Music from the Trading Spot

One of the trading world's really underrated guys is John from Johnny's Trading Spot. I say he's underrated because the guy literally drops fantastic packages on every one of his trading partners whenever he sends something. Johnny has sent me boxes of bobbleheads, massive and jammed Priority Mailers, and tons of awesome parallels that I have distinct difficulty finding in the wild at card shows or online.

John is right up there with Wes/JBF in my book -- both of them are incredibly generous fellow SEC fans who go above and beyond and seemingly ask for very little in return generally. John recently (within the past two months) sent me yet another excellent package. To thank John, I did a little research and found some of his favorite bands from his past. That means I read his blog, by the way.

Anyway, let's get to the music and the cards!

One of the first things I found on John's blog was a post where he showed off a TON of cards from a set all about Kiss from the late 1970s. I think it's a Donruss set based off a search on Trading Card Database. Every time I see a set like that, I think, "Man, I need to look more at non-sports cards and collect some." 

Then that feeling passes as I look at my mounting want lists for the Brewers. I have chipped away at those in terms of organization, though -- I'm all the way up to 2014 in terms of getting all the Topps parallels, inserts, and autographs into binders!

Speaking of parallels and inserts...here are four parallels that I needed. It's always interesting to get a Yuniesky Betancourt card. How he started in 152 games at shortstop for a 2011 team that won 96 games and won the NL Central is one of sabermetrics biggest questions. Betancourt "hit" for an OPS of .652 and tallied -0.5 WAR. And the Brewers paid him $4.3 million for that "production." Wow.

For whatever reason, it makes me chuckle to look at that team page on Baseball Reference and see the photos of the top 12 players from that team -- nearly everyone is shown on a team other than Milwaukee! The list goes Ryan Braun (MIL), Prince Fielder (TEX), Shaun Marcum (CLE), Corey Hart (PIT), Nyjer Morgan (CLE), Yovani Gallardo (SEA), Rickie Weeks Jr. (TAM), Randy Wolf (DET), John Axford (OAK) Carlos Gomez (TEX), Zack Greinke (ARI), and Jerry Hairston Jr. (BAL).

By the way, that Surhoff #1 pick is one of my favorite cards. I loved that subset in the 1985 Topps, and I was disappointed that it came out too early in 1985 for B.J. to be included. 

Now, when I saw John was a CDB fan, I knew damn well that he is a true Southerner despite his questionable choice of being a Florida Gator. Charlie Daniels comes from that late 1970s pop-country music time when country was really still country, but, as always, certain pop sensibilities had invaded. You have your Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelsons, of course, but folks like Eddie Rabbitt and Ronnie Milsap and Barbara Mandrell were their generation's versions of Luke Bryan, Tim McGraw, and Miranda Lambert. 

By the way, be sure to watch this video at least from the 3:30 mark on to see what happens when someone learns a new special kaleidoscope camera effect.

Let's get on the Upper Deck here. Two Prince Fielder inserts to go with a card from Carlos Lee to commemorate his short-lived Milwaukee stay and a Mat Gamel "Signature Star." Man, if Mat Gamel could have stayed healthy. All I got here, though, is that he went to the same Jacksonville High School as the daughter of two good friends of mine in Jacksonville (she's there as a senior now), and that his brother Ben is off to a pretty good start in Seattle this year.

I'm just not a huge fan of the song "Freebird," but I've listened to "Sweet Home Alabama" literally hundreds or thousands of times. I do hope that Neil Young will remember that a southern man don't need him around anyhow.

Of course, this is a big song for the University of Alabama, as you might expect. 

Man, I miss college football about this time of year.

Anyway...baseball cards....

Bowman seems to go well with the collegiate feel here for me. The whole "Bowman is about prospects" thing works in this regard. 

So, who is Cody Scarpetta and how did he end up on a Bowman Platinum card? Scarpetta was an 11th round draft pick in 2007 out of high school in Rockford, Illinois. His dad Dan was a third-round pick of the Brewers in 1982 who made it all the way to Triple-A before crashing out at the age of 25. Cody worked his way up the system all the way to Double-A Huntsville (Sweet Home Alabama) in 2011 and, in addition, made five appearances in the Arizona Fall League that year at the age of 22. He got shelled, and it was an indication that something was wrong -- as in, yup, Tommy John surgery. That really killed his career, though he continued to pitch in independent league baseball last year.

