Johnny's Trading Again

Over the four years I've been blogging, I have been the recipient of tons of cards and bobbleheads and all kinds of other stuff from John at Johnny's Trading Spot. He is a megacollector. Not only does he want all the Braves ever -- as he puts it, he only needs "like 108,000 more Braves cards" -- but he also puts sets together too. So, it looks like I definitely need to send him some cards again soon.

This is especially true because he sent me yet another package of cards about a month ago with some fantastic Brewers to add to my collection. Let's start with a short print from 2017:

Eric Thames seemed initially to be a very inspired signing by the Brewers early last year. Of course, he was not that much of a different player than when he went to Korea. It helped him early on that teams did not know whether he could handle what they were serving up to him -- especially the Reds. 

These days, Thames's playing time is getting squeezed a bit by the Brewers surplus of outfielders and corner players -- it's tough to find room for Christian Yelich, Lorenzo Cain, Domingo Santana, Ryan Braun, Brett Phillips, Keon Broxton, Jesus Aguilar, and Eric Thames on the same roster. Of those, Phillips and Broxton have options remaining, and Aguilar was a waiver wire pickup last year who might find himself there this year if the Brewers can't clear that logjam.

We'll see how good David Stearns is in that trading process. So far, he's made me a Believer.

Strangely enough, 1981 Kellogg's seem to elude me. 1982 and 1983 are plentiful, it seems, but 1981...maybe kids just didn't want to remind themselves about the strike by buying baseball cards. Still, these two Brewers stalwarts were both very much needed for my collection. 

The Greatest American Hero was one of my favorite TV shows in 1981. William Katt as the everyman superhero who screwed up and made mistakes but in the end always beat the bad guys was kind of an inspiration to me as a 9-year-old, because I always screwed up and made mistakes. My visual memory of that show tied to this song is the scene where he flies into a billboard and crashes. He was also about as graceful as a rhinoceros high on LSD. Plus, Connie Sellecca was hot.

Now, though, she's just married to John Tesh. That was after being married to Gil Gerard (yeah, Buck Rogers from that three year show at the end of the 1980s).

Gotta love these snowflake/holiday cards from last year. Well, actually, you don't have to love them. To be honest, I'm sort of agnostic. They are cool and all, but I'd prefer them if they weren't a glorified parallel. I guess they are pretty cool. They do put me in a holiday spirit, even though the only holiday really upcoming right now is St. Patrick's Day. Guess I'll have to drink a Guinness.

Sort of like the cards, I'm a bit agnostic on Madonna -- especially her early career. If you didn't live through that era, well, imagine if Taylor Swift spurred on an entire army of teenage wannabes who dressed like her and you have the feel of what it was like when Madonna first got big. This was really one of her first hits, and she became a phenomenon.

John has been sprinkling these Fleer Excel cards throughout the blogosphere. You have to love that El Paso Diablos card of future Brewer and Astro Mark Loretta!

I am still working on putting together my minor league want lists for the Brewers. I'm working on refining my Milwaukee Braves want lists currently, so that's taken more of my time recently. That and listening to tons and tons of different podcasts. 

If you have any podcast recommendations, let me know. 

When I think of 1995, I think of the time when I met Oasis. Speaking of which, I really need to find my signed concert ticket from that day. Of course, they were gobshites then and are gobshites now. Time has certainly revealed that Noel was the more talented of the Gallagher brothers. 

Oh, and f**k Man Citeh, Noel & Liam. 

It might seem weird that my favorite item from this box (which had a ton more things in it!) is a media guide, but I love media guides. Part of me thinks I should go back to my efforts to buy up as many old (but good) baseball books as I could. The other side of me, though, thinks I should stick with the Brewers but buy up every Media Guide in sight of every team. I know I have the Brewers from 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1990, 1991, 1992, and 1993 at a minimum.

And maybe I should do that. I enjoy the background about the players and all, and I also enjoy tidbits like seeing Fred "Chicken" Stanley showing up to work for the Brewers in 1992 -- one of the 1970 Brewers came back home.

John, thank you very much for the cards and ESPECIALLY for the media guide.

