A Parallel Universe Post

It's been almost two months since I received an excellent envelope of cards from Robby T a/k/a Boobie Maine. He used to blog -- it's been nearly a year since he did so at his blog, Detroit Tigers Cards and Stuff -- but he's fallen victim to what draws me away often as well, which is just going to Twitter and hanging out.

Around February or so, I almost went up to Nashville for the big card show up there that I attended last year. In the end, I decided not to make the drive for various reasons that I have forgotten by this point. So, Robby sent me cards in the mail. Because all good posts require music, I've mined his Twitter timeline for some help.

Let's start with the oldest cards and work our way forward.

Starting with Chuck Porter from 1984 Fleer. Porter came over to the Brewers as a street minor-league free agent in 1980, after the California Angels released him. Porter was a 7th Round pick of the Angels in what was Harry Dalton's penultimate draft as the Angels GM. He pitched well enough in 1980 at Single-A Burlington and Double-A Holyoke to find himself in Triple-A in 1981. That meant that he ended up on the Milwaukee-Vancouver shuttle (which must have a connecting flight somewhere along the way...maybe it was Minneapolis?) in 1981 and 1982 and made 6 appearances for the Brewers.

In 1983, thanks to various pitching injuries (Pete Vuckovich made only 3 starts,  Moose Haas appeared in only 25 games, and Bob McClure pitched in only 24 games), Porter started 21 games and pitched pretty well. His major league career was effectively ended in 1984 when he suffered a torn medial collateral ligament (a/k/a ulnar collateral ligament) in his right elbow and went through Tommy John Surgery. He came back in 1985, but by then the Brewers had moved on to promote Ted Higuera.

All that pain probably had Chuck Porter saying that he wanted a new drug. As a kid at the age of 12 in 1984, I'm not sure what I thought this song was about -- probably just pills or something. Reading the lyrics, it's pretty much not about any of those other than references to how other drugs (like alcohol, cocaine, amphetamines, marijuana, and barbiturates) wouldn't help him talk to a woman. 

For what it's worth, this song came about here because Robby retweeted Huey Lewis's tweet about how the album "Sports" was one of just 5 number one albums for the entire year of 1984. 

I'm grouping the next three together as "Late 90s Brewers." Obviously, Cirillo and Burnitz made an impact on the franchise enough to be player collections for me. David Hulse, though, has hardly made any impact on this blog. Hulse played 200 games for the Brewers in 1995 and 1996 since the Brewers were duty bound by league rules to play 9 fielders and a designated hitter in every game. He was awful as a Brewer (and not much better with the Rangers, from whom the Brewers got him) -- a slash line of .243/.281/.320 for an OPS+ of 53 (where the league average is 100) is terrible. Hulse did steal 19 based in 23 attempts, so I guess he had that going for him. 

A few days ago, Robby retweeted the fact that in 1987, U2's Joshua Tree began its 9-week run atop the Billboard album chart. And if ever there was a song that best described the Brewers under Sal Bando's general managership, it is "Running to Stand Still." Everyone else in the league was moving ahead, promoting good young players, increasing scouting budgets, and the Brewers were running on the cheap to prove to everyone that Bud Selig was right about small-market teams not being able to compete.

Every time I see one of these gold parallels from 2009, I wonder to myself why it was so important to highlight "58 years of collecting" on the front of the card. Yay Topps? I mean, sure, Topps correctly realized in the late 2000s (after Michael Eisner's private equity fund took Topps back private again) that its best path to profit increases was to suck as much money as possible out of older collectors coming back to baseball cards for the nostalgia. But, really -- who cares about "58 years of collecting" unless they are issuing cards for older collectors who have actually been collecting for 58 years? Shouldn't the caption be, "58 years of selling" or "58 years of collector frustration because they think they can do better"?

How appropriate is it that Robby's next tweet about music that I found is actually a cover song? I was thinking before I scrolled further into his tweets that I should try for covers to go with all the nice parallel cards he sent and, lo and behold, here's a great cover by one of my favorite female singers whose music I was introduced to in college -- Juliana Hatfield. If you don't know who Juliana Hatfield is, find the song "My Sister" from about 1992 or 1993. It's excellent and it's her signature song, I'd say. That, or "Spin the Bottle." She just released an album of all Olivia Newton-John covers, for what it's worth.

