This card was the beginning of a really bad, although short-lived trend. During the second half of the 1990s, Topps decided to place a protective sticker over the front of all their Finest cards. My bad, it's a "coating", which is fancy-speak for sticker. They were annoying in that they covered up the photograph on the front of the card. The stickers also presented an odd dilemma. Do I peel the sticker off and enjoy the card the way it should or do I leave the sticker in place?
Does removing the sticker diminish the value? Is it still in mint condition if I remove it?
I left the sticker alone.
I really like this photograph. There are plenty of cards with Ray Lankford wearing sunglasses, but I cannot think of another card where he is wearing regular glasses or goggles. In fact, I took a quick stroll through a few of the Cardinals social media pictures from their recent team Hall of Fame events (Lankford is in) and I cannot find a picture of him wearing glasses there either.
Maybe there is another reason to wear glasses?
Cut down on glare?
Windy and dust?
I do not know. I do not wear glasses. What I do know is that the Cardinals need to go back to wearing their blue hats on the road full-time. I know that I say that in every other Random Ray post, but I honestly cannot say it enough. I want blue hats all the time on the road.
Back of the card.
The stats are simple, but solid.
The Finest Moment is actually a really nice moment.
The color photo of Ray Lankford on the side looks nice with the green and gray in the background.
It's a busy day, so I am going to keep this short, simple, and sweet. I have people to see and places to go.
My son, fifth grader, took one of his End-Of-Grade tests on Friday. He worked really hard, which is all I really care about on standardized tests. According to his teacher, he gave it.
He choose a trip to the baseball card store and an Oreo Cookie Blizzard from Dairy Queen as his reward. There was a card show at the State Fairgrounds this weekend, but the little man does not always dig being in big crowds, so we went to our local card shop in Apex, North Carolina, Cardiacs.
Sorry, no photos of the Oreo Cookie Blizzard.
They're not exactly dollar boxes or quarter boxes, but they have a section of shoe boxes that has a lot of cards that are anywhere from a quarter to a few bucks. He loves them and will dig through them trying to find cards of players he has seen in games or has read about.
This is half the wall. There are more boxes on the other side of the television.
It was not my best photography day.
Beyond getting a few single cards, we also picked up a few packs of Topps Series 2 cards. The little man pulled a few decent cards. Although, he also pulled a Javy Baez and Corey Dickerson, which were gifted to me because he does not like them.
I did very well for myself, pulling a Home Field Advantage card of Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina.
I had to pinch myself.
I know the odds for these are pretty steep. I just wish the background included things that locals would recognize and appreciate and not just all the tourist attractions. I would throw a toasted ravioli on there, the Dirt Cheap Chicken, and one of those orange St. Louis City service trucks.
I don't make custom cards, but here is my five minute effort to make this card feel more like St. Louis.
Not every Albert Pujols card is sunshine and lollipops.
Let me tell about my Christmas gift to myself in 2005.
I had just moved to North Carolina a few weeks earlier and decided to hang out with a few co-workers for the holiday rather than driving all the way back to Missouri. There are a lot of transplants in these parts, so it's not hard to find people who host other people who are away from family. I had a nice dinner and spent a few hours getting to know some of the people I worked with a little better. I returned home after dinner to open some presents.
As a Christmas present to myself, I had bought two boxes of Donruss Diamond Kings the previous week from Charm City Cards. That place used to have some great deals on wax boxes. Apparently it is still a place.
Like all Diamond Kings products, these are art cards. They are typically very well done, but not this set.
This is one of those moments where I should have done a little more homework. I saw "2 autographs for $35" and not "These are really ugly cards". They painting of Pujols is not half bad, although the bat is wrong. The painted ring around the middle of the bat is a Rawlings, but Albert has used Marucci, Louisville Sluggers, or Sams Bats for the majority of his career. No Rawlings.
They are also typically blonde wood with black lacquer finish on the top half of the bat.
I am a stickler for details.
