Throwback Thursdays

Last week, I started the week with a post about cards that I got from JT at The Writer's Journey. 

This week, I'm starting the week with a post about a card that I got from JT at the Writer's Journey.

I'll admit it: I had never heard of Bert Kaempfert before this song. Of course, Kaempfert wrote such standards as "Strangers in the Night" and Wayne Newton's signature song "Danke Schoen." Perhaps I should have heard of him before this song.

Anyway, back to baseball cards. Last year, Topps had a bunch of online exclusives that they sold in sets of anywhere from 5 to 8 cards and which were available only for a week. They were called the "Throwback Thursday" collection. While I promised not to rant as much this year, this one's worth a rant. Topps issued a total of 185 "Throwback" cards last year, with designs ranging from the 1988 Topps Glossy All-Stars Design to 1957-58 Basketball (showing guys like Lou Brock and Satchel Paige but annoyingly talking about the card design instead of the player on the back). 

So, these cards look great, in my opinion. It's fun to see old football card designs used for baseball. In fact, that might be a better use for Topps Archives.

Amongst the 185 Throwback cards, there were SIXTEEN cards that had Aaron Judge on it (and 21 cards with the Yankees). There were, though, three teams that only got featured on 1 card. I'm pretty sure the "most disdained" team has to be the Detroit Tigers. The only representation they got was having Michael Fulmer on a 1997-98 Bowman's Best Basketball "Mirror Image" design with Aaron Judge (they shared being rookies of the year, you see, so that makes them mirror images).

Otherwise, the other two team to get the "one-card" shrift both got their single card in the same "set." 475 people purchased the TBT set featuring the 1968 Topps Baseball Design -- a true cop out set in light of the fact that it was the Heritage design already last year -- and those 475 people got the only cards featuring a Cincinnati Red (Johnny Bench) and the only card featuring a Milwaukee Brewer -- Paul Molitor.

The backs of these cards each note that this set -- "Throwback Thursday Set 5" -- all featured players that did not have their own rookie cards by themselves. All of them (Bench, Molitor, Andre Dawson, Nolan Ryan, Carlton Fisk, and Willie Stargell) had to share.

This kind of money grab is where I'm fine with Topps being completely oblivious to the fact that baseball exists outside of New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Even though this is a really cool looking card -- which I am very thankful to JT for sending to me -- I'm 100% okay with Topps soaking all the Judgeaholics and taking their $20 a pop every single week. 

That's right Topps -- just give them The Judge.

My thanks again to JT for the excellent addition to my Paul Molitor collection!

Nearly Finished with 2016: eBaying at the Moon

As I slowly catch up with the cards and packages I have gotten over the past several months, I'm starting to think that I'll never catch up. This is my final post of cards that I scanned in 2016, but I got a bunch more cards right at the end of 2016 from a card show, from Addiction as Therapy, and from Card Junk that I still haven't gotten around to showing.

So, maybe by the end of next weekend I'll have caught up to this year. Maybe.

Today, though, I have some cool stuff that I bought for myself for Christmas from eBay. It's actually the sum total of four different sales from three different sellers.

We start the show in Chilton.

Chilton is located in Calumet County, east of Lake Winnebago and west of Manitowoc County. If Calumet County or Chilton sounds familiar to you for some reason, perhaps it is because you watched the Netflix series "Making a Murderer." Steven Avery's trial took place at the Calumet County courthouse, and the prosecutor for Avery's case was former Calumet County district attorney Kenneth Kratz.

It's amazing how many different towns made these cards. Chilton is a little city of about 3,500 people, and yet the person who sold this set to me is located in Pennsylvania.

Next, we move west:

Prince Fielder and Ben Sheets are shown here on 2008 cards from the Trempealeau County Sheriff's D.A.R.E. Program. Trempealeau County is located just north of LaCrosse County on the Mississippi River. It's a huge county -- 742 square miles, or just 460 fewer square miles than the State of Rhode Island. I've never traveled in that part of Wisconsin. I'm interested in doing so since I've now found out that the county has three ghost towns. I have a weird fascination with places that have been abandoned.

This seller was located in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, so at least that one has an easy explanation for how the seller must have gotten this set.

The rest of these cards all came from the same seller -- another Wisconsinite -- located in Burlington, Wisconsin, and they came from two separate sales. 

The first consisted of forty-eight different team Brewers sets for which I paid a total of $43 with shipping. For that price, it was okay that a number of them were team sets that I had completed long ago thanks to the fact that it filled in some gaps and added some new ones.

Such as:

These two cards come from a four-card set helping to inaugurate the Brewers Walk of Fame at Miller Park. Norstan Communications sponsored the stadium giveaway in 2001, and this lot was the first time I'd really seen a set for sale. It's not that it is that rare -- I just haven't looked all that often for it despite Cynical Buddha telling me about the set in 2014.