As we move into the 2012 "surfboard" parallels, I will note that Cody Ransom got a card in the Update set as a Brewer that year. Interestingly, Ransom became a Brewer on May 23, 2012 when the Brewers picked him up off waivers after the Arizona Diamondbacks cut him. Then, on August 31 and after he put up a .196/.293/.345 slash line, the Brewers placed Ransom on waivers. He was promptly picked up by...the Diamondbacks. That's some weird kind of seller's remorse going on there.

Also, I was pleased to add a red Target parallel of Ryan Braun's All-Star card from the Update set. 

Since Robby tweeted he was listening to 99 Luftballons, I felt like I needed to keep it accurate to his timeline. Otherwise, it would have been a much easier transition from that Ryan Braun Target Red card to the English version of this song by Nena, "99 Red Balloons."

Alas, transitions are not always smooth in writing.

With the demise of Toys R Us, I wonder if we will start getting inundated with purple parallels in repacks? Or, were there so few Toys R Us packs such that this Nyjer Morgan is rarer than that Braun NL Home Run Leaders card that is serial numbered to 2013? 

I recall going once to a Toys R Us that is sort of near where I live -- about 6 miles away (and for comparison, within 6-1/2 miles, there are four Target stores) -- and going to buy cards in 2014. They had a standalone card display positioned sort of near the toy section and sort of near the kids' sporting goods area with blister packs that included three purple parallels in them. It allowed me to "pack search" in the way we used to look for rack packs with the cards we wanted on the top. But man, to try to put together a team set that way was impossible. 

The tweet that brings this ELO song on is one where Robby said that he'd been listening to the top 100 Billboard songs from 1979 and how he thought it was "interesting how many songs at the bottom should be at the top, and vice versa." Well, not sure if he meant this song, which finished at #81 on that year-end chart, but I had never put an ELO song here on the blog. So, deal with it.

 

Cards from 2014 have sort of a special place in my collection because it's the year I got back into collecting. I have much warmer feelings towards the 800 parallels from that year than I do from, say, 2016. That said, Robby sent me a bunch of great 2014 parallels -- so many that I've split them into two groups. 

I guess the warm feeling I have is in part due to these being the cards I came back to in the hobby. If I had come back in 2013 instead, I'd probably dislike these because of the complete lack of variety in their photographic choices -- a problem which continues to this day. Too zoomed in on action shots, too many action shots, poor cropping of photos -- it's an epidemic in 2014 cards.

Just as 2014 parallels will make up the last two groups of cards, the last two songs come from when Robby posted two "Friday Night 80s Album Reviews" at the beginning of April. The first comes from a band called Easterhouse. I'm embarrassed to say that I had not heard of this band before, because I should have heard of them. 

They are a Mancunian band -- Stretford, really -- that ran in the same circles as The Smiths, but they are named for a suburb of Glasgow that was essentially a huge public housing estate -- council housing, as the Brits put it. Easterhouse the suburb became one of those mistakes that served as a warning to others -- filled with housing and lacking in shops, sports, parks, and transport links, it became a blighted area with high unemployment and a breeding ground for gangs. This ties to the band because the band wanted to promote a revolutionary Communist agenda, so naming the band after a notorious/infamous council housing estate brought that to the forefront.

Also, it's a great song. My listening history on YouTube is such that the next song it autoplayed was "I Wanna Be Adored" by The Stone Roses. Like I said, I should have heard of Easterhouse before.

None of these guys are with the Brewers five seasons later. Of these guys, Scooter Gennett would certainly still help the team in light of the black hole that second base became immediately after Gennett's departure last year. Of the rest, Davis and Gomez would not be upgrades in the outfield, in my opinion, and the players that the Brewers got for Gomez and Mike Fiers from Houston made swapping him out a good deal. 

As for Davis, yes, he's been mashing with Oakland. The guys the Brewers got for him are starting to knock on the door of the big leagues. Jacob Nottingham made his big-league debut this April while Manny Piña was disabled for 10 days, while pitcher Bubba Derby reached Triple-A last year and has been relatively successful despite pitching for Colorado Springs. He's struggling a bit with control this year in limited innings there, but it is still early. Time will tell if these two guys can match Davis's performance, but the trade is not looking all that good right now.

