My Favorite Baseball Card of My Favorite Baseball Player

Peter at Baseball Every Night is celebrating his one-year anniversary as a blogger. To mark the occasion, he is holding a contest: write a post of any length, content, or whatever about your favorite baseball card of your favorite baseball player.

If you haven't interacted with Peter before, you should at least follow him on Twitter. Well, you should so long as you appreciate erudite conversation in which he discusses the ins and outs of game theory as it relates to Sylvia Plath.

No, not really.

But you should follow him if you appreciate discussions of good beer, a dislike for the overkill of love shown to David Ortiz last year by Topps, and a complete hatred of 1995 Fleer cards. From time to time, I've been known to ruffle Peter's feathers by saying that, contrary to reality, he actually loves  1995 Fleer. Believe me -- he really does. Not. I mean does not.

So, it should not be a surprise that his contest rules state clearly that:

Any entrants selecting a card from 1995 Fleer will be automatically disqualified. But please do still post as I'll then forward your entry to a psychiatrist so that you can get the help you need.

I can see his point. There's very little to like about that card set. I've stated my dislike for it in the past. But then, it got personal:

Any entrants that select a 1995 Fleer card that I deem is intentionally trying to get disqualified (Tony L.) will be re-entered into the contest and will have their name added to the randomizer 18 times.

Whoa. It sounds like I can tip the scales in my favor in a major way here! But I hate 1995 Fleer. What's a guy to do?

How about a custom "card"?

 

It's just a prototype for Peter's very own 1995 Fleer card, featuring his position of Blogger and Sylvia Plath Scholar and highlighting the baseball that he stole from a crying 7-year-old kid. Or, rather, that he got by beating out a surly 13-year-old kid. One of those two.

In reality:

The reality is that most cards of my favorite players are cool but never really approach the level of being "THE" favorite. Yet, every time I think of my favorite card literally in my entire collection, I always seem to come back to the same one:

I come back over and over again to the Cardsphere Hero custom card from Christmas of 2015 that came my way courtesy of Gavin at Breakdown Cards. Gavin has a far more popular and much more interesting blog than mine -- I mean, come on...I'm a one note wonder and his collection is as eclectic as it comes -- and he's a much more talented artist and card maker to boot.

Gavin deserves the thanks and praise that all in the blogworld give him. And I haven't thanked him enough yet for this incredible card that remains my favorite baseball card almost 18 months after I received it.

Thanks go out to Peter for both the contest and for being a good sport for putting up with my chicanery and once again to Gavin. And, also, thank you for reading -- I appreciate it.

Rip It Up

By now, you have probably seen the Holiday rip cards from Gavin over at Baseball Card Breakdown. 

It's the first time since I got back into collecting a few years ago that I was legitimately happy to see a 1989 Fleer card show up. Of course, like nearly everyone, I did the right thing when I got this card. I had to Rip It Up.

While Little Richard didn't write the song, his version was released first. So, I'm giving him credit for that -- meaning everyone after that was a cover. A quick YouTube search shows, well, it's absolutely crazy how many covers there are of this song. It's so crazy that I'm going to treat you to a few of them. 

But I'm going to make you wait on what is inside until the end.

1.  Bill Haley & His Comets

Bill Haley released his version shortly after Little Richard did, so it's a close question as to whether this counts as a cover. 

To start this off, I am going to highlight the protection that Gavin sent for these cards. He always sends interesting things, and this one was no different:

It's been over two years now since I had a dog around. With the two cats we have getting along famously and fabulously, we just don't want to introduce a third party into the situation to throw all that off. But I miss my Cinnie girl.

We subscribed to the BarkBox for a few years for her. She loved some of the treats, turned up her nose at other treats, and generally was a good sport about the whole deal. Even if that meant having a Christmas bow on her head.

Okay, let's get back to happier things -- baseball cards, of course.

2. Paul McCartney

The Beatles covered this song as part of a medley with "Shake, Rattle and Roll" and "Blue Suede Shoes," a track that was released on their Anthology 3 album. This version is Sir Paul covering the song live in concert.

Yeah, this card is pretty interesting. Is there a "Groveling Gavin" version of it somewhere? Perhaps this one is it:

I tried chewing tobacco when I was about 7 or 8 years old -- maybe younger. I think that is the perfect age to try it because you have no idea what to do and you think it's like gum or something and swallow it and become violently ill. And it takes like crap at that age too.

Or maybe that's just me.

3.  Buddy Holly

Perhaps this song was one of those songs that artists in the 1950s just had to play. You know -- like how every cover band has to play "Twist and Shout"? Because Buddy Holly isn't the only singer from this era to cover it. There will be more. 

