Meet the Brewers #36: Dave May

In this series of biographies, I've talked a number of times about how Marvin Milkes seemingly started making moves simply for the sake of making them. Just like the cliched "blind squirrel," it seemed inevitable that Milkes would make a decent move eventually. Perhaps that move came on June 15, while the team was in Baltimore, when, at the trade deadline, Milkes sent minor league pitchers Dick Baney and Buzz Stephen (both of whom had pitched in the majors before) to the Orioles in exchange for Brewer #36, Dave May. The Brewers also optioned outfielder Hank Allen to Baltimore's Triple-A Rochester team on some sort of loan deal.

1971 Topps

David LaFrance May was born in New Castle, Delaware, on December 23, 1943. His parents had nine children in total, and Dave was the fourth. May signed two contracts to play major league baseball -- one with San Francisco and one with Philadelphia. He became a Giant because the Giants were the first to get their contract to MLB. He did not stay in the Giants system for long because the Orioles snapped him up in the old "first-year draft," which allowed teams to draft minor leaguers away from other teams after just one season -- a 249 plate appearance season in the Appalachian League where he hit .379/.457/.561.

1971 Dell Today's Team Stamp

May moved up in the Orioles system fairly quickly thanks to his hitting ability, and he made his major league debut in 1967 at the age of 23. The problem for May was that he was with a team that had the outfield covered quite well already with 23-year-olds Curt Blefary and Paul Blair in left and center and future Hall of Famer Frank Robinson in right. As a result, in 1967 and 1968, May was on the Rochester/Baltimore shuttle, splitting time both years between Triple-A and the majors. 

1972 Topps

May's offense suffered, though, as an Oriole. He was not getting to start many games in the field and was used mainly as a pinch-hitter. As May said in The Sporting News when talking about his trade to Milwaukee, "It was tough playing for the Orioles because when you weren't in there every day, it was hard to get into a groove." Indeed, in the first two-and-a-half months of 1970 before his trade, May had started only two games of his 25 appearances.

1973 Topps

Freed from the Orioles at the age of 26, May was inserted immediately into the Brewers' starting lineup in centerfield. In Milwaukee, May was at home in many respects. He was an All-Star in 1973, which was his best season by far -- he led the American League in total bases and Win Probability Added. Part of that season left its imprint on the Brewers team record book as he hit safely in 24 consecutive games. That streak stayed on the books as the Brewers best until Paul Molitor's 39-game hitting streak in 1987.

1974 Topps

May struggled in 1974. He had the flu in spring training and may not have been right the whole year. It didn't help that Del Crandall decided to move May to right field, ostensibly to help May out after losing weight thanks to the flu. But he never broke out of the season-long funk. As a result, the team decided to trade him away, and May became the answer to a trivia question: Who was the player that the Atlanta Braves received when they traded Hank Aaron to the Milwaukee Brewers?

1974 Kellogg's

May later was traded two years later by the Braves to the Texas Rangers. The Braves sent May, Adrian Devine, Ken Henderson, Roger Moret, Carl Morton, and $250,000 to the Rangers for 25-year-old Jeff Burroughs. Dave spent one year and a month in Texas before he came back to the Brewers in May of 1978. May was nothing more than a bench player behind Larry Hisle, Ben Oglivie, Sixto Lezcano, Jim Wohlford, and Dick Davis -- yes, the team carried six outfielders then -- and ended up having his contract sold to the Pirates in September of that year.

1974 Topps Stamp

By that point, though, May had left his mark on the team record book for the first decade of its existence. Just look at this "team top 10" list from the 1980 Media Guide:

May was 4th in games, 4th in at bats, 4th in runs, 5th in hits, 6th in doubles, 6th in homers, 6th in RBI, 7th in extra base hits, 5th in total bases, and 5th in stolen bases. Yet, in the popularity contest that was the selection process for the 2000 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Brewers All Decades Team for the 1970s, May was overlooked in favor of Larry Hisle, Sixto Lezcano, Gorman Thomas, Hank Aaron, and Tommy Harper. Of those, Aaron was more of a sentimental choice than one actually based on production for the team, and Hisle probably made the team solely due to his being the first big-name free agent to sign with Milwaukee. May deserved better.

