Cards from JT at The Writer's Journey

See, guys and gals? I'm really trying now. I am. I know I need to get better about posting if I want to call myself a blogger, so here I am. 

As a lot of you know, I got lucky in winning a box of 2018 Topps from Steel City Collectibles on Twitter. So, I made it my goal to send as much of that out the door as quickly as possible. One of the beneficiaries was JT at The Writer's Journey. JT sent me cards about two years ago, at which time I confessed that his blog was one of the first ones I'd really ever read. 

Since then, I've been lucky to interact with him on Twitter on a regular basis and have really gotten to like his understated nature. He's a great guy to follow there.

Perhaps thanks to me sending cards to him or him just having too many Brewers lying around his house, I got a package from him. And since his blog just covered that his favor song about memory is Skid Row's "I Remember You" (which I've posted twice here and I won't do it again), I'm going with other great hair bands/songs from that same era.



Let's start off mostly in the late aughts, but with a Donruss thrown in. First off, it's Bill Hall, whose random 35-HR season in 2006 in the context of his career looks more and more suspicious every day...positively Brady Andersonesque. 

In the midst of that 2006 season, a random blogger -- whose blog still exists has not been deleted -- made one of those "Bill Hall is superman" posts. That blogpost included such statements as, "There are no steroids in baseball, only players Bill Hall breathed on."

Um, okay. Even funnier to me, though, is that the post has 20 comments. No kidding -- three legit anonymous posts, one from someone named Jamie (Easterly?), and then 16 spam comments. 

First song out of the box is Alice Cooper's "Poison." I remember hearing this song in my high school band room and thinking it was pretty cool. Like, cool enough that I asked the girl who owned the tape if she would dub it for me (which she was nice enough to do). I later found out that this song was really Alice Cooper trying to take the rough edges off his persona so he could become a member of the celebrity golf tour. Sort of.

Incidentally, the actress who appears in this video is a woman named Rana Kennedy, who is now a masseuse and pilates trainer to the stars in Carlsbad, California. 

I do love me some oddballs. JT's actually been interspersing these Baseball Champion packages around the blogosphere over the past month. For me, though, these two stay packaged. After all, a clear plastic card package with a player collection member on the top is another item to add to my player collections for Ben Oglivie and Cecil Cooper.

Then there is that wannabe 1959 Topps Paul Molitor. Baseball Cards Magazine almost got their font right for it. They messed up the font spacing on the name. Close, though. 

If you were a teenager alive in 1989 and you weren't really into garbage songs by Debbie Gibson and New Kids on the Block, you probably thought that Living Colour was one of the most awesome bands on the face of the planet thanks to their album Vivid. Now, Corey Glover's choice of a bright yellow Body Glove surfing outfit as stage wear is a bit dated, but this song is just as awesome today as it was then. 

For what it's worth, Living Colour just released a new album last year called Shade. I haven't checked it out yet...I will be soon.

While I hate to do scan dumps, I also am trying to focus more on posts that don't go on for 18 pages. So, sometimes, that will mean a scan dump will result. Lots of Bowman, some old school Upper Deck (please let them make cards again, MLB. Please. Limit them to 5 sets and 2 parallels if you're worried about market saturation. Seriously.), and even some Topps too.

One last song:

Please recall that I was 17 and turned 18 in late 1989, so you'll understand when I say that this song, too, reminds me of a girl I knew then. Actually, it was a girl I went out with a few times who was from a different school from me. She was from a good Irish-Catholic family and was a very good student. I was from a non-Catholic family and enjoyed having fun, but I was totally a goody goody too and was a good student. So, we got along well and had fun with each other and our mutual friends. 

She was almost 6' tall, had long, curly black hair, and really long legs too. And I had troubles sometimes describing her eye color because it varied greatly depending on the sunlight. So, this song totally reminds me of her. She is now the CEO of a company based in the Midwest, so she did quite well for herself. 

Me? I'm a baseball card blogger. Again. Finally.

JT, thank you very much for the cards.

You won't Believe What I Bought on eBay -- #4 will Shock You!

Clickbait is everywhere on the internet. It's on the bottom or in the margin on nearly every website -- everywhere from the tabloids where you'd expect to see them to reputable news websites. A number of websites -- like this one -- have even popped up to allow you to generate your own Clickbait Headlines. 

So, the next time you see my blog have the headline of "The Anakin Skywalker of Baseball Cards" or "Baseball Cards: If my tips don't make you money, I'll shave my head," you'll know that my blog got taken over by a clickbait site.

