30 Teams in 30 Posts: #1

Warning: The following entry contains images of a particular baseball player that could be deemed not suitable for all audiences. Reader discretion is strongly advised. If you have a weak stomach, sensitivity to light, intolerance towards greed or humans that make more money in a year than a number of countries in the world, please go do something else like watch birds fight over Doritos or something.

I have in the neighborhood of 7500 St. Louis Cardinals cards that I simply do not want. There's no way I'm going to be able to show off a good representation of those cards here. Instead, I simply pulled out a bunch of my doubles of cards that are in my Cardinals shoeboxes. (These aren't actual shoeboxes, of course, but the double-wide storage boxes suited to store cards in top loaders. I have two of these full of Cardinals that I deemed too snobby to be in the regular binders, and a third jammed full of similarly snobby cards that are part of sets that I'm collecting. I don't know why I'm telling you all this. I have a TON of Cardinals doubles. If anyone out there likes Jose DeLeon, Lee Smith, Lonnie Smith, Ozzie Smith, Bud Smith.. all the Smiths(!) or any other Cardinal from the past 40 years or so that I may have overlooked, let me know. I probably have 85 cards of that guy.

This is a "Your Mom" original back, guys. Original back!

See! I told you!

I came to be a Cardinals fan when I rejected the notion that one should always follow the closest geographically located team, even when said team plays ball a couple hundred miles away, and also finally decided to stop picking the same favorites as my father. The Cardinals were an exciting bunch of speedsters in the '80s, and they even had this guy who would run out and do a backflip before games. A backflipping baseball playing wizard! This sounded too good to be true! Furthermore, actually catching a Cardinals game on TV in Oregon in the '80s was akin to trapping the world's largest firefly in a jar and having it make a bunch of firefly babies for all of your friends to see on a cloudless, moonless night. Or something like that. It wasn't until ESPN started carrying MLB games that I got to ever see my favorite team play. That elusive Cardinals game was always out of reach, so the mystery was alluring. I would look at box scores and baseball cards and try to imagine Pedro Guerrero not being terrible at his job.

Favorite current Cardinals player: Chris Carpenter. Sure, Carp is out for the year, but he still gets my vote. As you can probably tell simply by looking at the players that I have singled out on the sidebar of this blog, Carpenter is my favorite. I rarely rank people this way, but Adam Wainwright would have to be second and Matt Holliday a close third.

Is it just me, or is it just as easy to get inserts from this 2006 Fleer Ultra set as it is to get base cards? I have multiples of all of these, not just one or two dupes.

Least favorite current Cardinals player: N/A. I just can't say I dislike anyone on this team. There's no Ryan Theriot this year. There's no Corey Patterson, either. And there, quite possibly, may be no championship this year. That's okay, though. I probably would have picked Tyler Greene simply for how frustrating he's been, but he made one too many boneheaded mistakes and got himself traded to Houston for some stale Wheat Thins and I can't pick him anymore.

The onslaught of mid-'00s inserts of the former first base star continues.

This isn't some specially colored strange version of this MLB 2K6 insert card. It just scanned really oddly. I don't know what's up with my scanner. I guess I probably shouldn't have bought it during a Circuit City fire sale.

This was a 2006 card, but the photo looks like it's from 2002.

I bought this card recently and received another copy of it in the mail the same day. Oops. For some reason that never happens with Cardinals from sets I collect, though. It would be nice, since I always need two of those cards.

Favorite Cardinals player of all-time: Ozzie Smith. I've long since removed all of the anticipation from this post. You just came here for the images, admit it.

Has Topps ever tried doing Heritage minis, aside from these Target exclusive T205 wannabes? Are they going to wait until 2024 Topps Heritage to pull out that gimmick, when it's 1975's turn to shine?

Oh, I have more questions. Did Topps release a 2012 Attax set? What's your favorite color? Is it blue? Do you like pancakes?

Lease favorite Cardinals player of all-time: Jason Marquis. You know, every Cardinal I've ranted and railed against over the years (Kip Wells, Mike Maroth, the aforementioned Patterson, etc.) hasn't really spent much time in the Birds on the Bat, usually due to his own incompetence at playing baseball. Jason Marquis was uniquely talented... unique enough to dazzle one day before four consecutive starts where he gives up 6 runs and walked 6 batters and looks like he'd rather be anywhere else but a baseball field. He was around for awhile. He was on the juggernaut teams of 2004 and 2005 and the team that limped its way to the podium in 2006. That last team opted to throw an unproven rookie into the rotation and left Marquis off the roster altogether.