What's with the design? What is it exactly? There are white lines around the edge for a border, black vertical lines, a wide blue textured stripe going down the middle of the card, and the grayish area that makes up the majority of the background has a different texture. Lots of colors, lines, and textures all with a tiny painting of Albert.
Give me a simple frame and make the painting larger.
This card is a mess.
The back of the card is a little bit better. Less colors, less textures. The write-up is not bad either. The bottom half of the card is a little weird. Do we really need crowns showing the sets where they included Albert Pujols? He is a player who is a no-brainer to include on the checklist, no?
The artist bio is weird too. Name dropping your father? Listing your place of residence on the back of a mass distributed baseball card. What am I missing here? Weird bio.
The first few years that I wrote in this blog space, Jon Jay's baseball cards frequently appeared. He was a solid member of the Cardinals. He played a good center field and got on-base at the top of the lineup in front of Albert Pujols, Matt Holliday, and others. Who wouldn't want a card of a key cog from their favorite team?
Jon Jay always had great looking cards.
Better yet, Jon Jay is one of the more likable players from the past decade.
Today, the filler Cardinals content in baseball card products beyond Goldschmidt, Arenado, Molina, and Wainwright features far too many cards of players I do not enjoy very much. Paul DeJong comes to mind. Ten years ago, the Cardinals secondary tier of players included Jay, David Freese, Lance Lynn, Furcal, and Joe Kelly. This groups had personality and their on-field faults did not include hitting .200 with 150 strikeouts.
Recently, Jon Jay announced his retirement from baseball, and I am going to miss him.
Card companies gave up on making Jon Jay cards two or three years ago even though he was on both the White Sox and Angels in a limited role. I actually think he has a White Sox card or two, I just do not own them. Anyway, I thought I would take a few minutes on this Sunday morning to share some of my favorite Jon Jay cards.
There is also a bat.
The oldest Jon Jay card in my collection came from the 2005 Upper Deck USA Baseball set when he played for the College National Team. Jay played on several College World Series teams during his time at the University of Miami. Unfortunately, I was still living in Missouri in 2005, so I missed out on seeing him play at the USA Baseball facility up the road from my house.
I actually wish I had more cards of Jon Jay as an amateur player, but there is only one card that I know of showing him as a college baseball player. However, the card was made after the Cardinals drafted him. It shows him wearing his batting practice jersey from Miami, but it identifies him as a member of the Cardinals.
Jon Jay was a good Major League player, but he's one of those professional athletes who was a really important amateur player. Talk to people who have extensively followed college baseball and they can properly summarize his impact on the sport in the early 2000s. Jon Jay deserved a few more cards featuring him as an amateur. Especially given the large number of college baseball products that were released while he was in the Minor Leagues for the Cardinals and those that have looped back to show current Major Leaguers playing as amateurs.
The University of Miami has 4 National Championships in baseball and appeared 25 times in the College World Series. Jon Jay is considered one of their best all-time players.
I am going to stray from baseball cards for one second to share one of my favorite Jon Jay pieces in my collection, which is connected to his amateur playing career. This is a used bat that I picked up a few years back at USA Baseball.
They frequently sell game-used equipment at their team store. I managed to stumble across a Jon Jay bat. It has a huge crack in the barrel, but it is still a really great item that I am proud to own.
The top of the bat is cupped out and shows Jay's USA Baseball uniform number from the 2005 College National Team. It hangs proudly in my baseball card room.
Now, back to cards.
My favorite base card of Jon Jay is his 2013 Topps card where he is crashing into the wall of Busch Stadium next to a giant picture of Tony LaRussa.
This is from a playoff game in 2012. The Cardinals were playing the Nationals in the first round. This feels like a picture that would be on a Stadium Club card. Topps rarely goes all out for their base set, but this is a great looking card.
The colored parallels of this card are nice too......
even if you cannot clearly see the picture of Tony LaRussa on the wall. He's a crazy old man these days anyway.
