Christmas with All Trade Bait All The Time

Here amongst the baseball card blogorati -- which is sort of like the Illuminati but with bubble gum stains-- discussions often turn from baseball cards and baseball to discussions on beer and bourbon and other similar vices. Since we are all collectors, a lot of us like to collect experiences on tops of our cards.

One of the guys with whom I interact regularly is Oscar from All Trade Bait, All the Time. Oscar is a unique dude. He is a Dodger fan -- which is as unique as sand at a beach in Florida in the blog world -- but he is studying Buddhism on the way to getting a Masters degree in Buddhist Psychology. Oscar also is one of the beer guys, as he gets together with buddies and samples beer and cigars.

Oscar is just a all-around good dude.

He confirmed that with his "club PWE" mailings recently. Here's what he sent to me:

This card is a subtly terrible photo. The way the lighting hits Brock's mouth makes it appear that he's missing a tooth or two up front in his mouth.  He also looks a bit hungover. 

Oscar, is Brock a member of your beer club?

This photo looks like Vaughn was in a photo studio in front of a green screen and the background was photoshopped in. In fact, I'd bet dollars to donuts that is what happened here. I don't think that lighting behind him occurs naturally.

Is Gary Sheffield a Hall of Famer? The answer to that question has to start with the elephant in the room: his steroid use is admitted and well known.  He gave an interview saying that Barry Bonds introduced him to the BALCO labs. He claimed he did not know that BALCO supplied him with steroids. 

I tend to give very little weight to such claims of a lack of knowledge.

The more relevant question relates to his overall numbers. On some levels, he should be a Hall of Famer. The Bill James Hall of Fame Monitor puts him #78 overall with a 158 score (likely HOFer is around 100). The Hall of Fame standards test is a Baseball-Reference creation that puts him at 61, with the average HOFer around 50. 

On the other hand, looking at JAWS and WAR, though, and comparing him to right fielders, his career WAR is below the average HOF RF, his 7-year peak is below average, and his JAWS is below average. And, the black ink and grey ink standards there also say he is not a Hall member. 

I think that's right. Just because he went over the 500-homer mark does not make him a HOFer. He doesn't get there without steroids, either. Sorry Gary.

Not sorry.

The Brewers paid Franklin Stubbs $4 million over 2 years, yet lowballed Paul Molitor after the 1992 season and offered less than $1 million a year. 

I don't get it either.

Minis! These UK Minis were never on my radar screen in the late 1980s. Apparently enough of them were printed then, however, that they are typical filler in repacks. The "Tiffany" version is pretty cool though.

This is what it would look like if a baseball player were also a stalker. Probably.

Another mini! I keep putting off buying the 12-pocket sheets for these cards, and yet with GQ and A&G pushing out more and more minis, I am probably going to have to break down and buy them. Zach Davies had a good year last year -- he's a solid mid-rotation starter for the Brewers. Hopefully, going forward, he will end up lower in the rotation thanks to others jumping him rather than him sinking down without being passed.

And, finally:

Thanks to all the random parallels that infect Topps sets like the Zika virus migrating into Miami, I feel like I have or should have this card already. But, it's a high number in Heritage, meaning it's a short print. Why is it that I have about three or four of those chrome parallels for it, but this is the first copy of this card in my collection? 

Are the chrome parallels more readily available than the regular base set cards? If so, that's ridiculous. Base set cards should be more plentiful than parallels. They should -- if set collectors meant anything to Topps, that is. 

Well, at least I like beer.

Thanks, Oscar, for the PWE, the beer recommendations, and the fact that you are just a good dude!

P-Town Songs for P-Town Tom

Last week, I received an envelope from P-Town Tom with a note that said, in part, that he was emptying out his trade boxes. He added a postscript, though, that made me smile. He complimented my blog and said that it has "great music and lots of creative writing to go with all that research."

I'm blushing, Tom. I really am. 

I say that because I often feel that I ask a lot of my readers to wade through the long and often unfocused journey through my mental processes that lead me to highlight a card. Many times, a single word sends me down a rabbit trail, into the weeds, deep into the briars, over the river, and through the woods in ways that getting to Grandma's house would be a relief even if a big bad wolf was at the end of the trip. 

Tom has sent so many packages to me that I am now officially reaching for a theme. The thing is, though, that, with mailings from Tom, there has to be a theme of some sort because there are always so many cards that he sends. I like to highlight more than one or two, so it ends up almost more like a scanner dump than it does a real review of what he's sent. 

So, I came up with a theme. We've covered bands who are from Peoria, but what about songs that mention Peoria? Sure -- why not.

