I Was An Owl Once

Pretty much everyone in the baseball card blog world knows Night Owl. He's been around a long time -- since 2008, in fact -- and is a prolific poster as well.  It must be all that quiet time he gets being a Night Owl that allows him to be that prolific. 

But it brings me to a confession of sorts: I was an Owl for a long time -- at least 13 years, in fact. My school mascot all the way through elementary, middle, and high school was and still is an Owl. The Slinger Owls.

We've never had anyone remotely famous attend Slinger High School, as far as either I or Wikipedia can tell. I mean, we've had a couple of NCAA Division I athletes, a few college professors here and there, and a few attorneys as well. But, no one truly famous.  

I lettered in high school baseball three years at Slinger, but I wasn't really good enough to do much after high school with it. Perhaps I could have gone to a small NAIA school and tried out, but even then I'm pretty sure that I was not all that good at the sport. I mean, I was good in the "better than people at my school" sense of the word, but not in the "better than other players my age" sense of the word. 

But at least someone now has come up with a great logo and a booster club now for the team:

So, my Owl-history aside, it's time to show off the cards that Night Owl sent my way.

I think that this 1982 Topps Ted Simmons sticker started the festivities off for this envelope coming my way:

While that alone would have been great to add to my collection -- I'm quite deficient in 1980s Topps Stickers because I insisted on putting them into an album all the time -- Night Owl didn't stop there.  

He hit two player collections with some parallel majesty:

The 2012 Gallardo refractor is followed up by a 2015 Stadium Club Gold Parallel of Jonathan Lucroy.  So, now all I need are the base cards for nearly all of the Stadium Club set.  Man, I need to get cracking on that.

Night Owl also sent a great variety of cards from other years that I needed.  First off, he sent me a tough-to-find 1972 high numbered card:

This is Mike Ferraro. I could have sworn that he managed a lot longer than parts of two seasons in the 1980s -- 1983 in Cleveland and 1986 in Kansas City.  He played one season of 124 games in Milwaukee in 1972 (and 5 games in Seattle in 1969) and 33 total games with the Yankees in 1966 and 1968 and was done as a player. He went into minor league management shortly after that, and then worked his way up to being a major league coach. In 1980, he waved Willie Randolph around third to try to score him in Game 2 of the ALCS. Randolph was out, and George Steinbrenner went ape$hit on him.  Steinbrenner cleaned house after the season ended, and manager Dick Howser led Ferraro out the door.  That 1986 season in Kansas City was the year Howser died. Ferraro took over, then was let go at the end of that season.

Night Owl then sent another great early 80s oddball:

The 1983 Fleer Stamp of Pete Vuckovich (I think it's '83, at least).  Fleer stamps were so exotic to me that I don't recall ever seeing them for sale in 1983.  I may have been too busy buying stickers and putting them in albums, though.

Leaping to the 1990s:

The Listach Leaf card from 1993 means that I am a Greg Vaughn away from a complete team set.  Someday soon, I'll have to highlight some complete team sets -- perhaps as a foil to falling back on "Meet the Brewers," though I will have to do one of those soon, I think. The Seitzer card is as 1994 as a card can get. It seriously looks like the Topps card designers borrowed from Pearl Jam's liner notes for Vitalogy...

...which also came out in 1994.

So, let's leave my enjoyed youth behind, as I slowly teeter toward my mid-40s, and go back to the cards again.

Night Owl sent me some great Upper Deck efforts from the Aughties too.  Those top cards -- 2007 Upper Deck Johnny Estrada and the 2008 Baseball Heroes Bill Hill -- are nice.  The Jeff Suppan O-Pee-Chee from 2009 with its black border would be much more beautiful if it weren't Jeff Suppan, of course (I covered my Jeff Suppan dislike here before and won't repeat it).  

