Cardinals, Heritage and Sometimes Both

 

A late spring trade package with some of the usual suspects and a couple of nice surprises.

Since I don't really do many prearranged trades outside of TCDB anymore, it's always nice to find a surprise bubble mailer in or near my mailbox. Make that doubly so if it's from Night Owl Cards, since we've been sending stuff back and forth from coast to coast for many years now. Right around the end of spring one such package landed in my lap and I'm finally ready to show off some of its contents today.

I won't get into my rant about what Fanatics did to my beloved Topps Heritage again, and I genuinely like some of the colored parallels, but the sheer quantity of them is too much. (If it's negative, everyone is blaming Fanatics now, aren't they?) I'd much rather get one of the traditional inserts or, gods forbid, a short printed base card than a parallel in every pack.

I was excited about Matt Carpenter returning to the team last year in part because I knew it could potentially mean more Matt Carpenter Cardinals cards, and I wasn't totally disappointed. I knew it might be a struggle for him at the plate, but he was deployed sparingly. Lance Lynn also returned to St. Louis to finish his career last year and ended up with more Cards cards, while Tommy Pham's brief reappearance last summer also netted him new Cardinals offerings. I was a bit less excited about Pham.

A former Cardinal who hasn't returned is the power hitting and oft-injured Tyler O'Neill, although he's only in his 8th big league season. He's got time yet. This aqua Donruss Optic parallel from his rookie year is numbered to 299. One of these days I have a huge rant brewing about the whole rookie card thing -- and it's not going to be pretty -- but for now I am just calling everything a "card from his rookie year" and leaving it at that.

Here's big surprise number one: my first ever Stan the Man card from his playing days! And it doesn't even look like it was fished out of a latrine or rolled up to smoke something. There are some visible scratches and a small crease, but it looks really nice to my standards. My scanner did not like the lower border for some reason.

There was a pretty decent pile of Heritage for the set build in the pack. I'll let the Christopher Sanchez SP represent the lot as you've likely seen all of these base cards numerous times by now.

The second nice surprise is this Dakota Hudson Allen & Ginter jersey card from 2020. It's not quite on the same level as the Musial card, of course, but it's not like people are backing up truckloads of these to my house every week.

If you do want to back up a truckload of cards to my house someday, make it full of Ozzie Smith cards, like this 2024 Donruss Optic Blue Velocity parallel. I'll never run out of these kinds of parallels to collect, but I'll also probably never stop wanting them.

Thanks again to Night Owl and everyone who has sent little and big surprises in the mail over the years!