A Holiday Weekend PWE Round-Up

 

Fun things come in small envelopes.

 

It's time for another round of small trade envelopes and things of that nature. This bunch is pretty baseball (and Cardinals) heavy, which is just about perfect for this time of year.

First up is the first of two envelopes from gcrl (cards as i see them). This one has been sitting on my shelf since February according to the postmark. A pair of obscure Cardinals pandemic relievers still look good in red, even with the blue background design that accompanies the red bordered parallel card from 2021 Topps Heritage.

Panini's Donruss product sprang forth this strange little die-cut card with a giant Rated Rookie logo on it in 2016. The nostalgia for the Rated Rookie logo supersedes what little Panini actually does with its Donruss brand, which is typically underwhelming if not just outright boring.

I think at this point I have more Tim Cooney signed cards than the total number of times I can recall seeing him actually pitch, but that's fairly typical for certain players who get featured in Bowman. I didn't have this blue parallel, of course!

This Career Year insert is apparently from the 2022 Topps flagship set. I don't really remember it at all, and I bought a decent amount of this Topps stuff that year. Pujols certainly looks much younger here in his 2009 state than he did during his memorable 2022 Cardinals comeback.

Ah, who doesn't love a good Stadium Club photo? When do we get Stadium Club this year? This month? September? December? Never?

Until they also lost the Players Association license, Panini continued their tradition of numbering all of their inserts to 999 copies, like this one. You could still find unnumbered parallels in their various retail configurations, though.

I kind of miss the dumb fake relic cards that they put in Topps blasters for many years. I believe this year (2023) was the last year that they did something like this. The rubbery hockey puck-shaped thing in the middle of the card is certainly memorable. It almost totally obscures the player.

Further cementing gcrl's status as Hamm King were this pair of inserts from the 2015 Topps set. I now own 17 of these by my count, and others will have their work cut out for them if they want to catch the leader.

Next up is a very coveted card from noted author and Brewers fan (and the two do intersect) Matthew Prigge. I did not know that a Jim Edmonds Brewers card existed until recently, which made me highly interested in obtaining a copy. After Edmonds was traded to San Diego (for future World Series hero David Freese), he went on a whirlwind tour though the NL Central, playing for every team in the division aside from Pittsburgh before winding up his career. Cubs and Reds Edmonds cards are readily available in some major sets, but the existence of a Brewers card was news to me.

I had to scan the back because I'm highly interested in police/team issued cards and wanted to check this out. I believe there are actually a bunch of different versions of this set, at least according to TCDB. I'm assuming that the main different is the presenting sponsor on the back.

Matthew also included a few shiny bonus cards that I had been hesitant to write about for some time now. I believe he was the first person that I knew of to discover this weird bootleggy looking set/box thing that was briefly available on Amazon. I was hoping someone else would discover more info about this set and maybe even put a checklist together for TCDB, but as far as I know no one has bothered to undertake this.

Here's a couple more. I have a whole stack of these that I also purchased from Amazon a year or two ago, but I don't know if what I ended up with was a complete set. I ended up throwing a few of these into envelopes for others myself, so I wouldn't even be able to attempt a checklist anymore. I'll probably toss the rest of these up on the blog as a giveaway at some point this summer because they've been sitting on my desk far too long. The set is full of weird errors and has a strange checklist, but the Cardinals were more than fairly represented.

Here's what all of the card backs look like. Ah yes, it's the Patriotic Baseball Eagle. The cards are are extremely thin and sharped like playing cards/TCG cards, except that they're all shiny gold... and probably very toxic. Don't eat these. I believe they're Korean in origin, from what little research could be done from when they were available for sale.

The third envelope comes from gcrl once again, who comes out swinging with this amazing autograph of one of my all-time favorite college football players. LaMichael James' Press Pass autograph card is numbered to just 99 copies, and I don't even mind that he's been cut off at the shoulders here.

From Duck to Duck, this is a pro rookie card of another Oregon running back who had a pretty solid run with the Seahawks in the '00s. I've never been one to root a ton for the NFL team up north of here in Seattle, but Mo Morris gave me a reason to check in on them from time to time.

The bulk of the envelope was comprised of a bunch of 2025 Topps Heritage needs. I'm pretty close to being done with the (non-SP, non-insert) set now, but there's a few stragglers as usual.

Last up is this single card from Damon Holtz, a great Bluesky follow who gives away cards on his feed there pretty frequently. This is one of the "silver pack" box topper insert cards from the recently released Series 2 set and also shows Pujols in his original run with the Cardinals. This is actually the second card I've snagged from the very generous Damon, but I think I ended up only posting on Bluesky about the other one. I'm not going to try to convince anyone of the merits of Bluesky (or any social media in general), but if you're over there, feel free to give me a follow!

Contest Winners and Cards from Oren

 

If you won something, say something! 

 

As of Monday, another college basketball season is in the books. That also concludes contest season here at Cards on Cards. Here is your big list of winners:

• 1st Place: bivlo (blitmeat)
• 2nd Place: rl16
• 3rd Place (tie): mds2942 (Chaos is a Bracket) and AngelsInOrder
• WoRsT pLaCe: mintxcore and josh.worley (Worley360)
• Championship Game Prediction: Brandon L (UConn 75, SDSU 62 - actual score UConn 76, SDSU 59)

If you are one of the winners (or "winners"), please get in touch with me as soon as possible so I can get your address and discuss your prize(s).

