A Mid-Week PWE Round-Up

A new pile of plain white envelopes includes my first look at Series Two from @brubaker.bsky.social and much more! 

 

This year's Topps flagship Series Two release date came and went without me finding (or really looking for) any packs or boxes. I did finally grab a pile of loose packs last Friday, but Marc Brubaker's all-Cardinals mailer happened to hit my mailbox first that day. Series Two always gets the least amount attention (from me, anyway) of the year's three flagship releases. These days, it's a combination of Photoshopped photos of players that changed teams in the past offseason, guys that were held back from the previous release, and some overlooked rookies.

Speaking of rookies, here are a couple of RCs of players who will definitely not be playing for the Cardinals in 2024. I can honestly say I'd never heard of Irving Lopez when I saw him on the checklist, but he made a handful of appearances late last September when I wasn't watching a lot of baseball. Lopez appears to be out of organized baseball right now. Drew Rom was part of the team's return in the Jack Flaherty portion of their trade deadline fire sale. The Cardinals, as always, are short a quality starter in the rotation and Flaherty would certainly look nice there. Rom was a disaster last season on the mound, but the club kept throwing him out there. Maybe they like his peripherals, or something else even less tangible (like his "stuff".) I believe he's probably out for the season with a shoulder injury, or a biceps problem, or whatever else you can find in your search injury.

Ivan Herrera, shown here wearing last season's Victory Blues, picked up a lot of playing time this season, only to find his role behind the plate usurped by rookie Pedro Pages. I think he's always going to be seen as more of a bat-first catcher on a roster that already has a prominent one (hello, Willson Contreras), so Pages' turn as an excellent pitch framer and, at least in one series, a clutch home run hitter is starting to make Herrera feel expendable.

Newcomers (if you also count Lance Lynn's return) make up three-fifths of the Cards rotation. Here's a couple of veteran guys in their Photoshopped best.

Here is the team celebrating something in 2023. It was a rare sight.

Of course, the Stars of MLB are back and this time there are three Cardinals to collect. I still need Masyn Winn and Sonny Gray, plus all of the Chrome versions.

From Fuji came this trio of Redbirds that look awfully familiar. A closer look would note that there's no foil on the Topps logo, giving these more of an Opening Day look. However, these otherwise ordinary looking cards are from a special promo set for a company called Clear Travel, which seems to be in the business of providing similar services to TSA PreCheck and similar things at other large venues.

The backs of the cards are pretty standard. You can see that these have a different numbering system and I believe the set contains 100 cards in total. I haven't run a free group break in awhile, but this is definitely the type of thing I'll be looking out for when I get around to doing one again.

Thanks to spectacular card-swappers like gcrl, I am now just two (non-SP) base cards away from completing the low series run of 2024 Topps Heritage. I say "low series" because we all know there's probably going to be a high series, whether we want it or not. These are so colorful that they're always fun to scan together.

I wish I had paid more attention to the idea of collecting SI For Kids cards. I've managed to pick up a few more recent ones that fit my collection, but it makes me wish I had kept a subscription for all those years, as weird as that would be for someone my age. (Well, okay, maybe not.)

Much had been made of the Cardinals wearing red during regular season games for the first time when they rolled out their City Connect uniforms, but red jersey tops had been a thing for a number of years during the spring. They actually had to drop these uniforms this season due to the limit of five jersey styles per team imposed by the league, or Nike, or some combination of the two. (In addition to the standard home whites and road grays, the Cardinals also have a cream colored retro-inspired jersey worn exclusively on Saturday home games and a powder blue counterpart worn exclusively on Saturday road games. And, uh, those City Connects.)

This purple partial parallel (PPP) marks the second appearance of Ivan Herrera in this post (along with Drew Rom above.)

Last up is certainly the most unique card I've received in quite some time, which came in a single-card mailer from blogger and contest-pariticpater The Diamond King. It's a shiny Donruss Optic insert parallel of then-rookie Stephen Piscotty. The colored border variation reminds me a lot of the original 1988 Donruss The Rookies set, which makes me wonder why this wasn't the color choice to begin with.

What makes it so unique? Well, check out that serial number! I only have a couple of cards with fewer copies in existence than this one.

Thanks to everyone who has sent these (non-TCDB transaction) envelopes over the past couple of months. I would love to see more, and I have plenty of things to get rid of!

In the Year 2024

A look at the ubiquitous 2024 Topps set. 

 

This would have been a bit more timely if it was posted closer to the release date of a few weeks ago, but I thought I'd show off/give some thoughts on the latest Topps flagship set.

