Orioles Rise and I'm Falling Behind

I spent most of this weekend cataloging my oddballs on Trading Card Database. My card count of just Brewers that I have is up to 21,773...and I haven't really gone through my binders to catalog those properly. This is not to mention the fact that I probably should have been doing some work this weekend.

Oh well.

Of course, that means that I've been a bit of a quiet hermit today, even though all that cataloging has been a really good time.

Yeah, something good. 

Someone who always seems to be into something good is my pal Cliff a/k/a @oriolesrise on Twitter. Cliff is always going to auctions and sales and seems to always come away with tons of great, eclectic stuff. He says he collects everything, and when you follow him on Twitter, you know he is not exaggerating to say that. 

I was lucky enough to receive a package of random items from him around the beginning of the year, so let's see what showed up.

These "Baseball Rub Offs" are ones that seems like they should be easier to find than they are. In my four years back in collecting, I've gotten two Robin Younts and ... these two. For some reason, these two dredged up some hair metal from its last death throes in late 1990/early 1991:

The song: "Screwed Blued & Tattooed". The band: Sleeze Beez.

Embarrassingly, I actually owned that tape for a while. It had a song that seemed appropriate for one's freshman year of college: "When the Brains Go to The Balls."

Soon thereafter, I first heard Nirvana and life was much, much better musically.

Believe it or not, I did not have these two Mollys in my team collection. You'd think that major-brand cards from 1989 literally would be tumbling out of my closet (and they are) but these two were only in my Molly collection.

Thanks for Molly, Cliff. These two songs are not, however, 16 candles down the drain.

After these cards and tattoos, things got a little weirder. Much cooler too. Because oddities are the best.

Cliff took the matches out of these old matchbooks from the early 1980s. You have to love these things. So, the back stories? 

Merle Harmon was the first lead announcer for the Milwaukee Brewers when they first moved to town in 1970. He started up "Fan Fair" in Milwaukee around that time, and built it into a 140-store chain before selling the business. Harmon left the Brewers in 1980 to go to work for NBC. He ended up working with the Rangers after that. He passed away in April of 2009 at the age of 83.

Parker Pens are awesome pens, in case you're not familiar with them. They are high-end pens -- Wikipedia calls them a "luxury" pen -- which is now owned by Newell Brands/Newell Rubbermaid. The plant in Janesville closed in 2009 thanks to corporate downsizing.

Music to go with matches?

Of course, my head went to the very end of this song with the lighting of a very loud match starting a fire and burning this damn place down...ooh hoo...down to the grounds. Heh heh heh heh heh heh....

I love schedules. Back in the 1980s, I think I read an article in Baseball Cards Magazine that talked about collecting schedules, so I wrote to a number of teams and got schedules from them. I also grabbed as many schedules as I could find at local retailers. And yet, I don't think I had any of these. 

I was looking at the 1976 schedule and noticed that there was a Scout Day that year. I have a very faint memory of being at that game because my older brother (who would have been 8) was in Cub Scouts at that point. It's a faint memory because, well, I was only 4 years old.

If you're going to go to the game, you'd better know what time it is. I recently watched a documentary on Netflix about the band Chicago f/k/a Chicago Transit Authority that was fascinating. I have been watching a bunch of music documentaries lately there -- it's a fun way to hear the backstories of the bands that otherwise would have made a VH1 "Behind the Music" except that show doesn't exist anymore as far as I know. 

But I ramble.

In any event, if you like music and documentaries, check that one out.

The final item in the package from Cliff was this awesome 8x10 autographed by Don Money. Money is a PC, and I have a couple of his autographs from later in his career. Money is a guy whom a lot of fans today don't know but who had a really good career. He was with the Phillies from 1968 through 1972, when the Brewers traded Ken Brett, Jim Lonborg, Ken Sanders, and Earl Stephenson to Philadelphia and, in return, got Money, Bill Champion, and John Vukovich. 

He arrived in Milwaukee at the age of 25 and got plugged in at third base for the most part. He was a four-time All-Star for the Brewers, and while he was never going to be a Hall of Famer, he was an excellent player through 1978 for the team. From 1979 to 1983, he was a platoon DH with Roy Howell and occasionally played some third base, second base, and first base. He got the short end of the stick when the Brewers got Sal Bando and Cecil Cooper in 1977 and, then, lost his spot at second base thanks to Paul Molitor's emergence in 1978.

