Farewell Randal

The Cardinals traded for Randal Grichuk after the 2013, picking him up from the Angels in exchange for David Freese.  Peter Bourjos and Fernando Salas were in there too.  Most Cardinals fans were excited about the trade.  The Cardinals do not really dabble in speedy players these days, quite a departure from the 1980s teams, so Bourjos was an exciting player, and Grichuk seemed like he was a good prospect with a lot of tools.

The tool most often mentioned with Grichuk upon his arrival in St. Louis was his power.  Well, also he was drafted one spot in front of Mike Trout in the 2009 MLB draft.  As a card collector, I was intrigued.  I sipped the Kool-Aid, dipped my toe into the pool, and picked up a Randal Grichuk autograph.

I had some high hopes for this card.  He was not the cheapest rookie card floating around out there, and if he were on any other team I would have passed on this card by in a second, but for a Cardinals player I was all in.  I am usually really good with buying and passing on Minor Leaguers, I completely missed here.  I was thinking as a fan of the Cardinals and not from the numbers on the stat sheer.

It was easy to get excited about Randal.  He hits home runs.

His first time up with the Cardinals for an extended period of time was in 2015.  He hit 17 home runs in just over 300 at bats.  What's not to love about that?  Sure, he struck out more than 100 times in those 300 at bats, didn't walk, but I was willing to look the other direction a little bit longer.  

Plus, he had even more cool baseball cards.  

That's a nice looking card and it cost way less than my Bowman autograph of him.  I was still feeling pretty good about the prospects of Randal hitting a lot of home runs and becoming a good player.  

Really, he was the same player the entire time.....  

even while he was in the Minors.  

Randal does hit home runs.  Randal does strike out.  That's what he does, that's what he has always done, and it's likely what he is to do when he gets to Toronto.  It's not the worst thing in the world, but at the moment the Cardinals have Tommy Pham, Marcell Ozuna, and Dexter Fowler as starters, with Harrison Bader and Jose Martinez as reserves.  They also have a few good outfield prospects in the high Minors.  

It's right there at the bottom of his stat sheet on Baseball Reference where they average out what Randal would do in a 162 games....

which seems to perfectly match what the numbers above say Randal has done during his time with the Cardinals.  

Which brings me to one more baseball card.  

I feel like this has happened before in the past with Shelby Miller.  As I recall with Shelby, I was watching a card that I wanted on Ebay, the seller had an autograph of the former Cardinals pitcher with no bids, so I typed in something just above the minimum $0.99 bid.  I won the card.  By the time it got to my mailbox, he was traded.  

So, earlier this week I was mailing out a few cards to people on Twitter.  Cleaning out the closet, take my cards kind of stuff.  Sometimes people mail me stuff back, but since I am trying to lessen the number of cards in my collection I usually try to discourage this practice. 

Welp, I had someone insist that they had a card with my name on it and it was just one card.  You already know who it is....

I must say that this is a really nice card.  Five Star cards are always quality and this is actually the Grichuk card that I am most likely to keep in the long run.  On card signature, thick card stock, cool picture of Randal with his well groomed facial hair.  It's nicer than my other two Grichuk autographs.  The card showed up Thursday and he was traded Friday, which is a better story than the other two cards.  Not sure if it's even that great of a story.  

Anyway, farewell Randal.