2018 Eric Thames Inserts from Baseball Every Night

I have met a couple of bloggers in person. For example, I have met up with Dayf/Dave who may still post occasionally at Cardboard Junkie but who really can be found on Twitter as @cardjunk. 

This past fall, I was in Boston for an ABA seminar/meeting for work. I got in a day early to go to meetings, so I had some available time one morning. It allowed me to meet up with a guy who I really respect -- P K a/k/a Peter of Baseball Every Night. We were able to grab coffee at Starbucks and sit like two old men on a park bench across the street from the Boston Public Library for as long as Peter could afford to be missing in action from work and just hang out and talk about everything but cards.

I really enjoyed getting that opportunity. It ended up being a baseball day -- my wife and I walked to Fenway too:



What's even cooler is that Peter still speaks to me even after we met in person. I can be a little much sometimes, and I can drop off the face of the planet for a while too, so that's not always a given.

At any rate, Peter has been opening up some 2018 Topps. He was lucky enough (from my perspective) to pull two inserts that are Brewers. Well, two Eric Thames Inserts to be specific:

On the left, we have an Eric Thames "Opening Day 2018" insert, and on the right we have a "Memorial Day" insert of Thames. The brick thing coming off Thames's chin on the left makes it look like he's smoking a big fat stogie of sorts. The green on the right looks like Panini took over the Topps printing facility for a day to come up with weird, incorrect color combinations.

In all seriousness, I'm glad I got these. I've stopped chasing inserts and parallels for anyone other than my player collections effective starting with the 2018 season in part because it takes forever to catalog them and in part because it's simply not fun trying to find 12 versions of the same card with different color effects for literally everyone on the team. 

But, I will still take the inserts if people are willing to send them my way. 

Now, to thank Peter, let's hear from one of his player collections. Peter collects two guys who seem like they may not enjoy hanging out together. The first is Los Angeles native Darryl Strawberry, and the other is Charleston, West Virginia, native John Kruk. Maybe that's why he likes them. 

Let's focus on Kruk. I enjoyed watching him as a player, and I turn the TV off on him as an analyst. He's a self-professed redneck too, which isn't that big of a deal to me because that's how I grew up. That said, he got together with a group of unknown-to-me country singers and came up with a country-music theme for "Baseball Tonight." Since I don't watch the show, I have no idea how well know this song is, but here goes:

Peter, thank you as always for the cards and for being a cool guy to interact with -- I greatly appreciate your thoughtfulness and watching your beer consumption.

Two More Crackin' Wax Breaks

Greetings from sunny and humid Ponte Vedra, Florida. I'm attending a trade organization meeting this weekend, which will leave me with a fair amount of downtime -- it will almost be like a vacation of sorts in some respects.

Of course, I still need to dodge the local fauna.

So, as I have written about a few times here on Off Hiatus, I subscribed to the "Topps Package" with Crackin' Wax as part of the charity case break series. The last two products in the package were Topps Series 2 and Museum Collection. 

I tend to forget about Series 2 being separate from Series 1. I'm still stuck in the 1980s, when all the cards were issued at once and had 792 cards in the set and had checklists without front photos and had prospect cards and team checklists. You know -- the good old days of wild overproduction! So, getting the guaranteed team set from Series 2 from Chris was a good thing. 

As for Museum Collection, I splurged on a box of it for myself back in 2014 when I got back into collecting. I like the product in many respects, but there are problems with it too. I like the base cards -- the high quality, thicker stock with a classier looking design appeals to me. I wish it could be a standalone product with just the base cards and two or three parallels sold in packs of 6 cards for $5 or something. The problem with it is the problem with all of Topps's non-flagship sets (other than 2017 Stadium Club for some reason): the Brewers generally get ignored. 

The Brewers really got shafted by both Series 2 and Museum Collection in terms of hits this year. It was so bad that I got money back from Chris on both breaks because of the lack of chances at a Brewers hit. So what did I get?

Let's hit up some music and introduce the cards!

How about a cover of a Loverboy song that sounds like it is being played in a drainage pipe? Sure, everybody is working for the weekend. No question about it. And there's nothing like a cover artist from Saskatchewan playing it to make it awesome!

