Get Off Hiatus, Chop Keeper!

A couple of weeks ago, Steve from the Card Chop announced that he was taking a summer hiatus from blogging. His reasoning is sound -- fighting blog burn out and working long hours combined with the familial responsibilities during the summer can take a toll on anyone.  I speak for myself and a lot of other bloggers, though, when I say come back soon, Steve!

Apparently to celebrate his stepping back a bit from blogging, Steve was kind enough to send a package my way -- even making reference to the #WarwithJBF monster packages along the way:

What frightening things I might find? What do you mean?

Those Wacky Packages are awesome.  I've never collected them, and probably won't, but that Twerx bar with its "Break Me off a Piece of That!" slogan is almost certainly scarier than Jason Voorhees.  I mean, Jason isn't real...but that scary-ass backwoods twerker is as real as it gets.

Thankfully, Steve didn't just sent me those. Otherwise, I would have considered that whole package to be just a big Troll-up. Steve sent me a few cards as well -- a few great cards, that is.

Not a bad start -- Rickie and Prince, the "Brew Crew" (imaginative name there, Topps).  

As a side note, crazy weird groups of players put together on a single card for no apparent reason other than the photographer caught them posing together -- like those Fleer cards in their first ten or so years of existence -- are sorely missing from cards today. Sure, it's great that I can get a Skittles rainbow of refractors of Trevor Plouffe, but how about giving me a card featuring Pat Neshek talking to Munenori Kawasaki?  Or a David Price and Sonny Gray "Anchor Down" card? Would it be such a bad thing to make cards fun again?

Now, to be fair, that was the only Brewers card that Steve sent to me.  

The rest?

Del Crandall and Bill Bruton -- two of the early stars of Milwaukee Braves baseball.  As a kid, I had no idea how good of a baseball player Del Crandall really was. I only thought of him as the really not-so-good manager of the Brewers and the Mariners.  As for Bruton, I only think of him as a Milwaukee Brave, but he finished his career with four seasons in Detroit.

And there were two more cards too:

More Delmar!  And Johnny Logan too!  I love the play at the plate that Del Crandall's card has and the double-play/turning two on Logan's card.  I wonder -- has Topps sold off that original artwork?

But those weren't even the best part!

Holy Johnny Logan Autograph!

Steve, thank you very much for the great cards including the awesome additions to my Milwaukee Braves collection and especially the Logan autograph!  Enjoy your time away from the blog, but you better come back.  Otherwise, you'll be forced to watch this video on constant loop like some sort of classical conditioning straight from "A Clockwork Orange."