Snake Jazz and Snakeskin Refractors

A PWE arrived at my house a little over a week ago, and I just didn't feel like writing last week. Tonight, though, I'm in the mood for a post. So, it's time to celebrate the great cards that Brian from Highly Subjective and Completely Arbitrary packaged up and sent my way. In the spirit of Snake Jazz, this post is going to be heavy on jazz and perhaps a bit light on writing.

Let's start with Mr. Snake Jazz himself, Dave Baldwin. This card is one that Baldwin gives out to those who write to him, I believe, and it's my first autograph from him. Baldwin says that the term "snake jazz" refers to offspeed pitches generally -- that it means "curvy pitches." Obviously that line never made Ball Four, but I'll take Baldwin's word for it since he played the game in the majors and I never played beyond high school.

The song "Take the A Train" was in the news recently thanks to Jeopardy! phenom James Holzhauer. It was the Final Jeopardy question with the following "Jazz Classics" clue: "In one account, this song began as directions written out for composer Billy Strayhorn to Duke Ellington's home in Harlem."

It's a jazz standard -- one nearly every student jazz musician should play before they leave high school. I played it in high school too (I was a sax player until I graduated college).

Next up are yellow parallels from this year's flagship effort from Topps. I don't understand why "Milwaukee" gets the big letter effect on the team card whereas "Anderson" and "Hader" do on the individual player cards. Shouldn't "Brewers" be the big name? 

I think I'd like the cards better if Topps did, in fact, swap the last name for the first name. The way it is written now is just silly and looks wrong.

I never understood "Green Onions" as a young saxophone player. That may be because it really didn't have much for me to do unless I was the one soloing. At its core, this song is just a great excuse for a jazz combo to jam and trade solos with one another. You have the walking bass line setting the chords and the rhythm, the drummer keeping time on the snare and bass drum with some flourishes on the toms and cymbals, and otherwise it's just the guitarist and organ trading solos back and forth. That's it.

Don't get me wrong -- with great soloists, it's worth every second -- but it's not groundbreaking or anything. 

Next up are two guys that the Brewers traded away. Gomez helped rebuild the farm system with Domingo Santana, Josh Hader, Brett Phillips, and Adrian Houser while Villar was flipped for Jonathan Schoop last year. 

Gomez has bounced around since that time, hitting Houston, Texas, Tampa Bay, and now back to the Mets where he started his career. The way he is playing this year, there may not be a next year for the almost 34-year-old. 

Villar is doing fine in Baltimore -- 7 HR, 9 SB -- and is about a league average hitter with a .736 OPS. He still goes up there hacking, though, walking just 16 times in 238 plate appearances.

According to Wikipedia, scrapple is a "Pennsylvania Dutch" (er, that's German, folks) dish of pork scraps and trimmings combined with cornmeal and wheat flour (often buckwheat) and other spices. Perhaps a song about "Scrapple from the Apple" is an appropriate accompaniment for the pork scraps and cornmeal that are Gomez and Villar.

You can identify whichever of them you want as the cornmeal and which one is the pork scraps. 

The next two cards are variations (I think) from Panini's attempts at continuing to issue baseball cards. If you're Panini and in light of MLB extending Topps's exclusive license, how long do you keep trying? I suppose they must be making money or they'd stop issuing cards, right? 

Brewers fans are asking similar questions of Jesus Aguilar right now. His hitting has been so bad that his bWAR is -0.7 and his OPS+ is just 60 -- way below average for the league, not just first basemen. Frankly, his struggles are not new. After the All-Star game last year, he slashed at just .245/.324/.436 -- an OPS of .760. But, his .604 OPS so far this year has continued the decline. His lack of offense has led the team to go back to Eric Thames for a jump start. 

