My Second Brendan Donovan Card

Another #CrackinWaxMailDay from @CrackinWax brings the Panini weirdness and a nice bonus. 

 

Brendan Donovan had a really nice season. Not only was he consistently one of the Cardinals toughest outs, he started at six different positions (not including DH) and racked up the league's first Gold Glove Award given to a utility player. The crazy thing is that he did all of this in his first year in the league.

All season long I lamented the lack of Brendan Donovan cards, and a group break from Crackin' Wax finally helped me out. While he still didn't start showing up on base checklists until Topps Update recently came out, I was able to land an autographed card from the extremely weird Panini Chronicles set. 

If you're not familiar, the rookie-heavy set shows off designs of would-be sets for brands that Panini owns. For the most part, the set is comprised of things that didn't get their own release. If you see plain old Donruss cards, it's actually intended to be in the form of an "update" to the main set. In the NBA Chronicles sets, the checklist is numbered so that it's one gigantic set numbering in the 600 or 700 range, but for some reason the MLB set sticks to numbering each individual design as its own separate thing. I'm not sure if this is due to licensing agreements or if it's something else.

Chronicles is about 90% rookies, so if you see a guy like Juan Yepez, he's going to pop up again and again... sometimes even in the same pack.

An acetate "Clearly Donruss" set would have looked nice as its own thing, although I'm sure the price would have been prohibitively expensive.

Even though the Chronicles break was the only thing I bought from CW this particular week, I ended up with a really nice second stack of bonus cards. The foil stamped 582 Montgomery Club factory set is sent to, presumably, Montgomery Club members each season and I was gifted a Cardinals team stack from it. The only card I need to eventually track down is a multiplayer card with Adam Wainwright on it. I won't bore everyone with more scans from this set as it's truly just the regular Topps factory set (series one and two) with a stamp on it, but it will certainly make a nice addition to my binders.

First Look at 2022 Cards

A brand new #CrackinWaxMailDay from @CrackinWax features the new Topps flagship set. 

 

As I write this, MLB and MLBPA are entering their 17th (?) hour of negotiations on a new collective bargaining agreement in hopes to avoid cancelling regular season games for what would be the second time in three seasons. I had originally intended to write something about the new 2022 Topps set cards I'd received from Crackin' Wax earlier today, but the prospects of an indefinitely delayed baseball season were not exactly making me feel inspired to write about baseball cards.

In any case, here we are, where there is actually some hope considering the news trickling out of Cardinals training site Roger Dean Stadium, where Andrew Miller is playing a prominent role. Let's look at the (mostly) Cardinals cards from the new set. I haven't had a chance to buy any of this stuff for myself, but I did see that blasters were finally on sale as of today at both the Topps and Target websites.

We have, well, half of an Arenado here. I'm always curious about the decisions made into choosing photos for horizontal cards like this here. I feel like in the past, a card would only be created in landscape mode when the photo demanded it. Now, it seems like a certain number of cards are assigned this horizontal position, which is a strange (and lazy) choice.

We need more of this Alex Reyes and less of the one that threw too many pitches out of the strike zone. His 2021 season was encouraging enough at least that he didn't get injured. I think he can build on it.

I am so glad that Bader finally picked up a Gold Glove. It's dumb that offense ends up factoring in those awards, but then again, it was his offense that kept him in the lineup every day.

Topps definitely brought the star power to the Cardinals team card this time.

Jon Lester gets a sunset card, which should make a lot of people happy. Not all of them will like who he's in uniform with, though.

Adam Wainwright is not ready to sunset, at least not quite yet. One of the most irritating things about thinking of losing games this year is reducing the number of opportunities to see Waino and his famous batterymate play a few more.

I've made it this far without talking about the design, which could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it. I feel like it's just rather... forgettable? It reminds me of the 2010 and 2013 designs, for whatever reason. At first I thought it was the font, but I'm not sure that's it.

Here's Yadi's 2013 card (featuring Waino, of course.)

And here is the 2010 card, where the name is really hard to read on certain scans... but it's the same font, isn't it? (Wow, the giant team logo/name was really a choice.)

Speaking of team logos, the thing that bothers me the most about these cards is the Cardinals logo itself. Why is it a hollowed-out white? It would have been one thing if it was like this for all teams, but apparently it is not. Who made this choice? I hope this outlined white interlocking "STL" isn't their official team logo for 2022.

In the hype buildup for the new set, someone (on Twitter, I'm sure) asked which card everyone was most excited for. For me -- sorry Wandermania people -- this was the one. I know there is always delayed gratification in the baseball card world whenever someone pops up on a major league field for the first time, especially with the supposed production delays everyone is facing these days, but it felt like a long wait for a Lars Nootbaar card... finally!

A Cardinals also returned to the annual Topps League Leaders cards for the first time in what feels like quite awhile. It's good to see it. It's too bad that Wainwright is flanked by a pair of Dodgers.

I ended up with the Royals as my random team in this particular break, which did net me this one card for my secret Ohtani collection. I know that he doesn't play for Kansas City, but one of these guys does.

As part of the Royals lot, this card made it to me as well. I'm very unimpressed with the fact that the Topps flagship set is doing 1987 inserts again for the third time in eleven years, but I don't make the rules. This one heads to the trade box.