Johnny's Trading Again

Over the four years I've been blogging, I have been the recipient of tons of cards and bobbleheads and all kinds of other stuff from John at Johnny's Trading Spot. He is a megacollector. Not only does he want all the Braves ever -- as he puts it, he only needs "like 108,000 more Braves cards" -- but he also puts sets together too. So, it looks like I definitely need to send him some cards again soon.

This is especially true because he sent me yet another package of cards about a month ago with some fantastic Brewers to add to my collection. Let's start with a short print from 2017:

Eric Thames seemed initially to be a very inspired signing by the Brewers early last year. Of course, he was not that much of a different player than when he went to Korea. It helped him early on that teams did not know whether he could handle what they were serving up to him -- especially the Reds. 

These days, Thames's playing time is getting squeezed a bit by the Brewers surplus of outfielders and corner players -- it's tough to find room for Christian Yelich, Lorenzo Cain, Domingo Santana, Ryan Braun, Brett Phillips, Keon Broxton, Jesus Aguilar, and Eric Thames on the same roster. Of those, Phillips and Broxton have options remaining, and Aguilar was a waiver wire pickup last year who might find himself there this year if the Brewers can't clear that logjam.

We'll see how good David Stearns is in that trading process. So far, he's made me a Believer.

Strangely enough, 1981 Kellogg's seem to elude me. 1982 and 1983 are plentiful, it seems, but 1981...maybe kids just didn't want to remind themselves about the strike by buying baseball cards. Still, these two Brewers stalwarts were both very much needed for my collection. 

The Greatest American Hero was one of my favorite TV shows in 1981. William Katt as the everyman superhero who screwed up and made mistakes but in the end always beat the bad guys was kind of an inspiration to me as a 9-year-old, because I always screwed up and made mistakes. My visual memory of that show tied to this song is the scene where he flies into a billboard and crashes. He was also about as graceful as a rhinoceros high on LSD. Plus, Connie Sellecca was hot.

Now, though, she's just married to John Tesh. That was after being married to Gil Gerard (yeah, Buck Rogers from that three year show at the end of the 1980s).

Gotta love these snowflake/holiday cards from last year. Well, actually, you don't have to love them. To be honest, I'm sort of agnostic. They are cool and all, but I'd prefer them if they weren't a glorified parallel. I guess they are pretty cool. They do put me in a holiday spirit, even though the only holiday really upcoming right now is St. Patrick's Day. Guess I'll have to drink a Guinness.

Sort of like the cards, I'm a bit agnostic on Madonna -- especially her early career. If you didn't live through that era, well, imagine if Taylor Swift spurred on an entire army of teenage wannabes who dressed like her and you have the feel of what it was like when Madonna first got big. This was really one of her first hits, and she became a phenomenon.

John has been sprinkling these Fleer Excel cards throughout the blogosphere. You have to love that El Paso Diablos card of future Brewer and Astro Mark Loretta!

I am still working on putting together my minor league want lists for the Brewers. I'm working on refining my Milwaukee Braves want lists currently, so that's taken more of my time recently. That and listening to tons and tons of different podcasts. 

If you have any podcast recommendations, let me know. 

When I think of 1995, I think of the time when I met Oasis. Speaking of which, I really need to find my signed concert ticket from that day. Of course, they were gobshites then and are gobshites now. Time has certainly revealed that Noel was the more talented of the Gallagher brothers. 

Oh, and f**k Man Citeh, Noel & Liam. 

It might seem weird that my favorite item from this box (which had a ton more things in it!) is a media guide, but I love media guides. Part of me thinks I should go back to my efforts to buy up as many old (but good) baseball books as I could. The other side of me, though, thinks I should stick with the Brewers but buy up every Media Guide in sight of every team. I know I have the Brewers from 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1990, 1991, 1992, and 1993 at a minimum.

And maybe I should do that. I enjoy the background about the players and all, and I also enjoy tidbits like seeing Fred "Chicken" Stanley showing up to work for the Brewers in 1992 -- one of the 1970 Brewers came back home.

John, thank you very much for the cards and ESPECIALLY for the media guide.

Then *poof* he was gone

For Brewers fans who troll around on eBay looking for items -- and especially for Robin Yount collectors -- a usual stop used to always be wfbookmen's page. Thanks to WF, I have added numerous Robin Yount relics and autographs to my collection -- sometimes at high prices, sometimes at cheap prices. From time to time, he might be a little slow in shipping for unknown reasons, but most of the time he's a solid eBay seller.

