All Cracked Up, with Crackin' Wax and a Cracked Bat

Hey there, everyone. Things have gone crazy here at Hiatus Central, what with all the traveling I've done in the past month -- yes, more traveling -- and work and all that. My time for hobbies has gotten limited somewhat so I'm way behind on website maintenance here, with sorting in my office, and with blogging.

As with my last post, while I'd prefer to post about all of these great envelopes I've received separately, I'm going to combine some things into one big post.

First up: a Topps Chrome half case break with Crackin' Wax. I had the Brewers and the Twins and got really nothing of interest outside of the base cards and the typical inserts, though I did get one Joe Mauer parallel:

It's been incredibly annoying this year to watch Topps trying to pimp Orlando Arcia as a Rookie of the Year candidate. Normally, of course, I'd be okay with a Brewer getting cards in various sets, but in this case I'm not. Why? Because Topps are run by idiots who don't fact check anyone outside of New York long enough to realize that Arcia was not rookie-eligible this year.

Total morons.

Now, that case break was a total disaster. The other half of the case that CW had was opened as part of a different case break of some sort. Not having unlimited funds to buy into every case break ever, I did not participate in it. As that half-case was opened, I got to watch as three Brett Phillips autographs tumbled out. Perhaps CW and his wife felt bad about this. It seems they talked the guys at Buck City Breaks into sending two of those my way anyway:

I'm hopeful for Brett Phillips's future as a top-notch 4th outfielder/guy not stretched to play every day. He played all three OF positions in AAA this season in preparation for that role. The Brewers have great depth with their outfield prospects and current players -- Keon Broxton had a quiet 20 HR/20 SB season, for example, and he almost certainly should be traded to upgrade the rotation if the right deal can be found. Phillips has an absolute gun from the outfield and registered a through of 104 MPH from centerfield -- the hardest/fastest throw Statcast registered all season.

Thanks, Buck City Breaks, for sharing your largesse with me.

I think I'm done with case breaks, though. For what I get out of them, it simply is a better deal for me to find the team set on eBay and buy that and the inserts instead.

Shortly after that case break, I got a huge package from my pal Julie at A Cracked Bat. 

Julie sent me the first National Geographic magazine I've ever gotten in a package:

This April 1991 story on "A Season in the Minors" featured the then Double-A affiliate of the Brewers, the El Paso Diablos. As always, NatGeo had great photographs and a well-written article to go with it.

A second magazine was a Beckett Baseball Card Monthly from February 2001 featuring hot prospect Ben Sheets on the cover with his gold medal from the 2000 Olympics:

A third "new one to me" was that Julie found an old postcard of my favorite baseball stadium of my youth: the dank, beer-stained Milwaukee County Stadium.

Finally, Julie also sent me some great cards. Here's a sample:

There are not that many bloggers who are kinder than Julie when it comes to sending great packages out. There are also not that many bloggers who even own any of those Score Summit Edition cards or even those parallel Panini Prizms. And while Jonathan Broxton and Adam Lind hung around Milwaukee for a very short time, it's always much appreciated to get a card serial numbered to TEN!

Many thanks, Julie, for the great cards!

Merry Christmas to me from A Cracked Bat

A Merry Christmas from the Atlanta area, where our meteorologists supplemented the NORAD Santa Tracker with a tracker for Noah and his Ark.

While the rain has returned after about a 12-hour respite, I'm thinking that we probably still will not need that $73-million ark being built at the "Creation Museum" in Kentucky, scheduled to be completed next summer. Of course, I'm not sure of the need for a $150-million theme park to try to promote creationism either, just as I'm really not sure about the need for the Hunger Games Theme Park here in Atlanta.

None of that really has any relation to the cards I'm showing off today. My good trading friend Julie from "A Cracked Bat" sent me a fantastic Christmas Card -- a "Michigan" Christmas:

I particularly like "Seven Vernor's Ginger Ales a Fizzing," as that is a local delicacy apparently that I have yet to sample.

Making this card even cooler were the two incredible baseball cards accompanying it.  



On the right, of course, is a 1953 Bowman Black & White Lew Burdette -- a card that goes perfectly in my Burdette player collection.

