A Lifelong Fascination: The 1982 Milwaukee Brewers

I don't remember a time in my life when I was not a baseball fan. With other sports for me, I can identify when I became a fan and why I stopped being a fan or stopped paying as much attention or started paying tons of attention. 

NBA? I loved watching the Bucks on TV as a kid during the days of Marques Johnson (before he was traded), Sidney Moncrief, Paul Pressey, and Terry Cummings. I grew up listening to Jon McGlocklin as the color guy on the 10-15 games a year that made it to TV. But, all those guys got old at around the same time in the late 1980s, and then the team was marked by draft decisions and ownership choices that made them easy to discard when I went to law school.

NFL? I was a Packers fan by 1980, watching every fall weekend with family. I still follow the Packers...but not as closely. I stopped paying as much attention to the Packers due to fantasy football, and I stopped paying much attention at all to the NFL in 2016 when I quit fantasy football. It's been freeing not to care.

College basketball? I liked Marquette as a kid. That changed when I went to college at Vanderbilt and I became a huge Vandy fan. Then Eddie Fogler left and Jan van breda Kolff ran the program down, and Kevin Stallings settled for good and mediocre. With VBK at Vandy in the mid-1990s and me studying a lot more thanks to law school, college basketball was not something I watched from that point on. And don't even get me started on college baseball -- Vanderbilt only got good well over a decade after I left.

College football? I had moments as a kid when I cared -- the 1981 Garden State Bowl between Wisconsin and Tennessee, for example. Between Wisconsin football under Dave McClain being awful and being a high school debater with debate competitions every Saturday, I really didn't care about college football until I got to college. Then, by the time I left Vanderbilt, I hated college football because Vanderbilt had about 12 fans who were serious fans and came to every game like the rest of the SEC. Then I went to Georgia for law school and I became a serious Georgia fan. But I am still not a big time "collector" when it comes to that part of my sports fandom -- despite some great items I have received.

Finally, professional soccer? I played a little pickup soccer in college, and I even watched highlight shows in 1994-1995 on cable. But I did not start to watch pro soccer until 2003, when I had Fox Soccer Channel show up on my cable system and my dog would wake me up early to go for a walk in the morning. That led to my Manchester United fandom, but, once again, it's not a major collection thing for me.

But baseball has been a constant. It's like the Thomas Mann soliloquy in Field of Dreams. Even as life moved inexorably forward, the one constant in life has been baseball. As a fan, I've attended NL and AL playoff games, a World Series, and an All-Star game. I've been to games in California, Illinois, Georgia, Pennsylvania, New York, Florida, Ohio, and Canada. I have come back to collecting baseball cards after nearly 25 years away.

And yet...current cards are...well, just okay. Perhaps it's my age and that baseball cards are a nostalgia game. What else explains the popularity of Topps Heritage and (to a lesser extent) Topps Archives and the inserts based off old card designs? It brings us collectors back to the days when we collected the original design.

Collecting baseball cards and other memorabilia is something I do as a hobby. It's my pastime. It's fun. Sometimes I start losing the fun, though, and I get cranky. Irritable. Pissed off at Topps for ignoring my favorite team. Unhappy that there are no other options except Topps for properly licensed cards. 

So, my focus here is shifting. Of course, I want to complete team sets. That's why I have tried to put together my Brewers want lists in such meticulous and exhaustive order. What I really want, though, are the players from my youth. 

I find myself inspired by blog commenter extraordinaire Mark Hoyle. His devotion to the 1967 Impossible Dream Boston Red Sox is legendary. While I am not going to say that getting everything for everyone on the 1982 Brewers is where I am going with my collection, I am saying that I really want everything related to the Milwaukee Brewers from the 1980s. 

Matchbooks, schedules, pins, programs, pennants, stickers, oddball cards, police sets, photos inserted from pizza packages -- you name it, I want it. 

