A PWE That Should Have Come with Bubblegum

Recently, Jeff from "Wish They Still Came with Bubblegum" peppered the blogging world with PWEs, and I was one of the lucky recipients.  On this Black Friday, how about we recap the cards he sent with music? To be in the spirit of Black Friday, I've got a theme that'll be pretty obvious pretty quickly.

Of course, that's The Beatles "Can't Buy Me Love" off their album, "A Hard Day's Night." That early Beatles stuff is so upbeat and light and airy and poppy. Literally every rock band borrows from The Beatles -- I mean, if you have both Kurt Cobain and Noel Gallagher on the same page, you know that there is something pretty incredible going on.

Speaking of pretty incredible, here's the Stadium Club Members Only Insert commemorating Robin Yount's 3000th hit. The Brewers lost the game in which Yount got his 3000th hit thanks to a Darren Holmes and Doug Henry combined blown save. Henry put two guys on, and Holmes finished it out when he threw away a bunt by Kenny Lofton and allowed two runs to score.  Not so good, Darren.

Here's a catchy country song that's out now that gets stuck in my head every time I hear it. It's called "Buy Me A Boat" and it's by Chris Janson. The refrain goes, "Yeah, and I know what they say, Money can't buy everything. Well, maybe so, but it could buy me a boat." I'm telling you -- if you're prone to getting songs stuck in your head, you might not want to listen to this.

Jeff sent a couple of great oddballs of Robin Yount to go with the Stadium Club card. On the left, that's the 1993 Post cereal card for the 3000th hit, and on the right that's a Baseball Cards Magazine special. 

See, money can't buy everything -- and maybe so, but it could buy me an oddball.

Now here's something you don't see everyday -- T-Pain singing without his autotune. Dude can actually sing...including the first song called "Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin')."

Mascot cards are okay. I'm not as enamored with them as some people are. I think it goes back to my freshman year of college. I was involved for a year with Vanderbilt's intercollegiate debate team, and we had a tournament at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. My partner and I did okay but we didn't break to the elimination rounds. 

More to the point, nearly all the teams in the tournament were staying in the same hotel. On the Saturday night after the final regulation rounds, SIU's debate team bought some kegs and hired a DJ to come to the hotel. It was a great party. Oddly, though, SIU's Saluki mascot was at the party. She was actually pretty cute under the oversized head. Still, it is seared in my memory how weird it was to have been flirting with someone with a big dog head and mascot outfit on. 

Twenty years ago, Everclear was pretty big -- especially with their song "Santa Monica." Personally, my favorite Everclear song is "Volvo Driving Soccer Mom" but that song doesn't fit this theme -- "I Will Buy You a New Life" does.

Speaking of new, here are two Update cards that I needed that Jeff sent. I finally got around to updating my Topps need list for 2015, so take a look and check it out. There are a few cards that I am surprised I needed, but hey -- that should make for some good trade fodder.

Let's finish on a weird note. As I do sometimes when I do these musically themed posts, I put the word "buy" into Spotify to remind myself of some songs, find new ones that are popular but which I haven't listened to, and then perhaps find something off the wall.  This is the off the wall.  

The band is called Electric Six, and they are from Detroit. Despite this American origin, the only place they have had any singles hit the charts is the United Kingdom.  The always-reliable Wikipedia says their rock is "infused with elements of 'garage, disco, punk rock, new wave, and metal.'" To me, it sounds like Meat Loaf met Stone Temple Pilots or something similarly horrifying.

By the way, the song is called "I Buy the Drugs."

I'm pretty sure Jeff sent me this. Sometimes, when I get a bunch of envelopes in at once, things get mixed together. I hope that isn't the case here.  This card is the most appropriate for that Electric Six song. O'Leary became a short-lived minor star for the Boston Red Sox in the late 1990s, totaling 117 HR in a little less than 1000 games as a league average hitter (OPS+: 100; .276/.331/.459 slash for Boston).  

The Red Sox got the benefit of those 1000 games because Sal Bando, in his infinite lack of wisdom as a GM, decided instead to keep a 27-year-old Matt Mieske (OPS+ for Milwaukee: 90; .260/.317/.436 slash for Milwaukee) instead of the 25-year-old O'Leary. Those two years of development matter at that age. Mieske was never going to be more than he was already, but O'Leary could develop a bit more power and hit slightly better -- and did in 1999 with 28 HR, 103 RBI, and a .280/.343/.495 slash line over 661 plate appearances.

Perhaps the Electric Six were buying Sal Bando his drugs.

Jeff, thank you very much for the cards. I sent you some Braves back your way -- I hope you like them and can use a few of them.

Product Review: 2014 Bowman

Now that the hot-pack euphoria has worn off, and I've opened all four of the Bowman boxes, in the level-headed view of day, how do I feel about the 2014 Bowman product?  As with most card sets these days, there are things I like and there are things I don't like.  Let's just go bulletpoints with illustrations here.

