The Best Customs Around

Today is both my birthday and a very special end of the year, not-on-the-normal-date card show. So, for me to write a post about something else take some doing. 

And yet, this post is well overdue. Many folks have been seeing the fantastic custom cards that Gavin from Baseball Card Breakdown sprinkled around the blog world. Gavin sent a bunch of other cards -- including my very special Lamarr Hoyt serial numbered 1 of 12 Christmas ornament -- but the custom card is the only one I'm going to highlight today. I was one of the lucky recipients of a custom card:

 

If you haven't noticed, I changed my avatar both here on Blogger and on Twitter to this awesome photo of Robin Yount in the past month. I remember this day extremely well, in fact. 

On October 21, 1982 -- a Thursday (I had to look that up) -- the Brewers were welcomed back to Milwaukee on the day after losing the incredibly disappointing Game 7 on a Wednesday night in St. Louis. Yes, they played Game 7 on a Wednesday. Nearly 100,000 people lined Wisconsin Avenue to watch the Brewers ride in open-top antique convertibles from downtown to Milwaukee County Stadium.

Gorman Thomas shakes hands while smoking a big cigar

The parade ended at Milwaukee County Stadium. It was there that the cars drove the players into the stadium on the warning track. Yount disappeared into the dugout -- I don't remember seeing him leave the dais on the infield, but the Milwaukee Sentinel story from October 22 mentions it.

Yount then came out on of the same opening where all the card had entered and, to take the words from the Sentinel, "he emerged . . . looking like a model in an ad for men's cologne with his hair pushed back by the wind, a leather jacket on and sunglasses firmly in place."

I was a lucky 10-year-old kid. My mom let me skip school that day and drove me the 30 miles to Milwaukee County Stadium to join around 10,000 other fans at the stadium to see this. We got to see the players speak, to see Bud Selig hiding his tears of joy behind his sunglasses, and to see the usual politicians glomming on to any kind of winner they could. As the newspaper mentioned, Governor Lee Dreyfus, Milwaukee Mayor Henry Maier, and Milwaukee County Executive William O'Donnell "were the only ones booed this day."

As a crowd, we chanted for Harvey Kuenn to speak. Harvey was our local hero still, and we wanted him to get his plaudits. He too was on the verge of tears, telling the assembled that "This is the most fantastic thing that has ever happened -- anywhere, anyplace. Yet, there is only one place this could happen. In Milwaukee."

Bud Selig promised that day that the team would be back to the World Series "again and again and again." That, obviously, didn't happen. The team hasn't been back to the World Series since 1982, and it won't be back for a number of years to come in all likelihood. 

But, it's not often that a card captures the spirit of a day -- one that makes a man now 44 years old today feel like a 10-year-old again.

It is a little sad to me that these photos are all in black and white. My world that day was full of color, and sound, and excitement, and these photos make it look a bit dreary.  Still, it was a day that I'll never forget.

Thank you, Gavin, for the trip down memory lane and for making me feel like a kid today.

Brewers Police Cards

I have mentioned the Milwaukee Brewers Police Cards before in this blog.  In working on my Robin Yount and Brewers collection, I started paging through an old "What's Brewing?" magazine, which was (and may still be for all I can tell from the Brewers unhelpful website) the "Milwaukee Brewers Official Magazine." The magazine was printed on cheap newspaper stock, so it has yellowed over the 32 years I've had it, but I kept the May 1982 issue because this issue was autographed:

That issue featured a story not about how long-time Brewer Charlie Moore (who is fifth all-time in appearances in a Brewer uniform behind Robin Yount, Paul Molitor, Jim Gantner, and Cecil Cooper) was going to learn to throw left-handed but how he transitioned to being a right-fielder after being a catcher for his entire major and minor league career.  It also featured an interview with "Brewers-Pepsi Fan Club Captain" Paul Molitor about his third or fourth new position in just five years in the majors -- this time to third base.

For all the fun and nostalgia that those articles brought about, it was a story on the then-upcoming release of the first-ever set of Milwaukee Brewers Police cards that caught my attention:

The first Brewers game I consciously recall attending was the May 8, 1982 game between the Brewers and the Twins.  I think I attended one game before that one when I was about 4 or 5 years old and my brother went with his Cub Scout Troop in about 1977, but I have no real recollection of that.

Anyway, I was surprised a bit by the quantities of cards that were printed even for year one of the program. I mean, 40,000 cards is a lot of cards to give away, even if the Brewers succeeded in giving out 10,000 sets at the first game.  In part, I believe this accounts for the relatively low prices for which these cards sell.

After that first game in 1982, going to baseball card day became a family tradition for us.  When I got to be over 14 years old, we started taking my younger brother to the games -- he was born in 1983, so he was guaranteed to get a set of the cards whether they gave me one or not.

The beauty of baseball card day was that the giveaway gave all the kids an immediately usable medium on which to obtain autographs.  When I was going through my old cards from when I was a kid, I was surprised a bit to see how many Brewers police cards I had and, even further, how many were autographed.

So, first the autographs.  I believe that I got all of these in person at some point, though I'm not sure about the Doug Jones:

Doug Jones was on the 40-man roster for
the 1982 Milwaukee Brewers in the Spring

Some of those cards are yellowing a bit -- the card stock was white and very flimsy, and my mother smoked for many years as well.

1982 was the only year that Harry Dalton, then the General Manager, got a card. Harry was a true gentleman who presided over the Brewers system from 1977 through 1991.  Before that, he had helped build the Orioles team of the late 1960s and early 1970s -- indeed, his first order of business as Orioles GM was to pull the trigger on trading Milt Pappas and Jack Baldschun to the Cincinnati Reds for Frank Robinson.  He didn't do the trade immediately -- he tried to get another player from Cincy.

The trade helped lead the O's to the 1966 and 1970 World Series titles and the 1969 and 1971 AL pennants, and his underlings there included John Schuerholtz (the architect of the 1990s and 2000s Braves) and Joe Maddon, current manager of the Tampa Bay Rays.  In Milwaukee, he had both Sal Bando (his eventual successor who successfully plunged Milwaukee straight into the toilet) and Dan Duquette -- current Orioles GM and past GM of the Expos (1991 through early 1994) and the Boston Red Sox.

But I digress.

The most fun thing about Brewers police cards in the 1980s are the number of police departments which apparently gave these cards out.  The scans below shows just the varieties that I have collected through the years:

As I mentioned in a previous post, the police/safety cards have continued in Milwaukee into recent years:

Chasing all of the set variations from the 1980s especially is probably a foolish idea.  I still want to do it.  I call it a pipe dream of mine, though, because it really isn't clear how many police departments or which police departments had these printed up, the numbers that were printed, or who printed them.  But, if you happen to run across some of these cards, I'm very interested in them and would love to see what you have.