On the other hand, there's Christian Yelich. Yelich has sort of struggled in May himself -- at least in comparison to his ridiculous March/April. In March/April, he hit 13 HR and slashed .353/.460/.804 (1.264 OPS). In May, he's only hit 7 HR and slashed .275/.393/.623 (a 1.016 OPS). Perhaps the real problem here is only that Yelich simply has not had as many guys on base in front of him in May -- only 10 RBI as compared to 34 at the start of the month (that's comparing 29 games in March/April to 19 in May).

"Stardust" is a jazz standard. It's one I have never played. It's sort of a mid-tempo song that is fine but it doesn't stand out to modern ears. At least mine, that is.

Purple Ryan Braun refractor, anyone? Damn the colored refractors in 2017 appeared to be some sort of futuristic nightmare. 

After "Stardust," I felt like a great Louis Armstrong version of "Sweet Georgia Brown" should help redeem things. 

Does everyone still associate this song with the Harlem Globetrotters? I remember as a kid that it was always a special day on "Wide World of Sports" when the Globetrotters were on. They made the kind of jokes that a kid could appreciate. My older self would probably be bored seeing the same jokes get rolled out but man, when I was 8, they were awesome.

To close out the blog post today, I have the bookend to Snake Jazz -- a Snake Skin refractor! Sort of.

Brandon Woodruff has been excellent this year for the Brewers. I was hoping he would be, and he has not disappointed -- unlike his fellow youngsters Corbin Burnes and Freddy Peralta, both of whom combined to destroy my fantasy baseball team's ERA and WHIP in April to the point where I had to cut them so I could stop slotting them in hoping for a rebound. Just terrible. 

Pitching in April was the Brewers big concern, but the offense outside of Yelich, Mike Moustakas, and Yasmani Grandal has really been limping along in May. That's why Keston Hiura got the call from the minors -- to try to kick start something. 

To close out on a high note, I have to go to saxophone maestro John Coltrane. Coltrane and Charlie Parker were the guys I wished I could sound like when I was a high schooler. 

Of course, that was akin to me saying that I totally wished I could pitch like Bret Saberhagen or Dwight Gooden in 1987. While it was a nice daydream, there's no way in hell it was really going to happen.

So, I watched those two pitch and listened to Coltrane and Bird. After all, if you can't be the best, you should watch/listen to the best to appreciate them while you can.

Brian, thanks for being one of the best -- and for the cards. 

Songs in the Key of Night Owl

Stevie Wonder had his double album called "Songs in the Key of Life" back in 1976. It was critically acclaimed from its release and spoke to many facets of life -- recollections of childhood, first love, lost love, songs about faith, and songs about social justice for the poor. Later acclaim came nearly 30 years after its release in 2005, when Rolling Stone named it number 57 on the list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

In the blog world, the most critically acclaimed blog around is Night Owl Cards. Greg's writing is excellent and reflects well on his real-world newspaper job. Greg also has consistency and staying power -- he had 329 posts last year, and that was his lowest output since his four-month debut in 2008.  Speaking for myself, I have trouble putting out five posts every week, whether it's because work gets in the way, or my wife says I'm spending too much time with my cards again, or I have a social commitment that I can't get out of (or, even, that I don't want to get out of), or I just don't feel like writing.  

Greg sent me an envelope of cards recently that crossed off several cards off my late 1980s/early 1990s want lists.  To thank him, yes, I'm going with a musically themed post. It's songs in the key of Night Owl!

1.  1990 Baseball Cards Magazine 1968 Topps Design Robin Yount

For whatever reason, I feel like Baseball Cards Magazine did a better job with mimicking the old Topps designs than Topps Archives has lately.  I am not sure if the magazine cards would stand up to the side-by-side scrutiny to which Archives is subjected here, though.

What song goes with this card? How about a Roy Orbison Demo Recording:

2.  1984 Fleer: Moose Haas and Ed Romero

This Moose Haas card shows what to me looks like a guy who was way ahead on fashion trends -- sporting a mullet a full 5 years before the rest of America caught up with him. Haas is remembered as a guy who never seemed to reach his potential, but I choose to remember him as the pitcher who won game 4 of the ALCS in 1982 in snow flurries -- forcing the game 5 that the Brewers won to get to the World Series.

