Short, Parallel and Vintage

A pile of returns from the last Spring Cleaning entry. 

 

I had a lot of fun getting rid of cards last year in my prolonged "Spring Cleaning" event. I'm hoping to have something going again this year more along the lines of free group breaks that I've done in the past, although if I keep buying cards I'm going to end up having to do another spring cleaning by the time spring actually arrives.

The last person to sign up for the event was reader Randy, to whom I sent a box of cards from assorted Minnesota sports teams for his family to peruse. For whatever reason, there was a huge run on Twins cards last year, but I managed to scrape a few up to go along with some Timberwolves and Vikings. Randy responded in kind with a big, generous package of Cardinals goodies and set needs. I'll show off a few here, but realize that these aren't completely representative of everything I added to my collection.

For as much as people complained about the glut of cards in the '90s, it did bring forth a new era of surprisingly difficult parallels to collect. This one from the 1999 SkyBox Thunder set is a purple foil "Rant" parallel. I think there are also "Rave" parallels, because SkyBox liked a little crazy in their Thunder.

Speaking of crazy, what about a card made entirely of metal? I should keep a stack of these by my door at all times to ward off potential intruders. I can throw them like shuriken.

Not strictly limited to the '90s (or more recent), in the package were also number of vintage cards, including some big names like these!

As mentioned, there were also a bunch of set needs. We're not just talking about base cards, folks.

Even these aren't just base cards. They're star players appear on those pesky short printed cards that Heritage loves to throw at you. As much as it's easy to complain about 75 to 100 short printed cards in each Heritage set, at least they don't throw at you the escalating rarity tier like the cards they were originally inspired by. It would be maddening if each group of 100 or so cards was more rare than the next. If anyone doesn't understand how annoying this is, just go back and try to complete a full set of 2008 Upper Deck Timeline. I dare you!

To contrast with the above 2019 Heritage cards are these originals from the 1970 set. None of these are high numbers, however.

Lastly, here's a couple of famous historic people from the second Allen & Ginter revival set.

Thanks again to Randy and everyone who sent me cards in last year's huge Spring Cleaning campaign.

A Jumbo PWE Round-Up

Most rectangular things in rectangular paper envelopes from @sanjosefuji @dvdgao and @vossbrink on a World Series off-night. 

 

There was no baseball to watch tonight, but there's always plenty of cards to look at. Let's tear into a few more plain white envelopes that I received over the summer. First up is a photo mailer from Fuji. I owned a bunch of these jumbo-sized Donruss Action All-Stars cards (I believe that's what they're called?) back when I was a child, and let's just say that they weren't taken care of properly. At some point I guess I threw them all out.

Now that I'm a smart adult or whatever, I have a three-ringer binder with specially-sized plastic sheets to hold big Cardinals cards in. Isn't collecting fun?

I do like the postcard look of the 1983 set. The Donruss All-Stars set carried on for quite awhile, but eventually by 1988 they reduced the cards down to standard size and made things a bit less fun, aside from the one-per-pack stand-ups that were included.

The 1984 design is pretty basic, especially when compared to the flagship 1984 Donruss set.

Both of these cards show off Cards players in their baby blue road uniforms, which they have brought back (in a way) for Saturday games only in recent years.

Fuji also sneaked in a regular-sized Trail Blazers card. Clifford Robinson (RIP) appears on this Topps Gold parallel from the 1993-94 set. Nice!

Cardinals fan David sent along two envelopes stuffed with set needs, and also included this Matt Holliday card from a long lost high end Topps set from a decade ago. The card looks really nice (full bleed photos always work) and it makes me wonder when or why Topps Marquee was killed off.

The rest of the cards were all Heritage and Ginter set needs. I know you're probably not here for the boring old base cards, so I just scanned the inserts for your viewing pleasure. Christian Yelich probably wishes he could get in a time machine with Cody Bellinger and go back to 2019 when life was good. But then again, a lot of us have probably been thinking that these days.

In 2020, Heritage was one of the only things that was relatively easy for me to buy, so I feel like I did a decent job at collecting the set. The inserts, on the other hand, I didn't do so well with.

The photo seems to imply that Joe Frazier knocked out Muhammad Ali, but they actually went 15 rounds without anyone getting knocked out. Do they actually allow people to beat the hell out of each other for 15 rounds these days?

I only recently learned that Yoenis Cespedes has a younger half-brother in the Chicago White Sox system. Now I have passed that knowledge onto you.

I know it's very fashionable to complain about Joe Buck (I do find this amusing) during the playoffs, but Alex Rodriguez on the pre- and postgame shows is something else. And by something else, I mean not great.

Last up for tonight is a single card from Nick Vossbrink. He sent over another terrific custom card, this time of blog fave Ozzie Smith. It features his iconic backflip.

Stats are really all you need on the back of a baseball card... as long as it's full stats! Once again, I am envious of all of your custom designs.