But let's talk just for a sec about the 2008 Documentary set. What a great concept done incredibly poorly by Upper Deck. You know the set make up -- it's basically the same photos of the same players done over and over again ad nauseum without any reference as to whether the player on the card had anything to do with the game itself.  

Wouldn't this be a great set to revive today, though, in a limited release style? As in, release a set of 200 to 250 cards, for each major league team, perhaps in box set form or online only, that chronicles each game from the previous season with a player photo tied to the actual game action.  If the team got no-hit in the game, show the player who struck out to end the game, or the starter who didn't get any support.  Then, include photos for each player who made an appearance during the season (or, to simplify matters, the top 25 players) and the manager and coaching staffs.  I'd buy a Brewers set like that.  And who among us team collectors wouldn't buy our team's offering?

But I digress, because Night Owl sent me one final shiny card:

That's a Shaun Marcum refractor from 2012 Topps Chrome with a painted-on Brewers outfit. It reminds me of the paean to the airbrushers of the 1977 Topps set that Night Owl wrote recently.

Finally....

...off Duran Duran's weird "Thank You" album. Thanks, Night Owl, for the great cards and the randomness embodied in this blog post.

The Dimebox Man in Black

Yesterday, I had my fantasy baseball auction for the one league I am in this year.  As the commissioner on a day-to-day basis, websites have made my life much easier.  But, I think my card collecting affected my strategy -- I ended up putting together the Brewers starting infield on my team. It wasn't my strategy coming in to do that, but as the flow of the auction went on and as it became apparent that the Brewers were going to go at auction at reasonable prices, I just went with where the current took me.

I'm doing the same today in writing up a trade post.  Nick -- from the always entertaining "Dime Boxes -- The Low-End Baseball Card Collector's Journey" blog -- and I have swapped envelopes fairly regularly over the past year.  I send him random oddballs I have unearthed along with other cards I hope he'll like, and in return he sends me cards for my collection that he has picked up in his various and sundry travels around the dime boxes of Chicagoland.  

His most recent envelope of cards appeared recently, and the theme for the post was apparent even before I opened it.

I can think of no more appropriate music legend than Johnny Cash to appear on a "Forever" stamp.  And when the opportunity to put up a bunch of Johnny Cash music is given to me, I will seize that opportunity.  

I grew up on Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson. Their music is classic country music to me.  When Barbara Mandrell, Kenny Rogers, and Dolly Parton (among others) kept moving toward pop sounds -- as Nashville continues to do today -- those guys were going the other direction.  

Some random facts about Cash before getting into the cards and music:

• He was born J.R. Cash. Neither initial stood for anything. He came up with John when the Air Force made him have a first name other than "J".  
• Like many of us in the baseball-card-collecting hobby, Johnny Cash and his second wife, June Carter Cash, were major packrats -- to the point of where their only child together (John Carter Cash) unearthed a lost album in their house after the two of them passed away in 2003.
• Cash was fined about $125,000 in the mid-1960s for having his car cause a massive forest fire in California by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.  The fire scared away 44 endangered California condors from their sanctuary, to which Cash replied, "I don't give a damn about your yellow buzzards."

Now, to the cards.

1.  "Doin' My Time"

From the album "Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar" came this song about being in prison -- a common theme for Cash despite his famously never serving more than an overnight stint in a county jail.

Someone that knows something about doin' time for his transgressions is my favorite steroid user, Ryan Braun.  Nick noticed that I did not have the Gypsy Queen mini of Braun's from last year, and, he also pulled one of the retail chrome Heritage cards to send my way:

2.  "Cocaine Blues"

Johnny Cash struggled with addiction his whole life. He made several trips to rehab, spent time overnight in jail from time to time for possession of controlled substances, and generally abused both amphetamines and barbiturates during much of his adult life. This was an old folk song that a number of artists, including a personal favorite, Uncle Tupelo, performed.  Here's Cash's version, live from Folsom Prison:

He's an easy mark for the cocaine songs, and thankfully he didn't have to go through rehab for drugs on multiple occasions, but Paul Molitor famously struggled with cocaine addiction in the late 1970s and early 1980s as well.  Somewhere, Nick found a 1988 Molitor O-Pee-Chee and the sparkly 2014 Bowman Is Back Insert of Molitor and was kind enough to ship them to me:

3.  "Blue Train"

This song was from one of Cash's sessions at Sun Records, but it was not released until after Cash had left Sun to sign with Columbia.