These are the rest of the base cards from Series 2 that I didn't show in the break that Peter did. It's a mixed bag. Taylor Jungmann has spent most of the year in Triple-A. Kirk Nieuwenhuis has been added to the 40-man roster twice and designated for assignment twice so far this year. Matt Garza has been as good as you'd expect a mid-30s starter in a contract year who can't stay healthy to be. 

Chase Anderson was developing into a guy who could be an ace earlier this year before straining his oblique and being put on the DL on July 1. His injury arguably was as big a turning point in the NL Central race as the Cubs getting Jose Quintana was -- he was pitching that well. Don't believe me? Check this out: in his last 7 starts before the injury, he pitched 41-2/3 innings, giving up 21 hits and 8 walks, striking out 44 and allowing 6 earned runs (1.30 ERA, 4-1 record for him, 4-3 for the team with two losses blown by the bullpen). Those are ace numbers.

Finally, we have Eric Thames, who has cooled down (as you would expect) since April. He has been okay, but his April stats have obscured a slash line of .221/.338/.450 since May 1 (14 HR, 27 RBi in 293 plate appearances). That's acceptable based on the OPS, but that is a factor in why Jesus Aguilar is getting more playing time as the season goes on.

I'm not sure if this counts as "trip hop." It's pretty relaxing, even if the guy in the video wears too much eye makeup and yells at us all the time and even if the song is called "Dummy." 

Wait, I'm not a dummy, and neither is Chris. What is going on here?

Okay, now I get it. Parallels are for dummies. Well, if there are too many parallels its makes us all feel like dummies, I guess. This one is out of 65, if I recall correctly. You'll have to forgive me for being dumb and not noting that on my scan file even though I knew I would be doing this remotely.

Maybe I am a dummy?

This song was originally written by Puerto Rican composer Rafael Hernandez Marin, who was given the name "Mr. Cumbanchero" by President John F. Kennedy. Hernandez is a hero in the Puerto Rican community. There are schools in the Bronx, Boston, and Newark named for him, as is the airport in Aguadilla, PR. 

Always good to have a little bit of upbeat music on a Thursday to get you heading in the right direction for Friday and the weekend, right?

I'm pretty sure that Topps has been stamping "buybacks" just to get rid of its inventory of 1990 Topps cards from its warehouses. Perhaps I should try to put together a 1990 Franken-team-set of Brewers from these buybacks, but I really just don't like the idea of chasing the cards. I'll take them if people want to send them, but dang...actively seeking out the 1990s? No thanks.

Also, Robert Flores is a native Houstonian and a huge wrestling fan who apparently owns a Louisville Slugger autographed by Ric Flair. 

This song strikes me as a bit uninteresting. Alexa Goldie is a Canadian artist whom some were thinking might be the next Avril Lavigne, except that these songs just weren't all that great. 

I'm not sure if anyone has picked up yet on the theme uniting the songs I've used here today. Perhaps it would help if I told you that Topher Stott is the drummer on this song for Alexa Goldie? 

Right, Chris?

In reality, I've saved the best for last. For the first time in a long time, I beat the odds in a break and got legitimately great cards for my collection:

The "Meaningful Materials" serial numbered to 50 beat the odds for me. Getting a gold parallel for Braun was nice too, but Brewers hits have been sparse this year. In fact, they have been fairly nonexistent this year in the breaks in which I've been involved. So, when I finally had the opportunity to check in on the break and see what happened with it, I was incredibly excited to find out that I got a nice serial numbered patch. 

Still, I'd rather that there be a separate product for the base cards away from all the hits -- I mean, these designs are excellent and look sharper in hand -- even if the photo cropping makes the card look miscut. 

Chris...Topher...whichever....thanks for running these breaks and enjoy the Topher music!

Topps Now, Year 2

It's year two for Topps Now. Topps kicked off its second season of "instant" cards with a Spring Training set for each team, some of which included optional autographs. The Brewers were not one of the teams with an autograph option, but I was tempted. 

Had I not sent my "20% off" coupon out to Zippy Zappy for a friend of his -- it was a Trout card, after all -- I may very well have sunk $40 into buying one of those sets. Even after sending off that card, I was still tempted to plunk down $50 for it. I checked with some regularity to see what 15 players would be included in the set.