Hey, I have a great analogy now! Every band and artist in the 1950s had to play "Rip It Up" just like Topps/Bowman must have at least 10 different parallels for every one of its sets! That's it! 

Don't get me wrong here -- as a player collector, I do enjoy getting these parallels for those collections. But as the numbers of parallels stack up in each set, I start thinking, "Maybe I shouldn't try to put together full sets for my Brewers collection of these."

Then I laugh, have a drink, and forget I ever said that to myself. I'm easily amused, especially when I'm in a pure Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness mode.

4.  Elvis Presley

See, I told you there were more from that era who played it. I mean, Elvis never met a song he didn't try to take and make his own. Or, rather, Elvis never wrote any of his own songs -- even the fawning "Elvis History Blog" says that he was not a singer-songwriter. So, it should come as no surprise that he or Colonel Tom Parker would hear a song with a good beat and say, "Elvis, you gotta sing this song." And he would.

Apropos of a southerner of whom a lot was asked, here's Ben Sheets. A serial numbered to 899 Ben Sheets from 2006 SP Authentic at that. That's pretty good in my book.

5.  Stray Cats

Considering the band's sensibilities -- and Brian Setzer's later dabbling in Big Band/Swing music when it got popular again in the 1990s -- it should hardly be surprising that the Stray Cats would cover this song. I don't know when or where this cover came from -- I'd guess the early 1980s somewhere. But the Cats do shred on it.

Astin was the Brewers third round pick in 2013 out of the University of Arkansas (Woo Pig Sooie and all that). The Brewers sent Astin along with Kevin Shackelford to the Cincinnati Reds in late 2014 in exchange for the large human being that is Jonathan Broxton. Broxton chipped in 47 innings at a 5.55 ERA clip (though with a FIP of 3.47) before the Brewers sent him to St. Louis in exchange for Malik Collymore (an Ontario native who "hit" .167/.227/.208 in 208 plate appearances in the Florida State League in 2016 at the age of 21). 

Astin and especially Shackelford have a chance to make the Reds this year, what with the Reds still being in flux and all. Astin will start in Triple-A this season, and Shackelford pitched creditably in Louisville in 2016 out of the bullpen.

6. The Chipmunks

If the Chipmunks did a song, you know it was probably overplayed. Funny thing, though -- at this point in my life and despite growing up with The Chipmunks being on TV regularly, I think the only song I really remember by them is The Christmas Song.

Gavin was responsible for putting the first Donruss Optic card in my hands this year. At least I think he was. I have probably about 2500 cards stacked up on my desk now waiting to get sorted out and cataloged thanks to the crazy generosity from the blogosphere this year, so I may have gotten other Optic cards from other places first but just haven't featured them yet.

I look at this card and think, "Damn it MLB, give Panini rights to use your logos just on the Donruss sets. Limit their parallels. Limit their inserts. Give them a trial run, and see if they do a decent job and not screw it up -- just please give us a little bit of competition for Topps."

Then I remember that MLB really doesn't care about collectors except for getting their licensing fee blood out of Topps. Oh yeah. Forgot that.

7. David Thibault

Wait. This guy is just a French-Canadian Elvis impersonator. No, really. The guy nails Elvis's voice on some French-Canadian morning show at this link. I'm waiting for the brunette with the really straight hair and bangs to start screaming like it's the Ed Sullivan Show.

But really, I can't end with this guy. Him covering this song is like a double cover, since his whole life is covering Elvis. 

8. Los Lobos

This cover was done as a part of Los Lobos providing the soundtrack for the movie La Bamba in 1987. Lou Diamond Phillips "sings" the song in the movie, but the Los Lobos version did not come out until their career retrospective El Cancionero Mas y Mas in 2000 was released.

Here's the carnage after the ripping of the rip card took place. Sorry if anyone wanted that special collector's 15/25 version of the double Gwynn for their collection -- maybe you can talk someone else into being nicer to their card than I was to this one.

9.  Hanson

No shit. The little girls shrieking in the crowd probably thought that Hanson were the first to sing this song even though they say they are covering Little Richard at the very beginning of the song. 

See, once something like this happens to a song, it's a sign that the song really should be discarded. If the phrase "jump the shark" hadn't become so trite, it would describe what happened to this song to a T. Except that even then, it wouldn't really capture it. 

Not to be too harsh, but listening to this version would make Little Richard roll over in James Brown's grave. Little Richard is still alive, by the way.