Don't mind if I take the Money and run at all.

Thanks, Cliff, for the great package and for the patience in my not even writing it up for 6 weeks! 

An Eventful 14 Days

It's been an eventful couple of weeks since I last had the time and opportunity to write about cards I've received. Since I last posted, we've had the long Labor Day weekend, two weeks of college football, a hurricane making landfall, I've been in three different states, I bought a blaster of Topps Heritage High Numbers, and my house lost power for nearly four full days.

Like I said, it's been eventful.

Let's take a look at the 2 weeks that were.

I didn't take any pictures over Labor Day, but it was a relaxing time. I posted here and on the 1980s blog, and then I got ready for my trip to Chicago and South Bend, Indiana -- with good reason.

The University of Georgia's fans invaded Chicago. Seriously, everywhere you went inside the Loop or just north of the Loop, you saw fans clad in red and black with their Georgia Gs on their hats, t-shirts, and sweatshirts. The flights between Atlanta and Chicago and Atlanta and South Bend were crazy. Everyone was wearing their Georgia gear.



That's just the gate area in Atlanta to get on the Boeing 717 at 8:50 in the morning. The flight was so full of Georgia fans that one of the flight attendants commented that it looked like a charter:

As always, the flights were overbooked. This is common because there are always a few stragglers who miss the flight or take an earlier flight. Normally, all that works itself out. In some situations, though, Delta ends up offering Delta voucher money good for use on another flight to volunteers to be confirmed on a later flight. Usually, it only takes a few hundred dollars in vouchers to get people to say, "okay, I'll take that later flight and I'll have a little money to take a vacation flight later in the year." This is, of course, as opposed to what United does -- dragging people forcibly off flights to make room for whomever they want to get on a plane.

Anyway, Delta had tons of trouble getting volunteers to get off flights to Atlanta and South Bend on this weekend. No one wanted to miss a thing, it seems, and the amounts for the vouchers to get volunteers proves this. For my flight to Chicago Midway, the gate agents got all the way up to offering $2,000 in Delta vouchers to volunteers who were willing to take a flight a few hours later with a guaranteed seat. They got their 5 volunteers for our flight at that price. That amount was eclipsed on another flight a couple of terminals away when a woman received $4,000 in vouchers just to give up her seat on a flight between Atlanta and South Bend.

My wife and I were traveling on award miles at an exorbitant cost -- 80,000 miles a piece, which usually will get you to Europe for a coach seat or, for some airports, in first class. If we had not had a scheduled tour in Chicago for early afternoon, we almost certainly would have doubled down at $2,000 and taken that money for a later arrival.

We arrived in Chicago and got to my wife's uncle's condo. He and his wife recently moved there for a job change for him, and he's doing quite well. Here's the view from his condo.



Too bad it wasn't sunny when I took this. That's Lake Shore Drive along Lake Michigan that you see. It was on that walkway right next to the lake that I saw Bastian Schweinsteiger and Ana Ivanovic walking arm in arm on Sunday morning after we had an early lunch.

So, back to Friday. We went and had lunch and then went to our tour -- one of those "architectural boat tours" along the Chicago River. I had taken one of those tours in 2008, but it was pouring rain half the time and sucked as a result. This one was much better -- no rain, and the clouds even lifted midway through the tour so we got some great views of landmark buildings like the Willis Corroon Tower f/k/a the Sears Tower:

We had a great dinner that night at Gibsons Steakhouse (thanks to my wife's uncle pulling a few strings to get a reservation).

The next day, we got up early and made our way to South Bend. It's about two hours from Chicago along Interstate 94, and we were surprised at the fact that traffic wasn't terrible for the ride out.



We got parked, and immediately we were greeted by Notre Dame fans parked on either side of us. Notre Dame has a national following, of course, being the most successful Catholic university in sports during much of a 20th Century when being Catholic would be brought up openly as a possible way to disqualify a person from serving as president. We met Notre Dame fans from Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, Georgia, South Carolina, and California in just a few minutes. It was really cool.