1994 Miller Commemorative Set

Dave passed away in October of 2012 at the age of 68. He suffered from diabetes for the last decade of his life after he moved back home to Delaware. May's son Derrick also played in the major leagues in the 1990s, spending 32 games with the club in 1995. 

Just before Father's Day in 2014, Derrick and his older brother David Jr. talked with each other in the form of a wonderful blog post about growing up with dad being a major leaguer on a website called Instream Sports. Derrick and David Jr. were a little more than a year apart in age, so they were partners in crime often. They played catch with the ball that Dave had gotten signed by the entire 1973 AL All-Star Team -- scuffing it up and getting grass stains on it. 

Derrick laughed about riding his bike to the White Hen Pantry and buying Bazooka and Topps baseball cards before going to the games with their dad in Milwaukee. Derrick also recalled one of their early neighbors in an apartment complex in Milwaukee where a lot of pro athletes lived. Their neighbor Lew was a little younger than Dave was, but Dave and Lew became fast friends. Then one day, the boys were told that Lew was no longer Lew -- that he had changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Dave May has 18 cards in the Trading Card Database showing him as a Milwaukee Brewer. I have the 8 shown here. I do not have the two Brewers picture packs from 1970 and 1971, any of his three O-Pee-Chee cards, the 1972 Topps Venezuelan Stamp, the 1973 Jewel Foods photo card, the 1973-74 Linnett Portrait, the 1974 Topps Deckle Edge, or his 1986 TCMA All-Time Milwaukee Brewers card.

Headin' for a Heartbreak

A few weeks back, Matt F. from Heartbreaking Cards of Staggering Genius was the recipient of one of my attempts to reduce my staggering number of baseball cards that are not Milwaukee Brewers.  I sent him a bunch of those 1972 minis from the 2013 Topps effort which were essentially collecting dust in a box in a cabinet in my house.  

Matt was kind enough to send me some cards and other items recently in return for those. Even in the midst of war with Hazel Green -- and trust me when I say that JBF has sunk to monstrous levels in the war -- these cards from Matt are far too good to wait.

In the spirit of another theme post, how about we use Matt's "Heartbreaking Originals" for the theme here?  Matt hasn't added to them in a while, though they are excellent and with the perfect sense of dry/gallows humor that Midwesterners are known for.  

Let's start with #12: an Allen & Ginter original 2008 "World's Greatest Victories" featuring Skrillex at the 54th Grammy Awards.  Skrillex is Sonny Moore, a 27-year-old from Highland Park, California, who has said he is influenced greatly by the Warp label, whose artist stable includes Squarepusher and Aphex Twin.  

Here's a little Skrillex for you:

That is music that may not be familiar to a lot of you. To be fair, I don't listen to much Skrillex myself, but there is a lot worse out there.  

Speaking of the unfamiliar, this card was in the envelope from Matt:

This Sports Kings Gum card from Series E is a card from a set that I have never even heard of before. It does not appear that Sports Kings Gum got very far, seeing that their website has not been updated for quite some time.  It's too bad -- who wouldn't want to have a dual memorabilia card featuring Joe Sakic and Sasha Baron Cohen on the same card? Or Terry Sawchuk and Paula Creamer? Or, more saliently, Maurice "The Rocket" Richard and Paul Molitor?

The next Heartbreaking Original is a 1975 Kellogg's 3-D Superstars card of Brett Favre's Lil Brett (NSFW, perhaps) that he texted to Jenn Sterger, the former Florida State "cowgirl" who, of course, was discovered and became famous in the time-honored tradition that made a name for Katherine Webb -- Brent Musburger perving over her in the stands while a national TV audience watched.

How about a real Kellogg's 3-D Superstars card instead, of Davey May (Derrick May's dad):

While Brett Favre will always have a place in my football fandom for bringing my Green Bay Packers back to the Super Bowl and winning it, Lil Brett should have stayed under covers.

What's next?