I have done a bit of shopping on eBay recently, though, and I did want to show off those purchases.

1.  1987 Sportflics Team Preview

What a nightmare this card is. I say that for a couple of reasons. The card was sold only to dealers in 1987 as part of a set. That doesn't mean that there are limited quantities necessarily, but in practice they are reasonably difficult to find. 

More importantly, as a player collector and thanks to the Sportflics "Magic Motion," this card contains photos of six different player collections. So, to have a "complete" collection, I feel as if I need seven of these -- one for each of the Rob Deer, Teddy Higuera, Paul Molitor, Dan Plesac, B.J. Surhoff, and Robin Yount player collections as well as one for the team set. 

If this were a 1987 Topps card, it wouldn't be so bad. But, it's Sportflics. Nobody bought these things. It's like Alice Cooper wearing the red protective cup on the outside of his leather pants in this video -- totally unnecessary and totally ridiculous.

So, this one goes into my Yount collection, which has inched up to 912 different cards/items. The next one I find goes in Molitor's collection.

2.  Jonathan Lucroy 2016 Topps Archives Blue Parallel and Base Card

I bought these two from box breaker extraordinaire Brent Williams. Usually, all of Brent's Brewers end up going to another Brewers collector -- a guy out of Texas who is a big Ryan Braun fan -- so either Brent got two of these or that other guy just didn't want Lucroy. I'd be upset with that whole set up if the Texas guy wasn't such a good dude. 

Anyway, I told Brent via Twitter that I'd pay what he was asking for the Lucroy if he'd throw in a base card, figuring Brent would have a few extra. He agreed to it and threw in the base card. 

I am on record saying that I really like this design for the Archives set this year. Topps seems to have put a little bit more work into it by selecting photos that wouldn't look out of place in the 1979 set. 

That song is over 20 years old.  Just saying.

To be honest, though, Lucroy's card would be a little out of place in the 1979 Topps Set. Only seven of the twenty-five Brewers cards in the Topps set that year (not counting the team card or the prospects card) featured the Brewers in their home whites. Most of the others appear to have been taken in Yankee Stadium or spring training. 

Still, I give Topps credit here for doing well with the 1979 portion of Archives.

3.  A 9-card lot of 1975 Brewers Topps Minis



I started looking recently for little lots like this one to fill in gaps in my collection. Sales like that Red Foley sticker collection spurred my thoughts toward trying to find sellers selling several cards like these as a lot rather than individually. All of these are in at least good/very good condition, and there are a few sharp corners as well. 

1975. What a great year in baseball cards.

Plus, I got to add to my player collection of both Jim Slaton (now at 52 cards/items) and Gorman Thomas (now at 61 cards/items) since I already had that Charlie Moore.

4.  1979 Open Pantry/Lake to Lake Milwaukee Set



I'm not quite sure how I missed this set before. In the early part of 1979, the local Open Pantry convenience stores -- which, in Milwaukee, have always been on the south side of town (other than a former location in Oshkosh) -- had a promotion with Lake to Lake Dairies to raise money for the MACC Fund (MACC stands for "Milwaukee Athletes against Childhood Cancer"). The back of the Cecil Cooper card below has the whole deal.

Probably the most interesting to me only thing about this set is the breakdown of Packers, Bucks, and Brewers in the set. There are only two Packers -- Rich McGeorge and Steve Wagner -- the set while there are five members of the Milwaukee Bucks. McGeorge is a member of the College Football Hall of Fame for his career at NAIA Elon, and he went through difficult times battling alcohol abuse. 

Wagner was included, I think, because he was a local boy who attended the University of Wisconsin. He was always a fringe/special teams type player, and he complained a couple of years after leaving Green Bay about how Bart Starr as a coach was a terrible man-manager.

These days, there might be one or two of the Bucks in the set and probably only two Brewers too. The Packers would certainly dominate the numbers. The late 1970s, though, were the dark days. Quarterback Lynn Dickey was hurt regularly, James Lofton had gotten upset and flipped off his own fans, and the team was terrible. In 1979, for instance, the team finished 5-11. It took another 14 years -- 1993 -- for the Packers to begin their run of success that has continued for most of the past 23 seasons.

To end this post, I'll give you a little trivia -- the Packers were the first NFL team with their own fight song. This song was first played at a game in 1931.

