Clowns

The Cardinals are playing like clowns right now, so here are some jokes. 

Ha.

Ha.

Ha.

Ha.

I get jokes.

(Thanks to Waiting 'til Next Year for the, er, humor.)

Cubs Fatigue

Cards from the other side of the rivalry courtesy of @TomSOlson 

I knew it was going to be bad when I was already tired of hearing about the Cubs before an official pitch had been thrown this season. The lovable losers are a lot less lovable these days, with their 7th ranked payroll and frontrunner status this season. Thanks to an impressive staple of talented young players, the team that floated into the NLCS last season on Joe Maddon's magic carpet is expected to win 130 games this season and destroy every team in its path on its way to world domination.

Okay, fine, sorry -- I'm cranky tonight. It's an exciting time to be a Cubs fan, but even tossing the rivalry with the Cardinals aside for the moment, I seriously dread the moment the Cubs actually win a World Series because it's going to rival the Red Sox of the past decade in terms of insufferable fan encounters. Fortunately, many Cubs fans are not insufferable, and I am positive that P-Town Tom is one of them. I've had nothing but great encounters with card collecting Cubs fans and the Waiting 'til Next Year blogger is certainly among the good guy traders I've dealt with. He was also kind enough not to send me any Cubs (or Heywards) in our most recent dealing.

A shiny, colorful Bob Gibson card will certainly help to calm my nerves. This one appears to be an insert from a 2001 Upper Deck set, and it was one that I needed.

The colors on this card are just off (blue and gold?) and poor Stan is reduced to a small photo. This card is super shiny however, and looks to be from a Panini Hall of Fame set that probably came out at a price a little too rich for my blood.

This has to be one of the youngest looking dudes to ever appear on a baseball card. If Nick Plummer comes into your bar, you should probably check his ID.

Here's a minor league card that looks like it may have been signed in-person by former Cardinals prospect Tyler Herron. Cool stuff.

Adam Wainwright is Fired Up! Unfortunately, his performance this season so far has been rather tepid, like a frozen burrito that you tried to microwave that's still cold in the middle. Hopefully Waino can right the proverbial ship, and soon.

Cards with Integrity

A solid trade package arrives. 

True story: I actually own a cracked bat. It's Chris Denorfia's bat, in fact. I've told the story before, but another fringe major leaguer lost the grip on his bat during a game in the waning moments of the last incarnation of the Portland Beavers AAA franchise. The bat ended up in my lap. Somehow in a blur of confusion and half eaten ballpark nachos, the cracked Denorfia bat became mine to keep.

This brings me to the latest bubble mailer of cards that showed up at Cards on Cards Central, from super Tigers fan Julie of A Cracked Bat.

The package contained a bunch of 2016 Panini Donruss Cardinals cards. Without being responsible and actually checking the checklist, I am pretty sure I've got a handle of the bulk of the team set now, which is great. I chose the Tsunami for scanning because he's pretty much the most underrated player around these days.

This looks like someone cropped Matt's head out of a magazine and blew it up to 3x5 proportions. This is not up to SI's usual standards, guys.

From L: Matt Holliday, Michael Wacha, Carlos Martinez, Jhonny Peralta, Yadier Molina and Trevor "The Subject" Rosenthal. Not pictured: Matt Carpenter, who was actually the best player on the team last year by many metrics. (NL doubles leader. Just saying.)

These Triumvirate cards are weird and nice. Or weird, but nice? I guess I need to go out and pick up the rest of the gang so I can put them together like some crappy 2D Voltron or... perhaps it's more apt to say, like Ignignokt and Err. If these weren't so dazzling looking, I would continue making fun of them.

Thanks again to Julie, who can expect a bundle of Tigers stuff in the near future!

Cards from the Bayou

A huge haul from @Teejnola includes another player I had to Google. 

My mailbox has been full of great stuff from Junkies lately. Unlike other junkies I'm familiar with, The Junior Junkie probably didn't have to dig through the reycling bins and scraps at the local construction site to find things of value for this deal.