A final song from Robby's timeline comes from the other album he reviewed a few weeks ago. This band is Rhythm Corps and the song and album are both called "Common Ground." Rhythm Corps was from Detroit, but they sure sound like they could have fit into the Manchester scene or whatever alternative scene you might identify from the mid-to-late 1980s. As their Wikipedia page points out, they played shows with The Psychedelic Furs, The Jam, Billy Idol, and toured with The Romantics. Yeah, those fit pretty well.

My thanks go out to Robby for the great cards, the patience in waiting for me to write this up, and the excellent musical offerings on his timeline!

S.mackdown

I'm terribly slow at posting and at catching up on trades. I have a package waiting for one trade partner, and I need to put together another trade package for another trade partner.

Jimmy from Talking S.mack cards is the exact opposite of me. He is meticulous about following up with trade offers, making sure things are acceptable on each end, etc. I sent him a bunch of those Topps Heritage Minor League cards that I opened way back when, and in return he crossed some needs off my lists (and probably kept some cards from ever getting to the want lists in the first place).

I've been in a strange, out-of-sorts mood all day today. I had trouble getting my clutch to engage properly on my car this morning to allow me to start it right away. That threw me off for the entire day -- my schedule was off, my routine was off, everything felt off. The music in my life which seems to go with that is late 1980s stuff. Random 1980s stuff.

Like:

I tipped my hand on this Pixies song going around in my head lately. The normal speed version of this song is really good. But I have always been more drawn to the "UK Surf" version. It's more pensive, and that's usually the mood I'm in when I want to hear it.  Like yesterday and today.

Nothing says "pensive" like 2009 Topps base cards. I'm being serious here. I still have card needs in that arena -- 2009 seems like the time that a lot of my trade partners started coming back, but mostly they hadn't made it back enough to have accumulated enough 2009 base cards to send Brewers to me. Plus, 2009 is too recent for most card show dealers to schlep boxes and boxes of them to shows. So, it's a big hole.

That hole got smaller, though, thanks to Jimmy's kindness here!

Most people who have heard of Oingo Boingo know their album Dead Man's Party, which features the song "Weird Science." I heard that on tape as a kid and said, "Let's buy another one of their tapes." The one I bought -- probably through BMG -- was BOI-NGO. This album never got any airplay whatsoever, as best I can tell, though this song, "We Close Our Eyes," was covered by every teen boy's late 1980s crush (Susanna Hoffs) for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer film soundtrack.

In that vein, let's show some cards from Peter Steinberg's favorite set, 1995 Fleer. Seriously, if you have duplicates, I think Peter, from Baseball Every Night, is trying to build at least 2 or 3 sets of 1995 Fleer, so send all your duplicates to him. He'll appreciate it greatly!

For some reason, it seems songs that I dig that are alternative end up on TV shows much later than when I get into them and suddenly become even more mainstream. "A Little Respect" by Erasure apparently got played on episode 3, season 1 of Scrubs. To be fair, this song did hit the top 20 in the United States, so it's not like it's entirely out of the blue.

Vince Clarke wrote the songs and played keyboards for Erasure. The guy is an awesome, visionary musician. He was a founding member of Depeche Mode, then formed Yazoo (known as Yaz here in the United States), then he started up Erasure. 

Some Upper Deck and some 1990s parallels to add to some player collections come with a little respect. I sometimes have trouble telling all the Upper Deck base sets from the 2000s apart. They all feature excellent photography that isn't overly filtered or contrasted so as to make veins pop off the card. But, they also tend to feature very similar minimalist designs. 

That, or I am just lazy and haven't taken the time to figure out which year is which yet. 

It's probably the second one.

Okay, last song to go with a great last card...inspired by what I just wrote about Vince Clarke:

This song has always kicked ass as a dance tune. When I was in my late teens, a buddy and I used to go to an underage dance club. We never had any money on us -- not even a quarter for water -- just enough to pay the cover charge and dance our asses off. While we always thought we were there trying to meet girls, the reality was we were there to hang out and have fun. We tried awkwardly to meet girls -- like teenage boys do -- but I usually ended up at least as interested in dancing like an idiot. 

