I Need Therapy

Just before the end of the year, a package from Adam at Addiction As Therapy showed up in my mailbox. It contained a plethora of great cards. I'm going to showcase a few of them and use this time writing simply as "therapy" for my collecting. I have no idea where it's going, but y'all are coming along.

There are things about collecting cards these days versus my original days back in the 1970s and 1980s that I like a lot. Back in those days, you had one shot at what the big companies released as card sets. Sure, there would be random other stuff -- 5x7 photos from Topps, card-sized stickers from Fleer, Donruss's Action All-Stars -- but those were really oddballs. 

The real action was each company's flagship, eponymous set.  

These days, it seems like it is a rare week when a new set doesn't come out from Topps or Panini that is available in stores, and it is indeed a rare week that Topps doesn't issue something new. Sure, unless you have unlimited funds, you will have to pick and choose what you collect. But the options these days are many. It's hell for a completist, but it's fun to chase. 



Of course you can't chase everything. The feature of collecting today is also its defect in many respects. Trying to catalog what a "complete" team set each year would look like is tough. All the parallels and inserts get mind-numbing. In that regard, it's almost worse than the "overproduction" era of the late 1980s/early 1990s. 

I worry about the hobby with things like this. It makes me wonder whether cards will still exist in, say, 2035. With how focused on the high-end sets Topps has become, and with how much of a cash cow Topps Now had to have been, it begs the question of how long Topps will continue to issue a Flagship. I could see them continuing Heritage and Archives for the nostalgic among us, but will they continue putting out a new eponymous set? 

And, how much longer will we go with only one card issuer? How long will it take MLB to bring card printing in-house when it sees the kind of cash that Topps generates or, conversely, when Topps fails financially and ends up leaving MLB without a card company? Could that happen?

Maybe the question is, "why wouldn't it?"

After all, Donruss looked like a pretty solid company. Now, its rotting corpse is being used to put out chrome cards without logos and with discolored jerseys. 

Going stream of consciousness on you and speaking of the future....

Here's Future. Perhaps the best comment about this video is, "This dude be speaking cursive."

Anyway, just remember, the future isn't always bright. At least not in a dystopic world. That's probably why I could use some therapy. It's tough to stay positive sometimes, especially when it seems that the world has turned against people who value intelligence, or expertise, or thoughtfulness. 

Is our world's anti-intellectual bent (I say world because, well, look at Brexit and Europe generally) just a phase? Or is it a dumbing down of the world that will be tough to reverse?

Who knows.




On happier thoughts about the future, perhaps in 2035 we will be celebrating the use of the 1994 set on Heritage and Topps will have dragged out the 1979 design for still more cards for Archives on multiple occasions. While the 1994 design is nothing special, I'm in favor of having the 2035 Archives set feature 100 more cards with the 1979 design.

Of course, will I still be collecting in 2035? 

If so, will I still be looking for another Corey Hart Topps Heritage card that I don't have, or some Jonathan Lucroy Archives short print from 2015 -- to complete a team set or a player collection? 

Probably. 

Well, I say probably. I assume a lot there. I assume I'll still be alive at the age of 63. 

I assume I'll still be collecting.

I assume I'll still be collecting in the same way that I'm collecting now. 

I'm hopeful that there will be better technological advances available then such that we will be able to automate some of the processes that we do manually now -- like, say, a set release that comes with an automatic filter to sort the cards however you want and then with photo recognition to check them off the checklist when you have them.

That is, if there are still physical cards being issued.



Just wait, though, till the 2015 and 2016 card designs end up on Archives. Is there any rule that Topps has about how old a design has to be to appear on Archives? If not, why haven't we seen some cards echoing the 2007 design? Or the 2000 design? I mean, the year 2000 is now 17 years ago. Those cards will be seniors in high school this fall. 

On a similar note, I have baseball hats older than that. In fact, I have a Brewers trucker-style hat with the mesh back from 1987 that my grandad used to wear. I still wear it from time to time. It's in good shape, so why not? 

Is there any point to these thoughts? Not particularly. Sometimes, it's better just to let the words flow and see what happens. These cards, this blog, these relationships we all have with others online -- all of it is what makes things fun. Just like any gathering of people, sometimes things will get one or more of us really upset. No one will like everything. 

It's tough to be zen. It's tough to be quiet. It's tough to be contemplative. It's easier to go through mood swings, to be upset and share that upset with everyone, to pop off when something seems off. I know -- I do all of those things, and being loud, upset, and popping off is far closer to my default position.

Part of me thinks that my job as a lawyer has done this to me. I'm always coming up with counterpoints to the points made by others. I'm perpetually trying to convince others that, sure, maybe J.J. Hardy did use that piece of wood in his card as part of a bat and it's not from a random 2x4 from Home Depot. 

Another part of my job is to remain calm, though -- to appear unflappable, unemotional, poker-faced. When something bad happens, the response isn't to go nuts, or to cry -- it's to think. It's to try to make things right. 

