Bowl Pick 'Em Contest Winnings, Part XXVI

College football will be here again before we know it IS HERE, so I've got to get my prize from last season's Bowl Pick 'Em contest at Cards on Cards posted! My prize for a second place tie was a very generously sized box of cards, so I felt a bit overwhelmed even sorting through them. I finally sorted them out by player, and, as usual, I'll plan to post them all eventually, but I might quit halfway through, we'll see.

Part I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X
XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII XIX XX
XXI XXII XXIII XXIV XXV

We're just about into Bowl Season again. Will I get these done anytime soon?

1986 Topps Traded #82T Jose Oquendo
1990 Sportflics #85 Jose Oquendo
1991 Topps Stadium Club #190 Jose Oquendo
1991 Topps Stadium Club #366 Felix Jose
1991 Topps Stadium Club #481 Jamie Moyer
1992 Donruss - Diamond Kings #DK-13 Felix Jose

St. Louis was Jamie Moyer's 3rd team, and yet he retired 21 years after he left the Cardinals.

1992 Fleer - All Stars #1 Felix Jose
1996 Donruss #87 Brian Jordan
1996 Donruss #153 Tripp Cromer
1996 Donruss #234 Jose Oquendo
1996 Donruss #282 Mike Morgan
1996 Pacific #228 Jose Oquendo

I got a nice handful of Felix Jose and Jose Oquendo cards, among others. Both of them were on the 1992 team which was the first I ever watched. Oquendo had a long coaching career with the Cardinals as well, but has opted to just be a spring training instructor for now. He's no Hall of Famer, but I think the Cardinals should retire #11 for him, for combined playing and coaching contributions to the team.

Zistle Trade #21

This trade was proposed through Zistle, but was with a fellow blogger, Mark Kaz, of This Way to the Clubhouse. Here's his post on my half (or I guess it's now his half) of the trade.

I put a lot of cards on my wantlist. I probably shouldn't do that, because I'll never acquire all of them unless I come into enough money to buy them all, and also enough money to quit my job to focus on tracking them all down full time. But at least it gives traders a wide swath the choose from in order to snag some of my duplicates. This small trade covered some set fillers and some Cardinals-specific wants as well.

1986 Topps Traded #82T Jose Oquendo
1990 K-Mart #12 Joe Magrane
2011 Topps Opening Day - Superstar Celebrations #SC-12 Matt Garza
2012 Topps Update #US185 Donovan Solano
2012 Topps Update #US285 Ian Kinsler
2012 Topps Update #US319 A.J. Pollock RC
2012 Topps Update #US322 Jordan Danks RC
2012 Topps Archives #134 Chris Carpenter
2012 Topps Opening Day - Elite Skills #ES-2 Alex Gordon

The old cards in the trade were a 1986 Topps Traded of Jose Oquendo, the secret weapon, who also played for Mark's New York Mets. The regular 1986 cards seem fairly easy to come by, but the traded sets, as usual, are a bit less common to find. The only other card from that set on my wantlist is Todd Worrell, though a quick look tells me I never went through and exhaustively added all the Cardinals. That would cover the two in uniform, but I collect all Cardinals in any uniform, so I'll be adding Will Clark, Dane Iorg, Joaquin Andujar, and more to my want list. You can see how it balloons so easily.

The full 33-card 1990 K-Mart set is on my want list, and Joe Magrane leaves me with 12 cards to go. I'll bet Nolan Ryan is the last one I'm able to acquire.

Opening Day is a set so cheap that I often decide I'm going to try to acquire every insert among the more common sets, basically everything but autographs/relics/printing plates, and the Alex Gordon and sideways Matt Garza cards are two of those inserts from 2011 and 2012.

I think I completed 2010, 2011, and 2013 Update, but never 2012 for some reason. But, I'm now 4 cards closer on that quest, too.

Finally there's Chris Carpenter from 2012 Archives. I really haven't jumped into Archives with both feet, but I do like getting the Cardinals from the sets. It's a level of restraint rarely seen from me when making my want lists.

Thanks for the trade, Mark! You knocked 9 cards off my want list, but thanks to the attention I paid to 1986 Topps traded, I added 12 more to it.

182 Packs Giveaway, Part VI

When I claimed the Cardinals - and Mark McGwire and Todd Stottlemyre - in the pack-per-day giveaway held at TribeCards, I had no idea just how many cards I'd wind up with, and how many different players. So that I can tag all of the sets and Cardinal players, I've broken this up into a series of who knows how many posts. Thanks for all the cards, David.
[ I | II | III | IV | V ]

2005 Topps Total
#492 So Taguchi

I'm surprised this is the first So Taguchi card I'm posting to my blog. I'm still making up for my lost decade of collecting.

1998 Stadium Club
#48 Delino DeShields

When trying to sort through the huge number of cards, I mis-sorted this 1998 Stadium Club away from the others in Part I.

2007 Upper Deck
#948 Kelvin Jimenez

I still can't believe there are over 1000 cards in 2007 Upper Deck.

1986 Topps Traded
#46T Mike Heath

Traded cards are much harder to come by than regular flagship cards, so I'm always glad to get one of these, especially a Cardinal.

2006 Upper Deck First Pitch
#184 Reggie Sanders

I rooted against Reggie Sanders for so many years with the Reds, and in 2001 with the Diamondbacks, I had to flip 180 degrees when he signed with the Cardinals.

A Random PWE, Part I

That's Plain White Envelope for those of you not hip to the collecting lingo. This envelope of cards arrived a week or so ago, but I didn't recognize the name or return address. I thought about it for about a day and remembered that Jaybarkerfan's Junk had requested addresses and favorite teams earlier in the year, and I thought I remembered sending an e-mail over. I still had to do a little digging, but I discovered that was indeed the source of my new cards. Enough about the back story, I'm sure you want to see more Cardinals on this blog. And due to my obsession with tagging the sets and players, you get this post in 2 parts!

1984 Topps #561 Whitey Herzog

Whitey was pretty much the god of baseball in this town until La Russa won two World Series, and some folks still insist he'd have done better. I was sort of surprised to see that this is only the 3rd card of Herzog in my collection, but he did quit managing in 1990, before the explosion of sets, and before I started buying cards.

1985 Topps #447 Jeff Lahti

I always think of 1985 Topps as "Vintage" and maybe even hard to find, but I now have 8 copies of this card. It makes me wonder if all the Cardinals filtered down to my local shops when I was a kid, and I picked them up in "random" lots, or if there is some sort of worldwide glut of '85 Topps. I also kind of wonder what the odds are of someone sending me an octuplet out of just 8 random Cardinals. Maybe I can figure that out one of these days.

1986 Topps Traded #28T Tim Conroy

I must admit I've never heard of Tim Conroy, but it's always nice to get a card from a Traded set. Those seem to be a little harder to find than the flagship counterparts.

1991 Score Rookie/Traded #63T Gerald Perry

Here's another card from a traded set, which is actually my first card from this set. I do remember Gerald Perry pretty well since he played for the Cardinals until 1995. I also heard this week he'll be the Hitting Coach for the USA Baseball team in the World Baseball Classic this year. Good for him. And he'll be working under former Cardinal player and manager, Joe Torre.

Well there's the first half of the cards. Thanks again to Wes at Jaybarkerfan's Junk, and come back tomorrow for Part II.