Snake Jazz and Snakeskin Refractors

A PWE arrived at my house a little over a week ago, and I just didn't feel like writing last week. Tonight, though, I'm in the mood for a post. So, it's time to celebrate the great cards that Brian from Highly Subjective and Completely Arbitrary packaged up and sent my way. In the spirit of Snake Jazz, this post is going to be heavy on jazz and perhaps a bit light on writing.

Let's start with Mr. Snake Jazz himself, Dave Baldwin. This card is one that Baldwin gives out to those who write to him, I believe, and it's my first autograph from him. Baldwin says that the term "snake jazz" refers to offspeed pitches generally -- that it means "curvy pitches." Obviously that line never made Ball Four, but I'll take Baldwin's word for it since he played the game in the majors and I never played beyond high school.

The song "Take the A Train" was in the news recently thanks to Jeopardy! phenom James Holzhauer. It was the Final Jeopardy question with the following "Jazz Classics" clue: "In one account, this song began as directions written out for composer Billy Strayhorn to Duke Ellington's home in Harlem."

It's a jazz standard -- one nearly every student jazz musician should play before they leave high school. I played it in high school too (I was a sax player until I graduated college).

Next up are yellow parallels from this year's flagship effort from Topps. I don't understand why "Milwaukee" gets the big letter effect on the team card whereas "Anderson" and "Hader" do on the individual player cards. Shouldn't "Brewers" be the big name? 

I think I'd like the cards better if Topps did, in fact, swap the last name for the first name. The way it is written now is just silly and looks wrong.

I never understood "Green Onions" as a young saxophone player. That may be because it really didn't have much for me to do unless I was the one soloing. At its core, this song is just a great excuse for a jazz combo to jam and trade solos with one another. You have the walking bass line setting the chords and the rhythm, the drummer keeping time on the snare and bass drum with some flourishes on the toms and cymbals, and otherwise it's just the guitarist and organ trading solos back and forth. That's it.

Don't get me wrong -- with great soloists, it's worth every second -- but it's not groundbreaking or anything. 

Next up are two guys that the Brewers traded away. Gomez helped rebuild the farm system with Domingo Santana, Josh Hader, Brett Phillips, and Adrian Houser while Villar was flipped for Jonathan Schoop last year. 

Gomez has bounced around since that time, hitting Houston, Texas, Tampa Bay, and now back to the Mets where he started his career. The way he is playing this year, there may not be a next year for the almost 34-year-old. 

Villar is doing fine in Baltimore -- 7 HR, 9 SB -- and is about a league average hitter with a .736 OPS. He still goes up there hacking, though, walking just 16 times in 238 plate appearances.

According to Wikipedia, scrapple is a "Pennsylvania Dutch" (er, that's German, folks) dish of pork scraps and trimmings combined with cornmeal and wheat flour (often buckwheat) and other spices. Perhaps a song about "Scrapple from the Apple" is an appropriate accompaniment for the pork scraps and cornmeal that are Gomez and Villar.

You can identify whichever of them you want as the cornmeal and which one is the pork scraps. 

The next two cards are variations (I think) from Panini's attempts at continuing to issue baseball cards. If you're Panini and in light of MLB extending Topps's exclusive license, how long do you keep trying? I suppose they must be making money or they'd stop issuing cards, right? 

Brewers fans are asking similar questions of Jesus Aguilar right now. His hitting has been so bad that his bWAR is -0.7 and his OPS+ is just 60 -- way below average for the league, not just first basemen. Frankly, his struggles are not new. After the All-Star game last year, he slashed at just .245/.324/.436 -- an OPS of .760. But, his .604 OPS so far this year has continued the decline. His lack of offense has led the team to go back to Eric Thames for a jump start. 

On the other hand, there's Christian Yelich. Yelich has sort of struggled in May himself -- at least in comparison to his ridiculous March/April. In March/April, he hit 13 HR and slashed .353/.460/.804 (1.264 OPS). In May, he's only hit 7 HR and slashed .275/.393/.623 (a 1.016 OPS). Perhaps the real problem here is only that Yelich simply has not had as many guys on base in front of him in May -- only 10 RBI as compared to 34 at the start of the month (that's comparing 29 games in March/April to 19 in May).