A Post-Election Day PWE Roundup

Counting those ballots with @dvdgao @BucsHere and more! 

 

Let's just say we're going on two days now of being on the edge of our seats. In the mean time, let's check out a few small envelopes that came in back in August, which both seems like yesterday and far away at the same time.

Fellow Cards fan David hit me back with an eclectic mix of cards (and some cool Cardinal stationary) after he snagged a spot in my last free group break here. I'd like to squeeze at least one more of those in before the end of the year, considering that we're still in a mostly "stuck at home" situation and certain card supplies have come down to slightly more reasonable prices of late. Melancon was another set need (i.e. non-Cardinals need.)

Every once in awhile a Bowman Draft card will surprise me, and you can count this card among them. This is primarily because I have no idea who Nick Dunn is. This is kind of cool, because Topps (and, sure, Panini) tends to put the same five prospects in all of their products, which is super annoying. There are a lot of baseball players out there!

Upper Deck had put out it's Victory set for a few years at this point as what I understand to be another budget priced offering that sort of continued on when Collector's Choice was ended. This final set from 2003 decided to be printed in the TCG/CCG style for some reason. I think there might have been a game here as well, but it wasn't very obvious. This is one of the apparently short-printed subset cards.

Here's a Chrome refractor of the former Cardinals closer celebrating with the hopefully not former Cardinals catcher. Great card, though.

Prizm's version of refractors are officially called Prizms, which is confusing because the set is (sometimes) called Prizm. So technically, this is a Prizm Prizm. That never caught on, though, so most people call them Silver now... which is not any less confusing considering the cards are, by default, silver in appearance. I hate Panini.

Next up are a couple of really nice parallels from Kevin of The Diamond King. I've never been a big fan of pink cards, but the Pink Fireworks design is just crazy enough that it sort of works.

Although the fireworks are nothing to sneeze at, I was really blown away with this numbered-to-25 orange Matt Carpenter card from the 2017 Topps Gallery set. The art is actually... impressive?! Using the old Bowman design here probably helps it a bit.

The last but certainly not least power packed envelope came from The Bucs Stop Here. This one came chockful of set needs, including last year's Allen & Ginter offering.

Giraffe Calf! It rhymes, and it's cute! I have been really fascinated with baby animals that look almost exactly like miniature versions of their parent animals lately for some weird reason. (See also: elephants.) I've also spent a fair amount of my Saturday mornings this year watching BBC America, which turns into an all-day animal show extravaganza.

Trevor Bauer is surely some kind of wonder.

My big priority set for the year has unfortunately fallen by the wayside a bit, but it's still nice to document a few more pickups from the 2020 Turkey Red project. I haven't looked into whether or not this is continuing into the soon-to-be-released Update set, but I lost a lot of steam when Series 2 blasters became scarce. Stupid LouBob.

These Cardinal Turkey Reds are heading straight to the team binders, though. Actually, Ozzie has his own binder. He gets special treatment apparently.

Thumbs Up to Cards

A PWE from @dvdgao hits up some set needs and team needs. 

Fellow Cardinals fan David recently sent me a nice envelope full of cards that hit up several of my want lists. I've been trying to significantly boost the number of envelopes I typically send, so it's always nice when I get one back -- especially from a Cards fan.

Here's a great opportunity for my semi-regular plug for The Junior Junkie. This continues to be my favorite* blog out there, which is surprising considering I've never been a big time Griffey fan. There's certainly more effort put into his weekly posts that I've cumulatively put into my entire year's worth of content, and they're always an entertaining read if you collect cards.

Any time I get a chance to knock off a Heritage insert, it's a big win.

I guess Adalberto really didn't want to be called Raul Mondesi Jr. I'm still missing a bunch of 2019 Heritage, of course.

Cardinals fans always tend to send the best Cardinals cards. It's probably because we always have the most dupes, right? I missed out on a recent Bowman's Best box break, but I opted to pick up some of the base cards instead (much cheaper.) This Goldschmidt refractor is a really nice addition to that small group.

High Tek Yadi! That's... all I've got.

*I mean, besides your blog, of course.

Fancy Foil Stamping

Foil-stamped fun and more from @marcbrubaker to help put the wraps on 2019. 

Topps seems to issue endless editions of its annual factory set during the summer, and one of them commemorates the All-Star game with a special stamp. I don't really know how long they've been doing this for, but I am pretty sure I've seen these before. Usually I'll end up with some sort of random parallel of some relief pitcher that I collect, maybe through a trade, or maybe through a repack box. If you're a player collector or even a team collector, buying this kind of stuff can get to be pretty spendy even if the set itself didn't cost all that much.

This is why it was terrific news that Marc Brubaker happened to come upon one of these sets and broke it up, contacting greedy team collectors like myself.

We're all probably sick to death of 2019 Topps flagship cards at this point, so I'll keep this pretty brief. I picked my top three faves of the set to scan here. The Busch Stadium wide shot reminds me of my incredibly fun first (?!) trip to St. Louis this past summer, although the ever present construction crane is missing from the backdrop in the photo. I'm going to miss Marcell Ozuna a little bit, because he seemed like a fun (but kind of weird) player. I always enjoy a baseball high five, though.