I'd say to imagine that you are at a seminar with a PowerPoint presentation going on, but none of you would read past this sentence.  And, let's be honest -- the people who give presentations with PowerPoints that look like blog posts have lost you at the first slide for one huge reason: TOO MUCH READING. If you've got that much content on a PowerPoint slide, you're not presenting any more.

Anyway, I'll stop being "The Off Hiatus Guide to Effective Public Speaking" and go back now to being the baseball card blog.

So, let's start with What I Like about Bowman 2014:

• Excellent Hits

First and foremost, this set emphasizes many modern collectors' desire to buy a box and sell a quarter or half of the cards on eBay, trade most of the rest, and keep their team/player/investment property.  While that sounds like a criticism, it is not meant to be.  The focus on having attractive inserts makes opening a pack exciting.  

For example, the on-card autographs are superior to the sticker-graphs, definitely (though I will admit that whiting out the part where the autograph is on the card is not optimum in my opinion):

Gabriel Encinas, SN 5/150.  And, as the card tells us, he "Enjoys carne asada."

Lewis Thorpe, no Serial Number, but one of his skills is that he is an "Upbeat teammate."

Daniel McGrath, no SN.  An Aussie like Thorpe, but he is a "fan of frozen strawberries and British independent films"

• Yes, the captions point out another positive, in my opinion -- the fun facts that are shared on the back. Sure, they are just fluff from some media guide or interview sheet, but it humanizes the player.

I mean, I selected a base card off the top of the stack of those at random, and suddenly I now have a reason not to like Josh Donaldson of the Oakland Athletics:

Being an Auburn football fan is not a good thing.

While I might have married an Auburn graduate and huge Auburn football fan, she also knows that the week leading up to the Georgia v. Auburn game is not a week during which she should be looking for reasons to have deep "discussions."  And, after this past year's game, that extended to the week after too.  In case you've forgotten:

It's too bad that Georgia had Afroman as our safety on the play.  If you don't know, just check out this story about #25, Josh Harvey-Clemons, and his no longer being a Georgia Bulldog.

Anyway, still bitter.

Back to Bowman.

• Another positive: usually two Chrome prospects in every pack.  While that may not seem like a lot, it makes it possible for me with four boxes that I might have a complete set of those -- I haven't sorted them out yet to see.  Same goes for both the base major leaguer cards and the base prospect cards.

It also means that I got two of each one of these:

Ignore those white pixels -- it's the scanning that put those on there from the background

• The 1989 Parallels

I really like these things, for some reason, and I'm glad they are cut down to the regular size rather than being the same size as the 1989 set was. I wish I had pulled the Paul Molitor card of this one.

• Final thing I like: the photography is pretty good generally.  I don't mind the blurred backgrounds that much, either.

Now, we've patted Bowman on the back quite a bit, so what didn't I like?

• Too many damn variations

That is demonstrated ably by this page at The Cardboard Connection. I'm not going to list all of them or what I got of each because that would bore me just to type it up.  I mean, there are 16 variations of the paper cards for the main set, 12 variations on the prospects paper set, 16 variations on the chrome prospect cards/refractors, 4 variations on the paper autographs (which are retail only), and 14 variations on the chrome prospect autographs.  Throw in 10 variations on 16 cards of the Chrome Rookies of cards from the base set.  Mix with 9 variations on the 150 cards in the Chrome Refractor MINI set and another 5 variations on Chrome Refractor Mini Autographs.  Then, add in the 1989 inserts...and 10 of those have an autographed variation....and the 1989 buyback cards, the AFLAC/Perfect Game/Under Armour autographs set, the autographed Ice cards -- again with 3 variations....I mean, I'm not even 2/3 of the way done with all the variations and inserts.

It's a positive to have nice inserts.  It's a complete negative when there are so many damn variations that even a player collector will throw up their hands and say, "aw f*ck it, it's not worth it."

• Damaged cards 

The Chrome prospect cards will sometimes come straight out of the pack with vertical scratches on the card -- they don't come through very well on scans due to the scanning process causing other faults, but I have tried to highlight the issue with the arrow below.

It looks a bit worse in person, honestly.  There were not a ton of these, but it got to the point of where I was concerned that I was causing it by how I opened the pack, etc.  Again, I didn't see a lot of these, but there were a few, and seeing a few was annoying.

Conclusion

So, overall, I like this set and I don't.  I'd rather have the set be one thing and not two or three.  If it wants to be a nostalgia gig, do more than the 25 "ice" throwback cards.  If it wants to be a rookies and prospects set, then do that and leave guys like Ryan Zimmerman out.  Of course, like many collectors, all the parallels frustrate me.  I opened four damn boxes of cards and didn't get even one parallel of a base-set Brewer.  I felt privileged to find the one prospect parallel I did get.

Topps needs to follow the immortal advice handed out by Everclear in a song from 1997: 

The key lyrics:

You do what you do 
You say what you say
You try to be everything to everyone
You know all the right people
You play all the right games
You always try to be everything to everyone

Topps needs to stop trying to have every set be everything to everyone.  But, if you pushed me for an answer under oath, I'd tell you that I'd buy four more boxes tomorrow if someone gave me a good price on them.