The ol' switcheroo

 

Three weeks ago I won a card giveaway from The Diamond King.

The winnings were a selection of random Albert Pujols cards in celebration of his recent retirement.

The vast majority of cards were from his Cardinals and Angels days, where he spent the overwhelming amount of his baseball toiling. There were also three Dodgers cards, and ... one of them I needed.

That's it. And that was all it took for me to enter. I won this card, and a whole bunch of non-Dodger cards.

Some maybe wondered why I entered the contest. I'm not a player collector, and I am known for having very few good feelings for the Cardinals and the Angels. What was the point?

The note that arrived with my winnings, alluded to these cards that seemingly didn't fit in my collection.

Thank you, I shall.

So, yes, obviously there isn't a lot here that I collect. But all that means is it's time to work the phone lines!

The first thing I did was check the Pujols cards against Cards On Cards' want lists. A couple of days ago, I shipped off the Pujols cards that seemed to fill needs to Kerry along with a smattering of other cards.

The next thing I did was find the biggest Pujols collector I know, who was once one-half of the blog A Cardboard Problem. Marie is still collecting Pujols cards after all these years, so I sent out an image of my winnings and waited to hear back.

Unbeknownst to me, she had sent me a message not even a couple of hours earlier telling me she had some cards for me if I needed them. So the trade came together with almost zero effort. I shipped off the Pujols cards and this is what came back:

Mercy.

Someone had been buying some shiny.

I liked this so much, I'm going to have to break it down a little bit.

The star of the show was a bunch of the 2021 Chrome Platinum Anniversary Dodgers cards. There are so many Dodgers in this set, all this does is make a dent, but at least I'm more than halfway there.

The Julio Urias card is a refractor, which means I still need the base card. I wish Topps would dispense with basic refractors, since with all the other refractor bells-and-whistles a regular ol' refractor hardly registers and just gets in the way.

There are some more fancy refractors. The Betts is an aqua wave refractor, it's pretty. The Gagne, I think, is a blue mini diamond refractor, Topps has confused me so much on just about everything that I don't know if "mini" refers to the card size or the "diamonds" or my brain size. Anyway, the Maury Wills is a prizm refractor, I know what those are.

 

Marie also very nearly finished my Chrome Dodgers needs. These mean I'm down to -- go, figure -- the Pujols card to finish the 2022 set.

 

I also got this hideous monstrosity.

The invention of "negative refractors" is the most Pointless and Hideous Thing that Topps has done in the last five years. These are so ugly that I list the Dodgers on my want list with a warning: DON'T SEND THESE!

 

Now I have one and it's pretty ghastly.

 

 I didn't know 2022 Prizm was out. But there's two of them.

 

Still not done with the shiny. These are two of the hot box purples from 2022 Heritage. I just landed the Urias purple today so there's just Buehler and Trea Turner left.

Finally, two cards where I don't have to worry about getting my reflection in the shot. I'm doing better at acquiring the Archives Dodgers than for any other set released this year. When these two arrived, I needed just two more to finish the set. Then I acquired one of the last two and all that's left is the SP Jackie.

Archives does weird stuff like this, just to create parallels, but any of this fancy stuff on an old-school design looks plain funky.

So that was my haul, plus several duplicates (Marie buys a lot of cards), all for some Pujols cards I didn't want.

I did end up keeping just a few that didn't fit into either Marie or madding's collections:

I had no early-career Pujols cards, because I wasn't collecting then, so the MVP and Leaf Certified cards are nice to have, they're from 2003 and 2002. My previous earliest Pujols, I think is from 2004. The other cards here are just cheapies that are fun ... or Donruss.

And, speaking of Cards On Cards, I might as well throw in the envelope that he just sent me, too:

Several Topps Fire needs there. Somebody needs to explain the gold-minted parallel phenomenon for inserts to me. Are they much more plentiful than the regular insert cards? They sure seem like they are.

Anyway, that was how I flipped some Pujols cards into cards I needed. The ol' switcheroo. Kind of like one of those fancy three-team trades in the offseason, right?

It's easy to do with highly collectible players like Pujols, Ichiro, Trout, Griffey Jr., Gwynn, Judge, etc.

And that's why I wanted a bunch of Cardinals and Angels cards.

Oh, and that Bowman card.