Thanks for reading -- more eBay wins and more trade posts are on the way!

Cards JayP's Mom Kept

I'm coming up on my two-year blogging anniversary next month, and it's been an eventful two years. Trades have happened, envelopes have been sent and received, and even priority mailers have shown up and been received.

I've even seen two people who started out as commenters start their own blogs.  Now, I did it pretty much backwards -- I mean, I saw that blogs existed and said "that sounds like fun to me." In fact, the reason I found out that blogs existed were thanks to Fuji cross-posting his blog posts to one of the online chat forums.

It's probably a more likely scenario that people start out as readers and commentators, though. Personally, I've seen Angus at Dawg Day Cards go from sending me O-Pee-Chee to blogging about the foibles of the Cleveland Browns. I can relate to that level of futility thanks to being a Brewers fan.

I've also seen a recent commenter, JayP, start up his blog as an apparent homage to the "Cards Your Mom Threw Out" insert set in 2010 Topps.  His elegantly named blog, Cards Mom Didn't Throw Out, has started up very recently. He introduced himself to me through email and comments, and now he introduced himself to all of us. The best thing is that he has a wantlist up already -- always a good idea in my book.

Anyway, I was lucky enough to get a nice envelope full of cards from JayP. Since he is about to become the man who gets a bunch of Diamondbacks from me, how about we use some Arizona bands to introduce the cards? Sounds good to me.

Let's start with Ben Sheets -- including a great card of Sheets with a Brewers hat and a United States jersey from the 2000 Futures Game in Atlanta's Turner Field. What's great about that is I actually attended that game!



Ben Sheets cards from the early part of the 2000s deserve music from that era. Let's go with a band from Mesa that formed in 1993 and is still going strong. Their biggest hits came off their 2001 album Bleed American. Of course I am talking about Foghat.

Oh wait. That was Sunday's post.

I'm talking about Jimmy Eat World. The song I always think of by them is "The Middle."

Next up, some singles from the 1998 Stadium Club set, including PCs Jose Valentin and Cal Eldred (along with Gerald "Ice" Williams):



While not an exact analog timewise -- in fact, not really all that close to be fair -- I like Meat Puppets and wanted to post one of their songs. To be fair, I like the Nirvana unplugged version especially, so that's what I'm putting up:

Old school throwback cards have been all the rage for quite a while now, once Topps figured out that its old designs still draw people in. Some of the attempts at "Heritage" cards missed the mark though.

Here's a good one and a not so good one.



On the left -- Tony Gwynn Jr., er, Anthony Gwynn in the "not-so-good", and, on the right, Taylor Jungmann's 2015 Heritage High Numbers card. I still need a few of the high-numbers from this year, in case you have some Brewers you'd like to trade.

As for a musical accompaniment, I don't think I could have Arizona bands without featuring the big baseball fan musician from Arizona:

Alice Cooper, of course. I mean, the guy owns a sports bar in Phoenix called "Alice Cooper'stown" -- I had to include him.

Okay -- last two groups of cards. The first group is another early 2000s pairing -- again from Stadium Club. Man, these 2001 Stadium Club Cards look GOOD:



As I have looked for bands to feature from Arizona, I knew of a few that I would definitely feature. This next one is an odd one because I had never heard of them before this blogpost. Still, it's pretty interesting music from a band called Audra:

That's Audra's paean to Syd Barrett, one of the founding members of Pink Floyd who passed away about 3 years before that album was released. Of the tracks from Audra to which I listened, there were some reminders of the band She Wants Revenge, whose song "Tear You Apart" was one of my favorites from 2006.

But, if you're an Arizona person, please tell me one thing: how does a state with so much sunshine produce such dark music? There is a ton of death metal from Arizona. Seriously -- does the heat make people want to thrash? 

Anyway, I digress because, well, most of the time I'm writing a blog that's Seinfeldian in its nothingness...

Okay, last group of cards -- two guys of recent vintage:



Braun and Fielder, of course. The guys who powered the 2008 Wild Card run and the 2011 division title will almost certainly have their defenders in Milwaukee. I'm among them, obviously, since these guys are both PCs for me. 

So, music? Yeah, it has to be done...

Mainly because I really and truly quote from this song's chorus about once a week, I think. This is a true classic to me -- I mean, how can you not quote the line "Everybody knows, that the world is full of stupid people"...especially when you find yourself in rush-hour traffic?

JayP -- thank you very much for the cards. I'm working on the return package to you.