A Big Box of Bo Cards

 
@BoRosny, not Bo Jackson. 

Right before the big blog anniversary group break, long time blogger Bo of Baseball Cards Come To Life! contacted me about trade involving a vintage project he had going. I cobbled together what I could, vintage-wise, and made sure Bo had a sizable package coming back in the group break. The sheer volume of what I got back was crazy, though!

Check these stacks of (mostly) '00s set building fodder! Great stuff. I don't see a lot of cards from these sets in trade packages anymore, now that there's more than a decade between these sets and the present day.

Let's look back into the past at some of these.

Ooh, a Bowman exclusive rookie card? What does that even mean? Tell me, Omar Infante!

Here's Jason Isringhausen, not long before he became the Cardinals closer for the mid-'00s years.

It's FOX broadcaster Eric Karros. Karros was coming up right when my interest in cards was dying out.

It's Tim Raines... Jr? Huh.

Besides the wonderfully black & white 2001 Bowman Heritage set, there were cards from other sets. Like this guy. Bear Bay is the name. Baseball on the sun is his game.

2002 Bowman Heritage brought us the weird signature box, but The Big Hurt isn't fazed about it.

1953 Topps is such a nice design.

Hey, it's the recently deposed Cardinals skipper in a Giants uniform!

Speaking of Cardinals, Bo included a healthy share of Cardinals for my team collecting needs (aka the biggest needs). It doesn't appear that I had a first year (2006) Allen Craig card in my collection, so this is certainly cool.

Speaking of cool, I am always pleased to add another Jim Edmonds card to my collection. And yet, I need so much more!

I always thought @ithrow88 was one of the best Twitter names.

One thing I have discovered in trying to figure out what was going on with cards in the long period of time where I didn't care about cards is that Tino Martinez had a lot of Cardinals cards. That surprises me, for some reason.

We end with a Finest card, which was in its 9th year at this point. Did they still have the protective coating for this set? I always want to peel that stuff off, but I don't for some reason.

Ginter Goodies from The Collective Mind

Want lists: reduced! 

Back in September, GCA from The Collective Mind set me a ton of Allen & Ginter extras to knock down some of my want lists a few notches. I am still working on putting together another stack of cards to send back for this one, but in the meantime I thought I'd show off some of the goods.

It was quite a sad shock to hear about the passing of Roy Halladay. It seems like there's been a lot of lives taken way too young when it comes to MLB lately. Halladay was one of my favorite players not connected to the Cardinals, and I still have vivid memories of his pitcher's duel with Chris Carpenter in the 2011 playoffs. And that's not to mention the day I heard about the no-hitter Doc had going in the playoffs the season before, which prompted me to pop into a sports bar out in the suburbs to see it through to the end.

The early days of the Allen & Ginter revival featured a lot of smiling posed shots like this.

Cap Anson, the original hipster.

I'm not sure I'd consider the Astrodome a field, exactly, but I do really like this insert set dedicated to defunct stadiums.

A tip o' the cap to Carlos Beltran, who is hanging it up after a long, tremendous career.

A tip o' the cap to Gandhi... okay, sometimes these things just don't transition well. Beltran was a fantastic player, but Gandhi was a little bit more important in the grand scheme of things.

The Pastime's Pastimes inserts were so jarring at the time because they used an all black background in a set that traditionally favors lots of white. I guess this was just the precursor to the interesting looking but wholly unnecessary Allen & Ginter X product.

Klosterman is a writer who lives in Portland now. Have you moved to Portland yet?

This tree looks like a giant mushroom.

Apparently someone tried to create a machine to play chess a la Deep Blue, only more than 200 years earlier. Of course, the whole thing was a scam, but the actual story that was passed down seems highly dubious as well.

Thanks again to GCA! You can check out my Ginter and other set want lists here.

The Night Belonged to Wainwright

The Cardinals ace was completely dominant tonight.

Expanded instant replay probably hasn't increased average game length all that much, but it certainly seems that I had yet to sit through a sub-3 hour Cardinals game this year. Tonight that all changed. In two hours and twenty minutes, which included a ten minute delay for an umpire injury of some sort, Adam Wainwright ripped through the Arizona lineup en route to a one hit shutout. The Diamondbacks have been a fairly sorry lot so far this year and have even brought Tony La Russa into the mix to try and clean house/fix things. However, Wainwright is once again tossing some of the best innings of his career, and it's a great thing to see.

The cards you see here came from Night Owl a couple of months ago. I haven't really talked about the Donruss revival here, but I finally got my hands on some thanks to my fellow nocturnal blogger. And they are just plain awful. Case in point - even if I can somehow get around the cheesy MSPaint graphics and the '78 Topps ripoff, the licensing issue remains. That's always going to be a sticking point for me, but on top of all of these other issues, they had to go and use a photo of him that is likely from 2009. 2009! The man has been in the majors for five seasons now and Panini digs up something that entirely predates his big league career. You can tell by the jersey number, one of the few things that they didn't have to worry about Photoshopping. This set is really seriously disappointing considering how much I love the Donruss NBA set that Panini once put out.

I'm probably not much different in this than most, but when a small card has basically the same aspect ratio as a standard sized card, when I load the image to the blog it just looks like any other card. This is a 1975 Topps Mini, however, one of Night Owl's specialties. Hence, I made the image ridiculously small so no one will be confused.

Finally, Night Owl knocked off some more numbers off of the 2006 Allen & Ginter want list. I'm not doing all that well on some of the sets that I've been working on for years, but I've already decided to dedicate 2014 to getting my so-called PCs in order and my Cardinals want list in better shape. In the meantime, these set want lists are there if you need 'em.

