Weekend PWE Round-Up

Good baseball cards sometimes come in small packages. 

 

Although the bulk of the stuff I receive in the mail these days is from TCDB trades, I still have a few friends of the blog who like to exchange blind letters and packages of cards. And they are still very, very fun. Here's a few fun ones, including this offering from late June by Night Owl Cards.

Night Owl tossed a couple of current Cardinals my way, including a screaming yellow Willson Contreras card and this Jordan Walker Prizm insert. We're at the point where it's difficult to see what the Cardinals will look like come next season, but I'm guessing they're going to try to reestablish themselves around a young core which will likely include Walker.

Along with the current guys came a pair of recently retired legends. Adam Wainwright is now trying to balance full-time dad duties with part-time broadcasting and singing pursuits.

Albert Pujols on a 1989 Topps design is always going to look weird.

Speaking of legends, we go back all the way to 1970 with this one. No Heritage here -- this is the real deal.

Night Owl always has a stash of minis seemingly at his disposal, and he was once again cool enough to help me out with some of these Ginter weirdos. Bill Walton will now have a new patch celebrating his life on the Blazers jerseys this coming season.

Next up is another PWE from another Dodgers fan. If you've been here before, you can probably guess that it's going to be a gcrl/cards as i see them envelope. This Matt Carpenter pink parallel comes from the online exclusive Topps Mini set, which I think they stopped making a couple of years ago. I don't think it was terribly popular (or necessary.)

Inception! That's fun. Cho spent the entire season at the High-A level, and while his bat hasn't seemed to have come around yet, he is very young still.

This is a great collection of Heritage inserts right here. Pong! Hammerin' Hank! A future HOF Cardinal!

Parallels will undoubtedly be the death of any team collector, but it was great to snag a couple more of these yellow things from the mystery envelope.

We end the gcrl envelope with a minor league autograph card. It's Adam Kennedy! A lot of players from sets like these aren't terribly recognizable years after the card has been out, but Kennedy had a nice career that included a World Series ring and ALCS MVP award with the Angels in 2002.

Our third and final envelope comes from the one and only Lost Collector. I've always been a huge fan of these framed Diamond Kings cards from the mid 00's. This Bud Smith card is numbered to just 400.

I've made some good headway this year into collecting all of the various Topps gold parallels (Cardinals) since these became an annual thing back, I want to say, 2001? The less said about this subject, the better, but at least this is one more to tick off the list.

The lone non-baseball card need in these envelopes came in the form of a Sage HIT parallel of Devon Williams, a Ducks receiver who left two years of NCAA eligibility on the table when he opted to enter the 2022 draft. As far as I can tell, he got a look from the Ravens initially but hasn't shown up anywhere prominent in a couple of years.

Thanks, as always, for these fun blind trades!

A Derby Night Trade Post

@ShaneKatz73 sends over a heap of Cardinals: vintage, retro and more! 

This season has been a slog for the Cardinals (just ask the recently fired manager!), so it's actually nice to get a little break from baseball and watch the exhibitions. Congrats to Bryce and his hair and all that, but I was actually most impressed with Rhys Hoskins tonight. I hadn't seen him play a ton, but his swing just looked so effortless compared to the rest of the contestants. I doubt the Home Run Derby will screw up that swing.

I'd like to think I'll take advantage of the break to get through my own personal slog of backlogged trade post material, but I try to do this every week and it rarely works out. We soldier on to a quite intimidating pile of Cardinals goodies from Shane from the blog Off The Wall. This was a trade I largely worked out on Twitter, which is a fairly new thing for me.

We kick things off with mins. Minis are the best! I prefer the tobacco card sized minis to the '75 Topps shaped minis, but to each his/her own.

It was fun to see some on-card autos in the mix (TTM? in person?! mysteries!) I wouldn't consider myself an autograph hunter, but I've built up a nice little group of cards like these that would be fun to show off in a display somewhere someday.

For such a weird little signature here, it doesn't actually look like it would be all that quick of a signature. My signature certainly has become more, let's say, efficient over the years.

Growing up the '80s and starting to collect in the '80s means that there aren't a ton of '80s oddballs that I haven't seen. This is one of those, however. This looks sort of like someone pasted another card on top of a 1987 Fleer card.

You've got to love vintage team cards. No, seriously, you do.

Floating Carpenter Head Alert! This was a welcome inclusion in the 2012 Topps Heritage set. I am still lacking some of the floating head stickers.

The next Cardinals manager?! I am interested in seeing how the interim guy does with the rest of the season, and how many times his zero MLB playing experience will be brought up over the course of the dog days of summer.