"Stardust" is a jazz standard. It's one I have never played. It's sort of a mid-tempo song that is fine but it doesn't stand out to modern ears. At least mine, that is.

Purple Ryan Braun refractor, anyone? Damn the colored refractors in 2017 appeared to be some sort of futuristic nightmare. 

After "Stardust," I felt like a great Louis Armstrong version of "Sweet Georgia Brown" should help redeem things. 

Does everyone still associate this song with the Harlem Globetrotters? I remember as a kid that it was always a special day on "Wide World of Sports" when the Globetrotters were on. They made the kind of jokes that a kid could appreciate. My older self would probably be bored seeing the same jokes get rolled out but man, when I was 8, they were awesome.

To close out the blog post today, I have the bookend to Snake Jazz -- a Snake Skin refractor! Sort of.

Brandon Woodruff has been excellent this year for the Brewers. I was hoping he would be, and he has not disappointed -- unlike his fellow youngsters Corbin Burnes and Freddy Peralta, both of whom combined to destroy my fantasy baseball team's ERA and WHIP in April to the point where I had to cut them so I could stop slotting them in hoping for a rebound. Just terrible. 

Pitching in April was the Brewers big concern, but the offense outside of Yelich, Mike Moustakas, and Yasmani Grandal has really been limping along in May. That's why Keston Hiura got the call from the minors -- to try to kick start something. 

To close out on a high note, I have to go to saxophone maestro John Coltrane. Coltrane and Charlie Parker were the guys I wished I could sound like when I was a high schooler. 

Of course, that was akin to me saying that I totally wished I could pitch like Bret Saberhagen or Dwight Gooden in 1987. While it was a nice daydream, there's no way in hell it was really going to happen.

So, I watched those two pitch and listened to Coltrane and Bird. After all, if you can't be the best, you should watch/listen to the best to appreciate them while you can.

Brian, thanks for being one of the best -- and for the cards. 

Highly Arbitrary and Completely Subjective

I have gotten cards on numerous occasions from Brian at Highly Subjective and Completely Arbitrary. Weirdly enough, despite my penchant for music posts, I have never done a Minneapolis music post to thank Brian for cards. 

First things first -- this post will not contain any Prince songs. Even in death, the Purple One and his lawyers kept nearly all of his music off the internet, and any music on the net gets removed very quickly. 

So, some of you may wonder what is left once you take the Prince out of the equation. The answer: a TON. Perhaps it's the need to be indoors all the time, but Minneapolis has produced many, many top bands. 

Like, say, this one:

Semisonic was a great alt-rock/power pop band from the late 1990s from Minneapolis. Their one big hit was this song, "Closing Time," which was apparently written by Dan Wilson about the birth of his second child and not about a bar's closing time. Weird. 

Wilson is now known almost as much or more for producing Adele's album 21, which won a Grammy for Album of the Year in 2012.

To go with this big 1990s hit are three big 1990s cards. With each passing day of seeing Topps caring less and less about Brewers fans and me looking for ways to get reinvigorated about collecting in the face of this, I find myself actually thinking that cards from the 1990s are cooler and better than what we have now. Yes, card companies had parallels and inserts, but they didn't swallow up the main set. The base cards in the 1990s were still collectible and companies tried hard to make them interesting as opposed to being an excuse to make 70 different versions of the same damn card.

It was a simpler time. It was a better time because there was competition. And, it was a worse time because some cards had to carry warnings that kids with epilepsy should not buy the cards thanks to the flashy mirrored stuff on them -- like these three cards.

I'm cheating a little bit here because Hüsker Dü is actually from St. Paul rather than Minneapolis, but it's my blog so I'm cheating. Hüsker Dü featured noted alternative rocker and recluse Bob Mould as its singer. Mould was a freshman at Macalester College when he got the band together, and the group formed because Mould and drummer Grant Hart bonded over a shared love of the Ramones.