Even so, UGA took over Notre Dame and its campus. Everywhere I went, we were greeted by Georgia fans. The Notre Dame folks wore expressions somewhere between bemusement and annoyance -- bemused at the fact that Georgia fans were treating the trip like a tourist event, annoyed at the fact that there were so many Georgia fans as to nearly outnumber the Notre Dame fans. To give you a sense of what it was like on campus, this is the reflecting pool in front of the library mural of Touchdown Jesus:



Of course, my wife and I had to get our obligatory tourist shot of us in front of Touchdown Jesus. The photo was taken by a very friendly Notre Dame fan from California, who joked with us -- rightly so -- that the reception in Georgia may not be as friendly for the Domers as it was for UGA in Indiana:

Then, there was the game. Georgia really could have and should have won the game by two touchdowns had they simply (a) had a wide receiver catch one ball that hit him in the hands on a long pass play, and (b) caught an interception inside ND's 20-yardline that the defensive back had hit him in the hands twice before it hit the ground harmlessly. That said, UGA still won and, in the process, really took over Notre Dame Stadium.



Lots of red everywhere. Some Notre Dame folks were a bit salty about the whole thing in the week after, but really -- if someone is offering you a $500+ profit on a ticket for a game, wouldn't you be tempted to sell out?

The whole time we were in Chicago, though, we also had Georgia on our mind (and I'm not talking about the song). We were watching Hurricane Irma's track to see what it was going to do. Was it going to hit Atlanta? If so, how strong would it be? As the weekend developed, we knew we would get back to Atlanta without a problem -- even if it was a bit windy when we landed on Sunday night. It was a matter of how long, though, we would have without problems.

As it turned out, my office closed on Monday per the request of the local and state governments asking businesses to close. It was nice that I got a day off that I sorely needed after the weekend's festivities. The power flickered a couple of times during the day, but I was hopeful that we would get through things without much problem.

My hopes were dashed, however, when the power went off at about 4:30 PM on Monday. At first, it was kind of fun. I got out my headlamp that I use for fire site investigations to be able to find my way around the house more easily. I ended up using it to cook dinner on our gas stove:

We did not get power back Monday night, and Georgia Power did not even have an estimate for us to get power back at that point. I learned through Twitter and using my phone for news that my part of town was probably the hardest hit thanks to the combination of strong winds and having a lot of tall trees.

I did not know why we lost power, though, until Tuesday. I took a walk to the grocery store on Tuesday morning to get some coffee and some cold cuts to eat and saw our problem.

I'm told that a transformer snapping off the top of a power pole is a bad thing. You can see that transformer on the opposite side of the road from the actual pole here. It took until Thursday afternoon -- fully 3 days after we lost power -- for our power to be restored.

Thankfully it was and no one around here got hurt by the storm. But, my Friday afternoon and Saturday mornings the last two days were spent taking care of our cleanup. We had a bunch of limbs and one small tree that we had to cut up and put into yard waste bags to dispose of in the trash. We still have some more to do, but the bulk of the work is done.

Still, it's been an eventful two weeks. Of course, this coming weekend is a big football game in Athens too -- one I'm going to with a couple of friends -- so radio silence over next weekend might result too. So, I'm pushing myself to write more during this week to catch up more on things I should have thanked people for weeks ago.

So, how's your September been?

Thanks for stopping by and, to those of you who have sent me things, thanks for your patience.

It's Been a Long Week

Hi kids! Welcome back to the Off Hiatus Baseball Card Blog! If you've been wondering where I have been the past week -- and, judging by the emails and the tweets, you almost certainly haven't! -- well, I will fill you in!

Last week Saturday, I spent my weekend at picturesque Sanford Stadium in Athens, Georgia. There, I watched as my Georgia Bulldogs came back and, with just 10 seconds left in the game, scored to go ahead of the Tennessee Volunteers. Of course, it being Georgia Football, that meant that we were being set up for one of the rarest of losses -- a "That Game" loss, as Bill Simmons put it in 2007...you know, around the time that Simmons's ego and paycheck started matching one another for which was bigger. 