All that together makes it tough for me not to engage Topps from time to time -- to call them out when they ignore teams. I want Topps to be around in 2035 (I want me to be around then too), and I see too many occasions where there does not appear to be a plan with them. It seems short-sighted to give short shrift to the Brewers or the Twins or the Astros earlier in the decade or the Rays simply because there might seem to be fewer fans of those teams that buy cards. Maybe it's that those folks don't buy cards from Topps because, well, Topps does very little to cater to them. 

Again, that's all a discussion I've engaged in before. 

Maybe just a little typing therapy helps sometimes. Just like collecting can be an addiction, it can be therapy too.

Adam, many thanks for the fantastic cards. I hope you didn't mind tracking through all this randomness.

Winning: Addiction as Therapy Sends a Pack My Way

Everyone has a story about how they got started in our hobby and, for many of us, we have our story about how we got back into the hobby.  My story is fairly mundane: through college and law school, I didn't have time or energy or storage space for my collection.  After law school, I lived in similarly small dwellings -- first an apartment in the close-in suburbs followed by a condo in the city.  Neither had a ton of space, so my cards stayed at my mom's house.

After I finally got married and my wife and I bought our current house, I found myself with more than enough room to have an office with my cards in my house.  Shortly after we celebrated 1 year in our house, my wife and I spent an extra day in Wisconsin that year at Thanksgiving to pull all my cards together and ship them back to Georgia.  Seven FedEx boxes weighing a total of just over 410 pounds later, my childhood baseball cards were mostly back in my possession again.  

My story pales in comparison to the story behind how Adam from a new blog on the block, Addiction as Therapy, got back into collecting.  As his first post, "First Taste is FREE", discusses, Adam has a typical blogger story -- collected as a kid, had heart surgery, and got back into collecting as part of his rehabilitation.

Wait, what?

Yes, he had surgery to replace his bicuspid aortic valve -- last year, in fact -- and is now a stay-at-home dad to two little ones under the age of 5. 

And yet, for some reason, here were are with HIM  sending ME  something.  In fairness, it was because his son wisely selected (randomly, I'll add) the Carlos Gomez Chipzzzzzzzz out of a hat. That meant Adam sent me the first pack of cards that I have opened all year (yes, seriously):

Adam taped the pack securely inside the envelope to some cardboard to protect it. That meant that these 9 cards all made it to me inside the pack in perfect condition:

Yeah.  Two Giants, Two Blue Jays, a painted Cub, a painted Brave, a team card, a Marlin, and a D-back.  No SPs, either.  To be fair, I'd have felt pretty bad if somehow this had been the all-chrome or all-printing plate hot pack of all Yankees that would be sold on eBay for thousands of dollars.

So, at least my conscience is clear.

Thankfully, Adam was also kind enough to throw in some cards from my want lists (which are updated for the mean time):

As over the top as those Studio cards from 1993 are, I totally dig them.  They are the anti-Panini, I suppose -- rather than no logos, the whole dadgum card is a logo.  And yet, I find myself drawn to these cards.  

Finally, Adam sent two Fleer Brewers stickers.  One of them had old Milwaukee County Stadium on the back.  On the left side, near the scoreboard, you can see Bernie Brewer's original home -- a beer barrel.  

That stadium still holds a warm place in my heart. Conservatively, I'd estimate that I saw at least 40 games in that stadium -- probably more -- during the 1980s.  That includes, in 1982, Game 3 of the American League Championship Series against the California Angels and Game 5 of the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals.  I also gathered somewhere close to 300 autographs -- at least -- at that stadium from both the Brewers and, as I got more confident in the mid-to-late 1980s, from the other teams that visited.  

Probably one of my least favorite but most memorable trips to the stadium also involved the Angels, but it was in 1990. My best friend in high school and I decided to go to a game.  It was a swelteringly hot day in Milwaukee that July day, and the Brewers fell behind right away -- badly.  They were down 7-0 after the Angels were done hitting in the top of the third. My friend and I were miserable, too. It was hot and we were planning on going out that night, so sticking around to watch a crappy baseball game just didn't make sense to my 18-year-old self and my 20-year-old friend.  

It was one of the first times I ever left a game early.  We left after the Brewers hit in the 3rd inning with the Brewers losing 7-1.  By the Win Probability chart on Baseball Reference, we left when the Angel had a 96% win probability.  We got in the car and drove the 35 miles back to where we lived.  By the time we got there, it was the bottom of the 4th, and the Brewers were in the midst of scoring six runs in the bottom of the 4th to tie the game off future Hall of Famer Bert Blyleven.  

In the bottom of the 5th inning, the Brewers scored thirteen more times to eventually win the game by the final score of 20-7.  

And we left early.

It always seems weird to drive by the old stadium location and see Miller Park there instead. My wife and I stay in a hotel in downtown Milwaukee when we visit up there (it gives us a respite from family, if you know what I mean), and we have to drive by the stadium site multiple times.  It still looks wrong.

Adam, thank you for the great giveaway, the great extra cards, and an excuse to relive some memories of my youth.