Rental Returns

How long was Jordan Montgomery on the Cardinals?  

A year and I didn't spend any money on his cards, because he is boring along with the majority of the Cardinals current roster. When the Cardinals traded away a whole bunch of their roster a few weeks back, it was a chance for them to add some non-boring, non-terrible players to their roster and perhaps give me a few new names to collect.  

I was preparing myself for disappointment, but they actually got a decent return for a few rental pitchers.  

In particular, there are two players I am willing to collect.  

First up is infielder Thomas Saggese (sa-jas-ee).  

The Cardinals are playing Seggese at second base, currently with their Triple A team. What makes Saggese a non-boring player?  

This year, he has hit 26 home runs, 34 doubles, and 111 RBIS all with a .381 on-base percentage.  

He's currently blocked by Nolan Gorman and Tommy Edman, so hopefully someone gets traded for a non-boring pitcher who actually strikes out some batters.  

I'm hopeful.  

Saggese has a bunch of cards, including several autographs. Unfortunately, the prospecting crowd has caught up with him, so they can be a little pricey at times. I managed to land this Bowman Chrome autograph in exchange for a few other Bowman Chrome autographs. 

One more, because it's Saturday and I have a long to-do list today.  

Tekoah Roby has a little more risk, because he has an injury history. 

He also strikes out batters, which is something different for the Cardinals. His innings have been limited to just 12 over the past month, but he has 19 strikeouts with 3 walks and an ERA of 3 in those appearances.

Pretty good.  

The prospecting crowd has not caught up with Tekoah Roby, so his autographed cards are generally around $5.    

Walgreens Magic

There is a Walgreens store that is a 5 minute walk from my house.  I have a bit of a love-hate relationship store.  The store is slow and disorganized.  I used to get my prescriptions filled there.  I dropped them when they started texting me to tell me that my prescriptions were ready, but I had to wait 20 minutes for them to fill the order when I actually went into the store.  They once lost a prescription for my daughter.  It was sent electronically.  I was speechless.  

On the plus side, it's convenient and some of the people who work there are entertaining.  There is an older women who works in the morning.  She has worked there for at least 10 years, but complains about working there every time I am in the store. Her latest complaint a few weeks back was something along these lines: "I am restocking the candy aisle this morning. I hate the candy aisle. It's all because people buy our candy and smuggle it into the theater. When the theater was shutdown during COVID, nobody bought candy." 

One women sings along to everything on the intercom and there is a college girl who dances to everything on the intercom.  If there was a lip-synching competition that revolved around only Haim songs, they would win.  

The store manager reminds people to fill out the customer surveys so he gets a bonus at the end of the year.  At least he is honest.  

In the 10-plus years I have owned my house down the street from Walgreens, I have never seen a current year pack of baseball cards in the store. I like those $5 repacks.  Always fun to see all the 1980s and 1990s junk wax in the packs.  Recently pulled a 1988 Topps Dodgers Leaders card out of one of those packs.  

Cardinal legends Pedro Guerrero and Fernando Valenzuela on the card.  

A few weeks back I went to Walgreens at 10 at night.  My wife and I sat outside on our patio while our daughter was playing in the sandbox and our son was hitting some wiffleballs.  She got bitten up by something and sent me down the street after the kids went to bed to buy some Caladryl.  I walked through the store to the back corner where all the First-Aid stuff is located, found what I came for and started walking to the checkout counter.  

I went through the toy aisle and was shocked to see a pack of 2021 Topps cards. 

A little Walgreens magic.  

I have bought single 2021 cards, but this was my first actual pack of Topps.  Pretty amazing to make it more than half a year without opening a single pack of these cards.  Even though it's August, I am going to post the first card I pull out of a pack along with the first Cardinals and former Durham Bulls player as well.  