A "That Game" loss combined two levels of losing -- a "Guillotine" loss mixed with a "Stomach Punch." A Guillotine loss is one where your team is in it or winning, but you can feel the inevitable breakdown coming. As Simmons said, you're angry at yourself for contributing to the bad karma and you are angry it happened at all.  A "Stomach Punch" game is a roller-coaster game that ends with an opponent making a pivotal, sometimes improbable play and ends with fans filing out after the game in stunned disbelief, if they can move at all.  

Simmons said only one game to him had made it to that level -- the 6th game of the 1986 World Series. This Georgia game made it there, though. UGA scored with 10 seconds left, and, sadly, my wife's uncle and I turned to one another and said, "that may be too much time left." It was, especially after the stupidity of a second-string defensive back running onto the field to celebrate the Ridley TD without his helmet on. Throw in a poor, short, kickoff and a complete Hail Mary, and you have a "That Game" -- one where ESPN's stats guys said UGA had a 99.9% chance of winning after Ridley's TD.

As if that weren't bad enough, we got an email during the game from my father-in-law saying that he wasn't feeling well at all. He ended up going to the hospital that night with kidney failure. He's been in dialysis all week, and only after the doctors started filling him with cortisone has he started feeling any better. The man is only 60 years old -- we're not going to let him go that easily.

Add in that my wife's older uncle is suffering from a disease very similar to dementia that comes on quickly due usually to a trauma of some sort, and last weekend was very, very long.

So, Monday came and my wife went home to help there. They needed her help with her uncle to get him to his various appointments as they try to get him into better shape, and my mother-in-law needed my wife's help because my mother-in-law was staying at the hospital with her husband -- as you would expect.

Of course, that wasn't enough drama. I had a conference for work that I had to attend in Chicago. It was something of a welcome respite from the disastrous weekend, but I really could have used being at home instead.  At least I had views like this from the hotel:

My hotel was on Upper Wacker Drive, so we had great views of Lake Michigan, the Chicago River Turning Basin, and the Navy Pier. Not that I got to go to any of those places due to all my responsibilities with our seminar, but at least I was around a lot of my friends whom I've known anywhere from a few years to over 20 years.

I got back in town late Friday night, and, yesterday, got up to run errands (like pick up dry cleaning and clean up the cats' litter boxes), and then I drove for two hours to my wife's hometown. I went to see her uncle and her dad -- who is now feeling a million times better thanks to the steroids -- and to take some things to my wife for when she has to go back there this coming week to help out again.

There are a few envelopes that were waiting for me here, so to get back into the mundanity of regular baseball card life, here's one of the envelopes. After my caterwauling to Topps about their ignoring the Brewers, of course the Brewers got two Topps Now cards in the final two weeks of the season. One of them was for turning their second triple play of the season, and that is the card that arrived:

The Brewers ended up totalling six Topps Now cards over the season, assuming that you count the Jonathan Lucroy "Traded" card and the Prince Fielder Retirement card with the Brewers. Of the other four, Chris Carter appeared on three of them -- the card for the team scoring in every inning in mid-August, this card for the triple play, and then his own solo card for reaching the 40-home run mark.

Carter was a heck of a pickup off the scrap heap for the team, as he ended the season tied for the National League home run title with 41. For what it is worth, he and Nolan Arenado tied both for the Homer lead and for the NL Games Played lead. No one in the NL played every game, but Arenado and Carter both sat out only two games each.  Carter also set a Brewers team record by striking out an incredible 206 times in 2016 -- but he finished 13 strikeouts behind MLB leader Chris Davis of Baltimore.

NL and Major League stolen base champion Jonathan Villar did not appear on a Topps Now card, however. Villar probably would have gotten one had he hit one more home run in the final days of the season. Villar finished the year with 19 homers, though, so he did not join Joe Morgan (twice), Rickey Henderson (three times), and Eric Davis in the "20/60" club. Of course, it is worth noting that those players plus Villar are still the only ones to be members of the 19/60 club. But we like round numbers.

In the next few weeks, I'll get caught up here on the packages I've received. I'll also write a few of the "Meet the Brewers." But, one more thing I am going to do is recap the Brewers season and the players the team used this year. My love for baseball comes out through words and photos/cards. Since I am not making any cards or taking any photos, I have to write.

Thanks for reading, and here's to a happier, healthier rest of 2016!