Up For Grabs Cardinalpalooza: Lance Berkman

Lance Berkman only really spent a full season with the Cardinals, while barely able to find his way on to the field in the second year of his two year contract. History will probably remember his Cardinals tenure as much more lengthy than it was, and Berkman was a fan favorite as he has been wherever his career has taken him, outside of New York I suppose. The list of his available cards follows at the end of the post.

I wish these cards didn't appear to be fading away at the bottom.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Berkman's run with St. Louis, aside from his being a key contributor to a championship winning team, is the fact that very late in his career he was sent to patrol the outfield regularly after having primarily been a first baseman for years. Nutty.

The list:

2011 Bowman #45 [3 available]
2011 Bowman Gold #45
2011 Topps Update (All-Star) #US52 [4 available]
2011 Topps Lineage #47 [5 available]
2011 Topps Opening Day #69 [3 available]
2012 Bowman #36
2012 Bowman Platinum #15
2012 Topps #466 [2 available]
2012 Topps Golden Moments #GM-27
2012 Topps Gypsy Queen #185
2012 Topps Opening Day #128 [3 available]

Airbrushed Fridays: 2013 Topps #368

Here we go, second half baseball! Can the Cardinals sustain their two out run production? Will the Pirates collapse again? Will we see Manny Ramirez in an MLB uniform again? Will that Puig guy talk to the media?

Who is this week's victim, and why do we care? Chris Young is one of the Chris Youngs, the one who is an outfielder. He spent his entire career with the Diamondbacks failing to repeat the prolific home run output of his rookie year.

Why is this a thing? Young was involved in a three-team offseason deal that moved some pieces around without really impacting any of the teams involved. Young ended up in Oakland, Cliff Pennington wound up in Arizona, and Miami got rid of Heath Bell. Topps Photoshopped another card, and life moved on.

Airbrushed Fridays is a weekly feature as the name seems to imply. If you know of a card with an altered photograph that you'd like to see featured, please contact me. You probably won't win anything other than a hyperlink and some of those useless Million Dollar Chase codes, but you never know!

A Blazer Detour

Frequent APTBNL later contributor jafronius is part of the Guilt-Free Basketball Card Club (free invites are always open!) and recently sent me a package of hoops cards (and a Duck that goes in a pile of Ducks that could be featured in the future). I don't get a lot of exclusively non-baseball packages, but I figured that while we're in the midst of some hot Summer League action, I may as well show off some (ex) Blazers.

The "combo guard" position is a weird thing that I think the league as a whole is still trying to figure out. Typically it means a player is deemed to be too small to be a shooting guard (or off-the-ball guard) in the NBA, but not skilled enough in the ways of ballhandling and distributing to be a true point guard. Hell, there are probably only a handful of "true point guards" in the NBA that can play a lick anyway. Basketball purists are the worst, sometimes. Anyway, Jerryd Bayless was one of several combo guards that the Blazers drafted in recent years. He and Jarrett Jack are the best known examples of them. Jack has made a name for himself lately and even Bayless randomly became a bit of a contributor late last season, but neither of them are doing it for Portland anymore. Both of them have worn quite a few different uniforms already.

Look out, Kelvin Cato! There's a much larger, black & white Super Kelvin Cato right behind you, ready to devour you whole!

It's hard to tell with the scan, but this is a really weird die cut insert. The only real text printed on the back are two pseudo-interview questions for Mr. Cato. I don't get it.

I don't have many Jim Jackson cards as a Blazer, so it was nice to get this one. I'm always intrigued by base set Topps designs that don't have a baseball equivalent.

So... '90s. What are those orbs, exactly? Are they volleyballs? Indoor soccer balls? Something straight out of Marble Madness? So many questions.

I'm Done with Series 2

No, I haven't completed collecting the 2013 Topps Series 2 set (as the title may imply), but I am putting my foot down and not buying any more packs. So far, I've purchased a rack pack, 5 loose Target packs, 3 loose hobby packs, 2 loose packs at Rite Aid and a blaster. Guess how many Cardinals I've pulled...

Here are just a few of the cards I pulled from the blaster I bought on Saturday. Pretty much everything I got from the box is available, and I pulled the usual pile of inserts and Target parallels if anyone is collecting the base cards, inserts or just stuff of of your favorite team(s)/player(s). Just let me know what you need.

This one is earmarked for Night Owl if he wants it. I don't often pull base card variations/short prints/whatevers, and there's a very good chance I would have overlooked this card's rarity if it wasn't for the fact that I'd already gone through the entire Series 2 checklist to see which Cardinals I need.

Big Papi will someday probably be the first player elected to the HOF primarily as a DH. In a sense, this will be disappointing to me, because it will overshadow the contributions of Edgar Martinez, who was a phenomenal hitter.

No Angels Pujols cards in my binders!

This is a great Rickey card. I like the older style A's jersey. It's hard for me to tell for some reason if this is actual an early photo or if he's just wearing more of a throwback design. Rickey did have four separate tours with Oakland, after all.