Jay's 2014 Topps card is also quality, but I am going to show that off as my favorite Jon Jay insert. It's technically a parallel, but it's not like anybody is going to make an insert featuring Jon Jay. This parallel card of his 2014 Topps card is one of my favorite modern Cardinals. It's an acetate parallel, which has a very low print run of 10 copies. Serial number in the bottom corner.
Phenomenal picture again with Jay jumping to high five Matt Holliday.
I really love the backs of the acetate parallels with the contrasting greyscale picture of the players with the colored background that is a mirror of the front.
'Tis a thing of beauty.
Let's pick up the pace.
Topps included him in their 2011 Anniversary Giveaway set. These were available online via a contest website. Considering Jon Jay was not supposed to even be the starting centerfielder for the Cardinals that year, this was a pretty heads up call to include him on the checklist.
Colby Rasmus was actually supposed to be the Cardinals long-term centerfielder, but he was a pain in the ass and ended up getting traded to the Blue Jays for a whole bunch of pitchers in the middle of the season.
Next up, some Jon Jay relics.
Giant bat piece.
Smaller relics from Allen & Ginter and Gypsy Queen. I love the frames around these relic cards.
Horrible scan of an autograph.
What happened here?
More Autographs.
Autographs in top loaders.
Autographs out of top loaders.
Even more autographs.
And another one....
Last one.
If there is one Jon Jay card I wished I owned, it would be a card of him pitching for the Cubs in 2017.
Nobody made a card of him as a pitcher and it's frankly disappointing.
I want to do a few Pujols rookie cards along the way. At some point in the past two years, I did a longer post about all the Pujols rookie cards that have ended up in my collection over the years. Today, I thought I would focus on one of the cards and give a little back story.
Several times in my life I have dabbled with not teaching.
One of those instances came within the first year or two of graduating college. I ended up taking classes to get my real estate license and worked for a Prudential office in suburban St. Louis. I was half-way decent at the job. I worked there for roughly a year and sold (helped people buy) a bunch of houses along the way. Like any job, there were good things and bad things about work. For this post, I am going to focus on the bad.
Sorry, real estate people.
I am not some great real estate sales expert, so maybe this take is completely wrong. Everything that I sold was from a person who was connected to a person I personally knew. Nobody (rarely) ever walked into, or called the real estate office and bought something. Cold calls in real estate are a complete waste of time. Still, the agents at my office were required to spend time each week answering phones at the office.
The majority of the calls were loan officers, underwriters, attorneys, or other real estate agents trying to get ahold of the real estate agents in our office. It was a complete waste of time and likely just a short cut for the broker to avoid having to pay out salary and benefits to a receptionist. It was not the best run ship and is no longer open.
Complete shocker.
According to the internet, the old office is available for rent for just $585 a month. Whoever took this picture did a great job of not including the gigantic empty lot behind the office that used to be a shopping mall. Don't worry, I have got you covered.
I survived my time playing receptionist at the real estate company many different ways, including opening a few packs of baseball cards. There was a nice little card shop right down the street from my office called "The Sports Card Dugout". Randy, the owner, ran a great little store.
While I do not live in St. Louis any longer, as far as I can tell, the Sports Card Dugout is still open for business. Obviously better run the real estate office.
The worst days to get receptionist duty were Saturdays. Nobody called. Nobody even came into the office. It was hours of sitting alone in an office with nothing to do. Well, expect opening baseball cards, reading some books, and surfing the web.
I pulled my 2001 Upper Deck Albert Pujols card on a Saturday at the real estate office. I already had a few Pujols rookies by the time Upper Deck Series 2 was released, but any chance of pulling one of his cards was a huge deal that summer. Many of his rookies were short-printed and hard to come across. The Upper Deck Pujols rookie was one of his first widely available rookie cards.
I did not miss out.
Here is the card.
I love the action picture on the front, which was taken in Coors Field. The Cardinals started the 2001 season on the road with the season opener coming against the Rockies. Upper Deck always had great photography, but I love that they got an action photo from within the first few games of the season for this Pujols rookie rather than using a staged Spring Training photo.
Here is Albert's first career hit against the Rockies.
The back of the card.