Thankfully, the contents of the rip card were far better than this crapola:

I tried to fix my poor scanning job on this. Here's the straighter version:

 

I love the unique Robin Yount collectibles that Gavin has added to my collection in the past, and this artistic magnet is just awesome.

Thank you so much, Gavin, for letting me Rip It Up.

Happy (Belated) Birthday, Robin Yount!

All humans go through slumps. The only question is how the slump manifests itself. 

I get into slumps where I just don't feel like writing. I was in that slump most of this past week. Even at work, writing was extremely difficult for me. The words did not flow. The thoughts did not flow, and they were jumbled. 

Yesterday, though, things cleared up a bit. I was able to focus a bit more and I got things done. I don't know if it was just a little "end of week" focus or something else, but things were clicking. The other thing yesterday, though, was that my wife and I had a "hang out" night last night -- catching up on some TV shows together, playing a little backgammon, talking, listening to music, and drinking a little wine too. 

So, this post should have been made yesterday -- on the day of Robin Yount's 61st birthday -- rather than today. 

Better late than never.

It is difficult to state or even overstate how important Robin Yount was and still is in Milwaukee Brewers history. While Hank Aaron and Rollie Fingers were enshrined in the Hall of Fame before Yount, Yount was the first player to wear a Brewers hat on his plaque. 

When he retired suddenly at the beginning of the 1994 season, it caught Milwaukee as a city -- and probably as an organization -- by surprise. It led off the local news, of course, giving such cringeworthy coverage as this:

In honor of Yount's 61st birthday, though, I thought I'd pick out a few of my favorite Robin Yount cards from my collection, in no particular order.

1975 Hostess

I love oddballs. At some point, I may decide to try to collect complete sets of the Hostess cards, even as difficult as that may be, thanks to this love for oddballs. 

This card makes my "favorites" list for a couple of reasons. First, my love of oddballs meant that at least one (and actually more) would make this list. 

Second, thanks to the continual reprinting/reusing of the 1975 Topps version of Robin's rookie card by Topps -- seeing as it appears in nearly every throwback excuse set that Topps prints -- I'm actually kind of tired of that photo and that card. It is an iconic card, but even icons can lose meaning if they are everywhere. I appreciate the fact that Robin keeps getting cards, but I don't appreciate the laziness that pervades Robin's getting cards from Topps.

But I complain too much about Topps, apparently.

2015 Baseball Card Breakdown Cardsphere Heroes

By now, most people in the blog world know about the prowess that Gavin from Baseball Card Breakdown has with making custom cards. This photo is such a favorite of mine that it is my avatar on Blogger and on Twitter. 

I've already mentioned all the emotions I had on the day on which this picture was taken (the welcome home parade after the Brewers lost the 1982 World Series), and I've already called this my favorite custom card in Post #500. So, including this one in my list of favorite Yount cards was a natural move.

1983 West Bend Police Department

It wouldn't be a favorite card list from me of anyone who played in the 1980s without including a card from a police department. West Bend is the bigger city closest to where I grew up -- where city means, "more than 15,000 people", that is. As a kid, I literally would spend days near my house on my bike watching for police cars to go by and hope that they would have to stop at a stop sign near where I was so I could flag them down and get baseball cards. 

What can I say -- it was 1983, I could only play so much Atari before my thumbs and wrists got sore, and I was an addicted card collector.

I can't remember at this point if this is a card I got myself back in the 1980s or if I bought this on eBay. It doesn't matter.

2016 Topps Allen & Ginter

Looking through all my scanned cards, I have a bunch of Yount relics, a few autographs, and a ton of inserts and base set cards of Yount from after his playing career. For whatever reason, this one really grabbed me today. It's a different photo from the usual ones Topps seems to use regularly, so that helps. The artwork is well done here also. 

To be honest, if I did a list like this tomorrow, this card might not make the cut. But, today it did.

1983(?) O'Connell & Sons Ink

And finally, another oddball. The art quality on this one is not very good -- the drawing is pretty amateurish (even if it is far better than I could do). The reason I like this one is that chasing it down was about an 18-month obsession for me when I first got back into collecting. I searched and searched and searched, and then one showed up on COMC for a reasonable price about a year ago. I snapped it up immediately.

It seems strange that Robin Yount is now 61 years old. I mean, he's not supposed to age and get old because if he does then there is no hope for me.

Then again, I'm pretty sure a lot of people would already agree that there's no hope for me -- after all, I'm a Brewers fan.

Happy birthday, Rockin' Robin!

Winning!

