S.mackdown

I'm terribly slow at posting and at catching up on trades. I have a package waiting for one trade partner, and I need to put together another trade package for another trade partner.

Jimmy from Talking S.mack cards is the exact opposite of me. He is meticulous about following up with trade offers, making sure things are acceptable on each end, etc. I sent him a bunch of those Topps Heritage Minor League cards that I opened way back when, and in return he crossed some needs off my lists (and probably kept some cards from ever getting to the want lists in the first place).

I've been in a strange, out-of-sorts mood all day today. I had trouble getting my clutch to engage properly on my car this morning to allow me to start it right away. That threw me off for the entire day -- my schedule was off, my routine was off, everything felt off. The music in my life which seems to go with that is late 1980s stuff. Random 1980s stuff.

Like:

I tipped my hand on this Pixies song going around in my head lately. The normal speed version of this song is really good. But I have always been more drawn to the "UK Surf" version. It's more pensive, and that's usually the mood I'm in when I want to hear it.  Like yesterday and today.

Nothing says "pensive" like 2009 Topps base cards. I'm being serious here. I still have card needs in that arena -- 2009 seems like the time that a lot of my trade partners started coming back, but mostly they hadn't made it back enough to have accumulated enough 2009 base cards to send Brewers to me. Plus, 2009 is too recent for most card show dealers to schlep boxes and boxes of them to shows. So, it's a big hole.

That hole got smaller, though, thanks to Jimmy's kindness here!

Most people who have heard of Oingo Boingo know their album Dead Man's Party, which features the song "Weird Science." I heard that on tape as a kid and said, "Let's buy another one of their tapes." The one I bought -- probably through BMG -- was BOI-NGO. This album never got any airplay whatsoever, as best I can tell, though this song, "We Close Our Eyes," was covered by every teen boy's late 1980s crush (Susanna Hoffs) for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer film soundtrack.

In that vein, let's show some cards from Peter Steinberg's favorite set, 1995 Fleer. Seriously, if you have duplicates, I think Peter, from Baseball Every Night, is trying to build at least 2 or 3 sets of 1995 Fleer, so send all your duplicates to him. He'll appreciate it greatly!

For some reason, it seems songs that I dig that are alternative end up on TV shows much later than when I get into them and suddenly become even more mainstream. "A Little Respect" by Erasure apparently got played on episode 3, season 1 of Scrubs. To be fair, this song did hit the top 20 in the United States, so it's not like it's entirely out of the blue.

Vince Clarke wrote the songs and played keyboards for Erasure. The guy is an awesome, visionary musician. He was a founding member of Depeche Mode, then formed Yazoo (known as Yaz here in the United States), then he started up Erasure. 

Some Upper Deck and some 1990s parallels to add to some player collections come with a little respect. I sometimes have trouble telling all the Upper Deck base sets from the 2000s apart. They all feature excellent photography that isn't overly filtered or contrasted so as to make veins pop off the card. But, they also tend to feature very similar minimalist designs. 

That, or I am just lazy and haven't taken the time to figure out which year is which yet. 

It's probably the second one.

Okay, last song to go with a great last card...inspired by what I just wrote about Vince Clarke:

This song has always kicked ass as a dance tune. When I was in my late teens, a buddy and I used to go to an underage dance club. We never had any money on us -- not even a quarter for water -- just enough to pay the cover charge and dance our asses off. While we always thought we were there trying to meet girls, the reality was we were there to hang out and have fun. We tried awkwardly to meet girls -- like teenage boys do -- but I usually ended up at least as interested in dancing like an idiot. 

I'd go home drenched in sweat, but thoroughly entertained. I loved the music -- stuff like Erasure, Yaz(oo), Ministry, Nine Inch Nails (Pretty Hate Machine came out in 1989, y'all), and even things like N.W.A. It was so much fun. 

As much as I can rail on and on about parallels, the reason I do it, I think, is because I'd like them to be more limited in scope -- maybe two or three per set tops -- and not as limited in number. I want to collect them. I want them to give me good memories 25 years from now about being shiny and pink and cool and attractive.

Well, at least as cool and attractive as this card design can be.

Jimmy, thank you so much for the great cards. They are much appreciated.