I checked and checked and checked. By the time the period for purchasing the sets had nearly ended, only eight of the fifteen cards had been posted. As much as I wanted to pull the trigger, I couldn't convince myself to do it. I just didn't trust Topps to provide decent players for the Brewers set in light of some of their selections for the flagship and Heritage sets. 

In the end, I'm apparently not the only one who eschewed buying that money grab -- Topps sold only 32 Brewers sets. I am kicking myself, though, for not buying into it on the potential that the Brewers could be in first place in the division at the All-Star Break. 

And then Eric Thames hit the scene. Thames exploded into the national baseball consciousness by an incredible hot streak of home run hitting against the Cincinnati Reds and Chicago Cubs. That led those now-much-less-lovable winners -- John Lackey and former Brewer/still lardass Chris Bosio -- to insinuate that Thames was on steroids. I'm assuming that was because Thames had the temerity to hit a homer against the Cubs. 

As an aside, the Cubs did not accuse Ryan Zimmerman of juicing even though Zimmerman has hit just two fewer homers in 42 games than he did in 115 games all of last year. Did Zimmerman really change his hitting approach to hit more fly balls, or did he just become acquainted with the clear and the cream? My answer: he changed his hitting approach and got lucky with how many balls left the park. Also, again, it's small-sample-size theater here too. If Thames or Zimmerman hit 13 homers in 28 games in the middle of August, we'd say they were on a hot streak. Do it in April, and John Lackey says, "check him for steroids!"

Of course, Lackey is a self-important prig for whom a Google search of "John Lackey is an idiot" returns 20,800,000 hits from sources as diverse as Yahoo Answers in 2011, the Daily Upper Decker website in 2016, a long-running forum dating back to 2014, and some Red Sox fans, who immortalized Lackey's absolutely stealing-money 2011 season. Even "The Big Lead" called him "exactly what's wrong with baseball." And he even filed for divorce from his first wife while she was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer.

I'm pretty sure that Lackey walks around in the summertime saying, "How about this heat?"

So, back to Topps Now.

I decided this year that I would not purchase directly from Topps because I could save a few dollars on each card by going to the eBay secondary market. I jumped all over both of the cards that Topps put out to celebrate Thames's excellent start, and I got them for about $7 each. The guy I bought them from made money, I saved money, and we all win.

Here are the Thameses!

I'll note that Matt Prigge covered the fact that Topps has upped its game in terms of the shipping container this year -- and considering that the purchase of a single card is a $10 venture, it's well past time for that.

When my shipping envelope from the eBay seller arrived, I pulled the cards out. Immediately, I noticed that these cards feel different from those from last year. They feel thicker -- perhaps more substantial -- as compared to last year's cards. Design-wise, I think I prefer last year's set, though. For comparison, here are the non-Trade Deadline, non-Prince Fielder retirement cards from last year:

Based on this selection, I'm very concerned that Eric Thames will not be a Brewer next year considering that every single Brewer to feature on Topps Now last year is gone. I don't count Arcia slapping hands with Carter as featuring him. 

The other thing: the rainbow back is a new feature. Last year's cards were just glossy on both sides:

Basically, last year's Topps Now was nothing more than a really expensive extension of the Topps flagship set in terms of the paper quality.  This year, though, it's almost to Stadium Club levels, I suppose:

Or something like that. 

As one would expect, Topps's orgasmic delight in everything Yankees continues to manifest itself. Last year, it was the Sanchize, Gary Sanchez, who appeared on 11 Topps Now cards -- literally one card for every 5 games in which he played last year. This year, it's all Judge all the time. Judge has appeared on seven Topps Now cards, including one card that celebrated his breaking a TV during batting practice, and six autographed parallels of that same card. 

Topps is just doing what sells, of course. They've issued a ton more cards during the first two months of the season than last year -- the Zack Greinke card on sale today is card #173, which celebrates an occurrence on May 22. Last year's card 173 was Yankee Starlin Castro's walk-off home run on June 22. In other words, Topps realized that the demand for these cards is high and will issue however many they decide makes sense on a particular day...even if they ignored the Brewers comeback from 6 runs down against the Mets a few days ago in lieu of issuing two Topps Now cards for Derek Jeter (RIP). 