How about the 2009 Topps Heritage of Thom Yorke from Radiohead?  This one may be my favorite Heartbreaking Original.  It's an iconic set design from 1960 that works perfectly for Yorke.

Yes, we need Radiohead here:

In the mid-1990s, I really liked 'Fake Plastic Trees" a lot. Speaking of plastic...

Two plastic-protected Topps Coins from 1971 -- one of former Brewers announcer (and later Indians announcer), the late Mike Hegan and one of former bonus baby Lew Krausse, who made his debut in 1961 with the Kansas City Athletics and, in his first appearance fresh out of high school at the age of 18, threw a 3-hit (and 5-walk) shutout of the Los Angeles Angels (then not of Anaheim) and went 2-for-3 at bat to boot.

One of the sardonic cards in the Originals is the 2009 Allen & Ginter Hoaxes card called "Book Value."  Believing in book value and then bidding on eBay is a dangerous game.  You will outbid almost everyone on every auction.  I mean, think of how dangerous believing book value would be with these two cards?

I made the decision to subscribe for a little while to the Beckett price guide online when I first got back into collecting.  I wanted it as a reality check of sorts, and because the first thing people always ask when they hear that you collect cards is, "oh, yeah, I have a couple of cards.  What's this one worth?"  

One of my first experiences with that was trying to help a neighbor who has a bunch of cards from the early 1960s in really great shape to determine how much his cards might be worth.  I looked at Beckett, and then for a sanity check I looked at eBay.  Beckett was always high by at least 10% and sometimes 25% or more.  As I looked further, it got worse for the so-called high-end cards like Triple Threads -- even the non-relic base cards -- and the serial numbered cards.  These Molitors would be amazingly overvalued -- or at least they were then.  

After all, it is one of the world's greatest hoaxes.

I'm left now with two cards that do not have decent analogs on the Heartbreaking Originals. So, let's play one more Radiohead song in honor of the second Thom Yorke card -- this time, a 2008 Allen & Ginter.

This is what you get when you mess with Jean Segura or Dave May.

Matt, I thank you very much for the great cards. I assume that the Heartbreaking Originals may make a comeback when you have the time and the inspiration to undertake a few more cards. I hope that you do that.

Thanks again.

Monthly Card Show #3: The 1970s

Back in the mid-1990s, grunge was at its peak. Former Minuteman and Firehose bassist, songwriter, and vocalist Mike Watt released an album under the band name "Mike Watt and Friends" called Ball-Hog or Tugboat?. On that album, Watt had a lineup of friends that sounds like a who's who of 1990s grunge/alternative music -- guys like Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam), Dave Grohl (Nirvana and Foo Fighters), Dave Pirner (Soul Asylum), Henry Rollins (Black Flag), J Mascis (Dinosaur, Jr.), Cris & Curt Kirkwood (The Meat Puppets), Krist Novoselic (Nirvana), Evan Dando (The Lemonheads), Flea (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock from The Beastie Boys), and Frank Black (The Pixies) all contributed in some way.

One of my favorite songs on that album was one that got a lot of airplay in 1995. It was called "Against the 70s":

It wasn't lyrically impressive; half the song is Vedder and Watt singing, "The kids of today should defend themselves against the 70s."

Now that we're twenty years past when that song came out, though, I'm tired of defending myself against the 70s. Indeed, I'm embracing both the 1970s and today.  

But, for today's post, I'm embracing the 1970s. From Topps, at least.

1973 Topps

Rick Auerbach was actually a draftee by the Seattle Pilots.  I found that out when I was working on the post for him for the 1982 Topps blog. He lasted three seasons in Milwaukee -- though only 6 games in April of 1973 -- before the Brewers sent him to the Dodgers for Tim Johnson.  

I'd like to think that Auerbach began his love of bowling in Milwaukee too.

As an aside, I'm not sure what shenanigans were going on between the Brewers and the Dodgers. In 1973, Baseball Reference has the Brewers trading him to LA in April, buying his contract back at the beginning of September, then selling him back to the Dodgers at the end of October. That is a weird transaction line.

