Wrong Way

The 2017 Cardinals had a lot of help from the Memphis Redbirds.  There were nearly a dozen different Minor Leaguers who debuted with the Cardinals during the past year.  Some were successful, like Paul DeJong and John Brebbia, while others were less successful.  The Cardinals also had a few players who failed to met expectations.

Really third place is not cool in St. Louis, and if I were just going to strictly write a post about baseball, I could write a dissertation about why Matheny should be unemployed at this point.

One of the bigger names, who ended up going the wrong way this season, was shortstop Aledmys Diaz.  As a Cardinals fan, it was fun to watch the Cuban import hit his way into the line up last year.  As a card collector, it was fun to have another Cardinals player to collect.  However, this year was bad on the field, so guess what has happened to his cards?

They're are headed the wrong way.

Which can be good, or bad, all depending on what happens from this point going forward.  Last year I pulled my first Aledmys Diaz card from a box of Topps Traded after debating whether or not to skip the product to buy a single autograph of him.

Last year when I pulled this I had a fellow collector suggest that I sell this card, it was selling for roughly $30 last fall, because there was no way that Aledmys Diaz was going to maintain that sorts of card prices.  My brain might have known that there was truth in that statement, but my heart was happy to pull a card that I wanted out of a box of cards.  How often does that happen?

Even now that this card is selling for a fraction of that $30 price, it is still a great memory.  The card is staying for sure....

Now, that they are cheap and getting cheaper I am actually finding some great bargains on Aledmys cards.  A few weeks ago I wrote about two new cards of his that I had added to the old collection.  Today, I have two more.

First up....

Is a Topps Clearly Authentic card.  This is an acetate set, which I really love.  I also have a Luke Weaver autograph from this set.  Of course, the best part of the acetate cards are looking at the card backs.....

Very nice. Next card....

is an insert from Topps Chrome.  I usually have a pattern of sorts with Topps Chrome, more on that this weekend, and this card does not really fit the pattern.  I am not really a huge Topps Chrome person in terms of autographs.  Often I buy a base autograph, or two, and then call it quits.  I never go after the inserts, let alone the insert autographs.

Overall, Aledmys Diaz cards may continue to slide, but I am still having fun tracking down his cards and that's the most important thing.  Maybe he will bounce back and have a good year in 2018, or maybe he will be hanging out in Memphis, either way there are still some more cool Aledmys cards to find.....

Where Have You Gone Aledmys Diaz?

Not even a year ago I was in my local card shop buying a box of Topps Update.  I had actually thought about skipping the purchase in favor of just buying the base set and using the savings to buy an autograph of Cardinals shortstop Aledmys Diaz.  How often do you walk into a card shop, think about the most ideal pull you could make out of a box, and then pull it off?  Next to never.

Yet, it happened to me last year.  

I love this card and I was so incredibly happy to pull this autograph out of a pack.  However, I have done almost nothing with any Aledmys cards this year.  Topps and Panini are still making Aledmys Diaz cards, it's just that he's disappeared.  First, Aledmys was in St. Louis and didn't really look anything like the guy who was one of the best rookies in all of baseball last year.  

Since Mike Matheny and John Mabry can't actually fix any young players on the Cardinals, Aledmys disappeared completely from the Cardinals.  It's happened before with Randal Grichuk and Stephen Piscotty.  Usually the second they get away from John Mabry the young Cardinals learn how to hit again.  However, Aledmys has disappeared in Memphis too.  He's been out homered by Wilfredo Tovar, although he does have a slightly better OBP with a .306 mark.  Still pretty terrible.  

Aledmys disappearing from the baseball field has actually helped out my collection of Aledmys baseball cards.  Before, last fall, his cards were at least $30 or so.  Now they are $5 on Buy It Now on Ebay.  I'm a little hesitant to even pay that much because I have gotten his cards for less than that just bidding on auctions.  

Not going to weight down a post with too many Aledmys cards, but I have two cards that I have enjoyed more than the others.  Both were steals, compared to last year's prices, not this year's prices....

First up.....

an Allen & Ginter card.  I always love a good Allen & Ginter card.  I especially loved the framed cards out of this set.  I'd always like to have nice autographs, but I will be autographs from the dollar bin if it's on a framed Ginter card.  

Last one.  

Really cool picture on this Stadium Club card which came from the video clip above.  Always a really big fan of these cards too.  On-card autograph, everything about this card is quality.  

Jeteresque Aledmys

Topps is never afraid to go back into their past and borrow an old design.  In my quest to find a few more Aledmys Diaz cards for my collection I ran into a Topps card whose design was borrowed from a popular card from my teenage years.  Kind of make me feel like an old man.

There were a lot of cool 1990s shortstops, especially the latter half of the decade, but one of the most popular and affordable cards belongs to former Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter.