This song title fits for the Topps base set and Opening Day efforts for this year for Milwaukee. I like the design -- it's good to see Topps hearing a lot of the comments on blogs that matching cards' borders with the team colors is a good thing.  Nick sent me two cards that fall into this category -- one of which is a foil parallel and one of which is an Opening Day card:

4.  "Chicken In Black"

For the first time in, well, forever, I was hoping for a Gary Sheffield card.  You see, this song was written by Cash as a self-parodying protest to try to get Columbia to drop him from the label.  It worked -- he was gone two years later -- but the song itself tells the sort-of funny story about a three-way brain transplant gone bad.

You could probably figure out why I'd say Sheffield would work there.  I'll use the song instead for the men who preceded and succeeded Sheffield as the Brewers starting shortstop, a Sportsflics card of Ernest Riles and a Toys R Us boxed set card of Bill Spiers:

5. "One Piece at a Time"

As a kid, I always enjoyed Cash's song about a scavenging auto worker who built a Frankenstein Cadillac by taking one piece of it at a time from his job in Detroit.  The song lyrics even refer to the car as the "Psycho-Billy Cadillac."

In my mind, the perfect Psycho-Billy player was Brooks Kieschnick.  As a pitcher, he was an outstanding hitter whose presence on the team as a potential extra bat was never used enough.

6.  "Wabash Cannonball"

Johnny Cash was neither the first nor the last to sing this old folk tune, and his version is not the most famous either -- Roy Acuff's probably is.

To be fair, the Wabash River does not go through Muncie, Indiana -- the White River, one of the main tributaries to the Wabash, does. Having little tie to this player other than "he just got to Milwaukee and now he's on my fantasy baseball team", I don't have much to go on yet for Muncie native Adam Lind.

7.  "The Wanderer"

I have liked this song that Johnny Cash did with U2 since it was released in 1993 on U2's "Zooropa" album. 

My use here is a stretch.  It's not like Travis Ishikawa has played on a ton of teams -- he started with San Francisco, came to Milwaukee in 2012, went to the Yankees and Baltimore in 2013, then returned to the Bay in 2014.  But, this 2013 mini of him is my excuse to get this into the post.

8.  "I've Been Everywhere"

This song got licensed to a motel chain to use for its advertisements.  Since Cash covered the song, I'm not complaining too loudly, I suppose.

  

This Mike Ferraro card from 1972 might have been everywhere too.  Ferraro himself was a long-time coach for the Yankees over a number of different stints and also managed the Indians and the Royals.

9.  "Guess Things Happen That Way"

A song that hit number 1 on the Country chart and number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1958, "Guess Things Happen That Way" was a mix of doo-wop and gospel and sounds very much like it came from 1958.

I am using this song for two guys whose last year in Milwaukee might have been 2014. Rickie Weeks and Yovani Gallardo both find themselves in new uniforms this year.  I guess things happen that way.

The Weeks is a Fleer mini die-cut...which you can't see from this scan because the die-cutting was to round off one corner.  The Gallardo is, of course, from Topps Heritage.

10.  "Folsom Prison Blues"

This song traditionally started off nearly every one of Cash's live shows and, of course, is a classic.

The Brewers this year apparently are talking about having Carlos Gomez leading off.  So, here's his chrome Heritage card that Nick sent to finish off this fantastic PWE:

Nick, thank you for the great cards and for the excuse to put up a 10-song Johnny Cash playlist on my blog. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did in writing it!