People seem to like Ripken. I guess when all is said and done that I like the Chasing History inserts the most out of the flagship set.

Finally, here's a nice looking half-full bleed (is that a term?) photo of the oft-injured Nationals third baseman.

Happy All-Star night, everyone. It would have been nice to see the Senior Circuit get more than 3 hits, though. Just like it would be nice if, out of all of those packs mentioned above, I had pulled more than 4 Cardinals cards. (Two Stan Musial inserts and two Joe Kelly base cards for those who are curious.) I am stopping with this madness because the checklist is just far too short on Cardinals to make it interesting to me, so I'd love to hear from any of you that have trade offers for me involving 2013 Cardinals cards. Please check the want list to see which ones I need.

Trading with Card Buzz

It's late on the eve of this year's rendition of the All-Star Game, and the Cardinals will have as many as 5 participants in addition to Adam Wainwright, who opted not to pitch as he just pitched yesterday. I'm hoping for an interesting game, although considering what's at stake for the winning league, I wouldn't mind another blowout like last year if it helps the Cardinals in the playoffs.

I recently traded with Laurens from Card Buzz, acquiring two more much needed SPs from the 2007 Topps Heritage set and a few Redbirds.

It seems weird that this will be the third consecutive All-Star Game without Albert Pujols. He likely would have made the 2011 team were it not for injuries, but his numbers have not been there at the break to justify his selection in either of his seasons with the Angels. I could see him having a stronger second half this season, but he's clearly very limited in his mobility which seems to affect all sorts of things.

Here's to hoping Adam Wainwright has a strong second half. I'd love to see him finally win the Cy Young Award this year after he came so close to doing it in 2009 and 2010.

Airbrushed Fridays: 1978 Topps #645

After a bit of a "soft open" period, I'm going to go ahead and announce that Cards on Cards, for whatever it's worth, is now on the Twitter. You can follow me at @cardsoncards. The account is mostly just autoposting links to my posts here on the blog, which may be useful to some of you, but I will probably find occasion to use it for other things as well. I've finally succumbed and decided to embrace the more useful aspects of the Twitter machine (real-time information, thoughts and musings from my favorite musicians) while rejecting the things I choose to reject (hashtags, being a dick to people for no reason.) I promise to respond to inquiries and trade requests in that platform as much (or more?) than I do to emails, so if you're more comfortable with that sort of thing, go for it.

Who is this week's victim, and why do we care? Mike Torrez is an MLB lifer, and also the kind of guy who can spend 18 seasons in the bigs with 7 teams while having nearly zero name recognition whatsoever. That's a special kind of talent. He was a right-handed starting pitcher who won slightly more games than he lost, notching nearly 500 appearances and wearing at least 6 different uniform numbers. His peak season was 1975, when he won 20 games with Baltimore while managing to lead the league in bases on balls.

Why is this a thing? Torrez was involved in transactions with the likes of Ken Singleton, Don Baylor, Reggie Jackson and Dock Ellis, but his move to Boston was by way of a free agent signing. This card is, admittedly, one of the best airbrush jobs from the '70s that I've ever seen. I applaud Mike, and the "artist" involved, for bringing this card to the world.

Airbrushed Fridays is a weekly feature as the name seems to imply. If you know of a card with an altered photograph that you'd like to see featured, please contact me. You probably won't win anything other than a hyperlink and eleven Twitter followers, but you never know!

Trading with The Dutch Card Guy

I pulled off my first international trade in awhile late this past spring when I swapped cards with The Dutch Card Guy. I sent over (wayyyy over) some Yankees and cards for his player collection, and I received some my-te-fine Cardinals cards in return.

This rare black bordered David Freese card is a thing a beauty, or at least as much as a baseball card can be one of those things. I really need to own more black bordered Topps parallels. I only have a few and they are really impressive.

I'm pretty lukewarm on the blaster manupatch cards, but this is an Ozzie card, so it's automatically amazing.

I can't even begin to talk about how awesome this card looks. It's has blinding streaks of light that don't begin to show up on a scan. If you don't own any of these Passing the Torch cards, you're really missing out on something special.

Speaking of something special, Adam Wainwright appears to be in the lead as far as NL Cy Young candidates go. He has a chance to go for victory #13 (for whatever that's worth) on Sunday, which means we won't be seeing much of him in the All-Star Game.

This deal wasn't exclusively Cardinals, however, as I received a nice chunk of Allen & Ginter cards to boot. Balut apparently involves boiling a fetus, which is somehow less disgusting than the other Culinary Curiosities card that I received. Betcha can't guess which one that was! (hint: maggots.)

I'm really not a fan of most of Ginter's sketch cards, or many sketch cards in general, but this isn't the worst thing I've ever seen. I don't know if they are part of the 2013 set or not, but I wouldn't miss them. It's nice to knock a couple more of these off my want list, however.