They got the name of the band from a board game of the same name that means "Do you Remember?" in both Dutch and Norwegian. They gigged around Minneapolis for a while and became hardcore punkers -- attracting the attention of the Dead Kennedys Jello Biafra, who then signed them for his label Alternative Tentacles.



Baseball these days can be a cruel business. Even though Chris Carter tied for the National League lead in home runs in 2016, the Brewers chose to non-tender him. The move makes a ton of sense in many respects: the team tried to trade him, designated him for assignment, tried trading him again, and then signed Eric Thames out of the Korean league for about half or less what Carter would have made. Carter is going to land on his feet somewhere, but it is a strange thing to see a guy with 41 homers cut.

Nelson and Broxton are still Brewers as of this writing. I feel like I need to say that about everyone on the roster with Slingin' David Stearns as the GM. 

As I think about it, it really makes sense that Minneapolis/St. Paul would churn out incredible music -- especially alternative music. You have a huge city that is cold -- turning people slightly off kilter. Add in a major university with tens of thousands of students who need entertainment. Throw in the artistry and imagination that universities tend to draw as well, and you have the recipe for all kinds of great stuff.

Like The Replacements, who were sort of an early incarnation of a cross between grunge and emo. They were very heart-on-sleeve -- as "I'll Be You" shows. Westerberg went solo after the band broke up and wrote a couple of songs for the 1992 Cameron Crowe movie Singles -- the biggest one probably being "Dyslexic Heart."

Both of these cards are from the 2016 Topps Update set. It's Lucroy's swansong card, essentially, as a Brewer player thanks to his appearance as an All-Star. The Boyer is one of those foil parallel things that scan nearly indistinguishably from the base cards. 

As this year has gone by, this design has grown on me like a weird mold growing on cheddar cheese. It's not attractive. It's kind of greenish. You know it is something you probably should just throw out. Eventually, someone else probably will throw them out. No one will miss it, and once you realize it's gone, you end up buying another.

I am very surprised that Information Society is from Minneapolis. They just felt and sounded so damn British. Maybe it was just that I was listening to a lot of Depeche Mode in 1988 when this song, "What's on Your Mind (Pure Energy)" came out. A lot of folks call it "pure energy" only -- and what with Leonard Nimoy saying that phrase over and over, why not?

Lead singer Kurt Harland has scored numerous video games outside of his work with Information Society. I don't know any of the games, but he worked with Crystal Dynamics and Electronic Arts.

I have yet to catalog all of the cards I need from insert sets from all the years that Topps has issued them. Eventually I will. Maybe I will. Hell, I don't know. Maybe I never will. I just know that I have not seen this Record Breakers card before. At least I don't think I have.

Lyle Overbay. Yup. That's him. Good guy. At Wrigley. Looking confused as to why anyone wanted to take his photo. 

Good guy though. Smashing bloke.

No, I have no idea where that line of thinking came from either. Just went with it.

Some people think that Courtney Love was in the band Babes In Toyland. In a March 2015 interview, the band confirmed that Love was never in the band. As drummer Lori Barbero stated, "[Love] lived in my house, and one time I think when we were rehearsing she came down and probably picked up something and tried to play and we were just like, 'get out of here.'"

Babes in Toyland never got as big as Hole did, though you can definitely see why people think the two are related outside of the whole coincidence of Love living with the band's drummer. Babes in Toyland had much more of an impact in the UK thanks to John Peel's love for the band. When Peel loved your band, you got known. Seriously, just find anything as a "Peel session" on whatever music streaming source/iTunes/YouTube and you will hear fantastic music. 

Michael Ratterree never had a chance, really. He was a 10th round pick in 2013 out of Rice University. As a 22-year-old when drafted, he had to show a lot quickly. He did play very well in Helena in the Pioneer League -- but he was old for the league so he should have destroyed it. Then, he moved up to the Midwest league and, for a brief stint, Double-A Huntsville in 2014. It did not go well -- .228/.344/.442 slashline. 

