Thursday, July 30, 2020

Everyone's a Cardinal!


Even Hall of Famer Barry Larkin according to a @breakdowncards trade pack. 

For quite some time I've been considering a series of posts featuring a bunch of well known players that the casual fan might not know of their days in a Cardinals uniform. There's a lot of territory to mine there. Someone well known who was most assuredly not a Cardinal was Barry Larkin, a lifelong Cincinnati Reds player... unless you talk to some intern who worked at Donruss Leaf Playoff back in the late '90s, I guess? This is going to fit in to the weird little corner of my collection for novelty items, alongside one of my Bill Ripken 1989 Fleer cards and a few other weird things that I wouldn't ordinarily seek out. (Unless, of course, Nachos Grande really needs this card, but that would be pretty shocking considering there are supposedly 3500 copies of it in the world.)


The weird Larkin gaffe (and more!) came to me across town from Gavin of Baseball Card Breakdown. Morales also doesn't look like he has anything to do with the Cardinals here, but that's more typical of Panini's draft sets instead of being an actual blunder.


Back to guys you've heard of... it's a high end Carlos Beltran card. I wonder just what Beltran is up to right now, after being hired and subsequently fired as Mets manager once some details came out about the Astros cheating scandal. I always thought that was a strange hire to begin with, but it seems like the trend has been leaning heavily towards hiring dudes with zero coaching experience as managers because they're recognizable names who recently played or something.


Brian Jordan was that could-have-been two-sport star that wasn't named Bo or Deion, except that he wasn't crazy and chose to stick to one sport before jumping to the other, less brain damaging sport. Good for him!


Back to the no names -- here's a nice looking blue parallel of a guy who got into some games with the Cards in 2015 and pretty much vanished. He wasn't bad! Stupid injuries appear to have derailed him.


Mark McCormick was a first round pick at one point but really didn't pan out. I don't know that I've ever seen this kind of white Bowman parallel before, but it looks pretty nice. You can make white bordered cards really stand out when you actually have cards that feature colored borders.


Gavin was also one of a bunch of people that were kind enough to help me out with Turkey Red Series 1 this year. I'm not doing so well with Series 2 right now, but it's mostly because I have to buy everything online if I want to buy it at all. That's pretty much one of the themes of 2020. Complaining about cards right now seems pretty ridiculous considering everything that's going on in the world, though!

5 comments :

  1. The first of those UER Larkins I found went to Nachos Grande. The 2nd went to you. If I somehow end up with a 3rd, I'll have to find someone else to sicken with it!

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  2. I had a few of those Elite Craftsmen inserts back in the day. I either never own the Larkin or wasn't very observant, because this is the first time I've seen that error. Very cool.

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  3. Had no idea there was such an error like that

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  4. Imagine if barry larkin had been ozzie' s replacement. That would have been quite an evolution.

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  5. I thought I had seriously missed a corner of baseball history when I first saw that Larkin. Glad to know it's just an error, and that I'm not crazy (at least not about that).

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