Thanks to Three Big Names in the Baseball Card World

In the interest of picking up the pace on my thanking people a bit, I thought I'd combine a few thanks into one post. It's bad that I have to do this, because the people here getting thanked deserve their own posts. But I also need to do it while I have some time and have the desire to write a bit.

Let's start with a guy whom I'd never heard of before this year. He's burst onto my scene -- though, pretty clearly, there were a ton a people who knew him already -- thanks to his location in Georgia. I'm talking, of course, about Joey a/k/a Dub Mentality on Twitter and on his blog of the same name. 

I forget what the occasion was for this package. Perhaps it was just, "Stop whining about Topps and take these cards." In any event, he sent some good stuff my way:

What a true olio of cards. There are two of your 2017 Brewers MVP Travis Shaw -- thanks, Red Sox! Glad you guys wanted to give Pablo Sandoval another chance! Have fun storming the castle! 

The two Stadium Club cards are cards of infinite sadness. Villar's season was a huge step backward after last season, and Nelson got hurt on the basepaths and damaged his labrum severely enough that he's likely to miss time next year. If Nelson had stayed healthy, perhaps this season would be winding down with the Brewers looking down on the Rockies, rather than the other way around.

Then, there are the Bowman Platinum. Of course there is Ryan Braun. Trent Clark spent his age 20 season in High-A Carolina, where one website named him the 8th best prospect in the league on the strength of a .224/.361/.349 line with 21 doubles, 6 triples, 8 HRs, and 37 SB (on 42 attempts). He'll be in Biloxi next year. The other guy is Brandon Woodruff. Woodruff has found himself in the Brewers starting rotation in September with middling results. He's likely to start next year in the rotation at the age of 25.

Finally, there is Corey Ray. Now, Ray was named as the 4th best prospect in the Carolina League, but that is based on athleticism rather than performance. The club has to hope that he shows enough next year that he can be a good trade chit for pitching/whatever need arises, because it's looking more and more like Ray will not outdo Domingo Santana, Brett Phillips, and Lewis Brinson going forward, and Trent Clark may have passed him too.

Many thanks, Joey -- here's some Deftones for you!

Next up, I have thanks going out to another Twitter friend, RobbyT a/k/a Boobie Maine. Robbie collects Detroit Tigers cards, and he used to blog about them several years ago. He blogged three times this year for the first time in four years. Robby is a bit down on his Tigers these days, and so he changed his avatar on Twitter to the Astros logo. This makes sense, after all, with half the Detroit team that can still walk and does not have herniated discs traded to Houston. 

At any rate, in response to my 1980s Baseball post on the Donruss Action All-Stars sets, Robby sent me complete sets of the Donruss Champions set, the 1984 Action All-Stars, and the 1986 Action All-Stars:

Brewers and Strawberry, baby. I have no idea why I decided to scan Darryl Strawberry instead of either Paul Molitor or Cecil Cooper (who are both in that set), but let's not ask too many questions right now. Maybe I'm just trying to get Peter's attention, even though it's not 1995 Fleer.

Since Robby likes 80s music, here's a little Funky Cold Medina to get him more chicks.

Thanks, Robby, for the great 1980s sets!

As an aside, I had a little fun this summer reliving 1989 by rapping this song with friends. I know the words, still, without any help. 

I miss Spuds MacKenzie, though.

Finally, I got a single card PWE from my good friend Wes a/k/a Jaybarkerfan a/k/a Willinghammer Rising. Wes has decided to go dark on his blog for a while -- a decision that sucks for the rest of us but one I totally understand, what with my seeming inability to blog more than a handful of times per month as of late.

Anyway, Wes is making plans to hit up the National next year, and hopefully I'll be there too. 

It's the first time in three years that I have the summer reasonably open, so it's a good opportunity. You can see the card that Wes sent my way behind the message, but it's in such great shape, you need to see it by itself:

Billy Bruton was always a favorite of my grandfather and my mom. Bruton was born in Panola, Alabama -- a now unincorporated town that sits barely in Alabama and about 20 miles from Scooba, Mississippi -- the home of Last Chance U's featured school the past two years, East Mississippi Community College. 

Bruton got his chance in baseball thanks to scouting from the Negro Leagues. He had joined the Army for 6 months and, rather than returning to Alabama, he moved to Delaware instead. There, he got to play softball and sandlot baseball. It was there that his life changed. 

Specifically, Negro League great Judy Johnson -- who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1975 -- got the Philadelphia Stars to sign Bruton. Johnson heard of Bruton on the recommendation of Johnson's youngest daughter. Bruton caught the eye of both Johnsons -- making Judy's daughter Mrs. Bruton.

Bruton lied about his age to get signed by the Milwaukee Braves, shaving two years off his 23 years to claim being 21. The Braves decided 21 wasn't young enough, so they called him 19. Only on his retirement from baseball did Bruton disclose his real age.

After retiring from baseball after the 1964 season at the age of 38 and after spending his last four years in baseball in Detroit, Bruton became an executive with the Chrysler Corporation. He spent 23 years there, working mainly in Detroit and rising to become a special assistant to Chrysler president, Lee Iacocca. He retired in 1988, and moved back to Delaware to life in his father-in-law's former home (Judy passed away on June 15, 1989). Bruton worked with charities there for several years before he suffered a heart attack while driving and passed away on December 5, 1995.

Apropos for Bruton, here's a brief video of him hitting a walk-off single in Game 1 of the 1958 World Series. Everything seemed so sedate in the 1950s...

Wes, many thanks for this card and for all the cards you've sent me through the years.