Here we go.  First card out of a Topps pack in 2021 is.....

former Duke Blue Devil Marcus Stroman.  Long time fan.  I am old enough to remember when Marcus was a second baseman at Duke.  Almost positive I went to an NC State/Duke game at some point where the starting second basemen for the two teams were Marcus Stroman and Russell Wilson.  I like the action shot on this card.  I also like that he looks short here.  If you were not aware, Marcus is really short.  He has a whole line of merchandise he promotes based on the fact that he is short.  

Next.  

Jordan Hicks is my first Cardinal.  The yellow bordered cards are Walgreens exclusives.  Hicks is diabetic and did not play last year.  Nice to see Topps still include him in the set.  

Last one.  

Nick Solak played for the Durham Bulls in 2019, but was traded to the Rangers for Peter Fairbanks.  Solak is solid player.  Prototypical Rays guy who they ran out at 5 different positions.  The Rangers use him the same way.  He's got some pop in his bat too.  The best part of the card is the powder blue Rangers uniform.  So much better than the Cardinals.  

These aren't my favorite cards by any means, but I am happy that I finally got to open a pack of cards from this year.  

Procrastination Post

I am supposed to be creating a portfolio of everything that I did this year as a virtual and hybrid (50% in-person and 50% online simultaneously), but I am finding it hard to get started.  I have a large stack of cards on my desk at the moment since my blogging is down to almost nothing.  So many to choose from, but I decided to go with some random old 1960s, 70s, and 80s cards of former Durham Bulls players.  

When summer hits, I am going to work on putting together the Durham Bulls cards from the 1960s or 1970s set, similar to what I did last year with the 1975 Topps Mini set.  In the meantime, it's fun to just find some of these old cards for cheap.  This group of cards cost me more than $10 after shipping, so roughly a dollar per card.  Hard to pass up.  

Here's what I found, in sequential order by year.  

 

  

 

First up is a 1960 Topps of long-time Major League catcher Clint Courtney.  His claim to fame was starting several fights with the Yankees during the 1960s.   I believe he was a Yankees farmhand at some point and held a grudge against them.  Clint Courtney ended up on the Bulls at the end of his career.  He was the old guy on a Carolina League team.  

 

 

 

This is a 1974 Topps Rusty Staub card from the World Series Highlights subset.  The Mets did not win, but Rusty hit .429 during the 7 game series against the Oakland A's.  Always good to find a Rusty Staub card.   Easily one of my favorite Durham Bulls players from the early 1960s.  

 

 

Next up is a 1976 Topps Ken Singleton.  This set has really grown on me over the years.  I have already found a few of the other Durham Bulls players in this set, plus I have a bunch of the Cardinals too.  I have never put together a full 1970s baseball card set as a project on here.   This would be fun.  Great looking Singleton card with the cartoon Oriole bird uniform.  

  

 

 

Another 1976 Topps card, only this is from the Traded set, which is famous for the Oscar Gamble card.  That airbrushed Tigers logo is terrible, but I still like the card.  This near the end of Rusty's career as an everyday player, also his last year making an All-Star team.  

 

 

 

 

 

Last Rusty Staub of the post.  He was everywhere at the end of his career, including the Rangers for the 1980 season.  He ended up going back to the Mets as a free agent after this year where he played out his career as a bench player.  I remember getting a few of his cards as a kid.  He was the token old guy on the team.  

The last two cards are from the same set.  

 

 

 

 

 These are both from the 1981 Topps Scratch-Off set.  I have one or two of these hanging around somewhere, but not many.  There have been a few other bloggers who have posted some of these cards over the last few months.  Seemed like a fun pair of cards to add to the collection.  

 

Pat Darcy Is Lost

I last updated my 1975 Topps mini Durham Bulls project back in November.  I was down to just eight cards to finish off the "team set" of former Durham Bulls players who appeared in the set.  I already had the big names, Hall of Famers and greats of the era, so I was down to a few commons.

Now, I am down to one common. We'll save that story for the end of the post.  

Yes, the cards are mini even if the scans are large. A little blurb about each player is included.  