It went even worse in 2015. As a 24-year-old in the Florida State League, he slashed .150/.260/.221 in 282 plate appearances and, then, retired with a broken hamate bone problem in his hand. He's now a construction superintendent in Houston and he is a 3rd degree connection for me on LinkedIn. Hey Michael, if you ever find that you need a good construction lawyer, you know how to find me here. 

Many thanks go out to Brian for these cards.

#SuperTrader Highly Subjective and Completely Awesome

I'm a little behind on sending out cards to the #SuperTraders group. I will be trying to address that later this week; as I mentioned on Bob Walk the Plank, I went with a bit of quantity that hopefully a few people will like/need.

But, I don't want to take away from the great PWE from #SuperTrader Brian at Highly Subjective and Completely Arbitrary. It's such a refined group of cards, though, so it deserves a refined approach here.

American composer and musical genius/legend Aaron Copland is an American orchestral legend. This movement of the "Statements for Orchestra" called "Subjective" is a very moody and emotive piece that feels unresolved with the use of minor keys and expressive strings.

So, let's talk moody and unresolved. The Brewers traded Lorenzo Cain as part of their "all-in" deal in after the 2010 season, giving up Alcides Escobar, Cain, Jake Odorizzi, and Jeremy Jeffress (who has since returned) in exchange for Greinke and Yuniesky Betancourt. Betancourt is a bête noire among Brewers fans -- mainly because we had to deal with watching him play first base for more than 1/3 of the season in 2013 thanks to injuries to Mat Gamel and Corey Hart. 

Some people wish we could have that Greinke trade in 2010 back, but it was the right deal at the time, and trading Zach in 2012 (for Johnny Hellweg, Ariel Pena, and Jean Segura). Now that Hellweg has signed a minor league deal with the Padres and Segura is a Diamondback right next to Greinke, maybe folks will get over it. Plus, Pena may yet be a useful pitcher.

Bianchi was a utility infielder in 2013, thus earning him a card in that set. He spent last year in the Boston organization, and is a free agent currently. His last name means "white hair" in Italian. For what that's worth.

Let's stick with refined and American but not subjective...

I'd argue that either Copland or Gershwin could be considered America's first major contribution to the world's orchestral music. Gershwin's music to me seemed to have more of a popular bent in its time, combining the hot music of the time -- jazz -- into his compositions seamlessly. In this song, his music is along the lines of a tone poem in evoking a feeling of being in Paris -- with car horns honking, quiet interludes along the Seine, and the rush-rush of the big city.

Not that these evoke feelings of Paris, but the horizontal cards here tend to evoke more of a feeling of being at the park than the way-too-closely-cropped photos that dominate recent cards. As the Braun card says, it's all about perspective.

Richard Rodgers -- of the famous duos of Rodgers & Hart and Rodgers & Hammerstein -- wrote some of the most enduring songs in Broadway's storied history. "Blue Moon" (co-opted by Manchester City), "You'll Never Walk Alone" (co-opted by Liverpool), and "The Lady is a Tramp" (as far as I know, no English football team has adopted this as their song) are some of his best known songs. 

Of course, leading off the musical Oklahoma! is this classic. It is the perfect optimism needed to lead off a show like Oklahoma! 



Speaking of optimism...yes, it's prospect time. The Brewers farm system has gone in two years from being a desolate desert of dying dreams to being jam-packed with top-level prospects and guys with a ton of potential upside. Harrison is an athlete who turned down a football scholarship to Nebraska to play minor league baseball. He is still very raw and has a ways to go to be a contributor -- but people love his upside. 

Taylor was a 21-year-old in Double-A last year in Biloxi. He didn't hit poorly, but he did not show a lot of pop and got passed up in the prospect lists by the massive influx of new talent coming in from trades. He, too, needs to show more this year -- especially in terms of OBP.

Also, yes, I like musicals.

