2018 Eric Thames Inserts from Baseball Every Night

I have met a couple of bloggers in person. For example, I have met up with Dayf/Dave who may still post occasionally at Cardboard Junkie but who really can be found on Twitter as @cardjunk. 

This past fall, I was in Boston for an ABA seminar/meeting for work. I got in a day early to go to meetings, so I had some available time one morning. It allowed me to meet up with a guy who I really respect -- P K a/k/a Peter of Baseball Every Night. We were able to grab coffee at Starbucks and sit like two old men on a park bench across the street from the Boston Public Library for as long as Peter could afford to be missing in action from work and just hang out and talk about everything but cards.

I really enjoyed getting that opportunity. It ended up being a baseball day -- my wife and I walked to Fenway too:



What's even cooler is that Peter still speaks to me even after we met in person. I can be a little much sometimes, and I can drop off the face of the planet for a while too, so that's not always a given.

At any rate, Peter has been opening up some 2018 Topps. He was lucky enough (from my perspective) to pull two inserts that are Brewers. Well, two Eric Thames Inserts to be specific:

On the left, we have an Eric Thames "Opening Day 2018" insert, and on the right we have a "Memorial Day" insert of Thames. The brick thing coming off Thames's chin on the left makes it look like he's smoking a big fat stogie of sorts. The green on the right looks like Panini took over the Topps printing facility for a day to come up with weird, incorrect color combinations.

In all seriousness, I'm glad I got these. I've stopped chasing inserts and parallels for anyone other than my player collections effective starting with the 2018 season in part because it takes forever to catalog them and in part because it's simply not fun trying to find 12 versions of the same card with different color effects for literally everyone on the team. 

But, I will still take the inserts if people are willing to send them my way. 

Now, to thank Peter, let's hear from one of his player collections. Peter collects two guys who seem like they may not enjoy hanging out together. The first is Los Angeles native Darryl Strawberry, and the other is Charleston, West Virginia, native John Kruk. Maybe that's why he likes them. 

Let's focus on Kruk. I enjoyed watching him as a player, and I turn the TV off on him as an analyst. He's a self-professed redneck too, which isn't that big of a deal to me because that's how I grew up. That said, he got together with a group of unknown-to-me country singers and came up with a country-music theme for "Baseball Tonight." Since I don't watch the show, I have no idea how well know this song is, but here goes:

Peter, thank you as always for the cards and for being a cool guy to interact with -- I greatly appreciate your thoughtfulness and watching your beer consumption.

A Big Fun Game Leaves Me With Questions

Today in my office, we discovered that one of my law partners' Sonos system is accessible by anyone with a Sonos app on their phone so long as their phone is connected to the office Wifi. This led to a discussion about the proper way to prank him with terrible music. I offered up a couple of suggestions before doing a Google search and finding what might be the worst song ever.

Try this one on for size:

English bands have put out some of the best music ever. Unfortunately, England also produces some of the worst shlock in the history of music. This song is called "Fast Food Song" and it's by the unimaginatively named Fast Food Rockers. This band was a novelty act in 2003 and 2004. It's catchy, right? But is it catchy enough that it should have reached #2 on the UK Singles chart? It did, and it failed to reach #1 only because of the band Evanescence.

Moving to songs an American audience would recognize, there is one song that even the band that sang it has disowned -- or at least one of the singers has. In the 1980s, Jefferson Airplane had morphed into the pathetic excuse for a band called Starship and released this dreck:

It is such a bad song that GQ put together an oral history of the song discussing how it came to be. Basically, about everything in the song came together in stages and was written by an assembly line of songwriters. As Grace Slick said in "Vanity Fair" in June of 2012, 

I was such an asshole for a while, I was trying to make up for it by being sober, which I was all during the '80s, which is a bizarre decade to be sober in. So I was trying to make it up to the band by being a good girl. Here, we're going to sing this song "We Built This City on Rock & Roll." Oh, you're shitting me, that the worst song ever.

Yes, Grace, it's pretty damn awful.

So, why all this about the worst songs ever? 

I struck out badly in the "Big Fun Game" that ran on All Trade Bait, All the Time. I had two different lots stolen from me -- the 1960s lot and the 1950s lot. Rather than getting those -- both of which would have been excellent -- I ended up instead with a bunch of random stuff that I really could not use.

Such as?

Red Sox.

Lots of Red Sox.

Even Gypsy Queen Red Sox. With the luck I had in that game, of course, I got Rookie Star Andrew Benintendi at just the point when Benintendi disappeared from consciousness and Aaron Judge became the star outshining everyone on the planet and the only player in Major League Baseball, according to the MLB Network and Topps Now.

Complicating matters -- making them better or worse, depending on your position on weird oddballs -- was the main item on which the lot was focused:

For the Rangers fan who always thought Nolan Ryan should hang on their Christmas tree, I have just the item for you! A Nolan Ryan ornament!

It's not Oscar's fault, of course, that I happened to have the luck of picking two good lots only to see them stolen away from me. It's the luck of the draw. And I just had Bad Bad Luck.

Right, boys?

My thanks go out to Oscar for running the game, and my curses go out to my bad luck. At least Social Distortion doesn't suck like Starship or the Fast Food Rockers.