The Aftermath: It's Not Pretty

I took a good, long look at the 2012 Topps Heritage set over the past two nights and am not very pleased with my results. I was hoping to get things down to a manageable want list after buying a hobby box, but it seems like I have my work cut out for me. I'm still missing a ton of cards and I have a ton of doubles on my hands. Yikes!

I think I'll try to cheer myself up by looking at some cards from my latest package from Night Owl Cards. In all likelihood, Night Owl has now sent me more pieces of mail than my entire family combined. I think I made that joke once before, but I don't think I'm joking anymore.

Included were some Ginter and Cardinal needs, and this Carp mini counts as both. Now he just needs to learn how to clone himself.

I have Gold Lust. I am not shy about admitting this.

I can't bring myself to buy packs with 4 cards in them for $3, like some people. I don't even know what the Bowman Chrome people are thinking. I picked up some packs from a box of those at Target the other day and just about cracked up when I noticed that most of the contents of the box was just a giant styrofoam block because there literally aren't enough cards to fill the box. Not even close.

I also wonder what the Bowman Chrome people have to say to the people whose eyes bled with rage over the $100 factory sets of Topps Heritage High Series. You know, the one with the guaranteed cards and the guaranteed autograph at $1 per card. You $1-per-card Bowman Chrome pickers only guarantee is that you'll end up with someone you've never heard of in pretty much every pack.

Oh wait. What am I doing? These refractors look great. I am confusing the message. I am a sucker for this shiny stuff.

Nice! It's a real live Bob Gibson card from his playing days. It's just too bad that Fergie the Cub gets twice as much real estate as Gibby.

If you squint, you'll notice that this says REPRINT in the fine print. It's not your mom's 1993 Topps Ozzie Smith, that's for sure. She apparently threw that one out. Instead, it's the rare "original back" version of his Card Your Mom Discarded Because She's Mean And Will Never Let You Eat Sugar Cereal Or Stay Overnight At Your Buddy's House.

Oh my. Here we come full circle, back to Ginter and something... not pretty. Still, it's Ozzie, and even an Ozzie with a supermassive right arm is going into my Ozzie binder.

Trade You, Trade Me

Stats on the Back has a trade-a-thon going on right now. Name what you want, send him what he needs and reap the benefits of someone downsizing their collection. Hey, I'd do it, too, if I had any focus to speak of.

I mostly grabbed Turkey Red and Allen & Ginter, especially from older sets that are a lot harder to find/collect. A few of the cards were also needed for my Cardinals binder, including - surprisingly - this Jim Edmonds card from the 2006 set. Unfortunately, that means I still need a second cop for the set that I could theoretically put together someday.

St. Louis looks like a pretty smoggy place.

Mark Mulder's name is often invoked as a reminder of a blockbuster prospects-for-established stars trade gone wrong. I don't really refute this, but I still am in the (minority) camp of people that feel like it was hard to see Mulder's demise coming.

There were also a few Heritage cards to be had. Mo Vaughn really fills up a baseball card, doesn't he?

Finally, we go all the way back to the inaugural Allen & Ginter set, revival edition. Here's a German Emperor. You can tell he's an emperor because of the mustache.

Karma is a...

With the curtains drawn on the 2010 season for the Cincinnati Reds, we can also officially close the book for good on another Cardinals season as their chief competitors managed to break a record for playoff futility, managing just eleven hits in their series - two fewer than the record and also two fewer than they tallied off of one Roy Halladay start alone earlier this season. While I will certainly try not to let the grudge carry over until next season and beyond, I also can't say I'll be rooting for Brandon Phillips or Johnny Cueto anytime soon. With well-respected ex-GM Walt Jocketty at the helm and a number of ex-Cards dotting the lineup, this team had a chance to be my NL team of choice this year with St. Louis out of the picture. They were one of the only teams in the division that I didn't have a problem with (Dusty Baker aside.) In the end, the 2006 Cardinals stand as the last NL Central team to actually win a playoff series.

Meanwhile, on quite the opposite spectrum lies Night Owl Cards. I received at least the 32nd package from his neck of the woods back east recently and, as usual, it contained an assortment of Things I Tend to Collect. (You can see what is among those Things I Tend to Collect by checking out the sidebar on this very blog. You know, it's the thing... on the side... over there.) Should Night Owl read this post, he'll likely be quite confused about how my first paragraph relates to this trade package and, quite frankly, I am too. I think I just wanted to passively and aggressively complain about the Reds tonight because I (sort of) kept it classy during the season.

Speaking of complaining (see... I'm trying!), Adam Kennedy basically became a metaphor for a couple of lost non-playoff season that the Cards suffered through after the 2006 title. Kennedy was one of the few Cardinal role-player signees that failed to live up to his projections as an adequate player and do anything at all that endeared himself to fans. He talked his way out of town by his second season as much with his mouth as he did with his bat... um, with the uh... hitting instead of talking. Right? Right.

Great card. But is Gibby pitching... in a dream? Where are his teammates? Where is the opposition? Is he pitching in a biosphere? Where's Pauly Shore and the Baldwin guy?

Ahh, I love minis! I love it when people send me minis. I don't ever expect to complete any sort of set of minis, but I will continue to list them and love them when they're sent to me. At some point, maybe their novelty will wear off with people and I'll be around to scoop up the unwanted remains.

Finally, because I like to keep it short these days at 5 cards per trade post (also not coincidentally the maximum number of images Blogger will let you upload in one spell), I'll give Night Owl's team some love because it's the offseason and he sent lots of cards from Heritage and A&G sets that I collect without really buying packs or boxes. Thanks!

Oh, are you hungry for more?

That'll do it.