Thanks to everyone for reading these posts. I still have a bunch of the cards that I've shown here available to trade, so please get in touch if anything looks interesting. I will do a quick "garage sale" type post to wrap things up soon and then this blog heads off on its next adventure. If it's anything like this past adventure, it will be another cheaply disguised ploy to get you to take some cards off my hands.

The St. Louis Cardinals are #1 in my reverse-ranking of favorite teams as of the moment I picked them a long, long time ago on October 4th, 2010. All of these cards are very much up for trade, so please contact me if you're interested.

Trade You, Trade Me

Stats on the Back has a trade-a-thon going on right now. Name what you want, send him what he needs and reap the benefits of someone downsizing their collection. Hey, I'd do it, too, if I had any focus to speak of.

I mostly grabbed Turkey Red and Allen & Ginter, especially from older sets that are a lot harder to find/collect. A few of the cards were also needed for my Cardinals binder, including - surprisingly - this Jim Edmonds card from the 2006 set. Unfortunately, that means I still need a second cop for the set that I could theoretically put together someday.

St. Louis looks like a pretty smoggy place.

Mark Mulder's name is often invoked as a reminder of a blockbuster prospects-for-established stars trade gone wrong. I don't really refute this, but I still am in the (minority) camp of people that feel like it was hard to see Mulder's demise coming.

There were also a few Heritage cards to be had. Mo Vaughn really fills up a baseball card, doesn't he?

Finally, we go all the way back to the inaugural Allen & Ginter set, revival edition. Here's a German Emperor. You can tell he's an emperor because of the mustache.

"Vote For Me"

Vote here because I did this thing. Or... don't, because your vote could cause it to continue! It would be your fault! Your fault!!!

Airbrushed Fridays: 2008 Topps #581

Tyler Greene has played his last game as a Cardinal. I finished watching Wednesday night's Giants/Cardinals contest (if you can call it that) believing that Tyler Greene may have played his last game in the Birds on the Bat. He was the fastest guy on the team by leaps and bounds and a former #1 pick, but at 29, being a middle infielder on a team that is in most years desperate for mere competence, he couldn't do a lot of things right when it mattered. Despite the fact that he's only been thrown out stealing twice in his major league career, he got picked off yet again. Laziness, lack of focus, whatever you want to call it. He's Houston's to deal with now. I wish him the best. He seemed like a good guy. (Oh, the Cardinals lost 15-0, but evened up the series on Thursday with a strong performance by Adam Wainwright.)

Who is this week's victim, and why do we care? Kazuo Matsui had the misfortune of being the second highly touted Matsui to be posted to MLB in a New York market, and he struggled mightily after an average debut season with the Mets. His Astros tenure, for what it's worth, will be best remembered for a gruesome/humorous on the most juvenile of levels injury.

Why does this card exist? For once, I can spare my rant about the pointlessness of a second series of Topps cards when they don't bother to get new photos of players with their new teams in time because it took Kaz two or three weeks before he was Houston ready. Maybe I am cutting Topps too much slack. In any case, Matsui came to Houston in the previous offseason from Colorado, where he somewhat revived his career. His right-handed bat should have played well in Minute Maid Park with its short porch (Crawford Boxes) in right field, but after one solid season he went into decline.

Airbrushed Fridays is a weekly feature as the name seems to imply. If you know of a card with an altered photograph that you'd like to see featured, please contact me. You probably won't win anything other than a hyperlink and some 2007 Topps Heritage gum, but you never know!

Threat Level Bone

Every four years during the Olympics, certain events unfold that make world wide news. The Olympics are also a breeding ground for terror plots and other suspicious activity. A reported 1.5 billion dollars is being spent on security for this Olympics alone. While years of planning goes into a event as big as this, I can only imagine there is one man who is right for the job.

