Featuring Alan Foster

 

Another nice set of Cardinals, tobacco-style minis, and other ephemera.

If I was smart enough to have tagged everyone in every trade post over the years, I could tell you exactly how many times Night Owl Cards has sent me, well, cards. As it is, I am positive that total is as close to "many" as you can get. This latest batch comes from early February, when we were still looking forward to the days where masses of pollen would be flying around the neighborhoods freely for some reason.

Panini has really scaled back their baseball releases since losing the MLBPA license, which makes sense on some level. The sets that still remain have definitely taken a dip in quality, especially the already iffy Donruss product. There were significantly fewer parallels to chase last year, especially unnumbered ones, but that's not something I'm complaining about. What I really don't like is the design, and you can't pin that on baseball because they carry it through all of their sports including the ones they have full licenses on. Anyway, here's a holo laser style Bob Gibson parallel. I'm not sure I pulled any of these in the 2024 Donruss stuff I did open.

Speaking of too many parallels, Topps has taken up that mantle quite easily in the Fanatics era. The inessential Holiday set certainly hasn't escaped this phenomenon, as it leapt from one silly parallel to a whole bunch this past season. It's still far too early to evaluate the Cardinals decision not to bring back Paul Goldschmidt, but for the moment it feels like something that benefitted both parties. Goldy takes up another premier spot in a dangerous offensive lineup, and the Cardinals free up a position to allow both catchers who were sitting behind Willson Contreras last season to thrive. Also, money was saved, if you care about that.

Everyone loves food issues, don't they? I don't have a ton of Hostess cards and am always happy to take them in just about any condition. I really like the shirt that George is wearing here. 

This is, of course, a 1975 Topps buyback from last year's Topps Heritage set. This is actually the second time I've featured Alan Foster on this blog according to my records (i.e. the tags.) The last time was an Airbrushed Fridays (remember that?)

Here's a quad pack of those Fleer/Laughlin World Series cards from the '70s. No one talks about pitchers throwing lightning anymore, these days. It's always heaters and fire and such. Lightning seems cooler to me.

Here's some more stuff from the 2024 Heritage line. These are a couple of inserts from the original (low) series. I have had a hard time finding High Number stuff at a retail level that suits me, but I'm hoping that changes after today's official 2025 Topps Heritage release. I think it's probably due to the abundance of big name rookies in High Numbers, which is kind of silly no one collects Heritage for the rookies. (And, likewise, no one that collects rookies treats Heritage as a big deal.)

Big Cat! I don't mind animals on cards, but this always felt like a half-baked trivia game. The "answer", on the back, is Andres Galarraga.

Night Owl has sent me a ton of Allen & Ginter minis in recent years, and this latest package proved to be no exception. Which one is your favorite? I am going to guess that McCutchen would get the most votes.

Ian Kinsler was the lone horizontal representative in the stash o' minis, and he gets his own spot here. Insurance ads, partially displayed or otherwise, have no place in this product.

Contest Results and buckstorecards Cards

 

Genuine Coverage... Plus!

The 16th edition of the March Radness contest has concluded, and thanks to Florida's victory, there was a big shake-up in the final results. This also means that there was a new face on the top of the podium. Congrats to PSU wrestling dynasty (James C) for taking the top prize! In second place was fellow Cardinals fan Ray S, with Brian P taking third. Bringing up the rear and taking the mysterious worst place prize was none other than Bo Rosny. If you are one of these chosen few bolded names, please get in touch with me as soon as it's convenient so we can figure out the whole prize situation. As a side note, I still do have a couple of prizes to distribute from the winter bowl game contest, but that should get figured out here very soon.

As always, though, we're here to look at some cards. Today's offerings are from regular trader and all-around good guy Doug from Sportscards from the Dollar Store. The Blues have had a pretty incredible season which, heading into the playoffs, somewhat mirrored their 2019 Stanley Cup winning run where they fired their head coach about a month and a half into the season and ended up champions. This season they dumped their coach once again around six weeks into the season and turned things around. They were white hot in March leading into April, although it looks like they've dropped a few since their recent huge winning streak. Anyway, only Robert Thomas is still with the team. I do like the cardboard-y feel of these O-Pee-Chee cards and wish there was something like this in the baseball card world.

Here's a pair of champions from the 2024 Score NFL set. Score football is probably the best thing that Panini does, considering that it's affordable and typically decent to look at, while paying tribute to those old school Score sets.

Ricky Watters in his Eagles uniform came from the Tecmo Super Bowl III era, although seeing him in the modernized Eagles branding is a little jarring here.

