Free Stuff Friday: Damaged Goods II

More free stuff. 

 

It's time for another round of free cards to claim. Similar to January's "Damaged Goods" post, these are all cards that I didn't feel comfortable adding to my TCDB trade list for one reason or other. Some of these cards are leftover from last time while others are making their first appearance here.

No qualifications are needed here. If you have something you'd like to send me in return, feel free, but don't sweat it. (If you're someone who likes to pay things forward, you can always send me -- or someone else -- something I might not collect but might be something someone else could use some other day.) I'm happy to also just send these out to be rid of them.

As with last time, if you have any questions about what the damage or flaw is with any of these cards, feel free to let me know and I'll get back to you. You can claim cards here in the comments, on Bluesky, via email or Discord if you know where to find me.

There's a perfectly good set of fingernail stickers if that's your type of thing.

Click to enlarge any of these images.

FYI, not all of the pocket schedules show any damage. I just felt like throwing them in here.

Some police giveaways from my childhood where the community outreach officers would come to your school. I must have upgraded all of these at some point.

Time to Shine

These Affordable Group Breaks brought in some shiny things. 

 

Facebook group box breaks are pretty much the only consistent thing in my card budget at this point. (It's also one of the only reasons I haven't fired my Facebook account into the proverbial sun.) Let's check out some more goodies from some Affordable Group Breaks.

I began my time with this blog and my slow return to collecting cards on an even slower, but grudgingly acceptant trek towards appreciating shiny Topps Chrome cards. It's sad, and true, but I feel like I have an even bigger problem with how much I love clear acetate cards. This means that stuff like Topps Tek is right up my alley, but I don't think I'll ever be able to afford (or let myself afford) to open a box of it on my own.

This particular Topps Tek break (the 2000 set) was actually a player break, and I am certainly not regretting buying the Rick Ankiel slot. This die cut (basically, it's got round corners) Rick Ankiel pattern is numbered to just 10 copies. Nice!

Fast forward a couple of decades to land on the latest Topps Stadium Club release. The 2023 set was delayed into the early days of 2024, and I haven't heard of any news on a potential 2024 release, not that I'm really keeping up with card release calendars or new product press releases at this point. This one is a Chrome parallel of tonight's Cardinals hero Arenado, who hit a walk off grand slam to put the Brewers to bed for once.

This one rivals Ankiel's special gold card as the best of the lot. Alec Burleson basically carried the Cardinals through their early summer hot streak, but the team has come back down to earth and basically fallen through it since those days. Still, there's a lot to be encouraged about Burleson's work at the plate, and he is seen by some as a young option going forward at first base with a lot of other scenarios in play in the outfield.

I feel like Topps Big League inserts are pretty easy to come by, but at last check I'm still lacking the Paul Goldschmidt card from this very set.

The Affordable Group Breaks often offer up some interesting stuff from the past (which no doubt helps keeps things "Affordable".) This fancy looking thing from thirty years ago would have certainly been out of my price range if I hadn't dropped cards altogether for whatever the hell I was up to in the mid-'90s, but it looks pretty nice right now. The Gregg Jefferies card on the right is a gold parallel numbered to 10,000, which would make it more plentiful than almost every parallel these days. It's very challenging to find any numbered card from the '90s now, however.

It's almost football season, isn't it? Yikes.

Domestic Trading Card Day

The annual trading card holiday had a smaller footprint this year. 

 

Topps Trading Card Day was originally a collaborative effort between multiple card companies (remember those?) and was called something like National Baseball Card Day. I've never actually officially participated in this annual event, mostly due to a lack of participating shops in my area. I do usually hit the online markets to try to get what I want, and have managed to do just that this year.

In recent years, the annual event had expanded to multiple products beyond just baseball cards (and was briefly retitled International Trading Card Day), but it appears that it was scaled back to just baseball this year. Each team gets one player in the annual freebie set, and this year's Cardinals representative was Nolan Arenado. I managed to pick his card up in a TCDB swap.