There are flashier Jeter rookie cards, but this one is still really nice.  No foil or premium brand name attached to the card, just a nice card featuring the future Hall of Famer.  If you were going to make a set, using an old Topps design, and feature a set of young and upcoming shortstops this card design would be a pretty good choice.  

There are actually six cards in the set, but I decided to just pick up the Aledmys Diaz card.  The other five cards are Carlos Correa, Trevor Story, Francisco Lindor, Corey Seager, and Xander Bogaerts.  Nice group of players.  

Here is the Aledmys.  

The mark on the side of the card is from my scanner.  Not sure what's going on there, but it's not on the card.  Kind of bothering me, but I scanned the card, put it away, walked back in the room and saw it there.  A little lazy I know.  

The general design is the same as the Jeter with a few differences.  Of course there is the ridiculous RC badge in the bottom left hand corner.  Not really a big fan of the rookie card logos since they have started.  There is also the header on the card.  Since you can't slap a draft pick label on the players in the set I am cool with the new title.  Overall a really cool card.  

I picked up one other Diaz card while I was tracking down this one, really inexpensive, but I like it a lot.  

Bunt, the actually physical card set and not the app, was a really inexpensive box of cards.  I have seen the boxes floating around for next to nothing, but I skipped this product.  The cards look okay, but you can't buy a box of everything.  I'd rather take the $25 I could use to buy a box of Bunt and get a nice single card instead.  

I Was Hopeful For An Aledmys and.....

Card collectors sometimes like to look over the checklists of products before they come out, see what is in the set, and sometimes gleefully hope that they pull something cool they see there from a favorite player or team.  Really, how often does that happen?

I have been on the lookout for an autograph of Cardinals rookie shortstop Aledmys Diaz and had sort of formulated this plan in my mind to skip over the Topps Update product in hopes of putting the time, effort, and money into tracking down that elusive Aledmys autograph.  Welp.

I found myself walking in the door of my local card shop, The Trading Card Co-Op, and found myself standing face to face with Topps Update.  I'd like to think about what happened next as a brief moment of weakness.   Like driving through St. Louis and not stopping for Imos.....

I was trapped.  Jimmy, one of the store owners, insisted that he picked out the Aledmys Diaz card in the box.

So, before we get to the good stuff, here are some of my "hot" takes on the Topps Update set.  Let's start with a few base cards.  I will narrow the few hundred base cards down to my favorite two cards, one from each of my two primary rooting interests....

My favorite Cardinals card in the base set belongs to "rookie" pitcher Seung-Hwan Oh.  He actually spent years and years playing in both Korea and Japan before landing with the Cardinals last off season.  While Aledmys Diaz got most of the rookie spot with the Cardinals, Oh had quite the rookie season too.  I have picked up a few of his cards here later in the 2016 baseball card calendar.  Plus, I like the action shot on this card.  

My favorite Durham Bulls related card belongs to, sigh, former Rays infielder Taylor Motter.  He was actually just traded to the Mariners this week.  I am not even sure what the Rays got back in return, I have brought myself to even look up the players.  More on Motter later this week.  Cool to see a Topps base card of him with the cool long hair.  

On to other things......

My favorite insert set in Topps Update is the Fire cards.  Topps sold these last year as an online product, I picked up a Molina card off of Ebay.  Not sure I every wrote the card up on this space, but it's a pretty cool card.  The biggest difference being that the online cards were metal, these are cardboard.  Still, they look cool.  

On to the hit cards.

My two "relic" cards......

Kind of the typical Topps box.  The All-Star relics have long been a staple of the Update sets.  Jay Bruce is meh, but I pick the Padres colored uniform swatches.  The Yaz "relic" or manu card is okay.  I used to like these cards, but I am getting a little bit tired of coins and the whatnot.  The picture is cool, the card background is cool, the jumbo coin?  I could take it or leave it.  

Last card.  I bet you might have inferred from the title.....

I could not believe it when I pulled this card.  I sat and stared at for a few minutes.  When do you ever pull a card from a checklist, especially a hit card, when you buy a box?  I can hardly think of a time that it has happened to me, but I am glad this came out of one of my packs.  I am still thinking of adding another Aledmys autograph, I have my eye on one, but maybe I will be a little bit more patient with the next one....

Fixing Aledmys

A few months back I ordered one of those Throwback Thursday sets from Topps.  The cards arrived in the mail and were quite disappointing.  Instead of receiving a nice copy of the Cardinals shortstop's first rookie card, I got a bent up card.  Not happy.

I decided that I did not want to miss out on having the card, and it's not like Topps really did anything to help resolve the situation, so I went ahead and traded for another copy of the card.  This time the card came in a nice bubble mailer and was in good condition.

The scan is a little bit crooked, not my best day, but the card also does not have a big crease in it.  After completing the trade it has become clear to me that the best way to pick up these cards is to let other people buy them and pick them up on the secondary market.  Trade partners and sellers on sites like Ebay want to maintain their reputation, they know how to package cards, and if something were to go wrong I probably won't be ignored.  

