THREE!!!!!

When I was in college, nothing was better to me than watching Vanderbilt basketball. I stuck it out through four miserable football seasons (1-10, 5-6, 4-7, 4-7) in the marching band simply because I loved being in the basketball pep band. That was especially true thanks to getting to watch games like this one in person:

Early next season and assuming that this streak continues for the rest of the year, Vanderbilt will mark its 1000th consecutive game with a three-point field goal. Only three teams in NCAA basketball have had a three-point field goal in every game since the rule was passed prior to the 1986-1987 season: Vanderbilt, Princeton, and UNLV. 

As I mentioned yesterday, today is the three-year anniversary of my deciding to start writing incomprehensible drivel understandable by and interesting to perhaps 25 other people on this planet. Actually -- somewhat surprisingly to me -- my readership stays consistently between 100 and 250 hits per post, and I'm a little under 7,000 pageviews from hitting the 150,000 pageview mark. This is all very cool to me considering that some of my posts in my first month have yet to break into double digits even three years later. 

Maybe I'm more interesting now?

Tease me with a title like, "Worst Song Ever!!!" and I'm probably going to click on it. Give it a listen -- it's like what would happen if those "Ricola" horns met up with a yodeler trained by the people who sing Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo, but only if those people had stuttering problems. It's fantastic.

Last year, I made some "resolutions" for the beginning of my blog year. Let's revisit those to see how I'm doing.

1.  Grow the Robin Yount Collection to 1000 items: As I mentioned yesterday, this one is a SUCCESS, since I have pushed the count to 1,041 items (and I just got in a few more cards to add to that collection yesterday and today). 

2.  Get More Organized, Again: this one related to the need to sort through about 30,000 cards from the "Christmas Horde" that I got from my in-laws for Christmas in 2015. I will say that I have gotten someone more organized within my card room. However, my time allocation has been bad, so I still have about 20,000 cards from 1989 through 1993 to sort through.

That is a FAIL...like on the level of this kid, who calls this his worst trumpet playing ever:

Be sure to ask this kid why his video is so orange. Also, if you play an instrument, there is no need to put your practicing on YouTube.

3.  Winnow down my collection: Nope. Haven't really made a dent. I had less time than I wanted this year to devote to collecting, and it showed. I actually have been downright awful this year in sending out trade packages. 

FAIL

4.  Send out Cards to the SuperTraders: This was and is a great idea -- to have an identified team collector to whom you can send cards. I got plenty of packages just before Christmas this year from some of the SuperTraders, so it's been good to add some new trading partners. I even bought a couple of boxes early in the process to help kick off the group -- and pulled a Yoan Moncada autograph card for Mark Hoyle:

Of course, now Moncada is with the other Sox, having been traded in the Chris Sale deal. Can't blame the Red Sox for that trade -- they can always spend more to get players and their hitting prospects were deep already.

Anyway, I didn't do all that well here in sending cards out, but I did do some. Minor success

5.  Stick to a budget for cards -- or create one.

6.  Get my Brewers Parallels, Oddballs, & Paninis organized and get my post-1965 Milwaukee Braves organized and get want lists created.  

I've been sort of successful here. Little did I think about what getting want lists put together for all those damn Bowman parallels would take. I'm to the point now where I am thinking about giving up on serial numbered cards with serial numbers under about 250 or 500 as going into my team sets. I don't catalog cards numbered 100 or fewer any more except for wanting them for my player collections. But, I'm almost done with Bowman, and I'm getting closer to typing up all the checklists on Topps for parallels.

After that, it will be Donruss, Fleer, and Upper Deck. Ugh.

Then, it will be the police cards and oddballs getting the full treatment.

Finally, after that, I'll pick up the Milwaukee Braves. The Milwaukee Braves are difficult because online checklists will often list cards as Boston Braves or even Atlanta Braves when the player is wearing a Milwaukee hat. It's annoying. Fix it, people. Fix it for me. 

7. Keep on the 1982 Blog and the "Meet the Brewers" Posts. The 1982 Blog is about dead. I fought the 792, and the 792 won. I was too ambitious, basically writing far too much about each card. When I have time, I'm busy creating want lists. So, bye bye 1982 Topps Blog for me. Anyone want it?