Finally, any discussion of great American composers has to include one of the greatest ever from the only truly American music form -- jazz. Duke Ellington elevated jazz -- adding in orchestral flair to his arrangements that many jazz performers of the 1920s lacked. In many respects, Ellington took jazz from being a pop music based around jam sessions and fast playing improvisation to having a bit more structure. Of course Ellington's band could jam and improv with anyone in the day, but they also were tight and played like no other band of the time.

His work in jazz earned him a special posthumous Pulitzer Prize for music in 1999.

The most special card in the package from Brian is this awesome yellow printing plate from 2016 Topps. I have to admit -- I'm a sucker for a printing plate. I just love them. I am not willing to pay exorbitant prices for them but I am always super excited when I get one in a trade or find one I like for, say, around or under $15 to $20.  

Brian, thank you very much for the awesome envelope. My #SuperTrader announcement on what I have special to send out will come tomorrow, hopefully (assuming that my purchase arrives!).

Cards from the Water City

According to the Collections of the Minneapolis Historical Society from way back in 1910 (as linked on Wikipedia, but at least this source is still online to read it), the city of Minneapolis got its name as a bit of a compromise. Originally, the Hennepin County Commissioners wanted to call the city Albion (a word of questionable origin but probably meaning "white" and eventually latinized to "Albany"). A certain Colonel John H. Stevens suggested compounding "Minnehaha" with "Polis" somehow.  

The assembled worked their way through the permutations before settling on "Minneapolis". The "Mni" part that we say as "mini" came is a Dakota (Sioux) word meaning water with, of course, the Greek "polis" that shows up in a number of different city names.  Thus, these cards arrived from said "Water City" when Brian from Highly Subjective and Completely Arbitrary sent these cards my way.

"Why yes, I'll take tortured introductions for $1000, Alex!"

Brian was kind enough to wander his way through my want lists -- which are getting closer and closer to being complete! -- and fill some holes and, at the same time, send me some oddballs.  Oddballs make me very happy. I am an oddball, so that makes sense.

So, let's start with the want-list fillers first:

Before

After

Pitching in the bullpen appears to take its toll on a man.  Apparently, though, bullpen pitchers need not cut their hair.  That is one wicked mullet on the 2013 version of the Ax.

Due to the random nature in which I got back into the hobby last year -- ripping repacked wax like it was going out of style, which led to a lot of random Opening Day packs -- I did not realize that I needed that Segura or that Fielder until I went about putting my want lists together. The want lists focus on base cards, but base cards weren't the only thing that Brian sent my way:

That's the Dave Nilsson silver signature Collector's Choice, the Silver Braun Chipz, and two of those foily things from this year's flagship set.  

And if Brian had stopped with those cards, it would have been a great, fruitful, well-worth-it, awesome envelope.  But then, he took it up a few levels:

It starts with the "First Home Run" Manu-Relic from this year's Topps Flagship. This is a very cool embedded coin card, though I'll admit it -- I'd rather that Topps took the time to go 2 players deeper in the base flagship set than include stuff like this in packs and blasters. But man, it's a gorgeous looking manu-relic.

Odd.  Larry Hisle spent five years in Milwaukee and five years in Minnesota after four in Philadelphia. But, one would think that TCMA might have tried harder to find a photo of Hisle as a Twin for its All-Time Twins set. I mean, I know they didn't have Google Image search available to them back in the 1980s, but come on -- there are plenty Hisle photos from his Twins days.

That said, Larry Hisle is a guy that any one of us should want to be when we grow up. Back about four years ago, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel had a long-form story about Hisle's work with disadvantaged boys in the Milwaukee area -- how Hisle -- having grown up poor himself, having lost his father to a brain hemorrhage as a young boy, and then losing his mother to a kidney infection at the age of ten -- plowed his feelings of loss into working harder and harder on the baseball field. When a rotator cuff injury destroyed his career in 1979, he felt cheated out of what might have been with his career. But now, he spends his time mentoring literally hundreds of kids in Milwaukee, and he does it because he wants to help. Not for headlines. Not for money. Because he wants to help.

