How Are Those Bats? (Heating Up)

More cards from Padrographs!

This is a dizzying time of the year to be following sports. We're already four weeks into the MLB season, soccer is soccering, the playoffs kicked off for two major American sports leagues, and there's drafts-o'-plenty. I've been the lucky recipient of a few unannounced packages of cards from Padrographs in recent times, and today I thought I'd show off some of the contents from one I got back in January after getting a nice kick in the pants a couple of weeks ago when yet another generous package showed up.

These cards were heavily focused on 2025 products, and the gem of the bunch is this Albert Pujols Chrome "silver pack" version of his 1990 Topps inspired insert from the flagship set (Series 2?) This particular one is the rare aqua version, numbered to 199 copies. I have enough trouble collecting each of the regular cards for my team collection each year, so this was a really nice find.

Here's a six pack of some more of those 2025 releases. Nathan Church has settled in to be a regular presence in the outfield so far this season after being called up last August. Strop is an international signee that was only 17 when he got his first card (in Mojo! form), so I don't have much to say about him yet. The rest of the dudes are pretty well famous, with two now ex-Cardinal stars, an all-time legend, a Large Mac headed to my Heritage set binder.

JJ Wetherholt not only made the big club out of spring training this season, he's been on top of the batting order for every start he's made (all at 2B, with Masyn Winn firmly entrenched at his natural position.) His batting average is a bit low thus far, but he's more than made up for it with walks upon walks upon walks.

This is one of those Topps Flagship insert things that I think has something to do with those giant Costco boxes. Not being anywhere near a Costco or being willing to pay above retail price for something like that, it's been a couple of years since I've bought one. The "Flagship" design may well be something that was rejected in the process of coming up with the new base set design (or maybe not), but the ones I've seen do offer a nice alternative to what you usually see.

Rod included some nice in-person autos, including early '90s stalwart hurler Bob Tewksbury.

Adam Moffat also signed a card at one point. He was an expansion pick of the Timbers after logging a few years with the Columbus Crew, but only made a handful of appearances with Portland in their inaugural MLS season.

Last up is one of those "cards that could have been" style custom cards. Driessen's lengthy MLB career concluded with part of a final season with the Cardinals, but he has no official cards as a Cardinal or any kind of "sunset card" with his final stats on the back. (I would very much like to own his 1987 card with the Louisville Redbirds someday, though.)

Contest Results!

 

Another March Radness contest is in the books. Let's check the results!

With Michigan holding off UConn last night, we have some winners to announce in the annual March Radness thing.

Taking home the 1st Place prize is Bump and Run (Trevor P). Congrats! Jafronius was the only other entrant to pick the Wolverines to take it all, and as a result he gets the 2nd Place prize. In 3rd Place with the best non-Michigan bracket was Jeremy D. And finally, Erin who "Does not watch sports" came in hot with the worst bracket.

Congrats to everyone (except Erin, who will be annoyed with me if I try to give her any more cards) and many thanks for participating.

Bonus points to anyone who can spot the relevance of the image above.

Contest Update!

An update before the Final Four and a bunch of Christmas cards.

We're in the home stretch of the latest edition of the March Radness contest, and it all came crashing down for me on Sunday when Duke was felled by the shocking end to their contest with UConn. Huskies alum (and member of the back-to-back title teams) Donovan Clingan was just about to take the floor at halftime of the Blazers game we were at when he found out about the wild ending. While Jeremy sits in 1st place currently, I'm unsure of a path to victory for him as his predicted winner (Florida) is long gone. It all looks like it will come down to who takes the real title to determine our winner, with Trevor riding high with Michigan, both Brendan and Emily in play (Arizona), and Dominic lurking with his Connecticut pick. (Nobody tell Erin that she has clinched the worst bracket this year.)

Speaking of Michigan, we've got a ton of great cards to show today that came from big Wolverine guy Dennis of Too Many Verlanders over the holidays. Incidentally, the namesake of his blog is back in Tiger Town for what could conceivably be his final stop on his MLB tour.

I am pretty sure I have more "fancy" cards of Jeff Ayres (fka Pendergraph) than any of his normal base cards, but such is the way of the young hooper that doesn't blossom into a starring role in the pros. This one comes with a free mystery substance. I'm not going to forensically analyze this exactly, so let's just call it dirt?

I believe I have a lesser copy of this chunky jersey card of the one-time Cardinals closer. This one is a silver (or gray?) version numbered to just 149 copies, though.

