Winning!

I haven't been big on entering contests over the past several months. That's partially because my time for even finding the contests has been pretty limited, partially because it feels like there are few contests around, and partially because I haven't had any contests in a long time myself. 

But, when Gavin at Baseball Card Breakdown had the "handwritten post" contest, it was just too much fun to pass up. I did my handwritten post -- and, as Gavin noted, those posts got hits through the roof for some reason -- and made my entry. Gavin randomized the entrants, and then ran the contest as "combined runs scored between the Dodgers and Padres on April 30."

My number was 1. I thought, "great, another contest where I won't win. Oh well, at least doing the post was fun!" 

Then, an odd thing happened. Clayton Kershaw faced off against Drew Pomeranz. Pomeranz is on my fantasy baseball team this year -- a late round $1 pitcher in an NL-only league -- and has been surprising good so far. He and Kershaw each held the other team to just three hits. Kershaw had the only RBI in the game, though, and ended up winning the game 1-0.

He won, and I won.

My prize was to get one custom card from Gavin. I threw in a curveball and said that, rather than getting a Robin Yount custom, I wanted a Lew Burdette card. I found a couple of different photo options for Lew, and sent them to Gavin via e-mail for him to choose.

Rather than getting just one, though, he sent me two:

How awesome are these cards? That 1958-Topps-style card -- note: for entertainment purposes only and not for resale, lawyers from Topps...making me wonder why Bob Lemke can keep selling his cards the way he does, but anyway.... -- that is clearly a missed opportunity for Topps to use that photo. 

Topps has done a few "World Series"-type sets -- either as inserts with relics and autographs attached or as the "super teams" concept. The only pure "World Series" set I found for Topps was from 2003. It had zero Milwaukee Braves, though, despite the Milwaukee Braves two visits to the World Series and the win in 1957. Hell, it had three Brewers cards (two Younts and a Molitor) but no Braves. Weird.

I love both of these, but man -- after seeing the Burdette/Schoendienst/Aaron card, I feel like Getty Images really needs to allow someone to make a Conlon-style set from all their photos. They literally could do about one for each season of baseball beginning whenever they would want to begin. I mean, here's an awesome photo of Babe Ruth signing a baseball in 1924:

That would be a beautiful baseball card. 

So would this awesome photo of the great Walter Johnson with the sometimes-overlooked Dazzy Vance of the Brooklyn Dodgers:

Now that's just a cool photo. 

I could spend hours looking at the old photos from baseball's history on Getty Images. But, I won't spend any more time on that right now because Gavin also sent me some other excellent cards. He sent two packets inside the envelope -- one said I was winning, and the other labeled as "trade package." I've commingled those assets, though, so here are the rest of the cards I got from Gavin.  

In fact, he sent me one more 1/1 original:

As the back of the card says -- holy $hit! It's a one of one:

I also got two more BCB specials -- an original and an "aged" parallel of Hammerin' Hank:

The rest of the cards Gavin sent me were also very cool. However, they were all "normal" cards, so let's look at those en masse:

And that's a lot of parallels there! Everything from a Takahito Nomura to a Jean Segura mini; from a Braun Sepia-fractor to a Sweeney Retrofractor to two Topps Triple Threads Purple Passion Parallels (or whatever they were called that year). 

Gavin, thank you so much for the great cards you sent my way. I feel like this great package deserves some great new music...so, how about the first new Stone Roses song since 1994?  Yes, that's what we'll do!

Enjoy!

Gavin, Here's Your Long-Distance Dedication

Everyone knows Gavin. If you don't know Gavin -- the owner/operator/magician in charge of Baseball Card Breakdown -- well, you should start reading his blog before mine. Gavin is inventive, imaginative, and excellent with using his computer's Photoshop abilities to create some of the best, most desired custom cards around. Sure, Bob Lemke has his, and he does a great job. But, he also charges like $15 a card to get them. Gavin is such a good dude that he just gives them away.