This song, "I Wish't I Was in Peoria," was apparently written in the early 1920s by Billy Rose and Mort Dixon and copyrighted for the first time in 1925. The guys in the video above are called The Banjo Kings. The person who posted this tagged this video as being taken on Main Street at Disney World.

Having never been to Disney World, I couldn't tell you about that. 

This is a pretty decent little ragtime ditty. Perhaps the funniest part is when about a minute into the song, some woman walks up to the band, stands next to the washboard percussionist and poses for a photo. What was that?

For some reason, the ragtime whimsy led me to put up these cards from the late 1990s. I guess it's just that the late 1990s gave us such ridiculous cards like that Burnitz Ionix (which is probably from 2000, but...) with 6 photos of Burnitz on it. Then there's that Black Diamond look which Panini's creative team apparently thought was the very pinnacle of baseball card making -- as opposed to the PInnacle Aficionado card of Dave Nilsson, of course.

Seriously, though, if you don't take these cards with a grain of salt and a pocketful of whimsy, you'll get angry at the fact that they actually still look better than some of the cards that Topps and Panini have been putting out the past few years.

At least I would. But I'm an angry person sometimes.

Now, for something far less uplifting. The band Songs: Ohia -- really just singer-songwriter Jason Molina -- was an indie band in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Some folks call it folk, some call it alt-country, and some call it indie rock. This song is called "Peoria Lunch Box Blues," and it features Molina's friend and fellow Secretly Canadian label mate Scout Niblett providing the vocals. 

This is truly a blues song without being "the Blues." It's atmospherically depressing, and the vocals lend to that atmosphere. Unfortunately, it's also appropriate, as Molina was an alcoholic who died on March 16, 2013 -- the result of alcohol abuse-related organ failure -- at the age of 39. 

None of the cards that Tom sent really go with that incredibly sad and depressing story, so let's go the other way:

The two top cards are the first Topps Chrome cards in my possession from this year. I kind of like that blue cracked ice parallel, though I hope me saying that doesn't encourage Topps to issue 7 different variations on that theme. Dear God Topps needs to scale it back with the parallels. 

The middle row features 2 1990 Fleer boxed set cards of PC members Dan Plesac and Robin Yount. Red borders look good on cards to me. Other than those Target parallels, has Topps ever used red borders? They should. But not as parallels.

The bottom row? Yes, I'm still working on Series 2 of Topps. It happens every year. I get fired up for Series 1 and even get into case breaks for them. Series 2 rolls around and I barely notice it.  The shiny card is Greg Vaughn's Denny's Grand Slam Upper Deck card. It scanned incredibly well. The actual card looks like a cheap mirror. 

I guess that's sort of depressing. 

Sometimes, these random searches unearth some true gems. This is not one of them.

The YouTube counter says this video for "the peoria song" by jeff govednik (hey, I'm respecting the poster's decision to hate capitalization) says that he has gotten 474 views of his song. It appears that this guy has a really cool basement or he's in a really clean, empty, well-lit bar. Every line in this song starts with "the stupid f**ks," so I'm guessing mr govednik really hates Peoria.

Maybe he should leave Peoria if it's that bad to him. There's a pretty big country out there. Heck, he could just move to Pekin.

I single stacked these cards to make them bigger. Some of these cards were made by card companies whose names probably should have also begun with "the stupid f**ks." 

Pinnacle, for example. What the sam hill is that Aficionado set? I may have said it before a few weeks ago when I got a Dave Nilsson from the same set, but that large, disintegrating profile shot on the right side may be the ugliest feature ever on a baseball card. 1995 Fleer is ugly as a concept, but Aficionado takes it to a whole new level. 

And what kind of name for a card set is "Aficionado" any way? Were they trying to capitalize on the whole cigar craze thing that got hot for about 6 months in the mid-1990s? You know, the whole Swingers phase, when annoying a-holes went around calling their friends "money" and calling women "beautiful babies"? Plus that movie was so ridiculous. There's no way that Heather Graham ever gives Jon Favreau her attorney business card, unless she felt compelled to do so since he bought her a drink.

Still, it may be better than simply repeating the same damn photo on the front of the card like Upper Deck did to Robin Yount.

See, I'm getting angry. Let's move on.

Okay, so that's actually an attempt by Bradley University to make Bradley seem hip-hop. In fact, it's literally an official video from Bradley. The singer/songwriter is Josiah Williams, a 2014 Theater Arts graduate from Bradley who grew up in Milwaukee.

So, at least he's got that going for him. 

The song is pretty upbeat and catchy. Maybe he'll rename himself Brad Ley to take a riff off his clear musical influence, Flo Rida.