Besides trading for the Aledmys rookie card I also picked up a nice Wil Myers card.....

This is from this year's Topps Chrome set.  I have picked up some cards from that set, but have yet to post them on here.  This is an insert set featuring different Rookie of the Year winners.  Myers is one of two former Durham Bulls players in the set along with Longoria.  There are also autographed versions of these cards, but the seem like they might be a little pricy.  

National Baseball Card Day

I am not sure when National Baseball Card Day got started, but I had to look back a little while ago to see if I had ever posted or mentioned this day before.  I had not.  I did flip through my cards and found that I had a bunch of cards from National Trading Card Day back in 2004.  I am going to have to make a post out of those cards someday soon.

In the meantime, I decided that it would be cool to share out my first card and most recent card to celebrate National Baseball Card Day.  I have now been collecting for 33 years and have two to three hundred thousand cards.  Hard to narrow it down.

My first card....

I think I have posted pictures of this card before on this blog.  I am not quite sure of all the details on the card other than I pulled the card out of a pack of 1983 Fleer cards sometime during the fall of 1983 after my father bought me a pack of baseball cards from a convenience store in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.  I didn't live there long, but I managed to pick up some packs of 1983 Fleer and Topps cards while I was there along with some old singles from the early 1980s and late 1970s from a Flea Market my brother used to get cards from on Sundays.  

I have a few boxes of cool rookie cards in my baseball card room.  It's filled with all of my iconic rookie cards.  This Jim Smith card sits right in front of my Ozzie Smith rookie card.  Jim Smith is easily the worst player in the box, but I love this card.  I even love the fact that it is crinkled and has all sorts of creases.  

My latest card...

After receiving a copy of Aledmys Diaz's Throwback Thursday rookie card in less than mint condition, I have made the decision to avoid buying directly from them for awhile.  Not going to rehash the entire incident, but lets just say that Topps Customer Service agents don't seem to really care about whether they piss off customers or not.

The incident recently forced me to find a different spot to buy a copy of a Topps Now card of the Cardinals rookie shortstop.  Sometimes different is better.  Branching out away from buying directly from Topps helped me find a seller with Topps Now cards on Ebay who is selling for less than the cards go for on their website.  At least, if you are buying single cards like I am.

This Topps Now card celebrates a walk off single Aledmys had against the Padres a few weeks back...

Definitely the route to go from now on with the Topps Now cards, or anything else that Topps sells on their website.  

Simply Disappointed

As a lifelong Cardinals collector I have been eagerly awaiting the first Aledmys Diaz card.  The rookie shortstop, who was originally called up to be a stop gap for the injured Jhonny Peralta, has turned in a magnificent rookie season.  He's not quite Corey Seager, but he's essentially in the conversation with him for the National League Rookie of the Year.

The big difference between the two as a collector is the fact that Corey Seager has had cards out for several years, while Aledmys Diaz has a few team issued cards from his time in the Cardinals farm system.  Well, a few weeks ago Topps put up the first Diaz rookie card as a part of their Throwback Thursday sets.  The cards are sold in their online store and feature a design from a past Topps product.

Here's a look at the set for sale after it had been pulled down.  The cards are only for sale for one week.

I was honestly a little bit apprehensive about buying these cards.  First, they were $19.99 for 6 cards.  Second, the only other time I have bought something off of the Topps site I was sent two poorly packaged cards.  My post about the two cards is here, or you can check out my scan of the Bryce Harper card that was mailed in a flimsy Ultra Pro top loader with no penny sleeve.

This evening after dinner my son and I walked out to the mailbox to pick up the mail.  He's not really interested in the baseball cards that come in the mail, but he's interested in letters that are addressed to him.  Letters from grandparents, aunts, uncles, and even statements from his bank are reason to celebrate.  Similarly, I get excited when the mailbox opens and there is any sort of padded envelope inside which might be holding some cards.

When the mailbox door opened there were two items in the mail today.  A letter from my son's great grandparents in Michigan and a package from Topps.  He was excited, I was not happy just looking at the package.

It was in a hard cardboard envelope, which isn't terrible, but it just had a big lump in the middle of the package.  I opened the tab on the end of the envelope and my six card set, which cost me $19.99 was jammed into a plastic snap case with a piece of bubble wrap and no other protection for the cards....

Everyone has been mailed cards in a snap container before, but this is not the way to package them and have the cards arrive safely.  Bad things happen.  Here are my cards out of the case....

Which don't look terrible, until you turn them to the side.  This is where the disappointment sets in for a collector who was excited to get their first card of a player they enjoy watching......

or if that's not clear you can try this angle...

I tried, but I should have taken my own advice the first time that I bought cards directly Topps and stopped right then and there.  We will chalk this one up in the loss column and find some other Aledmys Diaz cards to post some other day...