Being the uber-completist that I am, I still want to get one more of each of these two cards so that I have a full set in my Brewers oddballs collection.

So this one was both unanticipated and disappointing. It was unanticipated because I did not realize that the DAV (Disabled American Veterans) had issued a card set in 2008 consisting of five cards, which included an odd selection of players: Mike Cameron, Jason Kendall, David Riske, Jeff Suppan, and Rickie Weeks. I'm not sure if any other teams other than the Brewers and the Padres had these sets issued by the DAV -- those two teams are the only ones listed on Trading Card Database.

You can probably see why this one was a bit disappointing, though: even though the pack was unopened, that Rickie Weeks is about as poorly centered as it gets without another card appearing. That's not a mis-scan -- that's how it was cut. So, I suppose I'm still looking for two of the Weeks card -- two that are centered better than this one.

I'm almost done with the 1981 Donruss team set now as well. I'm just missing one of the dozens of typographical errors that Donruss had and fixed in its first set in 1981 -- the Gorman Thomas variation saying that he had reached the 30-HR mark for the 3rd time in his career. For what it's worth, that is the correct version rather than the earlier version which said he'd reached the mark for the fourth time.

For the eagle-eyed, you'll note that the Buck Martinez card is another error that was fixed. The first print run from Donruss flipped the negative for the card, making Martinez a lefty hitter. Buck is more known as a Toronto Blue Jay thanks to his run of 6 seasons there from 1981 through 1986 as Ernie Whitt's first platoon mate, then as a radio and TV broadcaster and manager for the Jays. He left the Jays for a while to work with MASN on the Orioles broadcast team before returning to Toronto in 2010.

Thanks to my need for completeness, I'm still one card away from completing the Leaf 1986 team set -- and that card is actually the Cecil Cooper Diamond King you see above. This one went into my player collection, while the Jim Gantner card went into my team set.

Something I did not realize before I read Matthew Prigge's Brew Crew Confidential blog this week is the anomaly around the Brewers issuance of team number 17. In the 1970s and setting aside the Pilots year, the number 17 went from Pete Koegel (1970-1971) to Paul Ratliff (1972), Joe Azcue (1972), Bobby Mitchell (1973-1975), Bob Hansen (1976), Steve Bowling (1976) and Ken McMullen (1977) before Jim Gantner pulled it on for the 1978 season. 

Since Gantner retired after the 1992 season, however, no one else has worn the number. That's 25 years ago. Are the Brewers intending to retire the number? Is it just that no one wanted 17? Were there too many times that Winger played over the loudspeakers so that everyone was turned off by the number seventeen?

Inquiring minds want to know. I want to know.

The main reason I bought this big team set lot, though, was the fact that there were a number of police card sets included in the box. It did not yield as many new sets as I would have liked. But there were at least a couple.

These 1996 cards don't even say anything about the police on the front, but they are police cards. I really do not like this design, but that is true of a lot of sets from the mid-1990s. The graphic designers in Milwaukee were just as susceptible to crappy design sensibilities as anyone else was, I suppose. 

There's a danger involved when a police card giveaway is sponsored, in part, by a sports card store. That danger is that so many sets will be created because the store wants to keep some in stock to sell.

Waukesha is a Milwaukee suburb -- not all that much interesting to say about it, to be fair.

The other lot I bought from this same seller cost just $4, and it was about 20 to 25 Robin Yount Police cards. Sure, there were some duplicates in this and a few were the ubiquitous Milwaukee Police Department, but here's the results from that lot:

Adding seven new Younts to the collection for $4 is always a bonus. 

That wraps up the 2016 scans. Musically, 2016 was a bit of a desert, in my opinion. The biggest alternative music act was Twenty-One Pilots, a band I am very much on the fence about. On the one hand, their music isn't all that bad. On the other hand, their music is entirely like listening to a mixtape of alternative music from the past 20 years. There's a little 311, there's a little Sublime, there's a little Ben Folds Five, and there's a little Jimmy Eat World in it. Really nothing new.

But hey, let's close with a song.

It doesn't stress me out. Not at all.

Songs Stuck in My Head that Should Come with Bubblegum

The past several weekends, I have found myself doing one of two things. Either I end up watching some show my wife and I have recorded (most recently, Food Network Star and 500 Questions), or I end up sorting through my Brewers oddballs to get them put into a binder for proper storage rather than sitting in stacks on a table. 

My seemingly desired method of sorting and displaying is to put Topps parallels and non-food-issues in different binders from the true oddballs like the 1984 Ralston Purina set, which, though produced by Topps, came in boxes of Cookie Crisp and count as real oddballs. This is as opposed to the weird Topps issues such as the strange "rub-offs" that came out both in 1984 and 1985 with the exact same checklists.