The Meet the Brewers posts are actually turning into my personal favorite posts. I have gotten the opportunity to speak with two former Brewers already thanks to that series, and I am hopefully going to get the chance to speak to a few more. I may need to get some drafts done there, though, in order to get ready for speaking with those players -- so I can ask more informed questions.

As the song says...Moving On.

What about this year?

Let's set a few goals.

1. Increase my main player collections. Not just Yount this time. Let's do a list:

a. Robin Yount: Current: 1,041. Goal: 1150

b. Paul Molitor: Current: 516. Goal: 610

c. Gary Carter: Current: 261. Goal: 310

d. Eddie Mathews: Current: 183. Goal: 225

e. Warren Spahn: Current: 143. Goal: 180

f. Joe Adcock: Current: 44. Goal: 60

g. Lew Burdette: Current: 36. Goal: 50

h. Harvey Kuenn: Current: 58. Goal: 70

I set lower goals for some of those older players for obvious reasons -- there just aren't as many cards available. 

2. Get the Parallels, Inserts, and Oddballs organized and bindered up. Carrying on last year's work. This one will be a continuing challenge. It's not like Topps has decided suddenly to reduce the number of parallels, inserts, and card sets they are issuing.

But I also want to add the minor league cards from the Brewers organization to my lists as well. 

I am a glutton for punishment.

3.  Trade More: Time conspired against me over this past year. My goal this year will be more tangible: to send out at least 4 packages per month. It's a small, attainable goal.

Who wants some cards? Comment below and email me your address.

4. Care Less about the surrounding bullshit.

That has grown. 

I know that I get too worked up about Topps ignoring the Brewers in things like Topps Now and Archives. It's a simple answer, of course: focus less on the current and more on the holes in my collection. If Topps doesn't want my money, well, it doesn't have to get my money.

5. Keep up the Meet the Brewers. Like I said, I enjoy these posts a lot. It's a great excuse for me to read old newspapers, old news, do internet sleuthing, and generally find out about guys who played the game. I'm disappointed, though, that one of my main sources of information -- Google Newspapers -- no longer has the Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel online for free any more. When Gannett -- owners of USA Today -- bought the newspapers this past year, they decided to monetize that archive for their own profit rather than allowing the world to have access to it for free. 

F*ck Gannett.

That said, my SABR membership has given me access to the archives of The Sporting News, so I have something of a substitute. It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing.

6. Write anywhere from three to six times for the SABR Baseball Card Blog. That's a tough audience, to be fair -- tons of big names read it and write for it, like Keith Olbermann and Rob Neyer and Jeff Katz and Mark Aubrey and Mark Armour and Matthew Prigge. But I enjoy writing there so I'll try.

Hopefully I can stick to these better than last year's goals. 

Finally, let me close with five cards I got at a recent card show. I've started a binder called, "Cards I Like" as I have mentioned before. Here are the five cards I dig from that card show:

The Topps Tribute space race card just feels and looks cool in hand. It's from back when Tribute sort of did what Allen & Ginter does now -- with random rivalries and such. But Tribute cards are cooler. 

Then, we have Josh Gibson and his Tape Measure Blast in Yankee Stadium and, on the bottom, Judy Johnson. I have had a fascination with the Negro Leagues ever since I read Only the Ball Was White followed by I Was Right On Time. Even as a kid, stories of those leagues intrigued me -- I couldn't imagine why a Negro League was necessary, and it struck me as ridiculous that it existed. Then I read Buck O'Neill's book, and I realized that it wasn't ridiculous -- it was just life, and the guys who lived it actually loved it. Sure, those players would have loved the opportunity in the major leagues, but they loved the opportunities they got.

In the middle row, we first have Paul Gauguin. I've actually featured Gauguin's art on this blog in my first year, and I've been an admirer of his work since high school. I like this Mayo set -- using old photography makes the card more attractive to me, for some reason, over using faux old art like Ginter does.

Finally, we have David Price. The only reason I bought this card was because he is wearing his Vanderbilt uniform. Maybe I'll start a Vanderbilt-uniform collection at some point, but for now, it's going to be a "I like that card" visceral basis.

Thanks for sticking around for these three years. Even though I rarely respond to comments, I enjoy getting them. It means that I struck a chord with someone enough to get them to stop and take a few minutes to write a comment.

Here's to a few more good years here for me, and thanks for reading.

