PWEs and a Little Music

Thank you to all of you who read my post trying to honor the memory of Ray Peters. Your comments meant a lot to me. Ray was truly a special man who will be dearly missed.

In the meantime since my last post, I have been the honored recipient of two single-card plain white envelopes. The first arrived a couple of days ago from New Jersey and my Twitter friend Nick Vossbrink who also blogs at NJWV and, in addition, is one of the two new co-chairs of the SABR Baseball Cards Committee and Blog Editor. Nick is one of those people with whom I feel I could converse about any subject and learn something new. I like people like that.

Nick sent me an awesome thank you note featuring an Auguste Renoir painting of a ballerina that totally pump-faked me into thinking it was an Edgar Degas because whenever I see Impressionists and ballerinas that is a Pavlovian response.

See what I mean? But even now, thirty years later, I still hear the teacher I had in high school for training for the Academic Decathlon competition -- which is where my Impressionist knowledge comes from -- saying, "yeah, but look at the eyes. Those are Renoir eyes."

Anyway, Nick sent me a very cool 1980s oddball to add to my collection of a Giant turned Brewer, Rob Deer:

I'm pretty sure Deer is either about to swing and miss or crush the ball. That was what he did. For many Brewers fans, Deer's approach at the plate reminded them of an earlier Brewer hero, Gorman Thomas -- lots of homers, lots of strikeouts, a pretty good number of walks too, and low batting averages that didn't kill the team thanks to the OBP and the SLG.

To thank Nick further, here's a Baroque composition featuring attractive women looking cold on a beach with Tomaso Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor accompanying them.

Thanks Nick!

Next up, a PWE showed up yesterday from Mark Hoyle. Mark has either been buying a lot of potato chips from Utz lately, or else he ran into a deep, cheap vein of these cards at his local card shows. 

Whichever one of these it is, Mark was kind enough to share an Utz card with me:

If I were inclined to add any more player collections -- and trust me, I'm more likely to get rid of some than add some -- Lorenzo Cain would be in the running definitely. LoCain is such an upbeat guy, and he's also an incredible center fielder as well. It is unbelievable to me that Cain has yet to win a Gold Glove -- he deserved one last year, in my opinion, so I hope that issue gets addressed this year.

To thank Mark for the card, I think I'll give him faster horses, younger women, older whiskey, and more money -- from Tom T. Hall.

I grew up on country music in the 1970s, and I do recall this song. I probably would not have remembered this song, however, except for Twitter stalking Mark's timeline and seeing that he had interacted with the Great Wes Moore talking about the lyrics to this song specifically. 

Now that's what you call a friend -- someone to remind you of a Tom T. Hall song from 1976 that you haven't thought about in probably 40 years. 

Thanks, guys, for the great cards!

Moving Forward Part II: A New Player Collection

There's a lot of buzz and excitement amongst Milwaukee Brewers fans thanks to what I'll call Tremendous Transaction Thursday. It's almost like it's January of 1979 again in Milwaukee, where the team was coming off its first ever winning season. Or, maybe it's like December 1980, when the Brewers went to the winter meetings and pulled off what remains the biggest trade in team history to get Ted Simmons, Pete Vuckovich, and Rollie Fingers from the St. Louis Cardinals.

As you probably know by now, in the space of about an hour, the Brewers made two massive moves -- first trading away #1 prospect Lewis Brinson, #6 prospect Monte Harrison, #14 prospect Isan Diaz, and pitcher Jordan Yamamoto to the Miami Marlins in return for Christian Yelich, and then signing former Brewer Lorenzo Cain to a 5-year, $80 million contract.

The Marlins made the move to trade Yelich for obvious reasons: after the team traded away Giancarlo Stanton and Marcell Ozuna, Yelich had made it clear that he did not want to be the only major league player in Miami. And, the Brewers had depth in prospect talent that few teams could match, and their depth made for a good match for the Marlins needs.

Further to that point, the Marlins simply did not have much in the way of positional prospect talent in their system. Indeed, prior to this offseason's trades, basically all of the Marlins top prospects were pitchers. Prior to the trade with the Brewers, the only position players in the Marlins' Top 10 prospects according to MLB Pipeline were Magneuris Sierra (obtained in the Marcell Ozuna trade with St. Louis) and 24-year-old 3B Brian Anderson, a third-round pick in 2014 who made it to the majors for a short look last year. Now, their top ten features Brinson at #1, Harrison at #2, and Diaz at #9.

I was so ready for Brinson to be the next big Brewers star. Good luck to him in Miami.

Why would Milwaukee make these moves? First and foremost, the Brewers still have a ton of prospect talent remaining, including new #1 prospect Corey Ray (whom I don't buy as the #1 prospect right now, to be fair) and last year's competitive balance #1 pick, Tristen Lutz. Plus, the club still has tons of depth in the outfield from which to trade, if they choose. Starting pitching would be an obvious place to improve, and having Domingo Santana, Keon Broxton, and/or Brett Phillips as a trade chit could help bring in some help near the top of the rotation. Maybe the Rays would take Broxton for Jake Odorizzi so that the Brewers could get another of the guys from the Zack Greinke trade with Kansas City back (since they have both Jeffress and Cain back!).

The team could also choose to be creative and set up a plan to get all of their top 5 OF (Braun, Yelich, Cain, Santana, and Phillips) plenty of games and plenty of rest at the same time. The team struggled to score runs last year when Braun was out injured, and his advancing age (he's now 34 years old) means that finding him games to rest and working him into a platoon at first with Eric Thames. Thames crushed righties to the tune of .265/.382/.551 last season with 25 HRs in 440 plate appearances, but he hit just .182/.270/.394 against lefties. While Jesus Aguilar did a nice job in that platoon/pinch-hitting role last year, Braun would be a step up at that position hitting-wise (assuming Braun can learn the footwork at yet another new position).

At any rate, both Cain and Yelich now have contracts that, assuming no extensions, are scheduled to keep them with the team for five years each. That level of commitment and the potential to keep contending for at least that five-year period has me excited.

So excited, in fact, that I'm breaking my own internal rules that a player has to do something for the Brewers before I make them a player collection.

Yes, I am going to add Christian Yelich as a player collection. For right now, I'm just going to collect his Brewers cards. If things go really well, perhaps that will change.

Who knows? If things go well, perhaps Lorenzo Cain will be a PC by the end of 2018. 

Thanks for stopping by. 

#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!).