Anyway, that's how I'm doing it. It's taking a while.

Thankfully, there are good folks in the Blog world who help me by breaking the sorting depression that sorting and bindering cards sometimes brings my way -- I get tired of sitting in one spot for too long and my mind wanders. One of those people who helped -- this time by sending a great PWE -- is Jeff over at Wish They Still Came with Bubblegum. 

Jeff and I have a bet going right now as to which team -- either his Atlanta Braves or my Milwaukee Brewers -- will finish with the better record. He took his Braves, amazingly enough.  While this has changed over the weekend, when the Brewers left Atlanta on Thursday of last week, the Brewers had more wins in Turner Field this year at three than the Braves did at the same point of the season -- two.  

The good news, Jeff, is that it's Not Your Fault that the Braves suck. And, may I say, I love that video -- Claymation FTW! That song has been stuck in my head for part of the day today due, I think, to hearing someone talking about "fault" in design on an NPR Ted Talks podcast I was listening to today.

So, Jeff sent me a PWE as a possible down payment on his debt that will come due at the end of the year to go shopping at his local card show for me.  Let's see the highlights:

The envelope started out well with these cigarette-card-sized Rickie Weeks and Robin Yount. Gotta love that Topps 205, except for the fact that it's one of 74 different parallels from that set. 

This song got stuck in my head today thanks to the fact that there were some storms that went through here. Some powerlines ended up coming down -- and my drive home got rerouted thanks to that -- so the song about "what we do when the power's out" came into my brain. 

Also, I'm getting depressed with the realization that the bands in both of these videos are almost certainly young enough to where I could have been their dad without having kids before graduating high school and probably college too.

Screw it. It's still good music to me.

 

Yes, as a matter of fact I am using the easy transition of, "Speaking of kids young enough for me to have been their dad without having kids before graduating from high school/college/almost law school" (Demi Orimoloye was born on January 6, 1997. I was 25 years old at that point but still a year-and-a-half from graduating law school) to bring out the prospect cards again. Two Cody Ponces -- a guy who is injured already, mind you -- means that, eventually, I might have a new PC guy down the road. Once again, I'm waiting until he gets to the majors to make any decisions.

The autograph is of Matt Clark, who played 16 games with the Brewers in 2014 and hit three homers. Clark is a baseball nomad. After being drafted out of LSU by San Diego, he started on a circuitous path in baseball. He got to Triple-A in the Padres system before going to Chunichi in the Japan Central League in 2013. He hit 25 HRs with Chunichi, so the Mets and, then, the Brewers gave him another shot. After spending all of 2015 in Colorado Springs in the Brewers organization, he was released. At the age of 29, he found himself first with Laguna in the Mexican League -- where he played four games -- before signing on May 17 with the Orix Buffaloes in the Japan Pacific League.

twenty one pilots is an interesting group to me. This song sounds like an outtake from a Ben Folds Five recording session. Other songs of theirs -- like "Stressed Out" -- are totally different and sound more like a laid back Jimmy Eat World or some kind of version of the Pixies on crack or something. Every song of theirs that I've heard, though, reminds me of some other band.

But the one thing I will say is that I used to get Ben Folds Five's "Song for the Dumped" stuck in my head all the time too.

Anyway, where was I? Hell I don't know. How about Drakes?

As a kid, I had no idea where to find Drake's. I don't think they ever got to the Midwest. And that upset me. It seemed unfair that I would be denied access to great baseball cards just because I lived in the Midwest.

That was, of course, while I ignored all the awesome police card variations.

Last one. It's a true throwback song to about 20 years ago to go with a throwback card that Jeff sent that is 37 years old.

This song by Eve 6 always got stuck in my head as "the big word song." It was always this song that got the radio play, but I tended to prefer "Open Road Song" over this one many times. Oddly enough, the lead singer of Eve 6 is just slightly older than the cards that Jeff sent. 

That panel from the 1979 Hostess box bottom that included Gary Carter is just beautiful. Why can't we have even an unlicensed set these days that includes just good, solid photos rather than the overly retouched nightmares that Panini puts out? 

Seriously, good photos -- ones where logos are not shown -- can be taken. They can be found. 

Of course, I repeat that refrain so frequently that my complaints are becoming an earworm, stuck in my head like so many catchy songs.

Jeff, many thanks to you for the great PWE. I'll have to hit you up with some cards soon.

Okay, one more earworm. I'm positive this video will get pulled eventually, but this song brings back great memories for me too.

Even this kind of upsets me...Fox is remaking Rocky Horror.

Thanks for reading and listening.