Dub Mentality: An Archives Post

In the blog world, there are not a ton of big college football fans. I mean, there are a few, of course -- and I won't try to list them for fear of leaving someone who should be obvious out. But, for about as long as I have been writing my blog (almost three-and-a-half years now!), I have not really come across any Georgia fans.

This year, though, I did. He's a popular man in the Twittersphere and the Blog World who goes by the nickname of Dub Mentality. He's a good south Georgia guy who is a Bulldog fan. Well, I say that, but he may consider himself as not being from south Georgia. You have to remember that to us big city people in Atlanta, everything south of about I-16 and Macon is considered south Georgia. 

Dub loves to open packs. If you check out his Twitter feed or his blog, it's filled with pack openings from current products to some extent but mostly he loves what some would call "junk wax."

His other love is music, specifically a band that I have listened to a little bit but not a lot: The Deftones. So, let's dig into some Deftones and show off the cards that Dub sent my way -- and a couple of things I sent to him that I got at a recent card show.

A website I found called this the best Deftones song at the same time as calling it the more commercially successful single. Yup, I have heard it, so it must have been reasonably successful on commercial alternative radio in the early 2000s. It may also be the most viewed video on YouTube.

In an interview cited in its Wikipedia entry, the band described the process of writing this song as a turning point for them -- when they really started working as a unit. To summarize what was said, they stopped making songs about themselves specifically and started incorporating their own storylines and dialogue into the music to make it a little less personal and more able to have multiple interpretations. 

Dub sent me some 2017 Topps Archives. This is the Ryan Braun 1960 Topps version. I don't particularly like the color choices for this card. First, you have an orange background on the bottom and a blue left side. That's just ugly because it is Florida or Auburn colors, and nothing good has come from those schools other than my wife graduating from Auburn in 1996. Plus, Braun's name is hard to read on that background. The red letters on an orange background is hard on the eyes.

Next up is an even earlier song from Deftones: "Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)." This was the Deftones first alternative hit, making it to number 29 on the mainstream rock tracks. The Deftones get cited frequently as employing loud-soft dynamics in their music. I get that, definitely. Nirvana really made that a "thing" in the 1990s with Nevermind, and other bands grabbed it and ran with it. 

The good thing to me is that the Deftones are nowhere near as obnoxious sounding as one of their cohorts in the "nu metal" world, Limp Bizkit. Limp Bizkit was catchy for a moment, but they got so full of themselves, and Fred Durst is such a complete tool, that they were simply unlistenable after a while to me.

The other two Brewers in the Archives base set are Orlando Arcia and Jonathan Villar. While Topps got close with its reproduction of the 1982 design, it didn't get all the way there. Let's compare briefly.

As you can see, the coloration is close -- but the orange on the current version is brighter. That may be a variation in printing on the Vuke card. So be it. It's not bad. The real issue -- and it is a minor one, really -- is the font used for the team and player names. It could be seen as picking nits, but the real 1982 set had a bolded font versus the Archives version.

Like I said, it's picking nits. 

The backs of the cards (which I did not scan) are far worse than the original, though. The print on the back of the Archives versions are damn near impossible to read. The originals weren't great -- trust me -- but the Archives ones are very bad. 

In all, I still like the idea of Archives. The problems with it are numerous, as I've mentioned before -- set composition and overloading with the usual suspects in teams and including Zack Hample as an autograph...well, just weird. Apparently, as an aside, Hample is buying up his autographs off eBay. For what purpose, only Hample knows.

Time for a more recent Deftones song. This one is called "Leathers." This song came off their album Koi No Yokan. This song is a lot harder than the previous two in this post. It comes across as angrier -- more visceral. This was the first song off the album, though it was not released as a single. 

I could definitely see this being one to listen to if you were frustrated and wanted to let off steam or, conversely, where you wanted to get fired up for a football game. It might be a little much if you were going out to play a round of golf, though.

 

Dub was kind enough to throw in a Milwaukee Brave for me in Warren Spahn. I think the 1992 portion of the Archives set is generally well done. Some folks have complained about the card stock being thin, but have you ever picked up a 1992 Topps card? They are on thin card stock. It was the first year that Topps went to the white stock. It took Upper Deck and its high quality cardstock and photography to convince Topps -- read as, Topps lost market share -- to change to the white card stock. 

I think this card looks good and "right" in part because Topps had incorporated the trademark superscript on the team names in its 1992 sets. Being picky, though: Topps did not follow the coloration here properly. I don't know if it is because Spahnie is a Milwaukee Brave here, but the 1992 set had the team name for the Braves on a bluish-purple background.

So, not bad, but not correct.

Finally, we have "My Own Summer (Shove It)." The website Loudwire -- from which I pulled the list of the best Deftones Songs -- calls this song essentially the archetypical Deftones song. As the website put it: "Most songs in the Deftones catalog are exercises in tension building. They build you up to break you down, like the Marine Corps!"

I don't know about the Marines. I will say that this song does remind me a bit of Tool, which I was listening to a decent amount in law school because a woman I was trying to date really liked Tool. My dating attempts did not go all that well, but she did give me a nice business card holder as a graduation gift that still sits on my office desk today. Of course, I should have followed up after she gave me that gift, but hey -- I have long been an idiot when it comes to women. 

I am not an idiot, though, when it comes to getting free autographs -- or at least nearly free. To thank Dub both for the Archives cards and for tipping me off about a small card show at which the Braves shown here, Alejandro Peña, signed autographs, I paid $6 total for the card and the photo above and got them signed. 

I mean, for $6, I'd get just about anyone's autograph.

Well, other than Zack Hample, that is.

Many thanks go out to Dub Mentality for the great cards. If you want to read a blog of a guy who really has a great attitude about collecting and life, be sure to check out his blog at DubMentality.com.