Like this one:

Gavin wrote on the back of this card-that-never-was of the late Lyman Bostock -- shot dead in Gary, Indiana, in 1978 in September of his age 27 season. Bostock might not have been a future Hall of Famer, but he was a very good player. The 6-year-old me didn't understand how a baseball player could be killed, though I knew what that meant by that point in my life. So, it was really weird to see a Bostock 1981 Topps cards. Very weird.

But, on the back, Gavin said he hoped that I needed some cards he sent. And, honestly for the first time, I've gotten a suggestion as to the artists I should use for these cards. 

Well, Gavin, here's your long-distance dedication:

You might not want to listen to that at work. Casey gets a little bit frosty on that dedication.

So, let's take a look at what Gavin sent, with a few songs per Gavin's requests thrown in!

Caribbean Queen

There's a lot of unsettling stuff in that video. First, Billy Ocean looks like way too much like Darryl Jenks, Eddie Murphy's foil and competition for love in the movie Coming to America.

Second, that girl Billy's singing about in the video looks 14 years old at the beginning. Finally, what is with all the crappy sound effects in that song? The lasers, the breaking glass, a laugh at the beginning that sounds like Vincent Price -- I mean, all it's missing is one of those little "bomb" sound key chains that were fun for about 12 minutes in 1988.

What fits this song? Please don't throw things at me...

K-Rod's from Venezuela (Caracas), and I'm very happy he's no longer a Brewer. K-Rod should learn from this song and learn to treat the women in his life like queens rather than hitting and kicking the 23-year-old mother of his child (as he did in 2012, which he got out of by shipping her back to their native Venezuela).

Let's move on to something happier.

Shout

I am an admitted Anglophile. This song was a huge favorite of mine in 1985. I was a huge Chris Adams fan back then, and this song got used for a montage on World Class Championship Wrestling for WCCW:

Wow, now that brings back some weird memories.  My guy Adams is shown completely whiffing -- but getting the benefit of a great sell -- on a superkick at the 1:12 mark. I think he hit the guy's mullet, maybe. Adams shows up again at 1:32 against the Great Kabuki. The fact that I remember the Great Kabuki scares me.  Let's look at cards...



Jeromy Burnitz isn't exactly Chris Adams, and Nori Aoki isn't the Great Kabuki, either. But the two Gold Label are pretty awesome, and I'm instinctively drawn to red cards, I think...even Panini Prizm.

Everybody Wants to Rule The World

One thing I've noticed from these first three videos is how oddly...normal Billy Ocean and Tears for Fears dressed for their videos. I mean, it's just a salmon-colored polo shirt there. Sure, he's got a wicked rat-tail driving in that little convertible in that weird black and white jacket, but otherwise, it's just normal.

In the interest of normal, I present Bowman. Sure, any group of cards that includes a guy named Callix Crabbe can't be all normal, but these cards are pretty straight forward.

Loverboy

Yeah, damned if I know what some post-apocalyptic Star Wars rip off has to do with either Billy Ocean or the song "Lover Boy." I mean, I found this ridiculousness by Googling "Weirdest Billy Ocean Song." A person called Olivia Collette named this "The most weird-ass music video of the '80s." As she says on that blog, "I'm still not sure why George Lucas didn't sue."

Cards to go with this?

So, there's an Eddie Mathews Diamond King, which could easily be claimed to show him playing softball in Milwaukee with that black hat. Next, there's a 4x6 photo of Robin Yount. But, it's not just any photo of Robin Yount.  Thanks to Google Images, I can confirm that:

It is the photo of Robin's 3000th hit complete with a facsimile autograph. Jumping to the bottom, we have the first two ever cards found of the secret 1990 Donruss Confidential set. Sorry, gents, this set is rarer than those "Aqueous Test" set. As best we can tell, Brock and Spiers -- who went by Billy for about as long as it took him to hit puberty -- are the only two cards in the set.  Going back to the middle, now, there is an awesome Monte Harrison Bowman Mini serial numbered to 250.

