Temporary Title (or is it?)

 

A huge variety pack of Cardinals cards and card-like things. 

Coming up with a blog post title is not typically the easiest thing to do, and I often end up throwing a temporary title in while I work on the other aspects of the post, like the images and the words and what have you. For whatever reason, nothing was really speaking to me today even though this collection of Cardinals cards I received from Tracy's Box Breaks several months back was outstanding.

This Old Judge-inspired card from the 2005 Upper Deck Origins set is a really nice way to kick things off here. This is reminding me once again that I really need to get my hands on some real vintage cards sooner or later.

Cast aside by the Cardinals in the midst of last season when he couldn't hit his way out of a wet paper bag, Edmundo Sosa caught fire with the Phillies and ended up facing his old team in the abbreviated playoff series. This "orange ice" parallel is numbered to 299.

I know that a lot of people are down on vintage buyback cards, but I kind of dig them. I don't know that I would pay more than a buck for any particular one of these, but I enjoy getting them in the mail from time to time.

The Stadium Club would have never had me as a member back in the day, but I am glad to enjoy the perks of its membership from time to time.

Somewhat stunningly, this is actually the second copy I own of this Troy Glaus gold parallel from 2008. (There's only 75 copies in existence, supposedly.)

Panini's Cooperstown sets were a fun idea, and I wish they had stuck around longer. Mostly, I just want more round cards.

This is from one of those Topps online exclusive sets. Blake Jamieson designed this set and presumably drew the portraits of each player, modeled after the 1951 Topps sets, of course.

This is a "Fractal Materials" parallel. That makes it sound like there should be a lot more going on with this card other than it being super shiny/glossy.

Tracy included a couple of these metallic looking things that were modeled after the 1986 Topps set, still in their respective wrappers. I'm not sure of the story behind these, but they will settle nicely into my box of curios that don't easily fit into card binders.

Panini probably has a different name for these parallels besides "green ice", but that's what I'm going to call them for now. Now that the beleaguered card company has no active license with the MLB players association, I wonder what it would take to see Cooperstown make a comeback in the future?

Dollar Days

Trophies from the card show dollar bin. 

Even though Google Maps tells me I am more than two thousand miles (31 hours of travel time!) away from Busch Stadium, Cardinals cards seem to be in somewhat short supply around these parts. Recently, I took advantage of a $1 bin at the monthly card show that actually had some things of interest for me. I came away with 12 things (for $10 if you bought 12), some of which will end up in future trade packages. Here's what I kept for myself.

This Sweet Spot Update Chris Duncan card, circa 2006, boasts of "game-used swatches". There's absolutely no reason that's not just one big piece of cloth behind the scenes now, is there? This seems silly. All of the pieces are the same color and the threads are running in the same direction.

Josh Pearce is a local guy who got into a few games for a few seasons, but I don't really have any recollection of him. It's always fun to get bat relics of pitchers, though. (ABOLISH THE DH!) This one is numbered to 150.

I was about 80 to 90 percent sure I had one of these, and now that I've scanned it I am 100% sure.

I also have one of these Mulders, something I wasn't really prepared for. Both cards were acquired in 2010 according to my image date stamps, so I guess my excuse is going to be that it was eight years ago?

Here's a fun card of two guys who would be traded straight up for each other about five years later. This is an odd one, of course, in that only Troy Glaus (and not Scott Rolen) gets a jersey piece here.

There often aren't a lot of autograph cards of players who actually played Major League Baseball in these bins, so I was happy to get this 1996 Tom Urbani signature, even though it notes that he had moved on to the Angels at this point. Urbani is a guy who I first heard of when I started playing Triple Play 97 on my PC. I doubt I had any idea he had already been traded when I dragged him out of my bullpen when Mike Timlin inevitably ran out of ammo.

Like the weird Rolen/Glaus mash-up, Upper Deck's Ballpark Collection was notable for pitting a lot of different players together, sometimes with strange results. This is a strange pair indeed. Wood's 2008 would be the year he was reinvented as a reliever and made his second All-Star appearance, while Mulder was more than two years deep into his nightmare of not being able to figure out where he should put his arm to release a baseball. This isn't the first card to incidentally feature a Cubs player relic in my collection, and it almost certainly won't be my last. Thanks, baseball cards!

Curtains

I've struggled to find anything meaningful to say about the Cardinals 2012 season in retrospect, but I know I'm sad to see baseball over for the year. I wasn't all that surprised that the Giants stormed back to take the series. It's happened before and it will happen again. A 3-1 series lead in baseball is rarely safe. This team is its own proof that a solid team can get hot at the right time and overcome anything, even when Ryan Theriot is on the team. The Cards are positioned very well in the future and should be a contender for years to come if they stick to a similar payroll, which they should be able to do considering their usual high attendance and far reaching fanbase. That recent World Series ring doesn't hurt, either.

That's not to say I'm not a little bit disappointed. This team, absent its longtime MVP first baseman, actually felt like they would and should be better than the previous team. The stats bear this out, too, even with some of the injury issues they faced. (Every team gets their share of injury woes.) But as we've seen in past years (think 2004), the best teams don't always win the title. The Cardinals had two vastly superior teams fall in the playoffs in just the past decade. Last year's team was good, but their record didn't reflect it. It took a perfect storm (sorry) of a late season hot streak coupled with the Braves collapse to even get that team in the playoffs. This year's team was better, and their record still didn't reflect it.

These cards came over to me by way of The Angels, In Order. See, I bet you made it all the way through this post without realizing it was trade post. Bat relics are legit, right? I didn't hear about fake bat parts making their way into cards, but who knows.