Here's a fun unlicensed Joe Magrane card. People called cards like these "Broders" back in the day, for a reason that was never quite sufficiently explained to me, at least at the time. (Apparently there was a mythical sports card bootlegger named Rob Broder, who filled the hearts and minds of happy collectors with awesome fake Bo Jackson baseball cards, or whatever.)

Mark McGwire calls BS on this whole Broder thing.

Unlicensed cards make Sad Toothpick Sam Jones even sadder.

(Truthfully, I love weird cards, and that includes some unlicensed things and customs. 2018 Donruss is horrible, though.)

The gem of the lot, and the reason you bothered to scroll (or swipe?) down this far, is this glorious box topper from the 2015 Topps Heritage set. It's a cool patch card modeled after an obscure 1966 release that you can read more about here. As much as I'm starting to question my own interests in set collecting and Topps products in general, I absolutely love the weird nods to the past that they have been included in the Heritage product line. Topps Heritage is great! Everything else is Bootleg Donruss.

Airbrushed Fridays: 2007 Topps #361

All I can say is that it was not a great day to be a Blazer. Here's a late night edition of Airbrushed Fridays to forget that the NBA exists for awhile longer.

Adam Kennedy is a second baseman who has been converted to a utility player in recent years. Kennedy was originally a Cardinals first round draft pick in 1997 and began his career in St. Louis before being shipped to Anaheim, where he would spend his most productive years, as a piece in the Jim Edmonds deal. He won a ring with the Angels while gaining a reputation for his "dependability" and "not terribleness".

Why did Topps airbrush Adam's photo? Kennedy was signed as a free agent by the Cardinals in what was supposed to be a glorious reunion between Kennedy's first team, who happened to be defending champions. It didn't work out so well. The Cardinals were expecting more "not terribleness" and instead got "mostly terribleness".

What's wrong with this picture, anyway? Kennedy was assigned uniform #7 (sadly, not 47, because AK47 would have been easier to root for) and never wore #2 with the Cardinals, a retired number reserved for Red Schoendienst. As a sign of things to come, Kennedy was also at the plate without a bat in this shot.

If you are interested in obtaining a card featured here, please send me an e-mail. If you have a card you would like to nominate for Airbrushed Fridays, please get in touch as well. I will require that I am able to see the card in person, either on loan or as a donation, so that I can examine the card and experience it in all its cruddiness.

Memorabilia from Ryan's Memorabilia

The mail keeps on rolling in! Not that I discourage it, of course. If anyone is interested in working out a trade, please contact me. I have much work to do on my general wantlist, still, as there's probably at least 759,000 more Cardinal cards that I'd like to add to my collection. And that doesn't count the crazy black 2009 Topps cards that have infected everyone with stealth parallel fever.

This package came from M. Ryan of Ryan's Memorabilia Blog. He agreed to send over an Adam Kennedy jersey card, a few more of the pesky Allen & Ginter cards that I need and threw in a few bonus Cardinals cards for good measure. As much as I like the minis in the A&G, I have to say that I like the framed relic and autographed cards even more. I might have to chase down more of these cards (at least the Cardinals ones) even though I usually try to avoid investing time and money on autos and relics.

James Shields is another guy to watch out for as fantasy baseball draft times start to draw near. I barely had heard of "Big Game James" when my girlfriend smartly grabbed him last season. Somehow I managed to win one of the four leagues I was involved in last season, though, so I guess I'm not completely oblivious. Or perhaps I just get lucky...

I got to see Jack Cust play a bit as a member of the Portland Beavers, the current AAA affiliate of the San Diego Padres. He was a really interesting player: twice as likely to walk as strikeout, and if he put his bat to the ball it was almost always crushed. Yet he struck out so much that his plate discipline was constantly questioned, even with the ridiculous amount of walks that he took. Couple that with his limited defensive skill set and he seemed to be destined to be another Bernardo Brito and never get a true shot at the majors. But then, of course, Mr. Moneyball came calling and Cust has been a major leaguer ever since.

Here's one of the extra Cardinals cards that were thrown in. Fleer's Rookie Sensations were about the best thing ever as far as early '90s inserts went. It seemed like these were much more sought after in basketball products (Glen Rice! Tim Hardaway!), but I do remember this card being expensive enough to be out of my price range at the time. I know I spent a fair amount of cash and trades on funky Lankford cards like this back in high school, but this is the first time I've owned this card.

Make sure you check out Ryan's Memorabilia Blog... when you're done drooling over the new black Topps cards, of course.