Actual Cardinals Content

Sifting through some Cardinals ephemera.

Longtime fellow blogger Adam from Thoughts and Sox contacted me this past spring about some Cardinals stuff he had accumulated over the years. Needless to say, I was intrigued. There have been a number of still-active (or reactivated) blogger types from the baseball card community that I haven't traded with since I moved a couple of years ago, so it's always great to hear from someone who is still around and doing this weird thing.

The package was full of a bunch of very interesting Cardinals items, none of which appears to be cataloged in online databases like TCDB. There always seems to be a bit of fuzzy logic to what can be considered acceptable for TCDB vs. things they won't handle, but in any case I will find some good spots in my binders for these intriguing items.

First up is a stack of cards from the premiere edition of the APBA Major League Baseball Stats & Strategy Game. This looks to be a fully licensed product, with both MLB and Players Association logos on the back. There are no player photos on these, which separates them from other TCG-style baseball card sets that have been produced over the years.

This won't be the first time I'm saying this with this trade package, but these remind me a little bit of the old Strat-o-Matic game I had in the late '80s.

I may not be able to translate those numbers into something meaningful without proper context, but at least I'm learning about player nicknames I had never heard of before, like Ricky "Face" Bottalico.

Based on the numbers, I'm guessing this game had a dice roll mechanism to its game play. I'm thinking two dice are rolled, with each die account for one of the two numbers in black? I see snake eyes at the top! (I could probably just look up the rules online somewhere.)

Each card back looks identical and has some weird fake image of a Texas Rangers player.

These also came with a team logo header card that is of a slightly larger size.

Continuing on with the stat-based board (?) game thing are these stat cards from the 1955 Cardinals. The printing looks far more modern than that, and reminds me even more of a Strat-o-Matic type thing.

Here's a look at the back of Willard Schmidt's card, which includes actual stats from his 1955 season.

1955 was Ken Boyer's rookie season.

There are some differences between the pitcher cards and the batter cards, as you would expect for a game like this.

The next bunch of cards comes from a game with a 1975 copyright from Replay Games Inc. These are also, interestingly enough, based around the Cardinals 1955 season. It was not a good season! They finished 7th in the NL that year out of 8 teams.

The batter cards are significantly shorter than the pitcher cards as they are closer to a standard playing card size.

The backs all seem to have this retro-looking design. I couldn't find much info about these games, but I did find an eBay auction for the 1961 Kansas City Athletics which comes in a paper sleeve similar to how I found these in.

But wait... there's more! One of the coolest thing about this package was the inclusion of a dozen signed postcards and photos. They're mostly of lesser known players, but are very cool nonetheless. The majority of these appear to be photo paper glued to a thicker cardboard backing, but I am just speculating.

The backs mainly look like this, like something a custom card maker might have come up with. I only scanned a few of these, but can show off more in the future if there's interest.

Marty Marion's signature appears on what appears to be regular photo paper.

Big thanks once again to Thoughts and Sox on this very fun and intriguing pack of Cardinals history!