Chances are, you already have a few of these cards and may have formed some opinions of your own. I do really like the design quite a bit, particularly with the way they used foil in the team names. If Opening Day was still around, I could see a cheaper and therefore uglier version of this without any of the foil printing or stamping. With the foil, however, it pops. Aside from this significant turn in design direction, a lot of what you see is going to be the same. Heavily zoomed/focused photos help you get a little more familiar with your favorite (or least favorite) players, but they tend to wash out the background and remove the "action" part of the game, which is a shame. For this particular rookie pair, I do like the way the player positions are stacked when they fit into multiple categories. I like that they chose this route instead of forcing a single position on someone who does a lot of different things on the field.

The Cardinals only managed to get nine cards into this expanded set of 350 cards. There's enough players to field a complete lineup on the field, but that's it. The two rookies likely won't be much of a factor with the big club this year, and Tyler O'Neill is already gone. There's no sign here of Nolan Gorman or Jordan Walker, two of the Cardinals brightest young stars, nor do we see Gold Glover Tommy Edman. Masyn Winn, who debuted last season, is expected to be the team's starting shortstop this year but his RC is also being held back for some reason.

This is why I will never get involved in the deeply stupid RC or rookie card debate. Masyn Winn already has multiple insert cards in this set, and yet he couldn't get a measly base card.

Back to things I do like. The card backs have gotten a bit of a facelift after looking pretty much the same over the last several years. Full stats are represented once again, and everything just looks a bit cleaner.

Let's look at bit more at some of the parallels and inserts. After the success (?) of 2023 Update's holiday-themed parallels (Halloween, essentially), even more retail exclusive parallels were added to fit with this season. This set's theme is Easter, apparently, although the base "Holiday" parallel foil pattern looks a bit like some crappy wallpaper in an old building. It's also going to get confusing very quickly if they insist on calling these "Holiday" if they also continue making a separate Holiday set at the end of the year. (The holiday parallels, it should point out, were ostensibly to replace the one-per-pack manufactured relic cards that used to be inserted into blasters.) Due to the ever popular "shrinkflation", however, you get fewer cards than you used to in a given blaster, as there are now two fewer cards per blaster pack than 2023 Series 1, and still no relic!

The 1989 inserts are back to mark the 35th Anniversary, which is apparently always Topps' favorite anniversary to celebrate. Who knows why? This set is actually fairly large (100 cards in Series 1) this time around, which would make it quite a challenge to complete the whole set if it continues the same way through Series 2 and Update.

Stars of MLB are kind of plague if you only buy retail products. On average, you get around 10 cards per blaster pack and one of these in every pack. With the base set being 350 cards and the Stars of MLB set being 30 cards, it's almost as easy to pull this Goldschmidt insert as it is his base equivalent.

They've been doing this contest for years now, but I never participate. I'm just not much of a gambler and don't want to deface the cards for no reason.

A retired player like Tony Gwynn who was actually in the 1989 set really shows off the deficiencies of this design, with the left justification of the player name font being the hardest thing to swallow. It also looks odd that this uses traditional Padres colors while Gwynn is wearing the '90s (and beyond) shade of blue that they went for at the time.

I think these All-Topps Team cards were supposed to look classy, but I can't say a single thing nice about it. It's so weird that the coloring choices make Julio look like some weird clown alien here.

I'm not a fan of this one, either. I haven't seen much of Buster Posey in sets since his retirement, so that's probably fun for some Giants fans at least.

Yellow parallels are hanger box exclusives and no longer exclusive to any specific retail store (I'm not sure if there are any store chain exclusives anymore.) The design works better for some teams than others.

Royal blue parallels are here once again. I feel like they've never settled on a consistent shade of blue for these, but I don't think I've sat examples from each year side by side to get a good comparison.

And here is a card full of eggs.

I didn't intend this to be an exhausting review of all things 2024 Topps, so I've left out a few bits and pieces. The Superstar Blueprint cards have caused a bit of a stir but every time I pull one someone snatches it up right away. There are more parallels than what I've shown here, of course, but they're mostly just different colors and shiny accoutrements.

In short, I like this set quite a bit and it's one of the few flagship ones I normally wouldn't mind building, but I'm also trying to steer myself away from doing much more set building as it just takes up a lot of space. I'm always going to have more fun digging through my Cardinals binders than I would have in looking through a complete set. For that reason, I do have quite a few base cards that I don't need. Hit me up on TCDB or elsewhere if you're looking for anything. Thanks!