There are literally dozens of better songs from Steve Miller Band that I could have posted. But, I'm a child of the 1980s, and this song from 1982 is the one I most remember personally. Yes, "The Joker" is a thousand times better in my opinion, even if Billboard put this song at #70 on its list of Greatest Songs of all time. 

I bet my list would vary greatly from theirs.

Here's "the rest". Seth Lintz in the 2010 Pro Debut set as a blue parallel got into that set because he was a second round draft pick in 2008 out of high school. He barely made it to the Midwest League with the Brewers -- total of 14 appearances as a reliever in 2011 and 2012 with Wisconsin -- before he was cut loose. He made the independent league rounds some as well for a while, but it doesn't look like he has pitched since 2015.

Jed Bradley -- from Huntsville -- recently retired from baseball. He made it to the major leagues briefly last September with the Braves and appeared in 6 games in the same city where he went to college (he's a Tech kid). His card mate, Taylor Jungmann, was sent down to Double-A Biloxi earlier this year to be stretched out as a starter. Jungman and Bradley were both first round picks in 2011, but neither has really panned out. Jungmann's been passed not only Josh Hader, but also by Luis Ortiz and Brandon Woodruff and maybe even journeyman Paolo Espino.

My thanks go out to John as always for a great package of baseball cards. I would have played Molly Hatchet, but there's no damn way I'm putting any song called "Gator Country" on this blog!

Tardiness, Thy Name Is Off Hiatus

In some respects, Shakespeare presaged the internet. By that, I mean that Shakespeare was really incredible at coming up with pithy yet memorable lines that completely foretold the coming love 500 years later for memes. 

One that has persisted for centuries derived from Hamlet -- "Frailty, thy name is woman." To paraphrase Wikipedia, the "____, thy name is ____" phrasing is used to indicate the completeness with which something or somebody embodies a particular (usually negative) quality. 

That applies completely to me this month. I keep complaining about how work keeps getting in the way of blogging, but it does. I guess I need to start writing things up on weekends and scheduling and releasing them during the week or something. But then, I get tired of writing or I start writing in the same vein constantly and I fear that folks will get bored.

At any rate, today I am going to combine a couple of things that came in to the OHHQ from random directions. One is an obvious source and the other sounds just strange.

Happy Holidays from Topps

While I was never a fan of Wham! or of George Michael, there is no denying that the man could sing and write catchy songs. 

The Wham Christmas song goes well with Topps's Topps Now Holiday card. Lord knows I am critical of Topps on many levels. Topps deserves much of the criticism I send its way too. Take this holiday card, for instance. On the back, it features Ichiro (for his 3000th hit, I'd assume) and David Ortiz for his retirement. And while I have made multiple jokes about the multiplicity of David Ortiz Topps Now cards, the fact is that Ortiz had an excellent career. 

Then you see this side of the card. You get Kris Bryant -- the NL MVP who led the Cubs to the team's first World Series victory in 108 years. 

But Gary Sánchez? 

Gary Sanchez, thy name is shoe.

Yes, he had a good debut this year for his two months in the majors -- 20 homers in 53 games is nothing to sneeze at. But come on! He wasn't the AL Rookie of the Year -- Michael Fullmer was, and deservedly so. Sanchez was not the AL MVP -- Mike Trout was and deservedly so as well (only Mookie Betts was within a win by WAR of anyone in the majors of Trout's shocking 10.6 WAR) and, in fact, did not even get a single vote. 

So what the hell is he doing on a 2016 Highlights card, other than the fact that Topps had its own little Sanchez-gasm, spewing Gary Sanchez Topps Now cards around like Ron Jeremy at the AVN awards? I guess Topps felt like it needed to send its own employees a Christmas card with their favorite team on it.

Cards from Christmas for Kids

My wife does a lot of volunteering around Dunwoody. One of the coolest ones is Christmas for Kids. The Dunwoody Police Department collects up toys through donations. They then work with local social workers and local child services organizations to identify children in need and give those children invitations to a special outing the weekend before Christmas. 

At the event, the children are ordered by their relative level of need. The neediest go in first and get to select multiple gifts for themselves. The kids get to meet Santa, and they get to eat free food from local food trucks which volunteer and donate the food for the day. 

At the end of the event this year, there were tons and tons of toys left over. There were so many toys left over, in fact, that the DPD drove around Dunwoody on Christmas with toys in the back of a patrol truck and handed them out at local apartment complexes. My wife saw some cards laying around unclaimed and asked the police about them. Turns out that the cards had been left for a couple of years, so they said that my wife should take them.