And yes, I want the stuff that the Brewers keep putting out to celebrate that wonderful season that is now 36 years ago. Stuff like these cards inserted into the middle of the 1992 Brewers yearbook to celebrate the 10th anniversary, which I just bought this past week on eBay for a few dollars:

It's easy to see how much I really enjoyed the 1982 Brewers -- just look at those cards next to my player collection list. 14 of the 18 cards are of guys that are player collections. Only Rollie Fingers, Don Sutton, Pete Ladd, and Pete Vuckovich are not.

It is difficult to put into context how well that team hit compared to the league and historically. For example, 2017 was a hitter-happy environment; the highest scoring team was the Houston Astros, who averaged 5.53 runs per game. Joining the Astros in scoring over 5 runs per game in 2017 were the Yankees (5.30), the Indians (5.05), the Twins (5.03), the Rockies (5.09), the Cubs (5.07), the Nationals (5.06), and the Diamondbacks (5.01). 

The Brewers averaged 5.47 runs a game in 1982. The only other team in the major leagues to join Milwaukee at over 5.0 runs per game were their ALCS opponents, the California Angels, who averaged 5.02 runs per game. The MLB average runs scored per game per team in 2017 was 4.65; in 1982: 4.30.

That's just one average. In terms of individual performances: Robin Yount had a 10.5 WAR in 1982. That led the majors by 1.9 wins over 2nd place Gary Carter. Looking only at the AL now, the Brewers had 4 of the top 9 players in offensive WAR -- Yount, Molitor, Cooper, and Thomas. Three players -- Molitor, Yount, and Cooper -- scored over 100 runs, with Molitor first at 136 and Yount second at 129. Those three teammates each had over 200 hits that season; no one else in the AL had over 194.

Robin Yount's season was truly unbelievable. He was second in AVG behind Willie Wilson but was 10th in OBP, 1st in SLG, 1st in OPS, 2nd in runs scored, 1st in hits, 1st in Total bases, tied for 1st in doubles, 3rd in triples, 11th in HR at 29 (his teammates Thomas, Oglivie, and Cooper all had over 30 in a league where only 10 players hit 30 or more), and 4th in RBI. Even in advanced stats his season was excellent -- 5.5 Adjusted batting wins, .731 Offensive win percentage, 5th in power/speed number, 1st in base-out runs added (RE24, whatever the hell that means), 5th in win probability added, 1st in situational wins added, 1st in base-out wins added and first in OPS+. He was truly a dominant player that year.

I could go on and on and on. That 1982 team should have won a Championship. There were no missed calls to blame, though -- no Don Denkinger moments on which to rest our complaints. No, the Brewers just couldn't win the four games they needed to win against the Cardinals. It's a shame as a Brewers fan of that era that this team was not a Series winner so as to get the level of respect that such a win would have provided. 

All of this is to say that I don't mind duplicates from the 1980s. This may lead to a "project" and maybe eventually I will have as many projects as Night Owl does. At this point, though, it's just a recognition that I am more focused on the past for my collecting because it makes me happy. Just like Oddballs make me happy, and like knocking cards off my want lists makes me happy, and just like my Warren Spahn and Harvey Kuenn collections make me happy.

Just as I wish current cards could make me happy. But those are just different. Not bad. Just different.

THREE!!!!!

When I was in college, nothing was better to me than watching Vanderbilt basketball. I stuck it out through four miserable football seasons (1-10, 5-6, 4-7, 4-7) in the marching band simply because I loved being in the basketball pep band. That was especially true thanks to getting to watch games like this one in person:

Early next season and assuming that this streak continues for the rest of the year, Vanderbilt will mark its 1000th consecutive game with a three-point field goal. Only three teams in NCAA basketball have had a three-point field goal in every game since the rule was passed prior to the 1986-1987 season: Vanderbilt, Princeton, and UNLV. 