For a guy who played in just 730 games over 12 seasons, Ed Romero certainly enjoyed a great deal of success. He made it to two World Series (1982 & 1986, both losses for his team) and also was a member of the 1988 Red Sox that lost in the ALCS to the Oakland A's.

Success like that enjoyed by these two guys deserves a song off someone's greatest hits album.  How about Little River Band's "The Night Owls"?  Appropriately, this song is from the early 1980s too.

3.  1992 Score

Yet another card I needed for my player collections, the Chuck Crim 1992 Score is now safely in the Crim pages.  Bill Spiers bunting here seems appropriate -- he was drafted in the first round and seemed to have such promise coming out of Clemson.  To be fair to Spiers, he showed the kind of decent player he could be when he was in Houston later in his career -- he had too many injuries in Milwaukee, and the club deemed him expendable.

The less said about Stubbs, the better.  When the best I can say about a guy is that he was a poor man's Greg Brock....

To go along with these cards -- all of which I needed but which by themselves are fairly nondescript -- let's go with an upbeat song from the 1960s by surfer rock king Dick Dale and his Del-Tones called, of course, "Night Owl."

4.  1992 Stadium Club

Though not at all reflective of what is on these cards, I did a "Search Google for this image" for each of these.  The Doug Henry "Best guess for this image" returned, "ken griffey jr autographed" while the Gary Sheffield result was, no lie, "doug mirabelli."

It made me laugh, I guess.

Sort of like the original Blues Brothers movie made me laugh. Perhaps a little known fact is that the Blues Brothers backup band featured three members of the band Booker T & the M.G.'s -- an R&B/funk band which released a hit called "Green Onions" that became a staple for the jazz ensembles at my high school back in the 1980s.  They also had a great tune called "Night Owl Walk."

5.  1987 Donruss Opening Day

This year's Donruss offering used the border design from the 1987 set, but that's where the similarities end.  More to the point, this Opening Day set -- as opposed to Topps's set called Opening Day -- gets it right: Donruss's 1987 set included each team's starting lineup. If Topps did their set this way and didn't use the base set's design -- hell, just use plain white borders, even -- I'd love that set.

This card went right into the Gantner PC for me. Gantner appears to be daring all of us not to admire his auto-tint glasses. 

A song I had never heard before this blog post but which I really liked came from Rock 'N' Roll Hall of Famers The Lovin' Spoonful, and it's called "Night Owl Blues."

6.  1989 Bowman Bill Wegman

It helped complete a team set, so I had to post it.

Not that it has anything to do with my song choice, either.  R&B Legend Wilson Pickett released two of the best "hang out and party and have fun" songs in the 1960s, one of which stands up better, in my opinion, than the other.  The one that doesn't stand up well is "Land of 1000 Dances" -- I mean, any song that's was covered by the WWF Wrestlers int he 1980s.... The one that stands up much better is "Mustang Sally," but I may be biased because I played saxophone.

Wilson Pickett also had a song called "Night Owl" that he released in 1969.

7.  1991 Score 100 Rising Stars

George Canale never sounded to me like he'd be a "rising" star or a star of any kind.  I mean, the former Virginia Tech Hokie told the local newspaper that he wanted a trade in 1991 because the Brewers weren't giving him a chance to play.  Well, George, if you hit .254/.349/.393 in DENVER in 1990 with only 12 home runs in 544 plate appearances, tell my why you deserve a chance?

It also makes me wonder how low the bar for being a "rising star" was.

It's similar to my feelings about Carly Simon as a singer.  I know she was a huge star in the 1970s, but listening to her music then, now, and anywhere in between, I start to wonder whether musical tastes were a bit....off when she hit the top of the charts.  But, she has a greatest hit called "Night Owl" as well.

Greg, thank you very much for the cards, and I hope that at least one of these songs is one you enjoy!