Here are some of the more interesting story lines so far, and a wholly accurate assessment of each from a security perspective:

Usain Bolt Wins 100m Gold, Looks Set To Win 200m Gold, Can't Stop Talking About How Awesome He Is

THREAT LEVEL

Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh-Whatever Successfully Defend Their Olympic Gold

THREAT LEVEL

Water Shortage at Olympic Games

THREAT LEVEL

Some Clown Chucks Bottle Right Before Start of Men's 100m Dash

THREAT LEVEL

(aka Thuggish Ruggish Bone)

This concludes your Olympic Threat Level Assessment, Jay Buhner Division. Jay Buhner is available for autographs, parties, dog shows, and wherever balloon animal ideas are being conceived. Heck, he's even available for some Olympic style childcare.

30 Teams in 30 Posts: #2

It's really simple why the New York Yankees are my second favorite team in all of baseball. My father was a Yankees fan, and so was his father. I don't know where the Yankees history goes in my family beyond that, but it's there and when I was a little kid I was a Yankees fan, too.

I had a Graig Nettles glove when I played little league. I had a Yankees mesh cap as well as a novelty plastic batting helmet. I liked Righetti, Guidry and Mattingly. Reggie Jackson donned the pinstripes, or so I heard, and so did Rickey Henderson. At some point, though, I decided I needed to be my own person and pick my own team. That's about when I started my best friend's favorite team instead of the Yankees.

For these posts, I usually end up digging through boxes of inserts and other cards to come up with 5 or so cards to post. I was barely able to stop at 19 images in this post, and that just represents a small portion of all of the Yankees crud that I have to trade.

Favorite current Yankees player: Mariano Rivera. Hands down, the best closer of all-time. I'm afraid to admit that I did enjoy the Yankees run from 1996-2000 quite a bit. The "A-Rod Years" haven't really been as fun to watch.

Remember these? I have a handful of Yankee Stadium Legacy cards to get rid of, provided that anyone is still trying to put this set together 4 years after it infiltrated all of the Upper Deck products.

Least favorite current Yankees player: Alex Rodriguez. A-Rod is just hard to root for. It's not even about the money with me, really. He just seems like a pretty unlikable person. There's also the whole PED thing to consider...

Not pictured: the rest of the card that my scanner doesn't want you to see.

Wait, how did Jerry Hairston Jr. get in here?

I have so many modern Mickey Mantle cards, it's ridiculous. Topps has pretty much bled this guy dry, taken his blood, and squeezed the juice out of that blood. Well, something like that, anyway.

I collect all things Heritage, but when it comes to mindless, identical Mickey Mantle Home Run inserts... no thanks. I've traded off a few in the past and I still have something like 5 more. Don't get me started on all of the other inserts, home run or otherwise. I have lots of those. Lots!

I do think this is a nice looking card, however. Like the Bobby Abreu at the top of this post, it's a refractor. You can't always tell with scans.

Curtis Granderson is a timeless talent? Seriously? We can confidently say that in 2012, Granderson is a talent that could excel in any era? With all apologies to The Grandy Man, I am having some difficulty with this one. He's a good player, sure, and he may even be a great someday. Oh well, at least it's not Joba Chamberlain.

Favorite Yankees player of all-time: Don Mattingly. The shining beacon of an otherwise dreary period of Yankees baseball was Don Mattingly. He was probably overrated. His statistics as a whole aren't really that impressive. But he was Yankees baseball in the '80s and I liked Yankees baseball in the '80s.

It was also pretty awesome when he was given the mandate to cut his hair, for fear that he would turn the rest of the team into a bunch of dirty hippies or something.

If you're interested in this card, I should warn that it doesn't have sharp corners and has a little bit of a crease in it. It's gin-u-wine vintage, though.

I almost went with Reggie for favorite Yankee for calling out A-Rod on his PED-enhanced numbers, but when I was really getting into baseball he played for the Angels.

Least favorite Yankees player of all-time: Roger Clemens. A ha! Someone even more despicable than A-Rod. Once again, here's someone who diminished an other-worldly career by cheating.

And yet, there are more cards to show. This isn't one of those thick die-cut cards that were given away by the code machine last season. It was a Target exclusive insert from Series 1.

This was another gimmicky insert. It was one of three cards you could pull from a value pack of some sort.

There's one team left, and I'm afraid it's not the Seattle Pilots.

The New York Yankees parade around at #2 in my reverse-ranking of favorite teams as of the moment I picked them a long, long time ago on October 4th, 2010. All of these cards are very much up for trade, so please contact me if you're interested.