Perhaps Topps will issue a Topps Now card for when the Brewers do their "Re2pect Bobblehead" giveaway. And, to be fair, Topps did not issue a Topps Now card for David Ortiz picking up an honorary degree from Boston University over the weekend. Maybe Topps should have done a card for this story....Ortiz's claim that he failed a PED test and had the results leaked because too many Yankees tested positive.

All this led me to do a Twitter poll. Please ignore my typo on the second line.

I complain about Topps Now all the time for leaving out the Brewers. What are your thoughts on Topps Now?

— Tony L. (@OffHiatusBBC) May 16, 2017

Just in case the results are not showing: 59% of the 44 respondents said they did not like Topps Now. 48% dislike it and ignore it. 27% of people love it but do not buy it. Only a quarter of respondents -- 25%, or 11 of the 44 -- buy the product, whether they love it or dislike it.

I fear that Topps risks doing with Topps Now what it does with every good idea it has: beating it into the ground with a club so far that everyone hates it and refuses to buy it. Topps only does things for one reason: to make more money for The Tornante Group. To that end, perhaps we should expect Topps cards for BoJack Horseman or Judge Faith? 

Shall we expect more Topps coverage of League 1 in England next year, since Tornante has been approved to purchase former Premier League Club Portsmouth F.C.? Maybe he can talk his pals at his favorite club, Arsenal, into giving Topps some additional swag?

I'm just glad Eisner isn't a Manchester United fan. 

But I digress, as always.

Topps Now is a good idea executed with the ham-handedness that we have come to expect from the exclusive license holder. It's all about the maximization of short term profits without regard for a longer vision of creating new collectors. If there was a vision for new collectors, Topps Now would be a great opportunity for it -- by making the cards less expensive or available on a $1 per game subscription for kids or something like that. But that's not in Topps's business plan currently, nor is it likely to be for the foreseeable future. 

Topps would rather cut up bases and stick them in cards to sell with a Derek Jeter autograph for $4,999.99.

Something Strange This Way Comes

Hi there.

Yes. I've been gone for a couple of weeks, but I'm back now.

In the past couple of weeks, I have barely had time to be on Twitter. I have some cards to post, of course, and I have some other items to scan and post as well. 

More on that in a minute. 

But, something very strange has been going on here, and I'm not sure what -- if anything -- can be used to explain it. 

Why in the heck was my last post so popular in terms of views?

If you're familiar with the Blogger interface on your posts to see how many hits your posts get, you know that some strange things can happen there. Depending on how search engines catalog your pages, you might end up with dozens -- even hundreds -- of hits on a particular post. Prior to this year, my record number of hits for any one particular post came on the handwritten post contest idea that Gavin came up with last year. It was an incredible 1574 hits.

Then I decided to title a post, "Bowman's Coming, But I Need to Post Heritage." That was my most recent post before today. I had all kinds of stuff going on lately so I haven't been paying much attention to the blog or collecting generally, so I was a bit surprised when I looked at my post list today and saw this:

Six thousand hits? What in the actual hell is going on here?

I dug deeper. Most of my hits over the past several weeks have come from the US. No surprise there. But, proportionately speaking, my American hits are much lower than normal. 

Here's the Overall numbers:

But here's the numbers for the past week:

I've suddenly become huge in South Korea? Is it that Eric Thames is now a Brewer and suddenly everyone in South Korea is seeking out every morsel of Milwaukee Brewers writing on the Internet? 

I really don't have any good ideas why that is the case. It's just weird.

Maybe it has something to do with my Twitter activities. Maybe. I mean, Twitter is how I got a new addition to my Dan Plesac collection:

Back in March, Redskins fan Kenneth -- the man behind the Washington Redskins site Cardboard Hogs -- posted this Rediscover Topps card of Dan Plesac. I asked him if he would part with it, and he was glad to oblige. He even threw in another of the Dan Plesac MLB Network inserts from Topps Series 1 for me.

Y'all be sure to check out Kenneth's website and follow him on Twitter too. 

I mean you, my South Korean friends. Please follow Kenneth. 

Thanks to everyone for reading, and here's to my getting back to posting again!