Some really nice additions to the Carp collection were on hand, including a 2006 MLB Artifacts jersey swatch card and this black bordered mini from the 2008 Allen & Ginter set. This set is still my favorite of all of the Ginter sets because it was the first one I ever got my grubby mitts into.

I've been working on getting a better handle on cataloging my cards lately and have found that the Signature Rookies cards are really tough to find good info about. They tend to come in either "promo" versions, signed versions and unsigned versions, all of which look nearly identical and come with a not-quite serial number. Obviously, this isn't signed, but I'm never going to find it on any of the websites I frequent even though supposedly 5000 of them were printed. That said, I love getting early Chris Carpenter cards. (Not Cris Carpenter... that's another guy.)

This is an absolutely fantastic "gold mirror" parallel Jim Edmonds card, numbered 10/25. It's one of the better additions to my Jimmy Baseball collection of late.

I think we're just about at a stage of Jaime Garcia's career where we can expect things out of him for the first time in pretty much ever. It's nice. Just like this purple refractor is nice.

I'm familiar with Kevin Joseph in that he made some appearances here and there for the 2002 Cardinals team (the one that traded for Scott Rolen only to have him break in the playoffs) and the fact that somewhere I think I have another one of his autos or serial numbered rookie cards.

Ray Lankford is the King, man! Pacific did a lot of weird stuff, but the blinged out die cuts are pretty fun to look at even now.

Luke Weaver seems like he is destined to be another gem in the recently successful pipeline of Cardinals prospects.

This Matt Adams card is thick as a brick! I could probably shatter your car window and steal your spare change with it. It's definitely thicker than some entire packs of cards.

Mullinax... Mullinax... hmm... Jacob Mullinax? Doesn't ring a bell. There's not much out there about him, but he was apparently a 14th round pick that was out of pro baseball after just two seasons. Of course, that's two more than I played.

Purple Piscotty! He's gotten off to a nice start as the every day right fielder.

And we say goodbye for now with an early Pujols. One of these days I'll finally suck it up and track down a rookie year card, but for now I've got my 2002 cards to deal with.

March Loot

The latest @thelootlocker installment came with a big hit. 

I'm going with an abbreviated version this time around as two of the packs of my latest Loot Locker were my first two 2016 Topps Heritage packs. I always make it a point to collect this set, so I'm sure I'll have plenty of ink to spill (or keys to smack) about it as the year goes on.

No inserts were to be found, but I snagged an SP out of each pack. It seems like King Felix is always an SP.

Hopefully Odubel is a good player, for the Phillies sake anyway. I never understand the criteria used for selecting which 75 cards get the short print treatment. Are the Phillies sticking to a solid rebuild plan or is Ryan Howard beating up all the kids and taking their lunch money?

The 2015 Bowman Chrome pack proved to be fruitful, as it produced a big money card from (confusingly) 2014. And by big money, I mean... holy crap, I could sell this thing on eBay for $80-$100 apparently! As most of you know by now, I'm not really in this thing for the money and a fellow blogger got excited about this card and sent me something that is a good fit for my collection. More on that later.

I want to talk about putting cards from 2014 in 2015 products, though. This just feels really gimmicky to me. I know they've done similar things with Kris Bryant and Carlos Correa lately, but it just feels off. I get that Topps gets excited about a young player who is succeeding out of the gate and wants to make sure they have ample time to get things signed on card (I know this is good) and get the requisite "hits" out there, but there's got to be some other way they can do this. And when you hold things back like Topps held these back for another year, you have to wonder how many of these things were actually printed. This card is the refractor version, but it's not like it's serial numbered. Someone smarter than me about Bowman rookie autos can feel free to chime in.

Back to my favorite thing in Loot Lockers, my 2015 Bowman's Best pack was... well... the best. I pulled a green Miguel Cabrera refractor, numbered to 99. This will make some Tigers fan that I trade with happy, I am willing to bet.

This is a Mirror Image insert, and these guys are both brothers and teammates. They're not identical twins, however, because that would be a very small insert set concept.