It's a bit sad, therefore, that I have these cards. After all, it means that dozens of kids decided they would rather have some GI Joe toy -- or whatever else was available -- instead of grabbing baseball cards. I'll take them, but I feel bad about it.

On the bright side, I got some good stuff:

Such as a complete factory set of the 2009 Upper Deck First Edition set complete with relic and five 20th Anniversary cards. What did I get from those?

Josh Barfield didn't make it past 2009 as a major leaguer. He started his career pretty well with the Padres in 2006. He was passed by Asdrubal Cabrera in the organization by the end of 2007. He kicked around the minors thereafter, and played last in 2013 in the Atlantic League. Most recently, he has been a part of the Arizona Diamondbacks organization as the Assistant Director of Pro Scouting.

Otherwise, my 20th Anniversary cards were decent. Granted, I'm not a hockey guy, so I had to Google him to find out that Eric Staal is a "Triple Gold Club" member, being a winner of the Stanley Cup (2006), the World Championships (2007), and the Winter Olympics (2010). 

I've heard of the other four people/things, though the whole idea of putting "The Universe" on a card is a bit ridiculous. Maybe we can get a "stars of the stars" card set to highlight all the great stars in the sky soon.

As for the set itself, well, it's a set. I needed nearly all the Brewers in the set, so no complaints there. It was fun to see CC Sabathia in a Brewers' uniform and to see Mat Gamel listed with uniform number 98 though.



And, this set was a great reminder of how good a card design can be when you don't have the creeping death fog at the corners of the card.

I hope everyone had a good Christmas, and I'll try to write again this week -- but I do have to go to work some too!

#WarWithJBF: Here Come the PWEs

In my first post about Jaybarkerfan's assault on the postal workers in North Atlanta, I noted that I thought I would win the first battle.  But, as I also said, "the first shots never determine the final outcome."  After all, no one is exactly sure who fired the first shot of the American Revolution at the Battle of Lexington, and the Confederates, under the leadership of General Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard, first the first shot at Fort Sumter.

Is that a plain white envelope I see on the horizon, sir?

If General Beauregard asked that question, his view west to Alabama from the outskirts of Atlanta would have been filled with mail trucks.  You see, the onslaught of PWEs has begun. The first one I received carried some notes to warn me of what is coming:

As best I can tell, I think I am around day four of the PWEs.  On the first day, just one PWE showed up.  It contained these notes accompanied by four cards:

I already have the top three cards, which is why they are small, but I did not have the Upper Deck Game Jersey of Ryan Braun.  That's a great new edition.

The next day (Thursday), nothing arrived from the Hazel Green Roll Tide Church. On Friday, two envelopes arrived.  One of them, unfortunately, had been slashed open by some intrepid felon within the United States Postal Service.  The other one, though, had another great relic card:

Corey Hart's contribution to the 2012 Topps Golden Moments Game-Used Memorabilia Insert set arrived -- and it too was a new addition to a player collection.  

Then yesterday arrived.  Before yesterday, I was under the impression that JBF had sent out a PWE a day. Now, I know that is not the case.  

My wife has been following these proceedings closely -- after the warnings from Bob Walk the Plank were passed along to me, I thought it wise to give my wife a heads up to avoid moving any heavy boxes.  I filled her in when those notes above came. When she brought in the mail yesterday, all she said to me was, "I guess that guy wasn't kidding."

Yes, yesterday, SEVEN PWEs showed up.  It's starting to add up now...and my thoughts are that I may see another 11 PWEs before this is over -- and before the 6 "Monsters" arrive.  I am not afraid of monsters, though.  Not yet, at least!

So what did these PWEs have?

#1

#2

#3

#4

#5

#6

#7

Yes, that's a relic in every envelope.  Every. Single. One.  

The cool thing is that about half of the "filler" cards are ones I needed for my player collections and/or for the Brewers team binders.  

You might be able to tell from my write up here that my trepidation is increasing.  I mean, as much as you can see from the photos that Bob Walk the Plank posted -- and as many of you have found out personally -- one cannot appreciate the sheer volume of cards that Wes sends out.

Now, I have some great stuff for him already -- some of which has arrived in Alabama but most of which is yet to come.  Don't get me wrong.  

But this war...is this where we are heading?

We'll see.