I haven't been big on entering contests over the past several months. That's partially because my time for even finding the contests has been pretty limited, partially because it feels like there are few contests around, and partially because I haven't had any contests in a long time myself. 

But, when Gavin at Baseball Card Breakdown had the "handwritten post" contest, it was just too much fun to pass up. I did my handwritten post -- and, as Gavin noted, those posts got hits through the roof for some reason -- and made my entry. Gavin randomized the entrants, and then ran the contest as "combined runs scored between the Dodgers and Padres on April 30."

My number was 1. I thought, "great, another contest where I won't win. Oh well, at least doing the post was fun!" 

Then, an odd thing happened. Clayton Kershaw faced off against Drew Pomeranz. Pomeranz is on my fantasy baseball team this year -- a late round $1 pitcher in an NL-only league -- and has been surprising good so far. He and Kershaw each held the other team to just three hits. Kershaw had the only RBI in the game, though, and ended up winning the game 1-0.

He won, and I won.

My prize was to get one custom card from Gavin. I threw in a curveball and said that, rather than getting a Robin Yount custom, I wanted a Lew Burdette card. I found a couple of different photo options for Lew, and sent them to Gavin via e-mail for him to choose.

Rather than getting just one, though, he sent me two:

How awesome are these cards? That 1958-Topps-style card -- note: for entertainment purposes only and not for resale, lawyers from Topps...making me wonder why Bob Lemke can keep selling his cards the way he does, but anyway.... -- that is clearly a missed opportunity for Topps to use that photo. 

Topps has done a few "World Series"-type sets -- either as inserts with relics and autographs attached or as the "super teams" concept. The only pure "World Series" set I found for Topps was from 2003. It had zero Milwaukee Braves, though, despite the Milwaukee Braves two visits to the World Series and the win in 1957. Hell, it had three Brewers cards (two Younts and a Molitor) but no Braves. Weird.

I love both of these, but man -- after seeing the Burdette/Schoendienst/Aaron card, I feel like Getty Images really needs to allow someone to make a Conlon-style set from all their photos. They literally could do about one for each season of baseball beginning whenever they would want to begin. I mean, here's an awesome photo of Babe Ruth signing a baseball in 1924:

That would be a beautiful baseball card. 

So would this awesome photo of the great Walter Johnson with the sometimes-overlooked Dazzy Vance of the Brooklyn Dodgers:

Now that's just a cool photo. 

I could spend hours looking at the old photos from baseball's history on Getty Images. But, I won't spend any more time on that right now because Gavin also sent me some other excellent cards. He sent two packets inside the envelope -- one said I was winning, and the other labeled as "trade package." I've commingled those assets, though, so here are the rest of the cards I got from Gavin.  

In fact, he sent me one more 1/1 original:

As the back of the card says -- holy $hit! It's a one of one:

I also got two more BCB specials -- an original and an "aged" parallel of Hammerin' Hank:

The rest of the cards Gavin sent me were also very cool. However, they were all "normal" cards, so let's look at those en masse:

And that's a lot of parallels there! Everything from a Takahito Nomura to a Jean Segura mini; from a Braun Sepia-fractor to a Sweeney Retrofractor to two Topps Triple Threads Purple Passion Parallels (or whatever they were called that year). 

Gavin, thank you so much for the great cards you sent my way. I feel like this great package deserves some great new music...so, how about the first new Stone Roses song since 1994?  Yes, that's what we'll do!

Enjoy!

Gavin, Here's Your Long-Distance Dedication

Everyone knows Gavin. If you don't know Gavin -- the owner/operator/magician in charge of Baseball Card Breakdown -- well, you should start reading his blog before mine. Gavin is inventive, imaginative, and excellent with using his computer's Photoshop abilities to create some of the best, most desired custom cards around. Sure, Bob Lemke has his, and he does a great job. But, he also charges like $15 a card to get them. Gavin is such a good dude that he just gives them away.

Like this one:

Gavin wrote on the back of this card-that-never-was of the late Lyman Bostock -- shot dead in Gary, Indiana, in 1978 in September of his age 27 season. Bostock might not have been a future Hall of Famer, but he was a very good player. The 6-year-old me didn't understand how a baseball player could be killed, though I knew what that meant by that point in my life. So, it was really weird to see a Bostock 1981 Topps cards. Very weird.

But, on the back, Gavin said he hoped that I needed some cards he sent. And, honestly for the first time, I've gotten a suggestion as to the artists I should use for these cards. 

Well, Gavin, here's your long-distance dedication:

You might not want to listen to that at work. Casey gets a little bit frosty on that dedication.