Team Swapping Hijinks

I find this card fascinating. I originally was baffled that Troy Glaus's 2009 Spectrum card showed him in a Blue Jays uniform when he had been with the Cardinals for more than a year's time when this product hit the shelves, but I assumed it had something to do with Upper Deck having a surplus of Glaus Jays "authentic material" and figured they were being lazy. It's easier to make a relic card that looks exactly like the base card with a spot for the swatch, after all, so the helper monkeys that design card products don't have to think too hard in between banana breaks. However, I won the jersey version on Listia (it's great, seriously) and now I don't even know what to think. Here's a different design and a completely different photo of Glaus also appearing in a Toronto uni with the jersey piece. Glaus played for the Cards for the entire 2008 season and the card makes prominent mention of his being a member of that team.

I foolishly looked to the back of the card for clues that this card at least contained a piece of Canadian stitching, but alas, that's not the case. It very well might. In fact, it probably does. However, Upper Deck will take it to their graves (and they have at least one foot in it at this point) that this card contains official game-used memorabilia of some sort. Whether or not this is Cardinal road grey or Blue Jay road grey is insignificant. When I first saw the card on Listia, however, I knew I had to own it.

Airbrushed Fridays: 2008 Topps #390

Today's airbrushed wonder was nominated by reader James (thanks, James!)

Troy Glaus was already well covered on this blog in a previous Airbrushed Fridays post, so much of the same applies here as well. Sorry, this is what happens when you have exactly seven spare minutes in three days to post on your blog. Glaus spent 2010 with the Braves but has not played since, though he has not officially retired. I could see him getting a non-roster invite to spring training, health permitting.

Why did Topps airbrush Troy's photo? Even though Glaus was an everyday cornerstone of the 2008 Cardinals offense, Topps did not get a real photo of him in their series 2 product for reasons unknown. He was traded by the Blue Jays to St. Louis, straight up, for Scott Rolen in the offseason.

What's wrong with this picture, anyway? Other than the fact that it just looks ridiculous, but the Cardinals do not wear red jerseys during baseball games... not even in spring training.

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.

Airbrushed Fridays: 2008 Topps Finest #89

I'm not sure who came up with the hexagonal baseball card design, but I think it needs to be retired immediately.

Troy Glaus was a four-time All-Star third baseman who is best known for being one of centerpieces to the Anaheim Angels successful run to the 2002 World Series. While not officially retired, he has not played this season and has opted to "spend more time with his family", which I believe is agentspeak for "no team offered him a major league contract."

Why did Topps airbrush Troy's photo? After Troy's Angels run was over, he spent a year in Arizona followed by two seasons in Toronto. The Blue Jays and Cardinals hooked up for an increasingly rare "match trade" in which the teams exchanged third basemen straight up. Toronto got Scott Rolen and his perpetually damaged shoulder out of the deal. Oddly enough, the deal just about balanced itself out. The Cards got an extremely productive '08 out of Glaus, who also displayed some surprisingly stellar glove work at the hot corner while Rolen had an anemic '08 at the plate. 2009 saw Rolen rebound with an .846 OPS before he was dealt to Cincinnati while Glaus made just 32 plate appearances in a hobbled state.

What's wrong with this picture, anyway? There is no number on the jersey front, which really bugs me. The Cardinals went with this look in the late '90s for a couple of seasons (think McGwire era) and I am annoyed every time I see a Cardinal card or photo where there's no jersey number on the front. It just looks wrong. The Cardinals have a good history of rarely messing with their jerseys, which have essentially been the same since they ditched the polyester and stripes era in the early '90s and returned to the navy blue road caps.

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.

Upper Deck: The Real April Fools

On January 14, 2008, the Cardinals sent a declining Scott Rolen to the Blue Jays in exchange for Troy Glaus. Glaus, who is unfortunately injured now and out until at least June, played Gold Glove caliber defense and was one of the main contributors from the plate in a pretty potent Cardinal lineup last season. The card above is my first 2009 Spectrum card - featuring Troy Glaus in a Blue Jays uniform. That's right - a full season and more than a calendar year after being traded, Glaus is back in a Jays uniform in a 2009 product. This is one of the first cards that met my eyes in a stack sent over to me recently from Covered in Wrappers of A Cardboard Problem. The design of the set is also fairly ridiculous and the photo is downright awful (look, in particular, at the expression on Troy's face.) I would like to submit this card in place of, or alongside, the Manny Ramirez Spectrum card that Night Owl nominated for Worst Card of '09.

This is not to say I'm not appreciative of the cards in general. In fact, I probably have an even greater appreciation for receiving crud like this because it means I don't have to buy it. Now, because this appears to be one of those sets where every card has a million parallels and jersey versions, Upper Deck would probably try to tell you that they kept Troy in a Jays uniform because the little jersey chunks are from his Blue Jays years. You know, the ones that they probably have a huge box full of in some storage location. I'm still not having it, though. And was it really necessary to also have the "correct" team pictured in the photo on the back? Oh, I see, it's because it's just a cropped tiny version of his head from the front photo. I appreciate Upper Deck's stance on PhotoShopping, unlike some other companies whose names begin with T, but this is just plain wrong.

I also got a Rick Ankiel card. He couldn't be pictured with the wrong team, of course, because he hasn't switched teams before. I'm kind of surprised he doesn't have a photo from, say, '06 spring training or something though. Should I say something positive? Okay, at least all I need is Albert now and I'll never have to look at this product again.