Jim Ray is first up.  He was on the 1965 Durham Bulls as a starting pitcher, but spent most of his Major League career as a relief pitcher.  Pretty good during the late 1960s, threw really hard, and was nicknamed "The Ray Gun".   Ray pitched for the Tigers in 1974, but spent the rest of his career in the Minors.  This is his final card.  

Easily the best player in this post.  I've posted a few Bibby cards before.  He was not only on the Durham Bulls, but also a local player from Franklinton, North Carolina and attended Fayetteville State University for college.  Bibby played for the 1968 Raleigh-Durham (it's an airport) Mets.  He had been out of baseball the two prior years serving in the Vietnam War.  Bibby played a total of 12 years, won more than 100 games, which included being a starting pitcher on the 1979 World Series winning Pirates team.  

I was a little disappointed with this card.  I bought it off of SportsLots, but it is clearly not in "Mint" condition.  Overall, a little disappointed with my recent experiences with SportsLots.  More on that later in the post.  I will find another copy of this card at some point.  Morales played for the 1968 Raleigh-Durham (airport) Mets, but spent the majority of his career with the Cubs.  He was long-time coach with the Dodgers and Expos after retiring.  

Leroy Stanton was on the 1968 Raleigh-Durham (airport) Mets.  He played roughly a decade in the Majors and had some good years along the way with the Angels and Mariners.  Probably most noted for being traded with Nolan Ryan from the Mets to the Angels for Jim Fregosi, but was also an original member of the Seattle Mariners in 1977.  In fact, he led the team in home runs and RBIs during their first season.  

Bobby Heise was on the 1967 Durham Bulls.  The first year the team was a Mets affiliate, also the last year before the Mets decided that the team should be renamed after an airport.  Bob played on 7 teams in 11 years.  I could tell you his career slash line, but let's just say that even his slugging percentage is under .300 (that's really bad).  Something nice about Bob?  He could play all the infield positions.  That's all I got.  

I was excited about John Denny's rookie card, but he did not play for the Durham Bulls.  He did lead the National League in wins during the 1983 season.  Nope.  I bought this card for Rawley Eastwick who was on the infamous 1971 Raleigh-Durham Triangles. 

I need to do more research into why people in the late 1960s and early 1970s decided to go away from just using the Durham Bulls name.  Anyway, back to Rawly Eastwick.  

Rawly Eastwick led the National League in saves twice while pitching for the mid 1970s Cincinnati Reds.  Relievers weren't a huge deal back in the 1970s, but Eastwick was a good pitcher. Won two World Series rings with the Reds.  

This was actually a pretty tough card to find.  There are no short-prints in the 1975 Topps mini set, so I am not sure why there are not many of them on Ebay or COMC.  

Last card.  

Ted Martinez was on the 1968 Raleigh-Durham Mets.  He was in the Majors for 9 years, mainly as a utility/bench player. Apparently, he was a favorite interview of Ralph Kiner's during pre and post game radio shows for Mets broadcasts.  As the story goes, Ted did not speak much English, but it was okay because Ralph did not speak much Spanish. I can't find a clip, but apparently they were pretty fun together.  

Let's talk about Pat Darcy.  

Here is the Pat Darcy card that showed up in my mailbox.  

At the beginning of the post, I had stated that the cards were all Minis even though the scans were giant.  Not true here.  I bought a Topps Mini of Pat Darcy off of Sports Lots, but I was sent a regular 1975 Topps card.  I got a refund, bought a second copy, and it appeared to be headed to my mailbox last week.  It was supposedly delivered in the morning last Thursday, but my mail does not show up until late in the afternoon.  It did not show up in the late afternoon, or the next day.  I asked my mail carrier about the package, gave him the tracking number, but all I got a shoulder shrug.  

Pat Darcy is lost.  

Maybe the third time buying a Pat Darcy card will work out better than the first two times.  

Last Year's Bulls

I did not get many cards of the Durham Bulls players last year.  I am not sure why exactly, there were plenty of older players on the team who had cards and certified autographs before joining the team.  I ended up with a few of them over the last two weeks since I have been at home.  Most of them are pretty inexpensive. 