But, let's talk for a second about Jim Wilson. Wilson's 1953 Bowman color card accompanied the Burdette. More interestingly and from a historic perspective, Wilson holds the distinction of being the first Milwaukee pitcher to throw a no-hitter. On June 12, 1954, he held the Philadelphia Phillies hitless. In fact, the Milwaukee Braves had four no-hitters total and Wilson and Burdette had the first two -- both against the Phillies. 

The other two were both by Warren Spahn -- one against the Phillies and the other against the Giants. Of course, the Brewers have had just one no-hitter in their entire history -- a 5-walk, 7-strikeout performance by Juan Nieves against the woeful Baltimore Orioles in 1987 in the midst of the Brewers 13-game season-opening winning streak punctuated by Robin Yount's diving catch in center field to finish off the game.

Thank you, Julie, for the fantastic cards and the ability to get a little baseball history lesson on Christmas day.  To all the rest of you, have a happy holiday! 

Julie's Been Working for the Drug Squad

How else can you explain why Julie from A Cracked Bat would be sending out so many cards to so many people? She must have some kind of "connections" that are allowing her to put such great envelopes of cards together for people.

I have traded with Julie a couple of times already. In fact, my last trade post (called imaginatively "Julie: A Trade Post") is one of my most viewed posts ever (with over 1150 hits). It might be the American Girl part of the post that draws random hits to the post, but it's more likely that the world wants more "Cracked Bat"!

This time around, Julie sent me several very recent cards from a couple of the higher end sets:

Now that's a lot of Lucroy right there -- two of the Museum Collection base card parallels, the Topps Triple Threads base of both Luc and Gomez, the Lucroy Green parallel, and the Red prism card from Panini that reminds me of a Picasso painting for some reason.

Maybe.

Anyway, Julie also treated me to some relics and autographs too.

Coooooooooooooop! Dave Parker was a Brewer for just one year, but apparently the Brewers kept every one of his old uniforms to let Upper Deck cut them up into little squares. Finally, there's Carlos Villanueva, who was last seen in the bullpen for Baseball's Best Fans (who really seem to believe that Jason Heyward should have felt more kinship to St. Louis after 1 season than he would show for any other team in baseball).

Finally, Julie hooked me up with a few random cards for a couple of my other player collections:

Each of these great cards -- including the Gallardo Chrome Heritage up top -- were ones I knew that I needed for my player collections.  

This last one, though, was not.  I mean, I'm not a Scott Fletcher collector, except for his cards with the Brewers, of course...

...well played, Julie! Well played.

Thanks again for the great cards you've sent this time. And, guess what? I've been collecting up cards to send your way soon!

Julie: A Trade Post

Definition of Julie:

Sweet and downy haired girl, changeable, and often misunderstood and complex. A fearful creature as well as highly loyal. She will rule your affection and once you have hers it will be forever.

-- The Urban Dictionary (written by "Julie Renee")

If you have heard of the Urban Dictionary, you know that it is the frequently Not Safe For Work reference for those slang terms that, perhaps, should not be shared in polite company. Now, the definition for Julie -- not coincidentally written by a woman named Julie -- is quite tame and complimentary compared to other terms.

Thankfully for everyone, I am not turning to the Urban Dictionary for a theme post. But, to honor our blogging, baseball-card-collecting friend Julie of A Cracked Bat and to highlight the cards she sent me, I decided to go with the Google theme.  In other words, what does Google give me when I simply input "Julie"?

Hit 1: Call JULIE before you dig for safe digging in Illinios [sic]

Yes, the Diggers Hotline in Illinois is (1) called Julie and (2) misspells "Illinois" in its headline.  Julie here is an acronym, standing for "Joint Utility Locating Information for Excavators."

Julie the collector likes to dig too -- through dime boxes, that is.  One card in the huge package she sent to me came in a penny loader with a little sticky note attached:

Behind the note was this card:

Which is one heck of a great find in a dime box.

Hit 2: Julie, The American Girl Doll

I don't know how you folks with daughters do it. These American Girl dolls are ridiculous. My niece has one -- not a Julie doll, mind you -- and the amount of money that these American Girl stores require is unbelievable.  

