Cards and More Cards
Ok, maybe reaching into the vault frequently is helping to keep me sane. At least it distracts me from the endless scroll, and that’s probably for the best right now. Anyhow, here’s another year-old TCDB trade which I neglected to post. These came from Ray S. (rl16), whom you may know from All Cardinals, All The Time. They arrived just 367 days ago. Not bad!
Well I guess I blew the cover off already by posting the blog title, but if by some chance you hadn’t guessed it, Ray is a Cardinals fan. That meant he had a pair of Cardinals for me from the 2014 Allen & Ginter Pastime’s Pastimes inserts. I really liked the old-school chalk drawing and black borders, and so I tried to piece these together. I’m somewhere around 60% complete.
These, however, are from a set which I decided to chase much later. Heck, I didn’t even embrace that until months after this trade. I’d originally nabbed these Kimball Champion inserts from 2011 Topps in order to put them toward my Mini Frankenset, a project that I’ve yet to officially blog about but have been slowly building for a while. Well, somewhere in there I accumulated enough of these to decide to just go ahead and build the full 150 card set (50 each for Series 1, Series 2, and Update). It’s probably obvious to say that Sisler looks more appropriate here, but I like the modern players in this design as well.
There were some Astros in this trade, too. Daryle Ward is one of those guys that I got to see in the minors, and was always a nice guy to me as a young autograph hunter. That earns him a special spot in my Astros heart. The Deason comes from 2017 Bowman Draft. He’s still a young pup, in pro ball, and split 2019 between A and High A. As a mostly-starter, the righty went 9-6 with 120 strikeouts in 102.1 innings – that’s a 10.7 K/9 rate. He made 6 relief appearances in the Arizona Fall League as well, and while he got knocked around a bit more, his K/9 was still sitting pretty at 11.3. Not too shabby.
Oh, and then there was this guy. It’s certain not to make some of y’all happy, and I get that. But it’s a hell of a card, and I was pretty excited to add it to my collection in early 2019.
I hope you’re well. I hope you’re staying safe, and that you’ve still got work, if that’s a thing you were doing, and I hope your city, county, and state officials are smarter and more proactive than our president in their response to this pandemic. In Houston we just got our stay-at-home order from the city and county officials, and the others in the area are likely to follow suit in the next few days – well, except the dumb republican County Judge* of Montgomery County, the next county over and site of one of the main initial clusters in the Houston area. He thinks it’s “giving into fear” and “killing the economy.”
*Basically, this is a Texas thing from what I understand, but the County Judge is the highest administrative official for the county – so like the County President. They are not *actually* a judge.
Alright, back to that grindstone. These job applications don’t fill out themselves, and for some reason 75% of companies still insist on you applying through their own work search site and all of the resume parsers out there are pretty much worthless. If all goes well, I’m going to get to spend some time on the yard and garden, too. So here’s hoping for that.