Considering Pujols had been in the Majors for a short time, this is a pretty good little write-up.
Overall, there is nothing flashy about this 2001 Upper Deck Pujols rookie. It's just a solid baseball card from the early 2000s. Over the past 20 years, this card has aged well and is one of the better Pujols rookie cards out there. More importantly, this Albert Pujols card helped me get through one extraordinarily uninteresting Saturday waiting for the phone to ring at a real estate office.
I found more retail baseball cards this past weekend.
I think we have officially moved past the pandemic retail card craze.
The Target next to my house had physical fights over sports cards that required police intervention during the pandemic. They pulled them from the shelves and they have not returned.
Fighting. Over. Cards.
So, the cards from this post came from my local Wal-Mart, which is low on my list of places to shop. I recently wrote about the Wal-Mart that is halfway between the Duke and UNC campuses. The Wal-Mart near my house is interesting for different reasons. It's the cultural intersection of suburban-dwelling transplants and old farmers who can tell you what kind tobacco was grown in your neighborhood before it was developed.
That's for a different post.
Unfortunately, I bought a box of Donruss, but bear with me, it does get better at some point.
I was intrigued since the last few packs of Panini cards I opened were not actually all that bad. Baseball card money is finite, so I am usually carefully and picky about what I buy and how much I spend. I should have looked up the cards online before I handed over money for these cards.
Here is the basic design.
There are a lot of cubes and rectangles with different depths. Maybe it's my ADD, but I feel like my eyes are drawn away from the picture of the player and onto the design of the card. Catchy designs are good, but not when they are overwhelming and busy.
The back is the same.
The write-up is terrible.
It's hard to make an argument about someone being the best in baseball history when the stat involves getting hit by pitches. Do people at Donruss know how many times the Marlins have thrown at Ronald Acuna? I bet they account for at least half the total.
There are other disappointing aspects to this year's Donruss set beyond the base cards. The Diamond Kings cards, long-time personal favorites, now feature a background that looks like a floral sofa pattern from some 1980s living room.
The inspiration for the background of this Jose Ramirez card?
There are plenty of other half-assed cards also appeared in the box.
There is some sort of 1988 Donruss redux.
Where is the rest of the border?
Why is half of it whited-out?
Why is the colored pattern on the border on the adjacent corners from the original?
GET. THE. LITTLE. DETAILS. RIGHT.
I am not even a details person and it bothers me.
I saved this for last.
Donruss included some retired Hall of Famers on their checklist, but they could not just airbrush out the logos on their uniforms. They had to take it an extra step and add trim to their jerseys. The Brooks Robinson card leaves me speechless. Ozzie? The red trim is terrible.
At least Panini still includes the Rated Rookie cards in Donruss.
I managed to pull Rated Rookie cards of Vidal Brujan and Juan Yepez. I am still not sure what the Rays are going to do with Brujan. He's played well with Durham this year, but he's played all over the field. I am not sure if they are trying to turn him into a super-utility type or the Rays just do not know what to do with him. Shortstop is obviously taken for the next decade. Yepez has been excellent for the Cardinals. One of the few players who has hit well.
Then there is this.....
Rated Prospects?
This feels like New Coke or M&Ms filled with pretzels.
Okay, so bear with me for a few more cards.
As bad as the base cards are in the 2022 Donruss set, the inserts are actually pretty nice.
I pulled two Diamond Marvel cards. I am not a comic book collector, but I like the design here merging them with a baseball card. The cards have a nice finish too. Not sure if it comes through on the scan.
The other pleasant surprise with 2022 Donruss was the quality of Stan Musial cards.
Who saw that coming?
For a card with the logos airbrushed off, this is really nice. I also like the choice of using a black and white photograph versus the red, gray, and black boxes around the edge of the card. Perhaps, Panini should have used black and white photos for more cards.
The last card is just incredible.
Growing up in St. Louis, I have spent my whole life listening to stories about Stan Musial. I am not sure that any of them made me think of Stan as being ferocious. What attributes does Stan share with a bear?