And, one of the highlights of the package is the awesome Hank Aaron Jacksonville Braves custom -- which is also based on a real photo of the Hammer:

Sowing the Seeds of Love

I sort of stopped listening to Tears for Fears around this time. It came out in 1989, and by that time I had cast my lot for a while with a weird melange of metal, some dance stuff, and rap. When I was in high school, that all made sense. Sure, Tone Loc followed by Guns N Roses into Soul II Soul. Why not?

To be fair, this is a pretty good song -- even with the rare sighting of a trumpet/bugle solo in a pop song. And, there's only so much Billy Ocean that I can handle before I turn back to that Lover Boy video and scream in dismay and misunderstanding.

So, there are two more cards that Gavin sent:

The Sexson 2003 Bowman confuses me. Did it come in this casing originally? If so, why? It's serial numbered to 250, which is still reasonably plentiful to be cased in Topps-provided plastic. Any help there?

Finally, there's a Stadium Club Gold Parallel of Jonathan Lucroy. Luc is quickly becoming the player whose cards I'm chasing most these days -- I guess because he's still with the team, he's a catcher, he's a good player, and he's one of about three guys on the team whose name I recognize. 

Gavin, thank you very much for the great cards! And, since you asked for songs from both artists, here's one last Billy Ocean song to keep you going.

The Best Customs Around

Today is both my birthday and a very special end of the year, not-on-the-normal-date card show. So, for me to write a post about something else take some doing. 

And yet, this post is well overdue. Many folks have been seeing the fantastic custom cards that Gavin from Baseball Card Breakdown sprinkled around the blog world. Gavin sent a bunch of other cards -- including my very special Lamarr Hoyt serial numbered 1 of 12 Christmas ornament -- but the custom card is the only one I'm going to highlight today. I was one of the lucky recipients of a custom card:

 

If you haven't noticed, I changed my avatar both here on Blogger and on Twitter to this awesome photo of Robin Yount in the past month. I remember this day extremely well, in fact. 

On October 21, 1982 -- a Thursday (I had to look that up) -- the Brewers were welcomed back to Milwaukee on the day after losing the incredibly disappointing Game 7 on a Wednesday night in St. Louis. Yes, they played Game 7 on a Wednesday. Nearly 100,000 people lined Wisconsin Avenue to watch the Brewers ride in open-top antique convertibles from downtown to Milwaukee County Stadium.

Gorman Thomas shakes hands while smoking a big cigar

The parade ended at Milwaukee County Stadium. It was there that the cars drove the players into the stadium on the warning track. Yount disappeared into the dugout -- I don't remember seeing him leave the dais on the infield, but the Milwaukee Sentinel story from October 22 mentions it.

Yount then came out on of the same opening where all the card had entered and, to take the words from the Sentinel, "he emerged . . . looking like a model in an ad for men's cologne with his hair pushed back by the wind, a leather jacket on and sunglasses firmly in place."

I was a lucky 10-year-old kid. My mom let me skip school that day and drove me the 30 miles to Milwaukee County Stadium to join around 10,000 other fans at the stadium to see this. We got to see the players speak, to see Bud Selig hiding his tears of joy behind his sunglasses, and to see the usual politicians glomming on to any kind of winner they could. As the newspaper mentioned, Governor Lee Dreyfus, Milwaukee Mayor Henry Maier, and Milwaukee County Executive William O'Donnell "were the only ones booed this day."

As a crowd, we chanted for Harvey Kuenn to speak. Harvey was our local hero still, and we wanted him to get his plaudits. He too was on the verge of tears, telling the assembled that "This is the most fantastic thing that has ever happened -- anywhere, anyplace. Yet, there is only one place this could happen. In Milwaukee."

Bud Selig promised that day that the team would be back to the World Series "again and again and again." That, obviously, didn't happen. The team hasn't been back to the World Series since 1982, and it won't be back for a number of years to come in all likelihood. 

But, it's not often that a card captures the spirit of a day -- one that makes a man now 44 years old today feel like a 10-year-old again.

It is a little sad to me that these photos are all in black and white. My world that day was full of color, and sound, and excitement, and these photos make it look a bit dreary.  Still, it was a day that I'll never forget.

Thank you, Gavin, for the trip down memory lane and for making me feel like a kid today.