A PWE from All Trade Bait, All the Time

One of my earlier blog trades was with Dodgers fan Stealing Home from All Trade Bait, All The Time. SH is a genuinely nice guy to trade with and talk to by e-mail.  He recently went on a PWE-sending spree, and I was one of the lucky folks to get one.  Here are the cards he sent to me:

This Kyle Lohse card is just an opportunity for me to point out that once again the current "throwback" uniforms have a design error.  Everyone who is a Brewers fan from the 1980s knows that the hat with the yellow panel on the front was the away hat -- the team wore a solid blue cap at home.

Just as this 1986 Topps Ben Oglivie -- about to take batting practice on the road in his baby-blue road uniform -- proves.

I miss having a leadoff hitter who actually got on base.  Actually, I miss having a team that didn't hit like it was a Triple-A team.  This year to date, the team has scored 170 runs in 45 games -- 3.78 runs per game -- while allowing 221 (4.91 runs per game, so yes, pitching is a problem too).  But, the Brewers have scored 10 or more runs in 4 games this year (and lost one of them...again, pitching is a problem).  Remove those four games in which the Brewers scored 43 runs, and the team over the other 41 games are averaging barely 3 runs per game -- 3.098 per game, to be super exact.  The team has a slash line of .227/.285/.378 (taking out pitchers, it's .234/.293/.392).

Now I'm depressed...

That's better.  The Clash always bring a smile to my face.  Okay, back to the cards!

Khris Davis is not known for his defense, but his card from both last year and this year show him making defensive plays.

Finally, the piece de resistance for this PWE.  I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that my grandfather probably was convinced that Johnny Logan was the best player on the Milwaukee Braves in the 1950s.  Perhaps the 1950s baseball fans were as enamored with great shortstop play as a lot of us bloggers seem to like catchers -- or perhaps that reflects more about bloggers tending to be more cerebral than the average fan and appreciating all the thought, hard work, and intelligence that goes into being a catcher.

At any rate, Stealing Home sent me this card with the note that it clearly belongs with me due to the fact that Logan was such a bad ass in my grandpa's eyes.

I have to say that this reason for getting a card is perhaps the best reason I have ever heard.  My memories of being a kid growing up pretty poor in Wisconsin (my mom, my brothers, and I lived with my grandparents as I grew up) were filled with stories of past sportsmen to come through Milwaukee.  My grandpa and I bonded in the mornings by reading the game stories in the Milwaukee Sentinel of the previous day's Brewer game, or Packers game, or Milwaukee Bucks game, or even the Milwaukee Admirals games. I'd then get ready for school and head off, not realizing that those days would be ones I'd look back on now with a fondness for how innocent those days were -- and how lucky I was to have a grandfather who indulged my sports fanaticism.

Thank you, Stealing Home, for that reminder.