What Will Waino Do?

The latest #CrackinWaxMailDay from @CrackinWax includes shiny cards from the long time Cardinals battery and the original Topps Heritage. 

 

It's difficult what path forward remains for Adam Wainwright and Yadier Molina, both nearly inseparable for their long careers, as they both enter free agency. With budgets being slashed right and left, retaining the two players may be the only thing the team spends on this offseason. That they've entered free agency in the first place just adds to the uncertainty, though. It's a bit nerve-wracking to this Cardinals fan.

Coincidentally, Waino and Yadi cards were at the forefront of another week's worth of box breaks from Crackin' Wax. Wainwright's black refractor from 2019 Topps Heritage High Number is one of the nicest cards I've seen in awhile, and it's numbered to just 70. This one is exclusive to the Walmart "monster box" configuration. I also pulled a Vlad Jr. black refractor from the same set last year, but it's numbered to 69. I'm not sure of why there's an inconsistency. (I suppose they were honoring 1970 Topps and the year 1969 all at the same time?)

I seem to have terrible luck with getting cards for my team collection out of Panini Chronicles, but the truth is that there just aren't that many cards to be had. This green Certified Yadi parallel does really look nice in hand, though, and was a nicer pull than one of the regular base cards. (Does anyone know what the regular base cards actually look like?)

 

For the trade bait pile goes this Anthony Rendon Spectra card, as the Angels must have been one of my randomly assigned teams. These are very chunky and could probably inflict some considerable damage if I tossed one across the room.

What is this... is this gum?! Decades old gum? That must mean one thing.

Old school Topps Heritage cards! In fact, this break was for the very first Heritage set from 2001. Unfortunately, the break went live too early in the morning for me to have a decent chance at snagging the Cardinals, but given that I collect Heritage cards and have relatively few from 2001, I ended up buying in anyway. I took the Dodgers on the off chance there was a Duke Snider autograph somewhere in the box as he was one of the bigger names on the "hits" checklists from the remaining available teams.

My randomly assigned team was the Royals. Mike Sweeney is a black back variation.

There were no rare Duke Snider cards for me, but I did get one of the original Then and Now inserts.

I also ended up with a checklist. A checklist! Actually, this is really cool. I'm not sure that I have any checklists from this set, and I always try to get the checklists and some packaging material to set aside for each of the Heritage sets.

It was another interesting bunch of breaks. Who knows what awaits me in my mailbox later this week? (Probably spiders.)