Travis Outlaw was a bridge between the "Jail Blazers" era and the good vibes of the B-Roy/Aldridge days. Fun player! This is a fun card as well.

It's sort of amusing that this is called "Color Guard" when there is a distinct lack of vibrant color on it.

Here's a couple of other significantly more obscure Blazers on a signed card (or signed things affixed to a card, at least.) Portland certainly had some misadventures in the draft before landing Damian Lillard. Williams and Babbitt were a pair that didn't work out so well.

One of the things I like the most about Panini's draft sets is that they show players in the fully licensed college uniforms. This insert idea distorts the coloring and patterns of Franklin's Ducks uniform beyond recognition, unfortunately.

Hey, it's picture time! Encased cards don't scan so well, you see.

Here's a quick six-pack of cards from the various teams that I follow. Pacific really had some goofy designs.

And here's a nine-pack of all Ducks! I think my favorite here is the combo Freeman/Mariota card in their college uniforms.

I was fairly ambivalent about the Diamond Kings brand, but I do miss their framed parallels. This one is numbered to 99.

Blog favorite Ugo Amadi checks in here with a silver Prizm autograph from the much beloved Panini Prizm Draft Picks set.

And now we head all the way back to 1982 for a gander at a Garry Templeton Fleer stamp. I still have a lot of needs in the stickers and stamps areas.

The ticket motif that Panini Contenders is based on doesn't always work, but I like this design. The green foil helps as well. (Does anyone use paper tickets anymore? And they certainly aren't perforated, are they?)

It's baseball season! I hope everyone has been enjoying the first week of the long MLB marathon.

Contest Time! March Radness Year 17

Fill out a bracket and win some cards.

March Radness is back for another year! You probably know the deal by now. Fill out a bracket in my contest group and you may win a prize. I'm going with a simplified prize structure similar to the recent football postseason contest as that actually helped me get all of the prizes out the door before the next contest approached.

2026 rules:

• Selection Sunday is today, which means that you should be able to fill out your brackets very soon, if not by the time you are reading this. The games that actually count for the contest will start on Thursday, March 19th.
• Default ESPN scoring rules apply. You must fill out the entire bracket, including the tie-breaking final score of the final game.
• First place wins a 2026 Topps Heritage Value Box (blaster).
• Second place wins a 2026 Topps Heritage hanger box, while third place will win some sort of new(ish) unopened pack, subject to availability.
• As always, the worst (honest) bracket will get something, too.
• Click here now to join, and follow the "Join Group" link. The password is: radness
• Make sure to fill out your entire bracket prior to March 19th!

Contest Alert!

A new contest is around the corner! Plus-- group break goodies!

We're deep in the thick of the various college basketball conference tournaments right now, which means March Radness is just a couple of days away. I should get this year's contest group operational at some point late Saturday night in anticipation of Selection Sunday. I've watched next to zero college hoops this season (oh, my poor, poor Ducks), but I'm not going to let that damper my fun in picking the games.

Today we have a fun little batch of Cardinals cards from Nachos Grande breaks. I'm pretty sure there are still teams available for his monthly subscription through Patreon and he also still has his Discord group going for other breaks as well. I recently signed up for another "breaker's club" batch of a bunch of breaks, so there should be more good stuff like this to show off later in the year.

At 25 with 19 big league starts under his belt, Michael McGreevy already feels like a cagey veteran in the Cardinals rotation pool. That's how young this team is going to be, folks.

Masyn Winn is still running hard around the basepaths while dodging an onslaught of squares and rectangles. It's a stormy one out there.

I'm not sure how these Chrome "lightboard logo" cards are distributed, but they look pretty decent with the old STL logo in the background.

I am a sucker for a nice acetate card, and this Paul Goldschmidt from the 2019 Topps High Tek set does not disappoint.

Let's hope this is the year Tink Hence figures it all out!

Stamped buyback cards are as silly as ever, but they're still always a nice find for my top player collections.

Check back on Sunday for this year's contest details!

Not Forgotten

A baseball-heavy pile o' cards.

I almost never post about my TCDB trades, but one that came across my desk around Halloween time included a bunch of bonus stuff that made me want to recognize it here properly. This generous pile came over from Marc aka Remember The Astrodome. I've lost track of what was part of the actual trade and what was considered a bonus, but that doesn't really matter for the ol' blog purposes, does it?

What follows is another image-heavy post that hopefully makes up for the lack of verbal content over here lately. 

