Post #700: A Cure for What Ails Me

My lack of posting here is indeed a sign. It's a sign that I'm not as engaged in card collecting as I was two or three years ago. I could lay blame for it fairly easily -- equal parts of blame go to the Brewers (for playing well in the real world), Topps (for a multitude of reasons I've said before), and to rookie mania (which is just an unwelcome extension of the "sick hitz" mentality to me). 

So, I've avoided it, and I made some changes too. I stopped following Topps on Twitter, for example. I deleted my bookmark for Topps Now and have pretty much stopped caring about it. I've even changed my Twitter consumption to an extent by no longer following a few people who seemed only to retweet every Aaron Judge card ever seen. 

All of it has helped some. 

Also helping is diverting my own focus away from new products. About the only products that really give the Brewers a fair shot at getting cards in them seem to be Topps flagship, Heritage, and (perhaps thanks to Sooz seeing my continual complaints) Stadium Club. I mean, when a 200-card set like Chrome (which should have more equal distribution based on it being nothing more than a parallel set to Flagship) has just two base card Brewers, it makes it tough to care about new products without getting angry, upset, and alienated.

So, I found a cure: going to eBay and finding police cards and inserts I need. Yes, Post 700 is just a boring "look what I got on eBay" post, accompanied by songs from one of the best bands from the 1980s, The Cure.

Starting off, we have a song from way back in 1979. It seems hard to believe that The Cure have been around for over 40 years now. This song, "Boys Don't Cry," comes from their dark, gothic period early in the band's career. It was their second single after "Killing an Arab," which, by the way, is a song the band has really backed away from in their career.

The song itself is not particularly deep -- it is what it says it is, which is a song about how boys don't cry about their lost loves in the presence of others. Still, the band's place in the post-punk world after the Sex Pistols was solidified with this jangly song. 



Speaking of jangly, let's start with cards from a 1991 Police set of two guys who simply do not compute as Brewers. 

While he started his career with the Minnesota Twins and was traded to the Yankees in 1972 for the recently deceased Brewer #5 Danny Walton in October of 1972 before moving to Baltimore in 1976 in a terrible trade by the Yankees (Tippy Martinez, Rudy May, Scott McGregor, and Dave Pagan with Dempsey for Doyle Alexander, Jimmy Freeman, Elrod Hendricks, Ken Holtzman, and Grant Jackson), Rick Dempsey in my mind will always be a Baltimore Oriole. He spent just the one season -- 1991 -- Milwaukee after signing as a free agent in early April of 1991. Dempsey has his own website through which you can book him for golf and autograph appearances; I don't know what he's talking about, though, by calling himself "The Greatest Catcher of His Era." 

Willie Randolph was another one-and-done Brewer in 1991, though he played at a very high level at age 36 in Milwaukee -- putting up a .327/.424./.374 slash line in 512 plate appearances. That .424 OBP was good enough for 2nd in the league, and his .327 AVG was good enough for third. He did a lot of little things well, but was never a "peak" type player. There are worse players in the Hall of Fame than Randolph, though I'm not advocating that Randolph should be there. It is a close call, though.

Jumping from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, "Pictures of You" is from an era when The Cure had made an impression in the US and American radio wasn't as intimidated by the band. As Wikipedia notes, the inspiration for this song came from when a fire broke out in singer Robert Smith's home. He was going through the aftermath and found his wallet with photos of his wife, Mary in them. 

This song peaked at #71 in the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1990. Perhaps showing the fact that The Cure has gotten much more respect and notice in the years since, Rolling Stone put the song at #283 on its list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time."



Whomever designed the 1992 Brewers Police set must have been impressed by 1991 Fleer, I guess. My scans on this one show you two different police sets -- one from New Richmond, Wisconsin, which is only about 40 miles from downtown St. Paul, Minnesota, and one from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, which is about an hour north of Milwaukee. 

The Sheboygan police one kind of hacks me off a bit. I bought the set as being a complete set. I didn't scrutinize it closely enough before leaving feedback, which meant that I didn't notice that the seller decided to strip out the Molitor and the Yount cards from the set. I should have paid closer attention, I guess. 

"Fascination Street" was The Cure's first song to hit #1 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart, which had literally just been created only a few months prior. This song, too, was on The Cure's album Disintegration. I guess you can tell when my favorite Cure songs come from.

Yes, one more set of police cards from New Richmond. If you haven't figured out by now that police cards from random jurisdictions other than Milwaukee make me happy, well, you don't know me at all.

Jody Reed ending up with the Brewers in 1994 was a very strange circumstance. He came up with Boston, of course, but the Red Sox did not think enough of him to protect him from the 1992 expansion draft -- or, rather, they did not think enough of him to go through his final year before free agency with him. The Rockies picked him and promptly traded him to the Dodgers for Rudy Seanez. 

The Dodgers liked Reed, and they tried to sign him on a three-year deal worth $7.8 million after the 1993 season. He would have played out his career there, probably, on that contract. But, he turned it down and gambled that someone would hand him a larger contract. That didn't happen and, instead, he signed with Milwaukee on a one-year, incentive-laden contract under which he earned a total of $1.15 million instead. 

Proving that both Reed and the Dodgers were losers in the deal, the Dodgers filled their newly created hole at second base after the 1993 season by making a trade with the Expos to get Delino DeShields ... and giving up future Hall of Famer Pedro Martinez in the process.

Finally, let's move backwards about 4 years to 1985. "In Between Days" was the first song for The Cure to hit the Billboard Hot 100 in 1985 when it made it to #99. It's weird though -- it's an upbeat, superficially happy sounding song with lyrics about aging and fear and loss. 

I chose this song because of all of these things. It is upbeat sounding, but that upbeat nature belies the questioning, uncertainty, and fear that accompanies life generally. It's good to stay upbeat, even when all that I can think about are fears and difficulties. It can be a lot of work to do that, though.

Let's close out Post #700 with a couple of new releases of Ryan Braun. The 2017 Brewers team is struggling offensively over the last couple of months, and I'm not sure what will solve that. Braun has been good -- .281/.351/.513 -- but the team has tons of problems with getting runners in scoring position home. They are very reliant on home runs to score runs, which means that there are streaks where they just don't score enough. 

The hope is that the team starts hitting and continues pitching well and makes a run in the last 6 weeks of the season. They are close enough in both the Wild Card and the Division to where a quick win streak -- say of 6 or 7 games -- could really make a dent in these races. But, they need to score more runs more consistently to do this. 

Let me close by saying thank you to all of you, my readers. I'm consistently surprised by the fact that most posts these days for me get at least to 100 to 150 hits. I'm even more surprised when I do something new -- I joined Net 54's forum's this week -- and in response to my first post, I get a reply of, "Oh, yeah, I've read your blog for a long time now and really enjoy it!"

That stuff means a lot. Thank you, everyone.