As I mentioned yesterday, today is the three-year anniversary of my deciding to start writing incomprehensible drivel understandable by and interesting to perhaps 25 other people on this planet. Actually -- somewhat surprisingly to me -- my readership stays consistently between 100 and 250 hits per post, and I'm a little under 7,000 pageviews from hitting the 150,000 pageview mark. This is all very cool to me considering that some of my posts in my first month have yet to break into double digits even three years later. 

Maybe I'm more interesting now?

Tease me with a title like, "Worst Song Ever!!!" and I'm probably going to click on it. Give it a listen -- it's like what would happen if those "Ricola" horns met up with a yodeler trained by the people who sing Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo, but only if those people had stuttering problems. It's fantastic.

Last year, I made some "resolutions" for the beginning of my blog year. Let's revisit those to see how I'm doing.

1.  Grow the Robin Yount Collection to 1000 items: As I mentioned yesterday, this one is a SUCCESS, since I have pushed the count to 1,041 items (and I just got in a few more cards to add to that collection yesterday and today). 

2.  Get More Organized, Again: this one related to the need to sort through about 30,000 cards from the "Christmas Horde" that I got from my in-laws for Christmas in 2015. I will say that I have gotten someone more organized within my card room. However, my time allocation has been bad, so I still have about 20,000 cards from 1989 through 1993 to sort through.

That is a FAIL...like on the level of this kid, who calls this his worst trumpet playing ever:

Be sure to ask this kid why his video is so orange. Also, if you play an instrument, there is no need to put your practicing on YouTube.

3.  Winnow down my collection: Nope. Haven't really made a dent. I had less time than I wanted this year to devote to collecting, and it showed. I actually have been downright awful this year in sending out trade packages. 

FAIL

4.  Send out Cards to the SuperTraders: This was and is a great idea -- to have an identified team collector to whom you can send cards. I got plenty of packages just before Christmas this year from some of the SuperTraders, so it's been good to add some new trading partners. I even bought a couple of boxes early in the process to help kick off the group -- and pulled a Yoan Moncada autograph card for Mark Hoyle:

Of course, now Moncada is with the other Sox, having been traded in the Chris Sale deal. Can't blame the Red Sox for that trade -- they can always spend more to get players and their hitting prospects were deep already.

Anyway, I didn't do all that well here in sending cards out, but I did do some. Minor success

5.  Stick to a budget for cards -- or create one.

6.  Get my Brewers Parallels, Oddballs, & Paninis organized and get my post-1965 Milwaukee Braves organized and get want lists created.  

I've been sort of successful here. Little did I think about what getting want lists put together for all those damn Bowman parallels would take. I'm to the point now where I am thinking about giving up on serial numbered cards with serial numbers under about 250 or 500 as going into my team sets. I don't catalog cards numbered 100 or fewer any more except for wanting them for my player collections. But, I'm almost done with Bowman, and I'm getting closer to typing up all the checklists on Topps for parallels.

After that, it will be Donruss, Fleer, and Upper Deck. Ugh.

Then, it will be the police cards and oddballs getting the full treatment.

Finally, after that, I'll pick up the Milwaukee Braves. The Milwaukee Braves are difficult because online checklists will often list cards as Boston Braves or even Atlanta Braves when the player is wearing a Milwaukee hat. It's annoying. Fix it, people. Fix it for me. 

7. Keep on the 1982 Blog and the "Meet the Brewers" Posts. The 1982 Blog is about dead. I fought the 792, and the 792 won. I was too ambitious, basically writing far too much about each card. When I have time, I'm busy creating want lists. So, bye bye 1982 Topps Blog for me. Anyone want it?

The Meet the Brewers posts are actually turning into my personal favorite posts. I have gotten the opportunity to speak with two former Brewers already thanks to that series, and I am hopefully going to get the chance to speak to a few more. I may need to get some drafts done there, though, in order to get ready for speaking with those players -- so I can ask more informed questions.

As the song says...Moving On.

What about this year?

Let's set a few goals.

