Catching up on Mail and Codes

Have you ever completely forgotten about a player on your favorite team? I'm not talking about someone from 10... 15... maybe 20 years ago. The 2007 season already seems so long ago and until I got this card in the mail the other day I had completely forgotten about Troy Cate. Cate was a former Mariners draft pick who got busted for PEDs at some point and had long been forgotten about when he was rediscovered in Mexican winter league ball prior to the 2007 season. He ended up making some appearances for the beleaguered Cardinals staff that year, and just as quickly as he appeared, he vanished into obscurity once again.

The Cate card came part of a few small trades that I've completed lately. Reader Larry read a post of mine over at A Pack A Day and had a simple request for a Yankee Stadium Legacy card. He was kind enough to send over the mysterious Troy Cate, a gold foil Braden Looper 2008 Topps card and a trio of Hall of Famers. I think I always tend to slight Bruce Sutter in my Cardinals fandom because of his legacy as both a Cub and a Brave. In my most formative years, he was pitching for Atlanta, but the guy pushed down the door that relievers have to overcome when he was the closer for the championship '82 Cardinals team, so you have to love him for that. The Cardinals made some pretty shrewd decisions in the '80s payroll-wise and weren't able to keep Sutter around, but much of what was accomplished in the Whitey Herzog era was positive despite this. When healthy, Todd Worrell was a pretty rock solid closer.

This might be my favorite Lou Brock card because it was my first "real" card of his, meaning that it was not a reprint or "flashback" type of card. This particular card may be in better shape than the one I already had in my collection, but nevertheless it's awesome. For some reason the partially scraped off logo on Brock's helmet always amused me when I was younger.

Reader James and I agreed on a '08 Heritage for '08 Heritage trade recently. I won't bore you with another post of a bunch of these cards, but one of the cards he sent along was Fausto Carmona. Fausto was one of my big fantasy free agent pickups during the 2007 season, so he's another reminder to myself that I need to do my homework and soon. I have 3 drafts coming up this weekend, all pretty much at the same time, unfortunately.

I got another similar stack of '08 Heritage from Danny of Saints of the Cheap Seats. My brain is too feeble at the moment to remember exactly what I sent back for these, so it's entirely possible I owe Danny something big in return. I sent out a stack of packages on Monday, so if left him off the list I'll make sure and send something out very soon.

Finally, I got another package last week from Night Owl Cards. I like referring to him as "Night Owl" because it sounds dark and mysterious and kinda fits the theme of his blog, but his real name is Greg. The cards he sent over actually spawned a couple of ideas for future blog posts, but for now I'll just show you this shiny Rick Ankiel card, which I was very happy to receive. I've long resisted the idea of trying to collect parallel cards, at least as a priority, but something internally makes me go "gimme!" whenever I see one of these Heritage Chrome cards with a Redbirds logo.

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And now, this... I have codes. Some of those of you that I've traded with have kids. These sorts of things (Topps Attax, Topps Town, this year's Upper Deck wrappers) seem to be geared towards kids and would have little value for a so-called adult like myself, so I was wondering if there was any interest in these things. I can e-mail you the codes if you'd like. Just let me know.