All autographs.  

First up is former Phillies prospect Dylan Cozens.  He was only on the Bulls for two games, and I managed to be at one of those two appearances.  I had seen him before while he was playing for the Lehigh Valley, which is the Phillies Triple A team.  

This autograph is from last year's Gypsy Queen set.  It's an on card autograph, and a really inexpensive card.  Maybe waiting a year to collect these cards might be the way to go.  

Next.  

Jalen Beeks was another player who was barely in Durham.  A grand total of three games, but he pitched over 100 innings last year in Tampa.  Not the best player on the Rays, so I would not be surprised if he ends up back in Durham again at some point.  Beeks is another player I saw a few times playing for another team.  He was on Pawtucket for two seasons prior to joining the Rays last year.  

I like the Chrome autographs.  I think he actually has two of these, but one of them has a sticker autograph.  I like this card.  

Next.  

I saw Nick Solak while he was at Louisville.  He played half a year with the Bulls last season, and then got traded away to the Rangers.  They brought him up to the Majors at some point, and he ended up hitting.  I think Solak has a chance to be a decent player in the future.  I really like the 1985 Topps design on this card.  

Last one for tonight.  

I love when the Bulls have players like this on there roster.  Emilio Bonifacio has played 11 years in the Majors, and made more than enough money to retire.  Yet, he spent time as a 30 something year old playing baseball in Triple A.  I think you really have to like the game to stick around and ride the bus around in the Minors in that situation.  

This is an older autograph from the 2010 Upper Deck set.  Bonifacio actually has a bunch of autographs from earlier in his career.  Some are pretty nice.  

I Love The 1990s Cardinals Part 69- Todd Burns

Todd Burns has been on my list of 1990s Cardinals players to get a post in this series for awhile.  He does not actually have a card as a Cardinal, which may actually be a good thing.  Burns appeared in 24 games for the 1993 Cardinals.  If you ask Cardinals fans who watched the team in the 1990s to name some of the worst players to appear for the team during the decade, there is a decent chance that Burns would make the list. 

I would have put him on mine too at one point.  

Rewind a little bit.  I actually had this post drafted awhile ago and then decided to rewrite it a bit after thinking a little bit more about the situation.  Let's start out with the good Tood Burns.  I have a bunch of different Todd Burns cards in my collection from his days in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the Tony LaRussa A's teams.  

In 1988, Burns went 8-2 in 14 starts with the A's en route to the team winning the American League West and playing the Dodgers in the World Series.  The next season, Burns moved to the bullpen as a long reliever.  He went 6-5 with an ERA+ of 166, which was second in the A's bullpen to Dennis Eckersley.  The A's won the World Series, Burns pitched in two games, and did not allow a run to the Dodgers.  Similar story in 1990, except he did not pitch very well in the World Series.  

Although, the A's got swept by the Reds, so really nobody on the A's played very well that Postseason.  

In 1991, Burns spent two different stints on the disabled list with the A's missing almost the entire season, save for nine games in the middle of the season.  The A's let Burns walk after the season, he signed with the Rangers for 1992, and was never quite right.  His career ERA with the A's was 2.81, with the Rangers it was always higher.  In the half a season he played with the Rangers in 1993 it was 4.57.  

In the middle of the 1993 season, the Rangers managed to dump Burns off on the Cardinals.  On the day the Cardinals traded for Burns, they were 6 games behind the first place Phillies, and they needed relief help.  Burns was the only reinforcement that August Busch's thrifty ways allowed the team to acquire.  

A Burns card with the Rangers.  

It would be easy to sit here and spend a few paragraphs telling you how terrible Burns was during the second half of the season for the Cardinals,.  I am going to say it now, he was bad.  However, I have decided that it was not really his fault that the situation turned out the way it did with the Cardinals.  All things considered, fans in St. Louis should probably lay off the guy a little.  