I really like Jerami Grant (Portland native... technically!), but he really fell off a cliff this season. I don't have a lot of positive things to say about the Blazers in general right now, but I guess we shall see how this summer plays out.

Upper Deck's SPX sets are really a prime example of '90s sports cards excess.

Mookie Cook is a Portland kid but really just could not find much playing time in his time at UO. I hope he does well, of course, but him taking a bit of a half-step down to a WCC school (San Francisco) is interesting.

Here's a chunky Marcus Mariota card. Panini's "scope" parallels are kind of fun to look at with their circular patterns.

I know there probably aren't a ton of Jonathan Stewart megafans out there, but his career NFL totals of more than 7300 yards rushing and 1200+ yards receiving are nothing to sneeze at. The average pro running back's career is not a lengthy one.

*** PRINTING PLATE ALERT ***

Man, here's Mookie Cook again. Leaf did crank out a lot of cards of his. I wish this company or whatever it is would calm down and just put out a normal set or two with a few parallels, but it instead insists on driving anyone with a mere thought in their brain of compiling a checklist to the brink of insanity.

Bo Nix had a pretty impressive rookie season, so snagging a copy of his rookie card numbered to just 50 is a huge prize. I'm not sure that he's going to be a Hall of Fame type player or anything, but I think in the right situation he could prove to be pretty valuable at the helm of a good team for a number of years.

Rookie Johnny Wilson is also a Super Bowl champion. He's pictured in his college uniform as Score is always one of the first NFL releases of the season. He's a giant dude who I think could be useful in certain situations down the road.

The last card selection on offer is this Panini 'EEE' (as I like to call it) autograph of a St. Louis Cardinals prospect. Levenson was a 5th round pick in 2023 and is still at the A+ level of pro ball. There is a new Panini release ("Prospect Edition") that recently came out, even though it's branded '2024', that might be just a replacement for the Elite Extra Edition. I'm not really sure. I almost bought a blaster of it today, but I'm trying to temporarily save all of my cards cash for the back-to-back Topps Heritage sets this spring.

Contest Update and More Cards from Padrographs

Who is going to win this thing? 

 

It's finally baseball season and that feels great. It also means that we're just about to wrap up another year of March Radness. Before we get into the cards proper, let's see where we're at with the contest.

With just the Final Four games remaining, it's a pretty tight race for the top. The top three (Brandon L, Jordan L, and Andy R) are also the top three in max possible points, but there are quite a few brackets nipping at their heels. There was a fairly diverse selection of champions picked by everyone, but surprisingly most brackets' winners have made it all the way to the semifinal games. My champ is still alive as well, but everything else about my bracket has it stuck in the dregs of the standings.

Let's check out the cards from Rod of Padrographs. This is one of last year's holiday-themed parallels, but it looks more like some sort of tablecloth pattern to me.

I do like a good bat chunk, authentic or otherwise. I know we all need to assume the worst with cards like these, but I still like to collect them.

The second Goldy of the package is this blue prism refractor from the 2023 Topps Chrome Platinum Anniversary release. Are they doing this again this year? (And by this year, I mean last year, I guess?) I hope not. It just doesn't really appeal to me, even though I've always enjoyed this particular (1954) design.

When Victor Scott (the sequel!) debuted on the Opening Day roster last season, I noticed that I had zero cards of his. No draft cards, no minor league cards... nothing. It's nice that his cards are finally starting to trickle in, especially thanks to releases from late last year.

Here's a pair of Chrome parallels from last year's Stadium Club release. A legend of the game and a future Hall of Famer.

I don't know how much longer Topps is going to be rolling with the Pro Debut set, but it looks like they once again made Chrome parallels like this one.

I know it's baseball season and all, but I still haven't properly celebrated the Eagles big Super Bowl victory here on the blog. Fortunately, there were some nice recent Eagles cards in the package for this very occasion. This is some sort of orange parallel from a Panini Illusions release featuring QB1.

This one is a black parallel of the Eagles big (literally) wide receiver star.

Speaking of big, this is one of those silly "big head" cards that bothers me a lot. Maybe I just don't like fun. The weird thing about these is that they only increased Hurts' head size just enough to be disconcerting. I've seen bigger is what I'm saying.

The last one is a pretty slick looking Prizm parallel of Haason Reddick, a guy who was not on the recent Super Bowl winning team but was a key contributor on defense for the two previous years, including their big run to the Super Bowl in 2022/23.

Thanks again to Rod, whose pile of cards keeps accumulating slowly. I swear I'll drop it in the mail one of these days.