The man is incredible -- more than words can describe.

After that little interlude, it feels a little weird to talk about a card that came with pizzas. I've always loved Tombstone Pizza, though -- it's from Medford, Wisconsin, and it just tastes better than most frozen pizzas. 

But I never got a Kevin Seitzer card with one.

Going from pizza to a guy that a couple of folks on the MLB Network called one of the greatest players in the post-1970 baseball world -- one put him as the best centerfielder, the other as the best shortstop -- we have this "Cartwrights Magazine" insert called Future Hall of Famers. Cartwrights Magazine called itself the "Journal of Baseball Collectibles."  

Was that peer reviewed?

Trust me, though, this is a very welcome addition.  But, it's not the greatest thing that Brian sent to me.

This is:

This is a porcelain card from some time between 1993 and 2003 from R&N China Co., Inc. in Carrollton, Ohio. It's hand-numbered and everything! I wonder if that is a "52546 out of 100000" type thing, or what.  

Frankly, despite a couple of helpful blog posts from the wayback machine -- a 2010 post from Clyde's Stale Cards, a 2010 post from Collecting the Cubs, and a 2012 post from the Lifetime Topps Project -- I can't seem to find any reference to a porcelain version of this 1979 Topps Paul Molitor card. Yes, he appears in the Danbury Mint's "Hall Bound" Porcelain set from 1998, but that is not this card.  To be fair, none of the bloggers I've linked to above claimed to be comprehensive, but it seems just weird to find something like this.

Still, it does put a song into my head:

Man, I really liked Better Than Ezra in the late 1990s. Saw them at the 40 Watt in Athens for like $8, and it was the first time I went to a show and was so impressed with a band's new songs that I went out and bought the CD the next day.  Considering I was not a rich man -- I was a poor law student living on loans -- that's saying something.

Brian, thank you very much for the fantastic package of cards and for the great head scratcher that the Molitor card is!

Arbitrariness

As a lawyer, I have to do a lot of legal research.  Many times, that includes determining what standard of review applies when a judge has to make a decision.  Is the judge constrained in what she or he does by particular standards that must be followed? Or, can the judge exercise significant discretion?  If the judge has discretion, then the appellate courts view their decisions with a great deal of deference, and they will overturn the lower court's decision only if the court below abused its discretion or acted arbitrarily.

Perhaps it is an insight into the way my brain works, but my internal word-association tends to equate "abuse of discretion" with "arbitrary and capricious."  It's a tough standard to meet to overturn a judge's decision.  If that is your standard of review and you tell the trial court that, you pretty much are telling the court that it can do whatever it wants so long as there is some reason or logic behind the decision.

In our baseball card blogging world, though, a much more pleasant association has been established thanks to Brian's excellent blog, Highly Subjective and Completely Arbitrary. Recently, he tore through a box of the 2013 Panini Hometown Heroes to backfill some holes in his collection.  One of the inserts he pulled was a fantastic Jean Segura "Sportdisc" -- perhaps a tribute to the old 7-Eleven Slurpee coins from the 1980s.  I asked for the Sportdisc, and Brian sent it to me along with some other surprises.

First, here's the Segura that started it all:

That by itself would have been a great PWE to receive, but it was accompanied by some friends, including another round card:

Master Bread Company no longer exists as far as I can tell, and I don't think I'd ever heard of Master Bread before this disc came my way.  As the "Oddball guy," I'm disappointed in myself!

Brian also pulled another insert from that Panini box that he sent my way.  It goes right into my Yount collection:

...along with this little beaut:

This was a PWE from Brian, but he really did stuff it as full as he could with just one Forever stamp on the envelope.  Here are three more of the cards that came my way:

To close off the envelope with a flashy flourish, how about two of those "white ice" Bowman refractors from last year?  

How about that, indeed.

Brian, enjoy your epic road trip on which you're about to embark and thank you very much for the PWE.  I'm thinking that some really cool stuff will be coming your way soon from Georgia.  Soon.