And everyone else, don't forget to send Peter your 1995 Fleer.

What Did I REALLY Have on My Walls as a Kid?

Earlier this week, I highlighted some posters I bought recently. I also mentioned the almost ridiculously sized "growth charts" that I almost certainly will never measure up to unless I have a sudden growth spurt at the age of 44. 

You might be surprised to learn, though, that I still have some of the posters that festooned my walls as a youth. They are not in the best of shape, unfortunately -- I suppose 30+ years of being folded up, put up and down on the walls, and otherwise moved around will do that to a piece of paper. 

Still, a couple of them are cool so I thought I'd share them.

To put you in the mood, let's go with some good music from the 1980s to add to the ambiance for these posters.

There we go. I started getting into Britpop in the 1980s. Well, musically, I started getting into everything in the 1980s -- heavy metal, Britpop, pop, dance, rap, classical, punk, jazz...literally everything. I had a debate partner who was way ahead of me in terms of being into all kinds of music. I hate to admit this, but I was always envious of how cool he was and how much he really didn't give a shit about what anyone thought about him. On top of everything else, he was very smart and very well-read. 

I found out later that he actually was a bit envious of me as well -- that I had such drive and ambition and focus about everything whereas he was always sort of floating and dabbling in practically everything. Human emotions and envy are strange, especially in our teens, in that we seem to pine for everything we don't have and focus on that instead of being grateful for all the things we do have.

As with many things in life, age and the passage of time have softened that envy. Sure, I can slip into envy when talking about baseball cards and how Topps issues 85 Yankees/Red Sox cards for every 1 Brewer card. It happens.

I don't remember when I got this poster. I think it actually was something that got handed out at an appearance at a Foot Locker or some other shoe store that Robin did. As you can see in this poster, Yount had a sponsorship deal with adidas for a while. It appears that this photo might have been taken during Game 4 of the 1982 World Series since that was a day game.

Game 5 was a day game as well, but it wasn't sunny that day. The lights may have made it appear brighter, but it was not sunny at all. I was there. Here's a video of that whole game. 

I love the intro mentioning the fact that the windchill for the game was 37 degrees. Of course, I don't remember that part at all.

Another band that 1980s Tony listened to a lot was Oingo Boingo. Danny Elfman fronted the band, but he became much more well-known for his writing scores for television and movies such as Chicago, Red Dragon, Good Will Hunting, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Men in Black. Also, he married to Bridget Fonda and his nephew Bodhi's wife Jenna Elfman is pretty well known too.

With hollywood royalty like that, we need baseball royalty. This poster was part of the Brewers-Pepsi Fan Club package in 1986 (I checked the schedule on the poster to make sure of that).

In looking back at that season, I'm actually amazed at how poor the Brewers' attendance was. Opening Day wasn't a sell-out -- about 3,000 short. The next game -- after a Wednesday cancellation -- drew just 5,823 people. Even a Saturday afternoon game on April 19 against the Yankees drew just 13,922. For the season, the team drew just 1,265,041 -- and that was better than both Minnesota and Seattle.

And finally:

I guess I have always appreciated music that was a little different than the usual pop music. Sure, this song hit the top 10 on the US Hot 100, peaking at #9, but it was definitely a weird song to hit the top of the charts. 1983 really was a simpler time in that respect, I suppose.

But if your house were burning, you'd want the firemen to show up, right?

Like the Yount poster sponsored by adidas, this poster of Rollie Fingers and Bruce Sutter was a Nike creation. I found a nice, new, perfect version of this on eBay this morning for the low, low price of just $139.95 and a mini version of it for $40. So, I really do wish I'd taken better care of this one.

This is especially true thanks to the scribble you might see next to Rollie:

Yup, the reason I have this is yet another of those "in-store" appearances at a shoe store by Rollie Fingers. This poster stayed on my wall as a kid for most of the 1980s before getting put away at some point. It stayed in storage, folded rather than rolled, for the better part of 25 years before I got it back when I got all the random stuff I saved as a kid shipped to me by my mom.

I'm thinking of framing this one and putting it back on the wall, but with so many other options, I'm thinking that I'll keep this one rolled up for now.