Finally, here's a shiny Tulo refractor for Erin's collection. He's on one of my fantasy teams this year, so I'm hoping this is the year he doesn't lose an appendage as is his usual M.O.

Results, Results, Results

Did you win? Did I? Contest results and Group Break results from @allstarboxbreak

March Radness is over! It's April already and it's probably already time to go out and mow your lawn. Villanova dropped North Carolina on a buzzer beater tonight, and now there are prizes to be distributed.

In 1st Place was reader Danny L. (rladish), who in addition to being the only person who correctly picked Villanova to go all the way, was the 2013 "winner" of worst bracket. This topsy-turvy tournament produced a very tight race for the consolation prizes, with espn28013321, Cardboard Collections, and Wilson (2013 top prize) finishing 2nd, 3rd, and 4th respectively. They all won stuff. Meanwhile, 2013's 2nd Place finisher became 2016's worst with reader Brian C. (B) finishing at the bottom of a heap of lousy brackets. (Hey, mine was lousy, too.) Winners (and "winner"), please contact me soon, especially if you're the one with the default espn username so I know where to send your stuff!

In other news, I snagged the Blazers with a minimum $1.99 bid on an eBay box break auction recently from All-Star Box Breaks. I've never really jumped into the box break thing (especially not with basketball), but I've been following them on Twitter and so forth for a bit and decided to dip my toe in. I'm a sucker for getting my guaranteed team at a low price, which is exactly what happened here.

It was a 3 box break consisting of this year's Prizm (already a big fan), Court Kings (looked cool, didn't get any cards but the odds were not really in any team's favor) and Totally Certified - from which came this Dame card here. It looks a lot nicer than it scans, with some raised elements present on the card. This will look nice in my binder when I get around to organizing my Blazers (which is next on my list after I get my Cardinals wants under control.)

I also am excited about scoring a pair of Blazers playoff tickets for the first time in my life. For someone who usually goes to around 10 games a year (give or take a few depending on the season and what's going on in my life), it's pretty stupid that I haven't taken the plunge to playoffland yet. Assuming they clinch a playoff spot (likely but not a certainty yet), I will finally get to knock this off my list of awesome things to do.

So that's it, 4 cards for $1.99, including the Al-Farouq Aminu Prizm version (i.e. refractor) of his Prizm card. Can't complain about that. I didn't get a hit but I didn't walk away empty handed, either, which is all I was hoping for.

6 Shocking Trading Cards That Finally Turned Me into a Cubs Fan

Actual cards from actual envelopes. 

First of all, welcome to April. (It's just past midnight on the west coast.) It's funny to me that it's becoming harder and harder to tell the difference between clickbait and parody these days, so I'll dispense with the usual wackiness and show off a few cards I got from fellow #Supertrader and long time friend of the blog Play at the Plate. (Hey, I could have shown an actual card of Edmonds in a Cubs uniform, but no one needs to see that.)

Here's a '90s insert card that I didn't own. Rusty Greer of the Rangers is on the flip side, so it makes sense that PATP would end up with an extra.

Here's a pair of 1998 Ray Lankford cards from the underappreciated Topps Gold Label set. Unfortunately, these cards aren't labeled with what "class" they belong to unlike another year that I'm thinking of, but a little research tells me that the one on the left is a Class 3 while the one on the right is a Class 1. Probably.

Switching things up to some hoops, here's a Hoops insert of my all-time favorite basketball player. Nice!

This is one of my favorite Lillard cards that I've seen so far. The Blazers won their 40th game tonight (last night really) when many expected them to be one of the worst teams in the league. Instead, they are locked into a five-team battle for four playoff spots. Things are looking bright for this franchise, which has been rebuilt around an extremely young core.

Meyers Leonard looks so young here! He's out for the rest of the season with a bum shoulder and his contract is up. But he came into the league with Damian Lillard and, supposedly, intends to do what he can to stay with the Blazers. He's been one of the most polarizing players in the franchise, but there's no doubting the things he can do well (shoot 3's and be tall.) It'll be an interesting offseason, but we're not quite there yet, fortunately.