First, he had been racking up the injuries in the year and a half prior to the trade.  Clearly something was not right physically with Burns.  Second, he was a really good pitcher for a championship level team while he was in Oakland.  If the Cardinals had traded for another relief pitcher, added Burns as a player who they were taking a chance on down the stretch based on previous success, I think he might have been remembered a little bit differently.  

Took a chance and did not work out is a lot different than did not work out and we had everything riding on this one player.  

Another Todd Burns card from 1993.  

In the end, the Cardinals released Burns at the end of September of 1993.  He pitched the 1994 season with the Mariners Triple A team in Calgary and did not fair well.  That was pretty much the end of Todd Burns career.   Moving forward, if you are going to speak ill of Burns, please place all the blame squarely at the feet of August Busch instead.  

Set Project Update: 1983 Kellogg's

My original post for this set can be found here.

To summarize, I am trying to put together a few more sets that would be in the "oddball" category that are from the 1980s and 1990s.  Things like the Kellogg's and Hostess cards, maybe some of the Denny's sets too.  I started out with 9 cards, which were mainly Cardinals cards, a few players with connections to the Cardinals, like Jack Clark, and a few that are somehow connected to the Durham Bulls.

My goal is to finish in two months, it has now been over a month and I have crossed off another eight cards from my checklist.  That brings me up to 18 out of the 60 cards, or 30% of the set.  I am going to have to pick up the pace a little bit in the next month in order to finish this project in my allotted amount of time.

I am going to break these down into two groups.  The first five came from a Sports Lots seller.

I had a couple of more recent sets that had some holes in them, nothing worth posting as a project, but I always have trouble getting combined shipping on that site.  It's a cheap way to get single cards, but if you have to pay shipping to each person you buy a single card from, it makes it expensive.  

In this case, I found the four or five cards that I needed for my recent set, and also ran across these five Kellogg's card for this set project.  Love combined shipping.  

Next three.

I got these in a trade with someone off of a Facebook group.  They were not originally part of the trade, but I have been asking, while working on other trades, if people have any 1983 Kellogg's cards.   I ran into one collector.  

While I feel behind on this project, 70% more to fill the set, I actually have a bunch coming in off of COMC that I got by making offers, and a few more that I have pulled in from Ebay and another Facebook trade.  On paper, it looks possible, but it's going to be close.  

More Kellogg's early next week.   The updated checklist....

1 Rod Carew 

2 Rollie Fingers 

3 Reggie Jackson 

4 George Brett 

6 Pete Rose 

7 Fernando Valenzuela 

8 Rickey Henderson 

9 Carl Yastrzemski 

10 Rich Gossage 

11 Eddie Murray 

13 Jim Rice 

14 Robin Yount 

15 Dave Winfield 

16 Harold Baines 

17 Garry Templeton 

19 Pete Vuckovich 

23 Willie Wilson 

24 Johnny Ray 

26 Andre Thornton 

27 Leon Durham 

31 Nolan Ryan 

32 Dan Quisenberry 

33 Len Barker 

34 Neil Allen 

35 Jack Morris 

39 Jim Palmer 

40 Lance Parrish 

41 Floyd Bannister 

42 Larry Gura 

43 Britt Burns 

44 Toby Harrah 

45 Steve Carlton 

46 Greg Minton 

47 Gorman Thomas 

51 Fred Lynn 

52 Dale Murphy 

53 Kent Hrbek 

54 Bob Horner 

55 Gary Carter 

56 Carlton Fisk 

57 Dave Concepcion 

58 Mike Schmidt 

59 Bill Buckner 

Quick By My Standards

I have let some of the different set projects that I have posted in this space linger for a long time, either because I did not complete them quickly, or I just never updated the project to show my progress.  Back at the beginning of February, I made a post about putting together a set of the 1983 style cards in that are included in packs of this year's Topps base set.

I started with 8 of the 100 cards, last check in I was down to just 27 cards.  Last week that number was all the way down to 2 cards.  A few days ago in the mail I got a bubble mailer with......

the two cards that I was still missing.  I am crossing this card set off after just two and a half months.  Really pretty good considering that I did not open a box, or significant number of packs.  Almost all 92 cards that I was missing when I started were picked up in trades, or from buying small lots, no singles, off of EBay.

