Most everyone knows Matt from Bob Walk the Plank. He and I started blogging within about 10 days of one another back in 2014. That means that I forgot to celebrate my four-year anniversary of blogging earlier this month. Hey, I remembered my wedding anniversary for the 7th straight year -- cut me some slack. There's only room for one anniversary in my brain, I guess. At any rate, Matt sent me a couple of cards as maybe a blog birthday gift or just because or since I decided to post more than once a month after college football season finally ended for UGA. And while the envelope Matt sent was small, the cards he sent packed a punch. Let's start with the card that wasn't serial numbered first:
The man Haderade. Josh Hader is an interesting pitcher for the Brewers this year. He came up through the Orioles, Astros, and Brewers systems mostly as a starter. Sure, both the Orioles and Astros had times where they controlled his innings-pitched by having him work out of the bullpen, such as his first season as a pro back in 2012 and his two seasons in the Astros organization (2014 and 2015). But with Milwaukee, he has been groomed as a starter -- all 44 of his Brewers MiLB appearances have been as a starter. Then, he makes it to the majors throwing gas out of the bullpen in an Andrew Miller-type role last year. It would be nice to see him get a shot at the rotation this year, but that does not appear to be something that the team is considering right now. Is he more valuable in the pen, or in the rotation? It's a fine line.
Or a Thin Line, even. Huey Lewis and the News were totally among my favorite bands in the mid-1980s. Sports is a great album, and every boy I knew wanted that basement that is pictured on the cover. You can tell this because all the yahoos with "Man Caves" have almost exactly that set up as their "man cave."
Next up is Ben Sheets Fleer Box Score parallel from 2002 serial numbered to 100. Where do you find these cards, Matt? Just trolling on eBay for cheap serial numbered stuff? Picking up an extra card to save on shipping? I guess I don't spend enough time on eBay (despite my recent spree of random items bought there).
Anyway, this one is a great addition to the Ben Sheets collection. I'm still thinking about where my collecting goes from where it is now and going into the future in large part because Topps these days really isn't about anything but maximizing profits for themselves and for their favored breakers. I mean, they threw their own industry convention last week. Is that normal?
I guess it is and has been for years. I know that baseball cards is not what Kanye is rapping about here, but it really is true that "most of all we at war with ourselves." The divisions are weird and growing. I used to talk by email and on Twitter with Matt all the time, and my falling away from the hobby has made it feel like a division built up there.
There isn't one, mind you, but sometimes it feels like there is. That's what's weird about it.
To prove there isn't a division, how about a clear parallel from 2015 of Adam Lind serial numbered to 10. Lind only spent the 2015 season with Milwaukee, and he put up a pretty good season for the crew.
Even better is the fact that the Brewers then flipped him to Seattle and got pitcher Freddy Peralta for him. Peralta is a small Dominican -- 5'11", 175 pounds -- who has some issues with control but who strikes out seemingly everyone he faces. Last year in a season split between high-A Carolina and AA Biloxi, he walked 4.7 guys per nine innings but struck out 12.7 guys per nine while giving up just 5.8 hits per nine. That's electric stuff. Peralta struck out 33.4%of the batters he faces last year, trailing only A.J. Puk. And Peralta is a year younger than Puk. Peralta is high risk, high reward -- either a number 2 starter, or bullpen fodder.
I do hope that Lou Reed does not become Peralta's theme song and that Peralta can get his wild side under control. Also, I hope that we're not talking about Peralta coming from Florida and shaving his legs to become a she.
Matt, thanks for the great cards and the excuse to dive into some Walk songs.
Whenever a Zapping shows up in my mailbox, I know I can expect great cards. For the uninitiated, my pal Kenny a/k/a Zippy Zappy a/k/a disnalldat on Twitter a/k/a the World's Ultimate Luis Torrens supercollector will, from time to time, send out fat packs of cards that he calls Zippy Zappings. They are always densely packed with cards and, befitting Kenny's nature of being a fan of minor league baseball rather than the major leagues, they usually feature a significant amount of Bowman cards.
This mini-Zapping from Kenny was not very different. It did feature a couple of random Topps inserts of *gasp* major leaguers, but I'll forgive him for that.