Off Hiatus: A Retrospective

Today is my two-year anniversary of kicking off my card blogging life. Last year, I didn't even realize that my one-year anniversary had passed until three days after it had hit. It's been a tough, strange, fun, crazy, off-the-wall, difficult year for me personally and professionally as I left BigLaw, basically was my own firm for about 7 months, then joined another firm in July of last year. 

Lew Burdette was happy for me to switch law firms.

In between last February and now, I spent most of my time trying to catch up with trades both incoming and outgoing.  To be fair, it comes and goes for me in terms of having time to put together the outgoing trade packages. I owe some of you a package currently, and I apologize for my laxity in not getting those together already.  They will go out soon.

This past year has been a great one for me in many respects. I lived through a war with Jaybarkerfan -- a war in six parts (1a, 1b, 1c, 2, 3, 4, 5a, 5b, and 6) that was declared a draw thanks in large part to an invasion from Canada and the proprietor of Dawg Day Cards, Angus.

I received cards from a multitude of countries too (and I know I still owe cards, now long overdue, to the Italian Completist...dude, I am VERY sorry...I will be sending you a package soon). As best I recall it, I've gotten cards from Canada (a few times), France, Italy, the Netherlands, and England as a start.

My most popular posts of all time all came in the last year, and I have no earthly idea why these posts are so popular. That's not meant as a jab at the person I traded with whose cards are highlighted in the past, but I still don't know why these two posts both have over 1350 hits each while no other post has over 500 (there is one sitting at 500). Those two popular posts? 

With 1385 hits, it's "Julie: A Trade Post." Julie's "A Cracked Bat" provides a wonderfully different perspective on card collecting, as Julie -- unlike most of us -- came to collecting as an adult rather than having collected as a kid and returning when we want to be kids again. Still, I think the reason that that blogpost gets so many hits is because I included an American Girl Doll reference in it.



Not that I'm above doing things to drive web traffic to my site or anything.

The other post that gets tons of hits -- at 1451 hits as of today -- is "Catching Up with a Trade Post." Mark Kaz is great and the 1990s Brewers he sent were awesome enough to lead me to post both photos of kangaroos and a Violent Femmes song ("Promise" in case you were wondering). But why so many hits for those two?

Of course, now that I think about it, perhaps all the traffic is just looking for a "trading post" and clicks through that way.  Maybe I should name all of my blog posts "trade post."

So, it's the beginning of year three for me as a blogger. While some people do resolutions at the beginning of the year, I tend to like to wait for a different day important only to me. Here are my resolutions:

1.  Grow my Robin Yount collection to 1000 items. It stands currently at 875 items, including magazine covers, mugs, bobbleheads, glasses, placemats, rulers, books, talking baseball cards, and autographs.

2.  Get more organized, again. With the addition of approximately 25,000 to 30,000 cards as part of that Christmas Horde, I have got an absolute crapload (sorry for the legalese) of cards to sort through again. I'm pretty sure I have to have over 100,000 cards now, of which perhaps 20% are Brewers. 

3.  With that said, I want to winnow my collection a bit too. Get rid of some of those Twins cards, or Expos cards, or Blue Jays, or Yankees. Especially Yankees. 

4. To do that, I need to sit down on a regular basis -- perhaps even a scheduled basis -- to put together packages to send out. I'm hoping the "SuperTraders" will help me with this. By the way, does anyone know a good Indians, Royals, or Marlins collector who wants in?
Actually, does anyone know ANY Marlins collectors?

5.  Stick to a better budget on buying cards. Rather, create a budget for buying cards. If I had a budget maybe I'd follow it.

6. Get my Brewers parallels, oddballs, and Paninis all organized and set up in proper want lists and, also, get my Milwaukee Braves post-1965 cards organized and get want lists created. I love my lists and want more.

7.  Last one: Keep up on the 1982 Blog and the "Meet the Brewers" posts, trying to do one a month each.

Okay, finally, one more thing. I wanted to show off a card I got at my local show yesterday:

 

It's a JSA certified Eddie Mathews autograph. I got it for $24 from Frank Moiger, the promoter of the card show, and I love it. I wanted a Mathews autograph, and this one will do quite nicely, thank you.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm still trying to get Coldplay songs out of my head after that Super Bowl halftime last night.