Today's eBay post covers the first ever Upper Deck set 1989. As you probably know, this set is widely credited with the shift from brown to white cardstock, which seems to be just slightly thinner and stiffer as well. I can definitely attest that these are easier to line up on a flatbed scanner than other cards of this era I've been scanning, as they still mostly lie flat. There were a handful of duplicates, some from a big lot of Oakland A's I bought awhile back.
When I was a kid and the web was relatively devoid of the minutiae you can now find on it, I had to make up my own back story for players with interesting names, especially if they were not Cardinals and thus much less likely to be discussed on a broadcast I would watch. I always figured Von Hayes was Dutch or Scandinavian, just based on his first name. Of course, his card lists his birthplace as California, and I still don't know where the name Von came from.
I think I've said it before, but to me Randy Ready sounds like a professional wrestler or some sort of local TV commercial mascot name. Wait no,
last time I went with Superhero in a low budget Syfy movie.
Finally, a uniformed Cardinal, Greg Matthews. Mike Gallego also finished up his career with the Cardinals, presumably coming here because of Walt Jocketty and Tony La Russa's experience with him in Oakland. Milt Thompson above was also a Cardinal.
Finally there are two more Cardinals before they were Cardinals, Eric Davis and Danny Jackson. Eric Davis was signed pretty late in his career, but actually played here two seasons, and one more in San Francisco. Danny Jackson was traded away during his final season and finished in San Diego. When I look at that trade, it's not immediately obvious to me who was buying and who was selling, and it wasn't even a deadline deal; it happened June 13. The Cardinals traded Jackson, Rich Batchelor, and Mark Sweeney, and got Scott Livingstone, Phil Plantier, and Fernando Valenzuela. I guess Sweeney was the big piece in that trade, because Jackson, Plantier, Batchelor, and Valenzuela were finished in 1997, and Livingstone in 1998. Sweeney was 27 and played through 2008. At the deadline in 1997 the Cardinals picked up Mark McGwire, so maybe they were trying to clear some salary space. I really have no idea what they were thinking.
I added 41 total cards (the 36 pictured plus the 5 duplicates noted), for 41 cents.
| eBay Bargain Tracker |
| Total Cards Bought | 4327 |
| Total Spent | $58.26 |
| Per Card | 1.346 cents |
| Change | -0.004 cents |
I can almost hear this low budget, Scyfy superhero movie now - cue the cheap synths, "Randy is always at the Ready - he's Randy Ready!"
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