My musical tastes since the early 1990s have tended to angle toward Anglophilia very frequently. As a result, it should not be a surprise that I have heard of the scousers known as The Wombats before, and I've listened to them some about 10 years ago.
Even then, I hadn't listened to them much, and I have not paid attention to them lately. By lately, I mean, "since about 2010." This song, "Emoticons," appeared on Glitterbug, the band's third album. It's a pretty cool song -- very much in the Britpop lexicon.
Here are those major leaguers that really threw me for a loop coming from a Zippy Zapping -- mini or otherwise. Now, the Fielder is at least in the vein of a Kenny collectible -- what with its rookie leanings and all -- but to get a K-Rod, a Braun/Koufax, or a Jason Kendall card that isn't a Japanese SEGA card is a rare day. It feels almost like a limited edition of some sort.
It's pretty cool.
The Founders 15: "I Can't Be Satisfied"
It's not often that a song gets me digging into general articles about life in a particular country to try to figure out where it came from, how it came to be, and what its context is. This song did that, though. It started just by listening to the song -- which, to be honest, is a fairly unremarkable funk tune with some guitars thrown in and vocals that would not be out of place had someone said that the song came from Jamaica. But it came from Nigeria.
I admit that I don't know anything about Nigerian pop music of any time period. Wait....I'm reading an article on Pitchfork now (reviewing a 2.5-hour magnum reissue album from 2009 called Nigeria 70: The Definitive Story of the 1970's Funky Lagos)and it mentions a name I've heard: Fela Kuti. Okay. At least I've heard a name before.
But I've never heard of The Founders 15, and there's very little available online about this band.
If I'm guessing about this song's meaning, it might have something to do with the whole Biafran secession in the late 1960s and the Nigerian Civil War that followed to get Biafra back into the country. Biafra had support from France, and, odd in that Cold War context, the federal government of Nigeria had support from the Soviet Union and Great Britain.
The war was fought -- perhaps unsurprisingly -- over oil as much as it was fought over people, independence, or self-determination. Nigeria had fairly significant oil reserves, and Biafra and Nigeria were fighting for dominion over the BP-Shell oil fields and the right to the royalties being paid. Because the French were on one side and the British on the other, the US declared themselves neutral (though, in reality, their support was mostly for the Nigerian government).
Wow. Tough to come back to baseball cards after learning about all that.
Depressing stories of Civil War and famine followed by depressingly boring cards of guys in generic blue uniforms. It's depression on a far different level, of course, and I'm not trying to draw a direct parallel.
Tyrone Taylor was the Brewers top prospect or second-best prospect at the beginning of the 2015 season -- but only #93 overall. Since then, his star has faded. He's only 23 years old, but he's about to go into his third season at Double-A Biloxi after hitting .232/.303/.327 last year in 134 games there. Add in the fact that he pulled a hamstring in spring training so that his season won't begin until May, and there has to be genuine concern about him. Call him trade bait?
Speaking of Biloxi, Angel Ortega has started both games for the Shuckers at third base. He's still only 23 years old, but he too needs to show something this year. He doesn't have any power (minor league slugging percentage of .296 in slash line of .235/.270/.296....) or all that much speed and he doesn't have great plate discipline either. He's been a shortstop mainly before this year, but he's at third base at Biloxi thanks to the presences of Mauricio Dubon. Third base won't help him either, what with the very rapidly approaching Lucas Erceg -- who is at High-A Carolina -- and Ortega needs to develop very fast or find himself looking for a new organization or line of work.
Anthony Banda is a great highlight here. He's a very intriguing starting pitching prospect who has developed fantastically in the past couple of years. Unfortunately for Brewers fans, he's done that developing in the Diamondbacks system -- he was traded there in exchange for Gerardo Parra in 2014.
Finally, there's Zach Quintana. He was traded after the 2014 season to the Atlanta Braves in exchange for spare OF Kyle Wren. He made it to the Carolina League last year in the Braves system -- with the Carolina Mudcats -- before being released at the end of last season. An interesting sidelight: the Brewers and Braves swapped High-A outposts after last season. The Brewers got the Mudcats, and the Braves got the Brevard County Manatees -- which promptly moved to Osceola County and changed its name to the Florida Fire Frogs.