So, let's take a look at what Gavin sent, with a few songs per Gavin's requests thrown in!

Caribbean Queen

There's a lot of unsettling stuff in that video. First, Billy Ocean looks like way too much like Darryl Jenks, Eddie Murphy's foil and competition for love in the movie Coming to America.

Second, that girl Billy's singing about in the video looks 14 years old at the beginning. Finally, what is with all the crappy sound effects in that song? The lasers, the breaking glass, a laugh at the beginning that sounds like Vincent Price -- I mean, all it's missing is one of those little "bomb" sound key chains that were fun for about 12 minutes in 1988.

What fits this song? Please don't throw things at me...

K-Rod's from Venezuela (Caracas), and I'm very happy he's no longer a Brewer. K-Rod should learn from this song and learn to treat the women in his life like queens rather than hitting and kicking the 23-year-old mother of his child (as he did in 2012, which he got out of by shipping her back to their native Venezuela).

Let's move on to something happier.

Shout

I am an admitted Anglophile. This song was a huge favorite of mine in 1985. I was a huge Chris Adams fan back then, and this song got used for a montage on World Class Championship Wrestling for WCCW:

Wow, now that brings back some weird memories.  My guy Adams is shown completely whiffing -- but getting the benefit of a great sell -- on a superkick at the 1:12 mark. I think he hit the guy's mullet, maybe. Adams shows up again at 1:32 against the Great Kabuki. The fact that I remember the Great Kabuki scares me.  Let's look at cards...



Jeromy Burnitz isn't exactly Chris Adams, and Nori Aoki isn't the Great Kabuki, either. But the two Gold Label are pretty awesome, and I'm instinctively drawn to red cards, I think...even Panini Prizm.

Everybody Wants to Rule The World

One thing I've noticed from these first three videos is how oddly...normal Billy Ocean and Tears for Fears dressed for their videos. I mean, it's just a salmon-colored polo shirt there. Sure, he's got a wicked rat-tail driving in that little convertible in that weird black and white jacket, but otherwise, it's just normal.

In the interest of normal, I present Bowman. Sure, any group of cards that includes a guy named Callix Crabbe can't be all normal, but these cards are pretty straight forward.

Loverboy

Yeah, damned if I know what some post-apocalyptic Star Wars rip off has to do with either Billy Ocean or the song "Lover Boy." I mean, I found this ridiculousness by Googling "Weirdest Billy Ocean Song." A person called Olivia Collette named this "The most weird-ass music video of the '80s." As she says on that blog, "I'm still not sure why George Lucas didn't sue."

Cards to go with this?

So, there's an Eddie Mathews Diamond King, which could easily be claimed to show him playing softball in Milwaukee with that black hat. Next, there's a 4x6 photo of Robin Yount. But, it's not just any photo of Robin Yount.  Thanks to Google Images, I can confirm that:

It is the photo of Robin's 3000th hit complete with a facsimile autograph. Jumping to the bottom, we have the first two ever cards found of the secret 1990 Donruss Confidential set. Sorry, gents, this set is rarer than those "Aqueous Test" set. As best we can tell, Brock and Spiers -- who went by Billy for about as long as it took him to hit puberty -- are the only two cards in the set.  Going back to the middle, now, there is an awesome Monte Harrison Bowman Mini serial numbered to 250.

And, one of the highlights of the package is the awesome Hank Aaron Jacksonville Braves custom -- which is also based on a real photo of the Hammer:

Sowing the Seeds of Love

I sort of stopped listening to Tears for Fears around this time. It came out in 1989, and by that time I had cast my lot for a while with a weird melange of metal, some dance stuff, and rap. When I was in high school, that all made sense. Sure, Tone Loc followed by Guns N Roses into Soul II Soul. Why not?

To be fair, this is a pretty good song -- even with the rare sighting of a trumpet/bugle solo in a pop song. And, there's only so much Billy Ocean that I can handle before I turn back to that Lover Boy video and scream in dismay and misunderstanding.

So, there are two more cards that Gavin sent:

The Sexson 2003 Bowman confuses me. Did it come in this casing originally? If so, why? It's serial numbered to 250, which is still reasonably plentiful to be cased in Topps-provided plastic. Any help there?

Finally, there's a Stadium Club Gold Parallel of Jonathan Lucroy. Luc is quickly becoming the player whose cards I'm chasing most these days -- I guess because he's still with the team, he's a catcher, he's a good player, and he's one of about three guys on the team whose name I recognize. 

Gavin, thank you very much for the great cards! And, since you asked for songs from both artists, here's one last Billy Ocean song to keep you going.