Cards and a Gumball Box

A few fun things from a pair of @batcavelv group breaks as the weekend approaches. 

 

While going through my box of stuff to post about, I stumbled across a pair of stacks of things from Tracy's Box Breaks that date back to late summer. Tracy hosts super affordable breaks every so often through his blog, and has always generously kicked all sorts of other Cardinals related stuff my way. While the low numbered Adam Wainwright was the rarest find this time, it was an oversized thing that had nothing to do with cards that brought the biggest "wow" factor.

This is my first card from the Kenny Mayne game... sort of. I actually bought the first box set for Erin last year with the intention of actually playing the game and not actually treating them as precious collectibles or whatever. I was a big fan of Mayne, especially back in the day when I used to watch more SportsCenter than I do now, so it seemed like a cool idea. Of course, we haven't actually played the game, but that box is not going to count as part of any card collection. Maybe I'll pick up some more singles like Yadi here at some point for the binders. We'll see.

Tracy included a bunch of minor league Cardinals affiliated cards that I needed in the more recent package. Here's Anthony Reyes in his striped socks before he would pitch in a couple of big games with the parent club.

This Just Rookies design from 2004 is about as plain as you can get. There's a lot of white space.

Someone must have seen something in Stu Pomeranz back in 2005, because he had a lot of baseball cards before pretty much disappearing. His younger brother Drew is still enjoying a successful MLB career.

It wasn't all mid-'00s minor leaguers, however, as I also found a couple of parallels from 2020. This Jack Flaherty card is apparently a lime green version, if my eyes and brain are working together properly.

I was excited to get one of these green parallels as I believe they're only found in the blister packs at retail as the bonus card showing in front of the packs. I've been fortunate to find cards I wanted in these green parallels a couple of times, but obviously not lately.

Finally, here is the big fun thing that I'll still have to figure out how to store properly. It's apparently a box of gumballs (minus the gumballs) that Donruss sold at some point in the '80s. There's even a checklist on the side that shows all of the different players featured on these boxes. I guess that means I need to track down a Stan Musial box! The artwork is, of course, from Perez-Steele Galleries. Dick Perez, of course, was featured on all of the Diamond Kings from the '80s as well as some other smaller card sets that Donruss put out back then.