I'd go home drenched in sweat, but thoroughly entertained. I loved the music -- stuff like Erasure, Yaz(oo), Ministry, Nine Inch Nails (Pretty Hate Machine came out in 1989, y'all), and even things like N.W.A. It was so much fun. 

As much as I can rail on and on about parallels, the reason I do it, I think, is because I'd like them to be more limited in scope -- maybe two or three per set tops -- and not as limited in number. I want to collect them. I want them to give me good memories 25 years from now about being shiny and pink and cool and attractive.

Well, at least as cool and attractive as this card design can be.

Jimmy, thank you so much for the great cards. They are much appreciated.

And everyone else, don't forget to send Peter your 1995 Fleer.

La Dolce Vita

In the last four years before I met my wife and had far fewer demands on my time and money -- 2006 to 2009, to be specific -- I traveled frequently both for fun and for work. I took trips over Memorial Day weekend in North America and took trips overseas around Christmas.  I did that because I wanted to see the world and, frankly, I had a lot more free cash laying around then in the days before baseball cards, changing law firms, getting married, buying bigger houses, etc.

So, in 2008, I decided I wanted to go to Rome. To prepare for that trip, I used Rosetta Stone to try to learn Italian. I had had problems communicating in Paris the previous year, so I wanted to have the ability to speak the language at least a little bit just in case. I was okay at it, but I frequently thought of the Spanish words rather than the Italian words when trying to speak Italian. For the most part, though, that learning was not necessary -- nearly everyone in the Italian hospitality industry around Rome speaks English.

There was one day, though, when I needed the Italian I learned...or at least it seemed that way. I took a tourist bus tour from Rome to Florence for a day to see that city's architecture and art. We had small earpieces that picked up our tour guide's microphone on a short-wave FM system to guide us along and hear him over the din of the area around Il Duomo. A second solo traveler asked me to take her picture in front of the church, and I obliged. When we looked around for our group -- poof! -- they were gone.

The woman whose photo I took recalled that the guide had said that we were meeting for lunch at a restaurant called "Fantasia" on Via San Giuseppe. We found a police officer in the area around the church baptistery, and in my best Italian I asked, "Scusi, aiutame per favore. Dove la Via San Giuseppe or il ristorante Fantasia?"

The police officer replied to me exactly as follows: "ristorante fantasia? No. Via San Giuseppe -- you go up three blocks and take a left!"

Molto Grazie, signore!

Now, 6-1/2 years later, I find myself saying, "Molto grazie, signore!" That is because The Italian Completist reached out to me and asked if I would like to trade some cards back and forth across the Atlantic. I agreed and, though I am delinquent on sending cards to him, Riccardo sent me a 400-count box via aerea.  

While I never made it any further north than Florence, how about I turn this into a travel blog meets baseball cards?  Careful, y'all -- this one will have a lot of photos!

Rome

I stayed at an InterContinental Hotel in Rome, and I got a room on the top floor.  It wasn't huge, but it had a small balcony from which the view did not suck:

Yes, that's the dome on St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican. My first impressions were positive of Rome -- it's a great city, but it's a crazy city. There's an old joke that goes around about the divide between north and south in Italy that the northern citizens of Milan complain that the Romans do not know how to work and, in return, the Romans complain that the Milanese do not know how to have fun. I can tell you -- the Romans do not know how to drive either.

What cards go along with first impressions?  2009 Topps, of course. 

I say "of course" for these because all of these were new to me. 2009 cards generally seem to have eluded me more than they should have for cards of such a recent vintage. I'm pretty sure I have purchased or received more cards from 1971 than I have from 2009.  It's not a bad design, but that gold-on-black for the name plates sure doesn't scan well.

Naples

What a dump. Okay, I didn't spend enough time in Naples to be so cruel to the city as to stick with that thought, but the parts of Naples I saw (again on a bus tour) were dingy, dirty, and filled with graffiti -- which, bear in mind, is an Italian word meaning "scribblings." But at least the view out to the Isle of Capri was pretty cool.

What goes along with this sort of "well, it's better than a sharp stick in the eye" talk?

