Cards Malaise

For the last year, maybe two, I have felt a sort of malaise about collecting Cardinals cards.  I like players like Matt Carpenter, Adam Wainwright, and Matt Holliday.  However, there has just been a blah feeling about collecting their cards for the past year or so.  Holliday and Wainwright do not appear as signers in certified autograph releases anymore and their cards tend to be the same pattern of base cards mixed in with a few relic cards.  Matt Carpenter does sign for card companies, but I am not sure I am really excited about him as a collector.  I know that's not always been the case.  I loved this card way back when......

Maybe there have been too many Lance Lynn, Kolten Wong, Matt Adams cards the past few years that have dragged me down.  Not my favorite players, but I have still picked up cards of theirs in the past.  I even enjoyed a few of them, but not really feeling these players as good collection options at this point.  Probably my favorite card from these three.....

The Cardinals are having a rough season for the first time in five or six years.  The talent on the team has slowly been getting older and some of the talent has been leaving for other teams.  See Heyward and Lackey.  Still, I collected Cardinals cards through the 1990s and that probably was one of the worst stretches of play in the history of the franchise.  Through all of the losing I found players to collect: Ray Lankford, Brian Jordan, Fernando Tatis, and Mark McGwire.

I have been watching a few Cardinals games during the past week with the intention of finding a player to break my Cardinals collecting malaise and I think I have found a favorite new player.  At least, I am starting to really enjoy watching the Cardinals new right fielder Stephen Piscotty.  I had my doubts when he was coming up through the Minors, but the more he hits the more I believe.  I even have some cool cards of the Stanford alum from back in his prospect days.  This is probably my favorite.....

Now, if you have followed along in this space the last few years you know that I collect everything that is Ray Lankford.  Not many holes in that collection.  I am not going to go that far with Piscotty.  In fact, I will probably never go that far with another player as long as the current format of baseball card products holds for the foreseeable future.  Maybe Piscotty can be another Evan Longoria in my collection: lots of autographs and parallels, maybe even a few 1/1s, but I am not going to break the bank to collect every card....that's not even remotely possible anymore.  Here's my newest Piscotty.  Nothing fancy, but it's a start down a new path....