The most exciting thing about this annual promotion to me, as a team collector, is the team-specific giveaways that you can find by going to the ballpark on a specific day. Each team has their own team set based on the Trading Card Day design. These have a holofoil finish that won't show well in the scans, as compared to the plain white card stock of the regular set. Each team set is distributed in five-card packs, and some teams have as many as ten (or even fifteen if I'm not mistaken) cards on their checklist, which means you would have to track down multiple packs to get the whole set.

Fortunately, things are a fair bit easier for Cardinals collectors, as for at least the second year in a row, the stadium giveaway set only contains five cards. Again, these have the same design but a holofoil finish, and you can also see that Arenado (above) got a different photo while Sonny Gray here appears in the expected Photoshopped St. Louis uniform.

Paul Goldschmidt has been a staple of past Trading Card Day giveaways, and he appears here in the 2024 team set as well.

Tommy Edman's presence is a bit of a downer, as he has yet to appear in a game this season and was recently traded to the dreaded Dodgers. I hope he does well there, but I don't want to watch it.

Youngster Jordan Walker rounds out the checklist. I'm hoping his career starts taking off again once there are sweeping changes in the coaching and front office ranks. (They are coming, aren't they? Aren't they?!)

An Old Pack of Cards: Footy

English footballers of yesterday. 

 

Welcome back to another in an occasionally series of packs that have been left laying around on my desk for a number of years, waiting for a rainy day to be discussed. Of course, the weather is very nice (and mild for August) right now as I write this, and my desk was completely cleaned off (and disposed of) in my move last October. However, apparently I let a couple of these stale old packs make the trip with me and they ended up on my new desk for some reason.

230 - Pat Van Den Hauwe (Tottenham Hotspur) - If I recall correctly, Erin was sent this pack along with some sort of online order from an apparel store years ago. This set features players from recognizable clubs that most likely all competed in the top level of English football at the time. It was a couple of years before the Premier League officially became a thing, so most likely they would have been competing in what was known at the time as Football League First Division,

224 - Colin Pascoe (Sunderland) - I'm glad they print the team names on the back, because I wouldn't recognize most of these kits.

150 - Mark Robins (Manchester United) - Remember when Sharp was a big player in home electronics?

209 - Glenn Cockerill (Southampton) - There were a lot of striped shirts in this league. It's funny to look back at the early days of the MLS here stateside and see how many teams tried to go with stripes at first.

257 - Rob Newman (Bristol City) - In-action soccer poses can be pretty entertaining.

223 - Marco Gabbiadini (Sunderland) - This is about the point in most packs where I start running out of things to say.

180 - David Bardsley (Queens Park Rangers) - By and large these players are a generation behind most people I would have heard of, and maybe a generation and a half away from today's young stars.

17 - Chris Price (Aston Villa) - Price kind of looks like one of my co-workers. You know, like the guy you duck behind a corner to avoid when you see him coming?

302 - Steve Davis (Burnley) - We end things here with your typical cool '90s guy.

International Card Exchange

Another cluster of cards from a Canadian friend. 

 

It's been a bit. Let's check out some more sports cards from a variety of sports! This latest batch comes from Sportscards from the Dollar Store, which I received back in May according to my very sophisticated system of records.

Chase Davis was the Cardinals first round pick last season (21st overall) and was recently promoted to High A ball. This little die-cut parallel card is from last year's Panini Elite Extra Edition set and is numbered to just 200. I'm slowly warming up to (some of) Panini's draft-style sets, although there's still a long way to go before I'll be actively seeking them out. I do really appreciate when people send me these types of cards as they can be hard to keep track of.

A huge chunk of the package was dedicated to my 2024 Topps Heritage needs. Buckstorecards was one of the big reasons why I was able to finish off the (low series, non-SP) base set earlier than usual this year.

It is almost football season already. Can you believe that? In less than a few weeks I'll be yammering on in this space again about the Ducks, so it's probably best that I find some more non-football content to post up throughout the rest of the summer and the fall.