1974 Topps

Dave May played six seasons over two stints with the Brewers. He was an All-Star in 1973 when he hit 25 HR, drove in 93 runs, hit .303/.352/.473, and led the American League in Total Bases with 295. He then was traded after the 1974 season to the Atlanta Braves in exchange for the final two seasons of Hank Aaron's playing career.

1975 Topps

Del Crandall was fired one game before the end of the 1975 season. It didn't go well -- a 68-94 record, a fifth place finish thanks to the completely inept Detroit Tigers (57-102), and a team pitching staff that was dead last in the American League in ERA, Runs Allowed, Earned Runs Allowed, and Strikeouts and 11th in walks issued.  

On the plus side, George Scott had an incredible year at age 31 (36 HR, 109 RBI, .285/.341/.515).  Harvey Kuenn got his first managerial win in the one game he got to manage.  And, the team other than the 41-year-old DH Hank Aaron was very young -- fourth-youngest in batters even with Hank and the youngest average age for a pitching staff in the American League.

1976 Topps

George Scott has some of the best sideburns pictured on a baseball card. Too bad the photographer either was 3-feet-tall or thought it best to get an easily changeable photo for the inevitable point when the Brewers would trade Scott for two dimes to a quarter.

Believe it or not, Bob Sheldon was around 24 years old when that photo of him was taken. Sheldon was passed in the organizational reckoning by the end of the 1975 season and he would not appear in the majors in 1976. The Brewers had the spoils from trading Rick Auerbach -- Tim Johnson -- playing second mostly. That didn't work out well so Don Money got moved there for 1977. Sheldon no longer played professionally after 1977.

Eduardo Rodriguez came up with the Brewers in 1973 as a 21-year-old. He was a swing-man out of the bullpen. In 1973, 1976, and 1977 with Milwaukee, Rodriguez tallied at least one complete game and at least one save. He was what he was -- a fungible rubber arm who could eat a few innings here and ther while never being a star in any way. 


The Best Card Ever

I know nearly everyone knows about the Kurt Bevacqua Bubble Gum Blowing Champ card from the 1976 Topps set. If you don't know about it, it's time you were introduced to the master bubble-blower, Kurt Bevacqua.

What I especially appreciate about this card is not just the photo. As an aside, I'm not quite sure why this photo was in black and white. I mean, Bazooka is a Topps product, so couldn't they have sprung for a color photo of the championship?

More impressive to me is the fact that the card outlines some Byzantine rip-off version of the March Madness bracket that was employed to reach a champion.

This needs to be done again. It needs to be its own baseball card set this time, however complete with about three cards for each player during the competition. I mean, I would pay good money to see a card from that Johnny Oates/Gary Carter bubble-off (and let's be clear -- it can't be called a "blow-off").  

The fact that this competition included four future Hall of Famers (George Brett, Bert Blyleven, Johnny Bench, and Gary Carter) also lends credence to the fact that professional athletes will compete in anything. Heck, let's add as many other sports stars as want to compete. We'll call it the Goodwin Championship. Upper Deck can release the card set because no one has to dress in anything other than sponsor gear. 

Who's in?

Cards for the Player Collections

1.  Don Money

It looks like the beginning of Don Money's dodgy mustache that he wore from time to time is appearing on his upper lip here. This card was the most recent addition to the Don Money collection linked above.

2.  Gorman Thomas

On the other hand, compared to his scruffy, overgrown look that he sported through the 1980s, Gorman looks entirely clean cut here.  Skinny too. As a side note, he's pictured here wearing the number 44. He had to give that number up after the 1974 season so that Hank Aaron could wear his number.  Thomas was then assigned the number 3 for 1975 and 1976.

When he came back up with the team after Harry Dalton repurchased his contract from the Texas Rangers in the offseason after the 1977 season, Gorman was assigned his trademark number 20. When Gorman was traded in 1983, Don Sutton grabbed 20 immediately. These days, that number is worn by Jonathan Lucroy.


I bought all of these cards from the proprietor of my local show, Frank Moiger. Frank has a great selection of commons from the 1950s through the early 1980s, so if any of you have a want list from those years, please let me know.

Thanks for reading!