1. Increase my main player collections. Not just Yount this time. Let's do a list:

a. Robin Yount: Current: 1,041. Goal: 1150

b. Paul Molitor: Current: 516. Goal: 610

c. Gary Carter: Current: 261. Goal: 310

d. Eddie Mathews: Current: 183. Goal: 225

e. Warren Spahn: Current: 143. Goal: 180

f. Joe Adcock: Current: 44. Goal: 60

g. Lew Burdette: Current: 36. Goal: 50

h. Harvey Kuenn: Current: 58. Goal: 70

I set lower goals for some of those older players for obvious reasons -- there just aren't as many cards available. 

2. Get the Parallels, Inserts, and Oddballs organized and bindered up. Carrying on last year's work. This one will be a continuing challenge. It's not like Topps has decided suddenly to reduce the number of parallels, inserts, and card sets they are issuing.

But I also want to add the minor league cards from the Brewers organization to my lists as well. 

I am a glutton for punishment.

3.  Trade More: Time conspired against me over this past year. My goal this year will be more tangible: to send out at least 4 packages per month. It's a small, attainable goal.

Who wants some cards? Comment below and email me your address.

4. Care Less about the surrounding bullshit.

That has grown. 

I know that I get too worked up about Topps ignoring the Brewers in things like Topps Now and Archives. It's a simple answer, of course: focus less on the current and more on the holes in my collection. If Topps doesn't want my money, well, it doesn't have to get my money.

5. Keep up the Meet the Brewers. Like I said, I enjoy these posts a lot. It's a great excuse for me to read old newspapers, old news, do internet sleuthing, and generally find out about guys who played the game. I'm disappointed, though, that one of my main sources of information -- Google Newspapers -- no longer has the Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel online for free any more. When Gannett -- owners of USA Today -- bought the newspapers this past year, they decided to monetize that archive for their own profit rather than allowing the world to have access to it for free. 

F*ck Gannett.

That said, my SABR membership has given me access to the archives of The Sporting News, so I have something of a substitute. It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing.

6. Write anywhere from three to six times for the SABR Baseball Card Blog. That's a tough audience, to be fair -- tons of big names read it and write for it, like Keith Olbermann and Rob Neyer and Jeff Katz and Mark Aubrey and Mark Armour and Matthew Prigge. But I enjoy writing there so I'll try.

Hopefully I can stick to these better than last year's goals. 

Finally, let me close with five cards I got at a recent card show. I've started a binder called, "Cards I Like" as I have mentioned before. Here are the five cards I dig from that card show:

The Topps Tribute space race card just feels and looks cool in hand. It's from back when Tribute sort of did what Allen & Ginter does now -- with random rivalries and such. But Tribute cards are cooler. 

Then, we have Josh Gibson and his Tape Measure Blast in Yankee Stadium and, on the bottom, Judy Johnson. I have had a fascination with the Negro Leagues ever since I read Only the Ball Was White followed by I Was Right On Time. Even as a kid, stories of those leagues intrigued me -- I couldn't imagine why a Negro League was necessary, and it struck me as ridiculous that it existed. Then I read Buck O'Neill's book, and I realized that it wasn't ridiculous -- it was just life, and the guys who lived it actually loved it. Sure, those players would have loved the opportunity in the major leagues, but they loved the opportunities they got.

In the middle row, we first have Paul Gauguin. I've actually featured Gauguin's art on this blog in my first year, and I've been an admirer of his work since high school. I like this Mayo set -- using old photography makes the card more attractive to me, for some reason, over using faux old art like Ginter does.

Finally, we have David Price. The only reason I bought this card was because he is wearing his Vanderbilt uniform. Maybe I'll start a Vanderbilt-uniform collection at some point, but for now, it's going to be a "I like that card" visceral basis.

Thanks for sticking around for these three years. Even though I rarely respond to comments, I enjoy getting them. It means that I struck a chord with someone enough to get them to stop and take a few minutes to write a comment.

Here's to a few more good years here for me, and thanks for reading.