I'd stopped buying from him for a while to focus on picking up more team sets rather than the individual player cards. Plus, I'd often have to stop myself from bidding on far too many items. Then, I got one of his emails saying he had a bunch of stuff on sale with short deadlines for purchase. So, I looked at the stuff and, back at the end of January, I bought a whole raft of items from him (which I'm going to show below). It was a weird sale -- I was able to pick up many of the items by putting in a last minute opening bid on each, which usually doesn't happen.

But a weirder thing happened. Shortly after I left feedback, I went back to see what else he might have for sale, and a strange sight appeared:

Say what? Just like Kaiser Soze -- though hopefully without the international terrorist/bad guy overtones -- it seems like it was just *poof* gone. I hope he is okay -- as you can see, he's been a seller for over 19 years. Perhaps it was just a reaction to the continually increasing eBay fees.

At any rate, thanks to the big sale, I got a bunch of nice items. 

First off, we have two media guides from the Brewers early days. I eventually would like to get a complete run of the media guides in good shape like these two -- as opposed to the well-worn versions of my youth, which were my bedtime reading as a kid as if I would be tested on what Robin Yount's middle name is...which, oddly enough, is listed as "R." but many sources (including the late Bob Lemke) say that his real middle name was Rachel...leading me to believe that I too would use just the R and that his parents really wanted a girl when he was born -- but I digress.

Anyway, I don't have many of them currently, but I do like them. The 1973 one featuring Del Crandall and George Scott is particularly nice.

Another group of items that were available featured some of those Topps buyback cards with those wonderful foil stamps to "update" them. 

As you can see, other than the 1976 Topps Team card for the Brewers (with Hank Aaron placed in the center of the standing players), the rest all fit neatly into player collections -- Moore, Money, Cooper, and Oglivie are all core players from the Brewers teams of my childhood. I don't think I paid more than $1 for any one of these cards. These were, in fact, the items that were lingering without bids late on, so I snapped them up for the $0.99 open.

Something WF always seemed to have were the "higher end" sets like Triple Threads. He also seemed to have all the cool inserts and box toppers. I snapped up a couple of these as well:

I especially like the 2010 Heritage team stamps box topper with Braun and Fielder. I wish that Topps had done actual stamps for the new generation, as opposed to printing them on the box topper. Still, it's a pretty cool item to add to my Braun collection. I'm not sure that I'll find two more for both the Fielder and the team collections, though. I think this is the only one I've found (though I haven't looked all that hard).

Going deeper into the oddball side of things, this time around there were two team-issued photos and a couple of large oddballs for sale. 

In order:

The top one is probably from about 1978 or 1979 or maybe 1980. But, I think it's earlier because by 1980 Gorman Thomas was already on his way to covering up with the full beard look that would make him fit in well with Jayson Werth and Charlie Blackmon these days -- the halfway-to-homeless look.  

The next one has to be from 1983 (or it was a reprint from 1982) since it lists Harvey Kuenn as being "Manager." Harvey was the manager from May of 1982 through the end of 1983. Harry Dalton decided to fire Harvey at the end of the 1983 season after what appeared to be a disappointing finish -- losing 18 of 24 games in September of 1983 featuring a 10-game losing streak to blow the division title. Considering that Rene Lachemann came in the next year and led the team to a 67-94 record (featuring Paul Molitor missing most of the season due to Tommy John surgery), perhaps the chinks in the armor were simply displaying themselves a bit earlier.

The next item is a Cecil Cooper Mr. Z's pizza 5 x 7 photo. I have one of these already, but I kept this one unopened. 

Finally, there is the Jeff Cirillo black & white 5x7 photo issued by The Ohio Casualty Group. I really am confused by these because I'm just not sure if this is a giveaway or if Ohio Casualty just sponsored the team-issued set. I know that OCG issued a set of similarly sized photos featuring Braves and Brewers in 1999 for what was supposed to be County Stadium's final season (before the "Big Blue" crane collapse). But I don't know much more than that.

For the final items, well, it would not be a purchase from WFBookmen without some Robin Yount stuff infiltrating it.

The top item is one of those "Diamondmark" bookmarks issued in the early 1990s, when everyone was putting baseball players on everything. Skipping down, we have two serial numbered items -- one of Yount by himself serial numbered to 399 and one with Paul Molitor serial numbered to 1999.

The second item is an unused ticket stub from the 2010 game featuring a Robin Yount bobblehead for the team's 40th anniversary. It's incredible how many times the Brewers seem to feature that 1982 team and its players on bobbleheads, ticket stubs, and other stadium giveaways. This year, for instance, there is a Robin bobblehead being issued to commemorate his ride into County Stadium on his motorbike -- which was immortalized by Gavin on a Cardsphere Heroes card in 2015:

I will use any excuse I can to show that photo. 

At any rate, I'm hopeful that wfbookmen's exile from eBay will end eventually, or that he will surface on another auction site. My Yount collection hopes so too.