The good thing is that this was upbeat, so it's perfect for the finale -- the rest of the cool cards that I wanted to showcase.



Let's start with the angry Ryan manurelic. It's cool because it's the retro logo. Otherwise, it's a pretty bad photo of Ryan Braun. 

The next card down is my first encounter with Bowman Platinum for 2016. Platinum was a Wal-Mart exclusive this year. Thanks to the way that the BP set was put together, you are looking at the one and only base set card for the Brewers. There are a few other cards from this set that I need, and it has the full panoply of Orlando Arcia autographs scattered in the inserts. It also features a "Top Prospects" set that includes Brett Phillips, Arcia, Trent Clark, and still-non-prospect David Denson. I'm on the lookout for those cards.

There's a wonderful 1979 O-Pee-Chee of Cecil Cooper that made me wonder if I had accidentally mixed up the cards from Angus and had forgotten to post this, but nope -- it came from the Flatlands.

Finally, the bottom row features an excellent Bill Schroeder autographed 1986 Topps cards and a Ben Sheets Gold Label card. The Gold Label features a pretty clearly airbrushed/ photoshopped uniform and hat logo -- and probably stirrups and socks as well, since his sanitary socks are looking a little powder blue there. 

And, the Schroeder autograph is great because I don't think I have any Schroeder autographs. Despite his being the TV color guy for many years in Milwaukee now, he was always a bit elusive and somewhat difficult when he was a player. From all impressions, he's a decent dude now though.

Tom, many thanks for the cards, and I hope you enjoyed this slice of music! 

Red, Red Foley

Can we all agree that this pub where the video is set is the world's worst pub in the history of mankind? It's too full of people, there's a random dude wandering around without a shirt, the bartender is slow because of being on crutches, you'll get your pocket picked, it's totally smoke-filled with everyone smoking like fiends, it's a world fully in black and white, and at the end of the night the only person you end up with is the random dude walking two dachshunds. 

That really doesn't have much to do with this blogpost other than the whole "red" thing. I was doing some searches on eBay recently for things that I've had stuck in my head lately -- in particular, Red Foley stickers. For whatever reason and despite seeing these available for sale from time to time, Red Foley stickers have evaded me. I probably should have bought these with my random Amazon credit instead of those stamps, but I didn't.

Anyway, I found a buy-it-now of a seller on eBay who must have loaded up on a bunch of Red Foley books from 1987, 1988, 1991, 1992, and 1993 because the seller has a ton of "mega lots" of Red Foley Stickers for a total of $8 with shipping. Mega lot? $8? Count me in.

So, what did I get?

Lots of Younts:

And, other than that weird one at the top with the big green circle impinging on the photo of Yount, I've got at least four of each of these. It is interesting to see the two stickers both numbered 103 -- from 1992 and 1993 -- appear to have been photos taken from the same at-bat. 

Another interesting sidelight that I just picked up on is the fact that it appears that Yount must have had a shoe deal with Pony. That's a brand that I had totally forgotten about before seeing these stickers. Also, I don't ever remember seeing this ad for the shoes:

I didn't see Robin in there, though.

The good thing about buying lots like this that I often get multiples of players that I collect as PCs. With my oh-so-strict rules I've created for myself (which I break regularly if I choose), I try to get one card/sticker for my PC and then another for my team collection. As I have gotten into this more, though, I've started establishing more lines -- things like, "for cards serial numbered under 100, I only will list PCs on my want list rather than trying to build team sets for each" and, "I don't care if super old stuff isn't serial numbered...if the oddball is tough to find, having one copy of it is enough."

The downside to this lot buying is getting tons of doubles, of course. Also, for whatever reason, none of the different years contained any Paul Molitor stickers. I'm guessing that the seller parted those out in a separate sale.

Anyway, here are the rest of the 1987s:

Next, 1988, featuring "generic sticker with generic font yelling team name in manner that one need not worry about licensing!":

Here's 1991, even though the Deer Sticker features a photo taken at least a couple of years earlier:

1992's book included Gary Sheffield in his high-top Nike spikes (obligatory E-5 not included):

And, finally, 1993 only had one other than Robin:

Buying lots on eBay can be frustrating at times, in large part because most lots end up comprised of 80 copies of one card followed by just one or two of others that should have been equally available and, then, the lot ends up missing some key cards or players. At the same time, though, when a lot like this comes up -- of something I had exactly zero previously -- I'll take all the extras in order to get a cheap kickstart on completing the team sets and PCs.

And can't we all use a good kickstart on our collections like that?