Jeff Maehl was a converted defensive back and fan favorite in his time at UO.

I really wish that Upper Deck was still involved in making college football cards, because I tend to like them a lot more than other stuff that's out there these days. There are way too many fledgling companies involved now to keep track of, and checklist data can be unreliable at best, provided that you can find anything.

I definitely tune out the entirety of the NFL preseason, but will be paying attention to the Eagles again once that second weekend in September comes around. D'Andre Swift had a nice run for the Eagles but turned out to be one-and-done in Philly. (This is a silver Prizm parallel, by the way.)

Of course, it wouldn't be a proper Canadian card package without a little bit of the puck-and-ice (stick-and-puck?) This looks to be a card the player signed in person or sent through the mail. Fabbri has been with the Red Wings for several years, but played for the Blues back in the late 2010's.

Padrographs Delivers!

A heaping helping of Cardinals from the renowned Padres autographs collector! 

 

A few months back, a big fat package landed on my doorstep from fellow Portland resident Padrographs. I have been working on a return package of some sort for quite awhile now, but in the meantime, let's check out a few of the spoils of what I received.

As soon as I heard about the Bob Ross-branded Topps online set, it immediately went to the same place as "Ben Baller" Chrome cards and other vanity projects that the big company has put for sale online over the years. That place is not the want list. That's not going to stop me from begrudgingly collecting these when they can fill some spots in my team collection binders, though, even though the set feels a little bit like grave robbery. The main design reminds me of a GQ retread design, which could certainly be worse, but also could be a lot better.

This one is an insert, but uses similarly "inspired" Bob Ross-style background art. There are some goofy variations in the set, where they make player's hair grow like happy little trees or whatever. In any case, more Jordan Walker is always fine by me, even if they had to hassle the estate of the legendary PBS television painter one more time.

Here's a pair of Cardinals sluggers from the multi-sport 2002 Upper Deck Superstars release. This is one of those oddball sets I discovered long after the fact that it was released, especially when it's not always easy to search for due to how it's categorized.

A horizontal (or landscape as we like to call it) photo is the perfect vessel to show off the weirdness that was last year's Halloween-themed "black and orange" parallel from the Topps Update set. The background is gone in favor of the weird striped pattern that almost evokes Charlie Brown, but not quite.

I believe these thicker cards were part of one of last year's "Super Box" configurations that Topps used for their flagship sets. Confusingly, these were named Flagship cards (Flagship Collection?) despite being wholly separate from the actual base set. Also, several times I erroneously called these "Companion" cards, when in fact those were another thing more closely related to the base set. Got it? Good.

I've never been a fan of camo hats and other wearables in sports because they nearly always clash terribly with the rest of the team's colors, but it's nice to occasionally see one pop up on a card just to document the occasion. In this case, most MLB teams have been wearing stuff like this for Armed Forces Day, which just so happened to fall on May 21st, the day after Nolan Gorman's big league debut. (I believe they wore these caps for the entire weekend series.)

This 1969-inspired insert design from last year's Topps Archives set was a bit of a stretch. They took a team poster design from that year and repurposed it as single-player insert cards, slapping a bit of foil on them for good measure.

Another SI For Kids card has entered my collection. It looks like this one is from around 2007 and features Hall of Famer Scott Rolen.

Padrographs has sent quite a few Portland Beavers cards my way over the years. This is from the 1982 TCMA team set when the Beavs were the Pirates AAA affiliate and still riding high on the We Are Family fumes.

I saved the best for last, however, with a card that fits nicely into both my Beavers and Cardinals collections.

For a short time long before I was around, the Portland Beavers were affiliated with the St. Louis Cardinals, which would still resonate occasionally in their logos and branding well into the '00s, with a beaver replacing the familiar "birds on the bat" design. As you can see from the back of the card, this was from a Union Oil sponsored set (in 1961), and the subject (Ray Katt) was a former Cardinal who had started coaching with the Beavers.

Now I just need to dig up some more Padres autographs.