Late Night PWE Round-Up

Another round of the small envelope delivers including stuff from @dimeboxman and more. 

 

I have to admit to still being a bit shell-shocked from the recent death of my only pathway to buying trading cards in person and I haven't quite figured out what that means for my collection and my blog in the future. That's probably a better topic for another time, though, so let's just dig into a few things I received in smaller packages from kind folks who have spent their time here recently.

First up is a bunch of stuff from Nick of Dime Boxes fame. I am looking towards going to a card show for the first time in about 18 months when June rolls around, but I'm not expecting there to be vast quantities of dime boxes. We'll see what happens. The first card that rolled out of the envelope (or out of this post, anyway) is one of those mysterious modern Leaf cards. All I can gather from looking at the card is that it's a 2020 Leaf card and it clearly pays tribute to the 1990 design that caused such a stir back in the day.

Here's Eli Marrero on a SkyBox Thunder "Rant" parallel. It has purple foil to stand out by itself.

This one was a huge surprise, as one of my all-time faves hasn't exactly been on this earth and available to sign autographs for nearly two decades. I'd be interested to know the story behind this card, if there actually is one.

I opened a blaster from 2003 Bowman Heritage set recently, so the set has been on my mind a bit lately. It's not the best looking set by any means, but it interests me a lot more than most of what new stuff Topps and Panini crank out these days.

Speaking of new stuff, this Yadi card is a Chrome-d up version of the 1952 "Redux" inserts from the latest flagship set. It shines in person, of course.

Longtime Rockies blogger hiflew from Cards from the Quarry has taken the "Free Stuff Friday" thing (so 2020), flipped it to Sundays and run with it. I've claimed a few cards over the past few months, and have gotten some fun envelopes as a result. Alex Reyes is firmly cemented as the closer on this year's version of the Cardinals, even if the announcers constantly mentions his aspirations to move on to bigger and brighter things (i.e. a starting rotation spot.)

A Blazer sneaks in here. CJ and his squad made the playoffs for the eighth consecutive season, good for the longest active streak in the NBA. Let's hope that they do some big damage this time around. I'm just glad they avoided that horrible play-in tournament that should be killed with fire and never spoken of again.

It's a numbered refractor. It's swaggy.

Jason Motte's Upper Deck rookie card is featured on this one-and-done set called Icons, which continued the weird '00s concept where most rookie cards needed to be serial numbered. Nowadays, they print tens of thousands of them (if not a hundred thousand) and they're not numbered and people pay crazy money for them.

This Waino is an orange parallel that's numbered to 199, although it scanned in more of a salmon color.

Last up is a one-off card from Chris, The Collector. Unbeknownst to Chris, before the first Blazers playoff game that I ever attended, I had a photo of my next to a life-sized photo of Gerald Henderson while I was ultra-excited to go watch the team I'd been following all my life. He wasn't with Portland for a ton of time and was mostly a role-player, but for whatever reason I sought out his picture for the photo opportunity first. In any case, it was really cool to get this patch card of Henderson's that's numbered to just 10 copies.

Big thanks once again to everyone who has mailed me cards over the past year or so. It's made the tedious days a lot less tedious.

Life and Death on TV Tonight

MLB Network will be premiering a special called "The Life and Death of Darryl Kile" tonight at 6:00 PM PDT (9:00 PM EDT.) I encourage anyone who is a fan of baseball, casual or otherwise, to check it out.

Kile was my favorite pitcher in all of baseball at the time of his sudden, unexpected passing 10 years ago last month. On June 10th that very same month, I finally got to see the Cardinals play in person (a 10-0 drubbing at the hands of the Mariners at Safeco Field.) On June 18th, they lost longtime broadcaster Jack Buck. And on the 22nd, the news of Kile's death came down.

Cardboard Cardinals

Colbey of Cardboard Collections has been another frequent visitor to my mailbox, which is a good thing because I have a stack of things queued up and ready to send back to him. This latest package was a hybrid Cardinals/Blazers package with a couple of DK Astros cards thrown in for good measure. I'm saving the Blazers stuff for another post, so let's go ahead and look at the baseball stuff for now.

This is a very patriotic looking card, which is apparently an insert from the 1994 Fleer set. I'm not sure if I've seen these before. The huge presence of stars and stripes makes me think of the sets that immediately followed the terrorist attacks on the US in 2001.

A long, long time ago in a world far, far away, inside a dome wearing an off-colored rainbow on his jersey, Darryl Kile threw a no-hitter. It's easy to lose sight of that as he didn't really hit his stride as a pitcher until he joined the Cardinals in 2000.

Here's a sweet Chris Carpenter "workout jersey" card from the 2010 Topps Update set. I'm guessing they make these guys try on several of these jerseys to cut up for memorabilia purposes rather than cut up the only one that they wear during photo ops, practices and events. Who knows?

I'm in agreement with the majority that manupatch cards are senseless and pointless, but that doesn't stop me from wanting them when they have to do with the Cardinals. This patch commemorates the 2nd ever All-Star Game which was held at the Polo Grounds, the home of the Giants.