Here's the Julie doll:

The sentiment behind the doll is great -- standing up and fighting for what's right and all -- but the sentiment is merely an entrée into an entire world of books, clothing ("outfits authentic to her era and stories"), furniture (also period-specific to 1973, including an "Egg Chair" set [for the doll? for the kid?] for $100), and clothing for the human to wear that matches the doll.

Wait.  Where was I? Baseball cards.  Right.  

That little digression into the world of #FirstWorldProblems sort of reminds me of unlicensed cards generally.  I know some folks like/don't mind cards with guys without logos.  I don't mind them that much, to be fair, because I want these companies to stay in business creating cards long enough to get licensed and provide competition for Topps.  So, here are the unlicensed/non-logo-bearing cards that Julie sent to me.

   

 

I like the look of the Donruss Elite of Lucroy. Catcher cards are the best cards to get away with being logoless.  

Maybe the folks at Panini should put together a huge, multi-year set called "The History of Catchers".  Start with the first photos we have, or get an artist to draw Goudey-style art (and I'm talking 1930s Goudey, not the stylized versions we got in 2008 and 2009) and do a set entirely of catchers.  Or Catchers who played more than 50 games in a season.  That way, we can get great photos/art with cards that are inventive and Panini wouldn't have to spend so much time on making Gorman Thomas look like he is hitting as a member of the Chicago Cubs circa 1978.

Here's the thing, though -- just because a card is logo-less does not mean it has to be ugly or discolored.  

Right, Church's Fried Chicken card?

Hit 4 (after skipping Wikipedia): Julie: The 1956 movie starring Doris Day

In Glorious Black & White.  The plot: Doris Day plays widow Julie Benton, who is terrorized by her second husband.  Here's another movie poster to give you an idea of what this film might be like:

Run Julie, Run! Run for your life!

To what could I possibly compare this movie? How about cards from the mid-1990s:

So many sets from the 1990s feel like horror shows.  These duplicate action shots on 1994 Flair, the shiny-faced B.J. Surhoff Diamond King (it's limited in release, kids -- just 10,000 made and serial numbered too!) -- after putting my checklists together for these 1990s sets and looking at the cards online, I'm pretty glad I didn't collect during that decade.  I might never have returned, except for the love of the game of baseball itself.

Hit 5: Julie Bee's Creates The 12-Hour Shoe For The Fabulously Chic Woman

By that, they mean this:

or this:

So, this is our fashion plate Google hit for Julie.  What could possibly qualify here?

Our swatches of fabric and manufactured commemorative patches, of course.  Don't you want something in white with blue pinstripes? Of course you do.  Or maybe you'd rather be blandly attired in something white like Lyle Overbay?  The best choice is something bespoke -- made personally for you just like a manufactured patch made just for Jean Segura.

Hit 6: Julie & Julia

I watched this movie with my wife a few years ago, when it first appeared on DVD. My wife and I like to cook together from time to time, and, to be honest, I find Amy Adams to be incredibly attractive.

The problem with the Julie & Julia movie is...well, there are a couple of problems.  First, Julia Child was no fan of Julie Powell, the blogger who worked her way through Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking -- but mainly because Child thought that Powell was just not taking the art of cooking very seriously and thought it was a stunt.

The other part -- which was not mentioned, referenced, or touched on in any way in the movie -- was the fact that Powell was cheating on her husband for two years after she wrote the book that became the movie.  The movie portrayed their relationship as this supportive love fest, but the reality was less enticing.  

What cards could possibly go along with this random dissertation?

They look like cards.  They have backs like cards. But they aren't cards.  They are stickers. It's all a big lie.

Other Hits:

Julie (1975 Hindi Movie)

This Bollywood movie featured at its core an Anglo-Indian family dealing with difficult issues related to that crossroads between being Indian and being Christians with an Anglo background.  It's so random I had to include it for something completely random:

A "Molten Metal" Geoff Jenkins.  A metal card with (thankfully) rounded corners is about as random as it gets in my book.  

Julie, thank you for the great cards.  I hope that my weird, strange post highlighting your first name won't drive you away from sending me cards!