I also got to see Adam Wainwright start twice in person this year! I was pretty convinced that this was going to be his last season, but he had a pretty decent year all things considered and is back for 2020. He had pretty solid outings in both starts (at Seattle on July 3rd, and at home against the Cubs on July 30th) but didn't get credited with a so-called win in either start. The Cards won both games, however, so that's all that matters.

Marc sent other cards, including this flashy Chrome insert. I like these cards, but I'm not sure why they chose a photo of Yadi where he's clearly just witnessed something lousy. The hands are up on the head... it's probably out number 3, guys.

Also included with this generous package was a stack of 2019 Allen & Ginter needs. I have been playing and brushing up on a lot of '80s video games lately, so all I can think of is Capcom's 1942 series when I see this card. That's probably not great, is it.

There were plenty of Heritage needs to be found as well. I don't really give my set building pursuits anything close to equal time on this blog, but I had to make sure these were represented as there were a lot of them. I find it fascinating that Nixon was in charge when Earth Day was launched. I certainly wasn't aware of it until 1990, which would have been the 20th anniversary.

Finally, here's a nicely posed Kolten Wong spring training photo, complete with Delivery Dudes ad in the background. I don't think we have these Dudes around here, but I have long felt that there are entirely too many delivery companies in operation. How is anyone making money off of this?

Money Cards from the Dime Boxes

The @dimeboxman delivers! 

Now that we're past the holidays, it's time to reach back into the vaults and talk about what people were sending me back in the fall. That's how backlogged I'm getting here. A disclaimer - there were a few other surprise packages I received last month that extended warm holiday greetings, and they are very appreciated and will be featured here as soon as I can get to them.

The always generous Nick of Dime Boxes fame sent me a big stack of stuff back in September which allowed me to remove a whole bunch of numbers from various lists I keep. Nick is sort of the baseball card version of what you might call a crate digger if we were talking about music, which we're not. It seems that he's always digging deep to find the most interesting cards out there.

Here's an obligatory 2002 Fleer Greats scan, for example. If every post I wrote featured a card from one of the Greats sets, this would be a vastly more interesting blog.

Nick sent a bunch of great oddball stuff, including a whole stack of cards like these. I wasn't able to find a whole lot about this set and it seems to be somewhat poorly cataloged over at TCDB. The cards feature The Gas House Gang and all seem to have numerous variations (including the header that sometimes says 1934 Cardinals and other times says The Gas House Gang.) The backs have a 1974 TCMA copyright. I'm not sure how to check them off any sort of list, but they'll all be headed for my team binders nonetheless.

Many of you are probably familiar with these scratch cards from Topps. These weren't attached or anything -- I just felt like scanning them all together. I do have a want list for these, although it's another complicated set because I believe there are variations on the back. And then, do you want both separated and fully intact cards? Decisions, decisions...

This is a familiar photo of Dizzy Dean and a bunch of baseballs from some sort of (trivia? game?) set from 1989.

When finally putting together my minor league want lists, I was fascinated to learn that, going back a couple of decades, most leagues put out All-Star and "Top Prospects" type sets in addition to all of the team sets for each individual team. Here's one of the All-Star variety of current Cards starter Dakota Hudson.

Justin Williams, one of the players acquired in the Tommy Pham trade, has yet to see the field with St. Louis but looks great here on this Independence Day themed parallel. Or, at least the card looks great. I really like both of what Panini (Donruss) and Topps did with these parallels. I just wish they were easier to pull (especially the Topps ones.)

One half of Keith Hernandez's rookie card is looking pretty psychedelic on this shiny Archives Reserve card that I needed.

Nick also sent a handful of those Baseball Card Magazine cutout cards. I do sort of miss the old Krause Publications magazines and all of the crazy ads in those things, even if I never really took advantage of any of them and probably just bought them for the "cards".

Here's another Fleer Greats card. This one is from 2004 and is a Cardinals themed insert... the best kind of insert, really. It's also numbered (to 1928) which is pretty cool.

There are tons and tons of "Greatest" inserts in the various 2019 Topps flagship releases (including parallels) and I'm afraid that I need many of them. I don't need this one any longer, though!

Nick also sent a ton of needs from a couple of then-fresh releases. I'll just show a few cards here. This poker playing pro seems to have a lot of extra background ink on his card, making it appear quite a bit darker than other base cards in the set. I wonder if all of his cards are like this or if it was some weird printing goof.

Zack Greinke is serious. Always serious.

Nearly half of the package was from the Heritage High Numbers collection. I was happy to get this Duplantier card from the usually elusive Rookie Performers inserts, even if I have no idea who he is. He also looks rather serious. Maybe something was going on there in Arizona that I don't know about.

Thanks again to Nick!