Yes, the set is finished, but I am also going to leave the door open to find more of these cards when Topps releases Series 2 at some point this summer.  There were some things that I really enjoyed about this project.  First, the 1983 sets were the first cards in my collection.  I started opening packs of cards at some point that summer.  I have always loved these cards.  Second, there were plenty of players that I enjoy collecting on the checklist.....

a few Cardinals, a few former Durham Bulls, and also a few players I saw while they were in college.  The Carlos Martinez card is probably my favorite Cardinal.   Also plenty of older players in the set too, which is my lone, small criticism of this set.  It would be nice if the cards of the retired players included on the checklist had a connection to the actual year of the card design.  Might have said this in another post.  My three favorite older cards in the set.....

probably have to be the three shown above since they were actually around and playing in 1983. 

All three were younger players at this point, but they still were pretty impactful that season.  Especially Ripken, considering the final play of the 1983 season was a soft line out to him, which ended the World Series.  

 There were plenty of good players who were active during the 1983 season, eager to see what Topps comes up with in the next batch of cards in Series 2.  I'd be excited to see a Tony Gwynn, Wade Boggs, or a Willie McGee.  Doubtful I will see a McGee, but a Gwynn in some brown, orange, and yellow Padres digs would be sweet.  

I Love The 1990s Cardinals Part 27 - Alan Benes

The better of the two Benes brothers who pitched in the Majors.  Well, it was shaping up that way until his shoulder fell off.  His first full season in 1996 was fairly ho hum with 13 wins and an ERA of nearly 5.  Then there was 1997.  His record was only 9-9 through the beginning of July, with ERA of 2.89, and 3.5 WAR.  At the time he went on the disabled list, he never returned that season, his numbers were right in line with pitchers like Kevin Brown, Curt Schilling, and Tom Glavine.

Not the top tier with Maddux and Pedro during that 1997 season, but a very very good pitcher.  Mind you he was only 25 and his numbers had been trending up to this point in his career prior to the injury.  Could the first half of the 1997 season have been a complete fluke?  Sure, but I tend to think that he was headed that direction.  Not a stretch to say that the numbers put up by Alan Benes in 1997 were better than anything posted by Andy in his 14 years in the Majors.

The Cardinals drafted Alan Benes out of Creighton in the first round of the 1993 Draft.  He was a pretty highly regarded draft pick and immediately made his way through the Minor Leagues.

He had baseball cards almost right away too.  Like all mid 1990s prospects, he had a bunch of cards in Bowman products, but I actually liked his Upper Deck cards from that era better.  Benes was in both the 1994 and 1995 Upper Deck base sets.

He was in the 1994 set as a Top Prospect.

A lot of these cards were draft picks from 1993, it might have been all, did not do that much homework on the checklist.  When I think of these Upper Deck prospect cards, I always remember the Billy Wagner rookie.  He was taken a few picks in front of Benes in that draft.  The Benes card kind of sticks out because of the uniform.  I was never quite sure where the good people at Upper Deck took this photo, but that Cardinals uniform is straight out of the 1980s.

It could be that this card was made at some sort of photo shoot, or if they took it while he playing for a Minor League team that wore the old polyester Cardinals uniforms.  I found a Dmitri Young card from 1994 where he is playing for the St. Petersburg Cardinals.....

and wearing an old polyester style Cardinals uniform.  Young played for the Cardinals A Ball team in 1993, Benes played there in the early parts of 1994.  The Benes card is a high number, second series later release, so it would have given Upper Deck time to have taken the picture after the season started.  I would lean that direction for the picture.  

Benes was also in the 1995 Upper Deck set as a top prospect.  