Balance and Composure: "Quake"
It's odd how some bands that got bigger in the "modern rock"/alternative scene in the past decade have eluded me. It seems especially to apply to American bands that sound like this band, Balance and Composure. Perhaps it's just the radio stations -- whether created by Pandora, Spotify, or Amazon or actual radio stations -- that I listen to seem to focus as much on 1990's alternative as they do more recent songs. I don't know.
This song, "Quake," reminds me of any number of bands from that mid-2000s timeframe that sort of emulated Nirvana while mixing in attempts at being "harder" or just yelling/screaming more while singing. It's not bad, but it's not anything unique either. I'd give this song a 5/10 -- I wouldn't skip it if it came on one of those curated stations. I probably would react with apathy.
I reacted much more positively to these two Bowman Chrome cards. Even more so than the usual Bowman offering putting minor leaguers into the big-league team's uniform, these two cards look very photoshopped. The Nottingham card would not look out of place in that Elite Extra Edition set, other than having a realistic background and actual team colors. The easy reason why these two look the way they do is that both Hader and Nottingham were either completely new (Nottingham) or still pretty new (Hader) to the Brewers organization last spring.
Nottingham was the key part of the Khris Davis trade with the Oakland Athletics before last season. GM David Stearns was familiar with him thanks to Nottingham having been drafted by the Astros in 2013 out of high school. He went to Oakland in exchange for Scott Kazmir during the trade deadline in 2015 before coming to Milwaukee just before spring training in 2016. The jury is still out on Jacob, though. He struggled to hit in Double-A Biloxi last year -- .234/.295/.347 -- and then flopped in the Arizona Fall League (.203/.221/.284). I mean, his OPS in the Arizona Fall League was below Tim Tebow for crying out loud. That's bad.
Hader, of course, was named MLB Pipeline's top left-handed pitching prospect during the 2016-2017 offseason. He's starting the year in Triple-A Colorado Springs at the age of 23. He needs to work on controlling his walks -- that's always been his bugaboo -- but I would anticipate that he will make his big-league debut this year in Milwaukee after the All-Star Break if he looks decent during the first half of the year in the thin air.
Napalm Death: "You Suffer"
It took me longer to copy and paste this into this blogpost than it does to listen to this song. So, here's another Napalm Death song:
"Unchallenged Hate"
I've said before that I'm a lyrics guy. I like to hear the lyrics to a song and get their message. "Unchallenged Hate" is the opposite of that. To be fair, if you look up the lyrics for this song, they are really deep. I challenge you to find those lyrics in this song.
Napalm Death is thrash metal taken to its nth degree. It's hardcore, dense, thick, and even a little sludgy in terms of its sound. Those issues are probably why the band isn't bigger or why it never turned into Metallica or something. There are better bands that do this same genre better too -- Megadeth, for example.
The final group of cards that Kenny sent my way are all Asia Black Refractors from the 2015 Bowman Chrome Draft set.
These cards highlight the farm system before the big trades in 2015 and 2016 that added prospects numbered 1, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 12, 14, and 16 to the Brewers Top 20 on MLB Pipeline (and #11 Marcos Diplan came over in 2014 from Texas as part of the Yovani Gallardo trade). Of the guys here, though, we have #26 (Nathan Kirby), #15 (Cody Ponce), #25 (Jake Gatewood), #22 (Monte Harrison), #6 (Trent Clark) and #13 Jorge Lopez.
We've talked about Tyrone Taylor already, so let's talk about Tyler Wager. Wagner made it to the majors with Milwaukee in 2015 and got hit around some. He then was traded with Jean Segura to Arizona for Chase Anderson, Aaron Hill, and rising prospect MIL #5/MLB #63 Isan Diaz. Wagner pitched a little for Arizona in 2016 but then was waived after the season. The Rangers -- who apparently only scout the Milwaukee Brewers -- then signed him.
Kenny, thanks for the great bunch of cards. I'm going to use the rest of your songs for a post tomorrow, so don't worry -- you'll get my take on them too!