Meanwhile, here's another lovely batch of Cardinals cards from reader Oren. I was able to increase my Topps gold (the real gold) collection by a couple of notches with this package I got back in December.

Jack Flaherty has kept his ERA down over his first two (healthy, we presume) starts of the 2023 season, but he's been walking dudes at an alarming rate. Hopefully that doesn't become a thing.

Along with the tidy J.D. Drew autograph card is this striking blue insert from the 1999 Fleer Mystique set. I like it a lot.

More gold! Mooooore gooooold!

Tim Cooney made it to the big club in 2015, but my memory of this has more to do with remembering he has a card in Topps Update that year than of any recollection of seeing him on the field. Memory is weird that way.

Is this still the Players Weekend logo? Was it ever?

This insert from last year's Topps Chrome set leans a little too close to "Ben Baller" territory for me. It's always nice to get another Yadi insert card, though.

Last, but certainly not least, is this fancy encased Alex Reyes auto-patch card from the 2017 Panini National Treasures set. I wonder if Panini will continue to make sets like this in the future as they only have retired players and (apparently) minor leaguers to draw from now.

Thanks again to Oren and everyone who participated in my contests this year!

Everyone's a Cardinal!

Even Hall of Famer Barry Larkin according to a @breakdowncards trade pack. 

For quite some time I've been considering a series of posts featuring a bunch of well known players that the casual fan might not know of their days in a Cardinals uniform. There's a lot of territory to mine there. Someone well known who was most assuredly not a Cardinal was Barry Larkin, a lifelong Cincinnati Reds player... unless you talk to some intern who worked at Donruss Leaf Playoff back in the late '90s, I guess? This is going to fit in to the weird little corner of my collection for novelty items, alongside one of my Bill Ripken 1989 Fleer cards and a few other weird things that I wouldn't ordinarily seek out. (Unless, of course, Nachos Grande really needs this card, but that would be pretty shocking considering there are supposedly 3500 copies of it in the world.)

The weird Larkin gaffe (and more!) came to me across town from Gavin of Baseball Card Breakdown. Morales also doesn't look like he has anything to do with the Cardinals here, but that's more typical of Panini's draft sets instead of being an actual blunder.

Back to guys you've heard of... it's a high end Carlos Beltran card. I wonder just what Beltran is up to right now, after being hired and subsequently fired as Mets manager once some details came out about the Astros cheating scandal. I always thought that was a strange hire to begin with, but it seems like the trend has been leaning heavily towards hiring dudes with zero coaching experience as managers because they're recognizable names who recently played or something.

Brian Jordan was that could-have-been two-sport star that wasn't named Bo or Deion, except that he wasn't crazy and chose to stick to one sport before jumping to the other, less brain damaging sport. Good for him!

Back to the no names -- here's a nice looking blue parallel of a guy who got into some games with the Cards in 2015 and pretty much vanished. He wasn't bad! Stupid injuries appear to have derailed him.

Mark McCormick was a first round pick at one point but really didn't pan out. I don't know that I've ever seen this kind of white Bowman parallel before, but it looks pretty nice. You can make white bordered cards really stand out when you actually have cards that feature colored borders.

Gavin was also one of a bunch of people that were kind enough to help me out with Turkey Red Series 1 this year. I'm not doing so well with Series 2 right now, but it's mostly because I have to buy everything online if I want to buy it at all. That's pretty much one of the themes of 2020. Complaining about cards right now seems pretty ridiculous considering everything that's going on in the world, though!

More Big Guns

The hits, they keep on comin'.

Much like last night's trade post, here we have another ridiculously great batch of cards, this time from longtime friend o' the blog Play at the Plate. While he shares a first name with the sender of yesterday's loot, his interests lean more in the Rangers direction rather than to Twinsdom. PatP has been sending me stuff for years, and I always make sure I kick down my Rangers stuff to him. Rest assured I will be on the lookout for something cool at the next card show.

Tim Cooney got a turn in the rotation this year with Wainwright out and Jaime Garcia dealing with his own annual DL trip. He did fairly well in his six starts, but like most young pitchers he didn't go very deep into games.

Here's another one of those heavy duty Medallion cards from 2015 Topps blasters! I just need Albert Pujols and Yadier Molina and I will have them all. Well, shoot, those guys are pretty popular. And they'll probably throw even more at us in Topps Update.

It's a bright and shiny Stan The Man, which means you've either been staring at your screen too long and your eyes are dying... or it's one of those shiny refractor dealies. I guess your eye doctor won't kill me if I tell you it's the latter.

I just wish we had gotten more amazing on field moments out of Oscar while he was around besides that crazy first home run in the rain, because you just had the feeling that he was going to be full of them.

Fernando Tatis had a habit of dropping in and out of baseball fans' collective consciousness, and he often did it dramatically - like when he hit two grand slams in one inning for the Cardinals in 1999.

These new fangled Diamond Kings are kind of goofy, but this is more inspired than the base designs Panini has been throwing at us at least.

Finally, here's a photo variation of Yadi celebrating the Divisional Series win over the Dodgers. This one is going to Erin. I'd ask my readers out there for another one, but some of you are Dodgers fans and have probably already burned anything that looks like this.