They use pictures of him in the polyester uniform again, even though he was in Double A and Triple A during the first parts of the 1995 season.  He actually pitched a few games for the Cardinals towards the end of that season.  I hate recycled pictures, and the effort on this card seems really low when you take into account that his 1995 Upper Deck Minor League card had an updated photo of Benes playing for the Arkansas Travelers.  They would have been the Cardinals Double A team at that point.

I still like the blue background on the 1995 Upper Deck card.  I always prefer to see what is actually happening in the picture when it's an action shot, but this backdrop seems like a good Upper Deck card design element from the mid 1990s.  

Is this a game shot, or is he throwing in the bullpen?  You will never know.  

Before we get to the Major League cards of Benes, I would like to put up one more Minor League card of sorts.  Upper Deck had some Arizona Fall League cards in their Collectors Choice product in 1996.....

which had an Alan Benes card.  There are some other Arizona Fall League cards which have been floating around in more recent sets, but the Minor League players in that league now just wear their team's Major League uniform with a Fall League hat.  I like these mid 1990s cards when the Fall League teams had there own uniforms.  

Not sure when the unis switched over, but I am sure it was some cost saving move.

Benes did not have a ton of cards once he reached the Majors, mainly because he had a major shoulder injury towards the end of the 1997 season and was never quite the same pitcher after that year.  I have it narrowed it down to three or four cards.  

First up is my favorite card of Benes, which is 1997 Topps base card.

Speaking of recycled pictures, if you look up the other Alan Benes cards that Topps made in 1997 they are either this picture, or a photo that was taken from this moment in whatever game he is pitching in here.  Why do I like this picture?

I like the background of the picture.  It's a nice action shot too, but the Cardinals had spent the first half of the 1990s with an astroturf field and blue walls in Busch Stadium.

It's how Busch Stadium looked during my childhood through my years in high school.  After the Rams played a few games there during the fall of 1995, the playing surface was changed over to grass and the outfield walls were painted green.  

I have good memories of the blue walled, astroturfed field of the 1980s and early 1990s, but the green grass and green walls were a nicer place to watch baseball.  The 1997 baseball cards were the first year where you could find a plentiful number of Cardinals with the green fixings of Busch Stadium in the background.  I like that on this Benes card.

A few more classics from the mid 1990s....

The Emotion XL cards were always pretty cool cards.  Sometimes I could clearly see why the cards had a certain emotion printed on the side, other times not.  Alan Benes is excited?  He looked this way.....

almost every time that he threw......

a pitch.  

Good effort though and I still like these cards.  You cannot get them all right, but I am just excited that a smaller set from the mid 1990s had a Cardinals player in it outside of Ray Lankford, Ron Gant, or Dennis Eckersley.  Did not get many Alan Benes cards in these types of sets.  

Next.  

Another classic 1990s set.  Still trying to figure out what the Crusades have to do with baseball cards, but the design is really nice.  Sad story behind this card.  A few years ago this guy with basically everyone of these Crusade cards, all of the color variations, was dumping them all on Ebay.  I tried buying the Lankford red variation, a print run of just 25 cards, but the card ended at almost $200.  I lost, but I won this Alan Benes card.  

Last one.  

Alan Benes does have an autographed card in the 1997 Donruss Signature set.  It's not very hard to find and is also very affordable.  For whatever reason, Benes signed all of his cards across his picture rather than the space for the autograph that was provided at the bottom of the card.  There were not many players who missed the memo on where to sign these cards, but curiously three of them were on the Cardinals at some point during their career.  Benes from above.  

Edagr Renteria also signed his picture, as did Larry Walker.  

Benes did pitch after sitting out the 1998 season recovering from his shoulder injury.  Between 1999 and 2003 he only managed to pitch in roughly 60 games.  He was on the Cardinals until the 2001 season when he became a free agent and signed with the Cubs.  Benes would also pitch briefly with the Rangers and tried a comeback with the Cardinals in both 2004 and 2005.  Neither was successful.  

You can find an occasional Benes card from the later years of his career, but they are rather sparse,

although its nice that Topps made a few cards of a player who could have been great, minus the injuries, even though he did not ever live up to his potential.