The checklist for 2017 Topps is out. Well, I take that back. The checklist is not out, but the list of cards in Series 1 is. There are two pretty strange inclusions in the Brewers list of players. First off, we have Chris Capuano. Capuano pitched okay last season for the team in 16 appearances -- a 1-1 record, a 4.12 ERA in 24 innings -- but that should not have merited inclusion in the 2017 Topps set as a Brewer. That's especially true because Capuano did not pitch after May 25. The other strange inclusion is Will Middlebrooks. The now 28-year-old Middlebrooks is no longer a prospect and is now four years removed from looking like a competent major-league hitter (his 2012 rookie year in Boston is looking like a fluke). Middlebrooks appeared in 10 games and got 31 plate appearances for the Brewers last year and has already signed with the Rangers for 2017 -- yet he got a card. Just 24 Brewers had more plate appearances last year, including six starting pitchers. Why do these two get cards? Is it because they appeared in the major leagues before with more "important" teams (Middlebrooks with the Red Sox, Capuano with the Mets, Dodgers, Red Sox, and Yankees)? Is it because Will Middlebrooks is married to Jenny Dell and she demanded he get a card? I'd rather see Brent Suter -- the 27-year-old Harvard grad whom the Brewers selected in the 31st round of the 2012 draft -- get a card than either of these two. Suter appeared in 14 games and threw 21.2 innings, including 2 wins and a 3.0 K/BB ratio. The fact that he's a genuinely nice guy does not hurt either -- at least he has been in my interaction on Twitter with him. Anyway, all that is just to prove that Topps can't win with me. Include fringe players, and I complain as to which fringe players are included. Overlook my guys, and feel my wrath. Right? Topps/Bowman did not overlook the Brewers, though, in the recent 2016 Bowman Draft Picks & Prospects release. The Brewers were well-represented -- though, once again, there were some head-scratching inclusions. I signed up for the charity case break for this product through Crackin' Wax (I feel like I should call him "my old friend" by this point). I got all the Brewers, of course, and plenty of first-round pick Corey Ray out of Louisville. Let's see the chrome cards of these guys.
Mario Feliciano was the Brewers second-round pick out of the Carlos Beltran Baseball Academy in Puerto Rico. He's a decent-sized catcher (6'1", 195 pounds) and just turned 18 years old on November 20. MLB Pipeline ranked him the 28th best prospect in the Brewers system as of the end of the season.
Braden Webb was the Brewers third-round draft choice. He was an oddity -- a college freshman (at South Carolina) who was eligible to be drafted because he took two years off after high school and Tommy John Surgery. He was the Gamecocks Saturday pitcher, and he was named the National Pitcher of the Year by the National Collegiate Baseball Writers Association. He did not make the Brewers top 30 prospects on MLB Pipeline. I guess perhaps because of his injury history and the fact that he pitched 102 innings at USCe, the Brewers did not have him pitch in games last year. So yes, we know that photo above is 100% a Photoshop job.
Ryan Cordell was the player to be named later in the Jonathan Lucroy deal with Texas. Cordell will be 25 on Opening Day this year, and he has spent the past two years at Double-A. He was the Rangers 6th best prospect; he's the Brewers 18th best prospect. He has a little pop and a little speed, but he'll need to get to Colorado Springs and show something quick. The Brewers have enough OF to stock a trout pond with them.
Corbin Burnes was the Brewers 4th round pick in 2016 out of St. Mary's College of California. He made it to the Low-A Wisconsin Timber Rattlers last year. He's got good stuff -- scouts say he has a low- to mid-90s fastball with an elite breaking ball and a good changeup. He struggled a little bit in Low-A with his control -- 5.0 BB/9 -- but he could move up reasonably quickly. He's rated as the Brewers 20th overall prospect.
Say hello to the guy that MLB Pipeline on Wednesday called the best LHP prospect in baseball, Josh Hader. The dude has crazy hair and a consistent 93-97 fastball, and in the past has been compared to Chris Sale. The Brewers got him in the Carlos Gomez trade to Houston. Thanks, Houston!
As of the end of last season, Hader was the Brewers third-best prospect.
Trent Clark was the Brewers first round pick in the 2015 Draft, and received a $2.7 million bonus for it. He's made a couple of trips to the DL last year due to hamstring troubles, which limited his at-bats last year at the age of 19. He's a true center fielder, but he's projected to be able to hit enough to play a corner.
MLB Pipeline rated him the Brewers sixth-best prospect at the end of 2016.
