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!

I Will Not Forget the Astrodome

A few weeks back -- which is really when all of my trading activity is from at this point, Bru from Remember the Astrodome reached out to me and asked if I was interested in a blind trade. I thought of many snappy responses, such as "is the Pope Catholic?" or the ever popular, "does a Bear crap in the woods and wipe his butt with a white rabbit?"

Actually, the answer to that last question is, "More Bears crap at 1410 Museum Campus Drive in Chicago than they do in the woods, and as far as I can tell, they really don't clean up after themselves. Or at least that one named Jay. And, let's not forget that one who celebrated the sack down 25 points and tore his ACL...at least Martin Gramatica made a field goal when he did something that stupid."

Anyway, enough snarkiness toward the Bears.

Once I took a look through all of his want lists -- he's way ahead of the curve in terms of knowing what he needs, by the way, which makes it much easier to put a trade together -- I replied immediately that I was and that I knew I could help him out as well. 

I was surprised when a huge package arrived from Bru, including three of these:

Inside each were the three Brewers who were included in Series I of the Cracker Jack set that year -- Dave Parker, Paul Molitor, and Robin Yount.

Another great surprise was another addition to my Robin Yount Collection -- the 1990 Topps Coin:

Beyond Robin and the Cracker Jacks, Bru hit nearly every one of my player collections for players who played at some point after about 1988. To start with, let's look at the Ryan Braun cards -- two Bowman Gold Parallels and one of the four total Brauns that appeared in Topps base sets (including the Update set) from 2008.  

Next up is Ted Higuera. Higuera pitched for many years -- from 1979 to 1983 -- for the Ciudad Juarez Indios in the Mexican League.  Juarez is right across the Rio Grande River from, as Marty Robbins put it, the west Texas town of El Paso.

So that was from an Australian show in the 1960s.  These cards, of course, are of a more recent vintage.

Bill Wegman really was nothing more than the Brewers version of Andy Hawkins or Oil Can Boyd. First off, similarity scores show that to be true. Second, there are similarities -- all had talent, all were wildly inconsistent, and all had injuries that affected major portions of their careers. Oh, and all were done in the majors at or before the age of 33.

Dan Plesac is generally your typical MLB Network analyst -- long on platitudes, short on stats. No big deal there. What sort of annoys me just a little is that Plesac's Twitter handle is @Plesac19. I assume that is for his number during the final half of his career. But his background photo is of him as a Brewer -- where he always wore #37.

Sometimes, it does not take a lot to annoy me.

B.J. Surhoff's older brother Rich Surhoff -- who pitched for the Phillies and Rangers in 1985 -- looks something like B.J.'s evil twin, but only if the evil twin part was handled by the makeup artists from Knight Rider who came up with the look for Michael Knight's evil twin:

Despite pitching just five seasons for the Brewers, current Dodgers Bullpen Coach Chuck Crim is a player collection for me because of the fact that he is fourth all-time in appearances for Brewers pitchers and led the AL twice (1988 and 1989) in number of pitching appearances.  The Brewers sent Crim to the Angels for the rather plump Mike Fetters after the 1991 season.

Greg Vaughn's cousin is Mo Vaughn. Both Vaughns were very large men. Mo, however, decided that he could eat his way through New York and showed up one season at 275 pounds.

I don't think Greg ever got that big.

Cal Eldred finished fourth in the 1992 Rookie of the Year balloting in the American League despite pitching in just 14 games that year. Teammate Pat Listach won the award, but Kenny Lofton deserved it.

You can find former Brewer David Nilsson on Facebook. He's back where he grew up -- Brisbane -- and enjoying the sunshine on Australia's East Coast. Also, don't send him any Candy Crush requests.

I enjoy the irony of being him being called a Designated Hitter when the card shows him playing first base.

Two pretty cool action shots of Jose Valentin.

Three less than exciting non-action photos of Jeff Cirillo crammed on to two cards. At least the cards themselves are cool even if the photos are not.

Jeromy Burnitz's wall-climbing adventures. This is a business that needs to be started now.

Geoff Jenkins owns a sports bar in Scottsdale, Arizona called the Derby Public House. It apparently features "life-sized Jenga" and Skee Ball.

That alone should be sufficient to justify having a player collection for him.

Here is a sampling of the rest of the cards that Bru sent. I'm being serious when I say that it was nearly overwhelming to go through all of these cards!

For some reason, this 1993 Studio set with the massive Brewers logo behind the photo is one of my favorite sets. I don't know why -- usually I like the simple card designs that are full bleed with good photography -- but that big MB logo just grabs me every time.

That said, I believe I own a team set of the Brewers already.

And we close with the pitcher who, to date, still owns the only no-hitter in Milwaukee Brewers history. Next year, it will be 28 years since Juan Nieves walked five Baltimore Orioles batters on his way to the no-no. I can still remember walking in the door after being at school for some sort of banquet for some activity in which I was involved and watching the final out.

Bru, thanks for the walk down memory lane. Your return package should be in the mail as we speak!

Thanks for reading.