I bought several of the Megabox-only Panini Crusade product last year and it's proven to be a reliable source of trade bait. There were (and still are) a number of Cardinals needs from this set, so it was nice to get a little stack of these.

I'm guessing Marc either opened as much of this stuff as I did or somehow got saddled with the Cardinals in a group break. It's not a popular choice these days. Saggese here is one of the silver parallels. Some of the inserts in this set are actually pretty nice looking, unlike some of the junk Topps is doing these days.

I snagged a ton of minis from this deal, but Sonny Gray gets to stand alone in my Cardinals pile.

I've been adding some of these not-quite-minor league and not-quite major league prospect sets to my individual wants on TCDB lately, but only as I spot them. I'm not going to go after every college card of every player that was drafted by the Cardinals, but it does become more of a "want" if St. Louis is mentioned on the card. Similarly, I'm hanging onto/occasionally adding Ducks baseball cards if they are in Ducks uniforms like Adam Maier at the top of the post, even though I don't have a formal UO baseball collection.

I can't imagine anyone thinking that a photograph from Frankie Frisch's playing days would be used in this kind of way.

Here's the rest of the lot 'o minis. Gold border variations are highly represented here!

This is one of the few non-baseball cards of the bunch, and it's an interesting one. (I also received a couple of Eagles cards that are not pictured.) This is one of the actual cards from the now-defunct Panini NBA Sticker album release, a one-per-pack insert in their sticker packs. Panini is still making NBA cards, sans license, but the stickers are no more. (There is a forthcoming Donruss release ostensibly for the 2025-26 season.) Clingan has looked really good on the court in his second NBA season, becoming one of the more valuable core players on a team that has gone through the usual issues with injuries and attrition.

It's back to baseball with this insert from the 2024 Panini Crusade release. I don't remember as much about the 2024 release except that the base cards and chrome-finished Crusade inserts were pretty similar in look to the 2025 release.

It's becoming increasingly difficult to get ahold of inserts from 10+ years ago now, so I was really pleased to knock off another Ozzie Smith card. It looks like this is from the 2014 Topps Archives release. It's a puzzling idea, because while Topps more or less used this same template for their All-Star insert cards for eight years, it was long gone by 1995. They could have easily used a different photo  from a more appropriate year for this, but this at least fits into the "designs that never were" category, I suppose. Of course, there were then-current players in this set who never even played in that era.

Bru has done a bunch of custom cards, and I believe I own a few of these "Big League Bloodlines" that feature players that were related to each other. It's a fun concept. I wasn't around for Julian's playing days, but I definitely remember Stan from my original card collecting days. I always appreciate people's hard work in designing custom cards (and getting them printed!) and keep them in my team binders just like any other official card.

2010s inserts and parallels may be getting hard to find, but '90s parallels can be a tough find as well. All three of these fit the latter bill.

Here's another curious trio of Cardinals-affiliated minor league cards. Grichuk at last check was still a free agent, as a number of people have wondered if he could come back to St. Louis to give them some veteran help in the outfield. (I don't think the Cardinals are going to be spending money on anyone for awhile, but a minimum deal on the other hand...)

This last trio is a chrome-d up group from 2025 sets. The first two are "Raywave" Topps Chrome refractors, while the Saggese card is a Panini Donruss "Optic" parallel somewhat confusingly known simply as "Circles".

This last group heads to my Heritage binders, with five of these being color border parallels. I would love to finish off more of the insert sets like the Rookie Performers set that Zac Gallen appears in, but people in trades are usually more willing to dump the more common parallels that Topps has cranked out in the past couple years.

We do have another contest coming up just around the corner, and I may gather an informal poll as far as what the prizes should look like this time. We'll see!

Contest Results... Bring on Baseball Season!

Congratulations to the winners!

Another football season is in the books, and we have a group of winners to celebrate. If you're in the list below, please reach out to me with your mailing address if you haven't already done so.

• Taking 1st Place (as well as the Mayo Bowl prize) is Jason K (BOWL SZN), who established a big enough lead at the end that the last couple of games didn't factor into the final tally.
• In 2nd Place is Brendan H (EternalSigh) with an excellent pick list that finished in the top 98 percentile of all ESPN entrants.
• Taking 3rd Place is Brandon L (leiber88 entry), who finished just ten points out of 2nd.
• And finally, there can't be a 1st without a Worst, and that "crown" goes to Timothy H (ESPNFAN7043205575). (We had one entry with a lower score, but unfortunately two of the games were not picked in that entry.)

Thanks to everyone for participating!