Marcos Diplan is a pitcher the Brewers got as part of the Yovani Gallardo trade with the Rangers. He's a Dominican who pushed all the way through full-season baseball at the age of 19 last year. He dominated the Midwest League in 70 innings -- 1.80 ERA and just 6.3 hits allowed per nine while walking 4.1/9 innings and striking out 11.4 per nine innings. He got hit a bit in the Florida State league after that, but he was 4 years younger than his competition there.
MLB Pipeline slots him in as the 12th best Brewers prospect.
Luis Ortiz is another Rangers refugee, having come over from Texas in the Lucroy trade. He's had some injuries -- a groin muscle pull last year, for instance. That injury question is the big question over his potential.
MLB Pipeline's write-up for Ortiz says that he has the stuff to profile as a possible number 2 starter if he can stay healthy. On that potential, he finished the year as the Brewers 4th best prospect.
Oh, Silly Billy Philly. Phil Bickford was listed as the 5th best prospect in the Brewers system at the end of last year. However, he will be cooling his jets on the sidelines for the first 50 games of the 2017 season for testing positive for a "drug of abuse" -- probably marijuana, which he tested positive for in June of 2015 as well, apparently. He was the focal point of the Will Smith trade with the Giants last year.
A little bit of the luster is off Brett Phillips's prospect sheen after last year. He only slashed .229/.332/.397 at Double-A Biloxi and struck out 154 times. Still, he will not turn 23 until May 30 this year, so I would anticipate that he makes the move to Triple-A Colorado Springs. He dropped from being the 2nd best prospect in the Brewers system to being number 7 at the end of the year. He fell behind Trent Clark and Josh Hader, and Corey Ray slotted in ahead of him.
Speaking of Corey Ray: the Brewers first-round draft pick in 2016 and the 5th pick overall out of the University of Louisville, MLB Pipeline rated him the Brewers 2nd best prospect. He had surgery for a torn meniscus in his knee after the season ended.
He has a gun in the outfield, and he runs well enough to play center. He may not, though, have the instincts on balls in center (according to "some scouts").
All in all and as you can see, the Brewers were rightfully well-represented in the 2016 Bowman Draft Picks & Prospects set. If I had to nitpick a bit, I would wonder where the number 1 Brewers prospect -- Lewis Brinson -- is. I might also wonder where 46th overall pick Lucas Erceg is -- he could move up quickly in the system since he's practically the only third-base prospect in the system at 17th overall.
Still, that is nitpicking. It was fun to get a huge stack of cards of multiple players from a case break from a new product for a change. Many thanks go out to "Topher" and his wife "Literal Quirk" for all the hard work they put in to make these breaks a success.
In late November and early December, Josh Willingham Supercollector Jaybarkerfan opened up his sizeable trade vault for a tradeathon. People could claim up to five cards from the dozens that JBF posted. I saw one Warren Spahn card that struck my fancy and put a claim in on it.
JBF never leaves a trade package at just one card, though. Of course the envelope I got was packed to the top with incredible cards. Since JBF is a big wrestling fan, he'll agree when I say that these cards need their own entrance music.
I always loved the Macho Man's use of "Pomp and Circumstance" for his entry music. It made it much more enjoyable for me to play that song over and over and over again when we had to play it for graduation ceremonies at my high school.
Speaking of a time long, long ago, let's start with a card that made the smile on my face grow larger and larger. My first year of law school in Athens was in 1995. It was Ray Goff's last year. That was Hines's sophomore year -- he stayed all four years at UGA. Thanks to some injuries (Mike Bobo tore up his ACL, and Brian Smith got hurt for some games too) Hines ended up being our starting QB for several games. In a couple of other games, he was our starting RB. He was the slot receiver normally, though -- with WRs Juan Daniels and Brice Hunter getting most of the catches. Hines finished his career 82 passing yards shy of 1000 passing yards -- which would have been pretty cool to get since he gained 1,066 yards rushing and 1,965 yards receiving. I still don't know how that 1997 Georgia team did not do better than it did. That was Hines's senior year. Mike Bobo had a very good year. Robert Edwards did not do badly either (though he was hurt for the Tennessee game). And Champ Bailey was doing everything that Charles Woodson had done the year prior at Michigan, only better. Of course, the team leader in interceptions that season was none other than current Georgia head coach Kirby Smart -- who had 6. Those were, however, great days. Okay, I have to move along more quickly than this if I am going to get this post done before midnight.