The well-traveled, frequently swinging-and-missing Jose Hernandez. He spent three years in Milwaukee; in two of those years, he led the National League in strikeouts with 185 one year and 188 the next. Famously, in that 2002 year with 188 strikeouts, then-manager Jerry Royster held Hernandez out of the lineup for four of the last five games so that Hernandez would not set a record for strikeouts in a season.  

At least the card has a Brewers logo on it, I suppose.

Pompeii

No, I won't subject you to the video for the song by the band Bastille again. 

Pompeii is an incredible place to visit, because you really get a sense of how people were living their day-to-day lives almost 2000 years ago. Everything from brothels with sex scenes on the wall to what look to be restaurants with pizza ovens all are still there -- and historians and archeologists work daily to try to preserve it. One of the most incredible parts of the tour there is the storage area where castings of people who were caught unaware by Mount Vesuvius's explosion are kept. Here's one.

Just chilling to think that someone could have been just living their lives, carrying out their errands, flirting with someone, and suddenly, they are balled up in a fetal position hoping that their pain ends quickly. 

It's not a good parallel by any means, but Brewers fans viewed the early 2000s similarly. We just wanted each season to be over quickly so we could get our high-round draft pick and rebuild for the future. And yet, people still had to play those games for the Brewers. One guy whose career came just a bit early for Brewer glory was Ben Sheets.

There were more Sheets in this incredible box than just these 8, but this gives you the flavor. It's too bad for Sheets that GM Dean Taylor and managers Davey Lopes and Jerry Royster and Ned Yost decided to expend Sheets's arm toward the greater good of avoiding 120 losses, but that's neither here nor there.

The Vatican

If you have ever been to the Vatican and taken the tour there, you know that, just before you walk into the Sistine Chapel, you are warned about two key rules.  First, you are to be quiet. Second, you are not supposed to take photos.  So, when my tour group walked in, of course we were greeted with a loud buzz not unlike the moments before a rock concert starts and literally hundreds of shutters on cameras snapping.  Who am I to argue with that?  

Sorry it's blurry -- I drew the line at using my flash and the photo suffered accordingly. 

This was 2008. I was doing selfies before selfies were a thing.

So what cards can measure up to the Sistine Chapel? Um, there aren't any. Topps tried to go for art with its "Gallery" brand -- which I actually like, but it's not art -- so how about a Jeff Cirillo from that brand:

Florence

Ah, Florence. My favorite city of the whole trip and not for the story I told above. No, it's the art and the history.  Seeing Michelangelo's David is incredible -- it's absolutely huge. Giotto's Bell Tower is pretty cool. Brunelleschi's dome on the church is amazing. But the Basilica di Santa Croce was my favorite. I'm a sucker for seeing where historic figures are buried -- I guess it's like I feel I'm in their presence, and it's awe-inspiring to me. I mean, who wouldn't want to me in Michelangelo's presence?

Being in the presence of such greatness calls for great players' cards to be shown.

Molitor and Spahn are in the Hall of Fame, just as Michelangelo would be in any artistic Hall of Fame for which he would be eligible.

Tivoli: Hadrian's Villa and Villa d'Este

Perhaps my favorite day on my Italian trip was the day I spent just 30 km outside of Rome in Tivoli. It was a combination of a beautiful day with beautiful scenery. Two noteworthy former residences are located there. First, you have Emperor Hadrian's Villa and the stunning view of the early morning sun on the Canopus.

After walking around that complex for a couple of hours, the next stop was in Tivoli itself at the Villa d'Este. This residence was commissioned by Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este, the son of Alfonso d'Este and Lucrezia Borgia (and grandson of Pope Alexander VI), who had been appointed Governor of Tivoli by Pope Julius III. d'Este had marble appropriated from Hadrian's Villa to help build some of the stunning water fountains in the gardens below this incredible house.

To go with these views and this beauty?

Y'all know what a sucker for full-bleed photograph I am -- even if Dave Nilsson looks pissed off and Jeff Cirillo looks like he is training for a speedskating event rather than running the basis on his 1996 Fleer card.

Riccardo, thank you very much for the huge box of cards. I hope some day to make it to Milan, the Cinque Terra, and the north of Italy so that I can be taken aback by the beauty of the Italian Alps in the same way I was so impressed with Tuscany and even parts of Lazio.

Viva l'Italia!