite team, but it feels like it's been awhile since the Cardinals have lost a player from their core in free agency. Kolten Wong became the first significant player to leave from the Matheny days in awhile, as he comes off back to back Gold Glove award wins to join up with the rival Brewers. This Wong Big League parallel is just one of a bunch of Cardinals cards sent to me by Nick of Dime Boxes late last fall. While Wong's departure will certainly be felt, the Cardinals do see the rest of the core returning along with the huge trade for Nolan Arenado.

Dexter Fowler was recently dealt to the Angels to give other younger outfielders more of a shot at playing time, like Tyler O'Neill here. What this really means is the opportunity for Dylan Carlson to continue the big role he had at the end of 2020, but it should mean ample opportunity for others like O'Neill, Lane Thomas and maybe even Justin Williams.

Former Cardinal Stephen Piscotty shows up here on his rookie year "metallic snowflake" parallel from 2016 Topps Holliday. I've yet to figure out what a metallic snowflake is supposed to be, because these never really seem to have much in the way of metal in them. I guess they didn't want to call them glitterflakes?

Jack Flaherty is not yet under contract for the 2021 season, but it looks like an arbitration hearing will settle that. It will be interesting to see how Flaherty responds this season after only throwing 40 innings in 2020.

Nick sent no less than four purple prospect parallels from the 2015 Bowman set. Of the bunch, only Edmundo Sosa has logged any time with the big league club. Sosa seemed likely to be in the mix in 2020 as a utility player, but after adding Brad Miller to the roster it appears that he got squeezed out.

I'm a fan of these vintage World Series cards and really should own more of them considering how many of them feature the Cardinals.

My relative lack of interest in last year's Allen & Ginter set means that I'm not tired of the inserts yet. This Big Mac Longball Lore card still pops!

Nick also sent a quad-pack (a quad-laser?!?) of 2020 Turkey Red cards from the Update set. Most of my remaining needs are from the elusive Series 2, though I still need a couple from Series 1 and Update as well.

That's the Breaks!

Another fun batch of @bgmartin76 group break goods. 

I don't really use Facebook these days outside of a few groups that I'm, one being an excellent card breaking group that I've mentioned here before. The costs are kept very low by allowing you to have the cards shipped together whenever you want, rather than having to pay for shipping for each individual break. I had let a decent stack of Blazers and Cardinals cards pile up and decided to request a shipment recently.

Panini Revolution is crazy, so it's hard to tell that this is a special green parallel that's numbered to only 88 copies. These were pulled from a Chinese New Year box, which means many of the cards are their own special parallels (same pattern, but the red foil instead of green, I believe.)

Rookies (and LeBron and Jordan) seem to be the only thing basketball card collectors care about, so it's always nice to add another Nassir Little card to my collection. There are a ton of basketball breakers out there who won't even ship base cards of non-rookies, which is a weird concept to me.

I finally finished off a 2017-18 Donruss team set, and with it came this chunky style CJ McCollum jersey.

Swapping over to baseball, any time I see a spot in a Heritage break that's open, I am going to try to snag it. I did pretty well with the Cardinals here, as I wound up with two purple-ish refractors.

Purple(ish) Tyler.

And here's regular refractor Tyler. This one is numbered to 599.

2013 Select has been a popular thing to break lately, most likely because it's affordable -- unlike the 2020 stuff. I have all of the non-short printed team by now, but was happy to snag this Yadi insert. Good stuff all around.