I've have a post in the past composed entirely of Ric Flair, so it should be no surprise to anyone that the 14-year-old Tony loved Ric Flair's ego, arrogance, and results.
Going from a guy who might be the G.O.A.T. to a bunch of guys who may never even get a chance -- or who did get a chance and never did anything with it. The first six guys -- Carlos Corporan, Jose Mieses, Mike Kinkade, Dennis Sarfate, Ken Holmberg, and Nick Neugebauer -- never became stars of any kind. Corporan just signed on as a free agent with the Cubs after spending last year bounding from the Yankees to the Rays to the Marlins -- all in the minors or spring training. Holmberg and Mieses never made it to the majors. Neugebauer played for Milwaukee at the ages of 20 and 21 (14 total appearances) before his shoulder basically fell apart. Kinkade played 222 games in the majors -- none for Milwaukee -- and got 491 plate appearances as a utility guy (though he did bring Bill Pulsipher to Milwaukee in a trade). Finally, Sarfate appeared in 92 games for the Brewers, Astros, and mostly, for the 2008 Orioles. The last four cards -- and yes, there were two Josh Hader autographs -- are all guys for whom there is still hope. Nathan Kirby was a first round compensation pick in 2015 out of UVA. He got into 5 games in the Midwest League in 2015, then did not pick in 2016 after Tommy John surgery. Hader, of course, is one of the Brewers top prospects who struggled some in his first exposure to the thin air in Colorado Springs. He may make his Brewers debut this coming year so long as things go okay for him. Trent Clark just turned 20 years old. He was the 15th pick overall in the first round of the 2015 draft for Milwaukee. He struggled last year with some injuries and the step up to the Midwest league. He'll repeat there this year in all likelihood.
The Ultimate Warrior was one of those guys in the 1980s who was a huge fan favorite. I tended to like the bad guys more than the fan favorites -- I was always something of a contrarian. He died in 2014 just after his induction into the WWE Hall of Fame.
Again, being something of a contrarian, I rather like Ryan Braun. Would I have preferred that he do what he did in baseball without taking steroids? Absolutely. But has he put his mark on the Brewers organization and franchise history? Again, absolutely. It's tough to say what he would have done without steroids, but if this past season is any indication, he still would have been great.
So, for all y'all that hate Braun for being a steroid guy, feel free to get rid of your Braun cards by sending them to me. I'll take them.
Speaking of steroids, don't we have to think that Vince McMahon took steroids during his life? I mean looking at photos on Google, I think he had a bigger physique in the 1980s than I recalled, but dude got huge. That said, his entrance music is pretty good. I never liked him generally -- whether being the good-guy announcer in the 1980s as the foil to Bobby Heenan or being the heel commissioner from the 1990s onward.
Going a bit old school here -- or as old school as reprinted chrome cards and Paul Molitor Blue Jay cards might allow. Speaking of guys getting bigger, I recall a story about Robin Yount after the 1979 season buying a Nautilus machine and putting on 20 pounds of muscle -- thereby turning himself from the stringbean kid we saw from 1974 to about 1979 into the man that he became when the clock struck 1980.
That, or perhaps it was because when the 1980 season started, he was 24 years old and finally had become a man bodywise. I mean, his MVP season in 1982 was his age 26 season (he deserved it too...10.5 WAR that year, 1.8 WAR defensively putting him 7th overall, 9.8 WAR on offense was #1 as well). Think about that. It's too bad that half his career was wasted with teams that flailed around trying to figure out how to compete.
I had to put Bill Goldberg in here. He played defensive tackle for the University of Georgia (and he also shares my birthday). According to his appearance on Jim Ross's podcast back in 2014, Goldberg chose UGA because he was standing on a bar on his recruiting trip and someone handled him a big bottle of Wild Turkey. He had such an incredible time that he was sold on Athens.
I have also stood on a bar in Athens while drunk. Nobody handed me a bottle of Wild Turkey, but I did get a t-shirt for my troubles that, except for being white, looked like this one:
I wore it until it fell apart. I loved that shirt.
Let me be clear -- there were many more cards than this. But these player collection additions -- all of which were serial numbered -- were a great capper to yet another fantastic package from JBF.
Thanks go out to Wes for a fantastic giveaway. Now, I need to find some Willinghams to send to you!
