Mail from Ketchupman36

I'm always on the lookout for new blogs. I remember how long it seemed to take for my blog to get any traction with other bloggers. Some of those earliest posts barely reached double digits in hits -- like the 10 hits for my post highlighting my TTM from the early 1980s of the then-league presidents, Lee MacPhail and Chub Feeney, for example.  A few didn't even get that -- like the paltry five hits for the first and last of what was going to be a series called
Sunday's Strange Set from the 1980s.

Like I said, I know how it feels when you write something and it seems the only person who reads it is you -- and you get five hits because you forget to turn off that setting where your views count as hits and you reloaded the page 4 times hoping for a comment. 

Of course, I am throwing stones in a glass house because, well, I comment on posts approximately 5% of the time when I read them. Sorry.

At any rate, a new blog popped up in May called "Rekindling the Cardboard Flame." Operating under the nom de plume of Ketchupman36 and the nom de Twitter of The Cardboard Flame (so, let me call him TCF), RTCF is a well-written blog that appears about 8 or 9 times a month. 

A name like that deserves a song:




Um, yeah, I must have missed that song when it came out in 2002, but "Las Ketchup" are a pretty hot group of women in that "Spanglish" version. I guess "Las Ketchup" is the Spanish version of "Spice Girls." I guess it's cool that they are from Córdoba in Spain; I spent nearly 2 hours there one day on my honeymoon, so that makes them practically my cousins.

Anyway, back on point...I've exchanged messages on Twitter with TCF a few times. When I heard that he had an inkling of possibly maybe liking basketball cards, I quickly duped, er, offered to send him all the basketball cards I had -- maybe 150 or so, more or less. He told me sure, he'd take them off my hands.

In return, I got two great cards. Trust me -- I'm more than happy with my end of that bargain.

The first card I got was this very nice Robin Yount Insert from this year's Stadium Club -- the "Legends Die Cut" insert. As with nearly every recently issued product, I tend to shy away from buying unopened boxes of cards due to the fact that the Brewers end up with like 5 cards out of 700 in a set. I guess with this one, though, I should have been in the Club for it.

For some reason, this song has been stuck in my head for a couple of days now thanks to a Sporcle quiz that included the word, "Hug" in it. My brain works in ways I can't explain.

The other card that I got from TCF was even more inspiring:

From the 2007 MLB Artifacts comes this Rickie Weeks "Divisional Artifacts" relic with a serial number of 64 out of 199. In many respects, it's been good seeing Rickie Weeks continuing to hang on as a utility player in Arizona. Sure, he's had an almost league average season this year (OPS+ of 98) in 155 plate appearances, but by all indications he's fit in his role fairly well after last year's nightmare in Seattle.

Let's close with a little bit more rap -- Rickie's walk-up music this year in Arizona. Rickie is surrounded by a ton of very questionable song choices by his teammates, with Luke Bryan (Andrew Chafin), Florida Georgia Line (Chris Owings & Shelby Miller), Brantley Gilbert (Jake Barrett), Randy Houser (Paul Goldschmidt), and Eric Church (Phil Gosselin) all making games in Phoenix sound like a dried-out Nashville bar. Thankfully, Rickie has stuck to his guns and uses Lecrae:




Many thanks go out to the Ketchupman a/k/a The Cardboard Flame for these two great cards. I hope this is the first trade of many more.