Not Forgotten

A baseball-heavy pile o' cards.

I almost never post about my TCDB trades, but one that came across my desk around Halloween time included a bunch of bonus stuff that made me want to recognize it here properly. This generous pile came over from Marc aka Remember The Astrodome. I've lost track of what was part of the actual trade and what was considered a bonus, but that doesn't really matter for the ol' blog purposes, does it?

What follows is another image-heavy post that hopefully makes up for the lack of verbal content over here lately. 

I bought several of the Megabox-only Panini Crusade product last year and it's proven to be a reliable source of trade bait. There were (and still are) a number of Cardinals needs from this set, so it was nice to get a little stack of these.

I'm guessing Marc either opened as much of this stuff as I did or somehow got saddled with the Cardinals in a group break. It's not a popular choice these days. Saggese here is one of the silver parallels. Some of the inserts in this set are actually pretty nice looking, unlike some of the junk Topps is doing these days.

I snagged a ton of minis from this deal, but Sonny Gray gets to stand alone in my Cardinals pile.

I've been adding some of these not-quite-minor league and not-quite major league prospect sets to my individual wants on TCDB lately, but only as I spot them. I'm not going to go after every college card of every player that was drafted by the Cardinals, but it does become more of a "want" if St. Louis is mentioned on the card. Similarly, I'm hanging onto/occasionally adding Ducks baseball cards if they are in Ducks uniforms like Adam Maier at the top of the post, even though I don't have a formal UO baseball collection.

I can't imagine anyone thinking that a photograph from Frankie Frisch's playing days would be used in this kind of way.

Here's the rest of the lot 'o minis. Gold border variations are highly represented here!

This is one of the few non-baseball cards of the bunch, and it's an interesting one. (I also received a couple of Eagles cards that are not pictured.) This is one of the actual cards from the now-defunct Panini NBA Sticker album release, a one-per-pack insert in their sticker packs. Panini is still making NBA cards, sans license, but the stickers are no more. (There is a forthcoming Donruss release ostensibly for the 2025-26 season.) Clingan has looked really good on the court in his second NBA season, becoming one of the more valuable core players on a team that has gone through the usual issues with injuries and attrition.

It's back to baseball with this insert from the 2024 Panini Crusade release. I don't remember as much about the 2024 release except that the base cards and chrome-finished Crusade inserts were pretty similar in look to the 2025 release.

It's becoming increasingly difficult to get ahold of inserts from 10+ years ago now, so I was really pleased to knock off another Ozzie Smith card. It looks like this is from the 2014 Topps Archives release. It's a puzzling idea, because while Topps more or less used this same template for their All-Star insert cards for eight years, it was long gone by 1995. They could have easily used a different photo  from a more appropriate year for this, but this at least fits into the "designs that never were" category, I suppose. Of course, there were then-current players in this set who never even played in that era.

Bru has done a bunch of custom cards, and I believe I own a few of these "Big League Bloodlines" that feature players that were related to each other. It's a fun concept. I wasn't around for Julian's playing days, but I definitely remember Stan from my original card collecting days. I always appreciate people's hard work in designing custom cards (and getting them printed!) and keep them in my team binders just like any other official card.

2010s inserts and parallels may be getting hard to find, but '90s parallels can be a tough find as well. All three of these fit the latter bill.

Here's another curious trio of Cardinals-affiliated minor league cards. Grichuk at last check was still a free agent, as a number of people have wondered if he could come back to St. Louis to give them some veteran help in the outfield. (I don't think the Cardinals are going to be spending money on anyone for awhile, but a minimum deal on the other hand...)

This last trio is a chrome-d up group from 2025 sets. The first two are "Raywave" Topps Chrome refractors, while the Saggese card is a Panini Donruss "Optic" parallel somewhat confusingly known simply as "Circles".

This last group heads to my Heritage binders, with five of these being color border parallels. I would love to finish off more of the insert sets like the Rookie Performers set that Zac Gallen appears in, but people in trades are usually more willing to dump the more common parallels that Topps has cranked out in the past couple years.

We do have another contest coming up just around the corner, and I may gather an informal poll as far as what the prizes should look like this time. We'll see!