Cards from an Award-Winning Writer

I forget exactly how it was that I started reading Matthew Prigge's articles on the Shepherd Express website about the Brewers. I would venture to guess that I was researching one of my posts and happened across one of his articles. It may have been his "Best 20 Brewers baseball cards ever" article, or it might have been looking at the Brewers Free Agent signings. I just don't recall.

I'm very glad that I did find his article, though. I commented on his post and started following him on Twitter. Since that time, he's started getting integrated into our online baseball card community -- even starting up his own blog called Summer of '74 where he is working on two Brewer-related projects: collecting the all-time roster of Brewers and, in addition, collecting the all-time roster of Brewers in autographs.

Matt's also an award-winning history author. Earlier this month, he received an award from the Milwaukee County Historical Society called the Gambrinus Prize, which is awarded each year to the best book-length work on Milwaukee History. Receiving that award also allowed him to meet Bud Selig.

Being a fellow Brewer collector and being a fair amount younger than me means that Matt had a bunch of Brewers cards from the late 1990s and early 2000s that I did not have. He also threw in a few extra autographs. So, without further introduction (because this one is getting long already), let's get to the stars of the show: the cards.

Of course, I can't leave well enough alone, so I'm going to intersperse music that the Shepherd Express brings to my mind...which means music from about 1994-1995, the year I lived and worked in Milwaukee between college and law school. Get ready for songs from Alternative Music's best year ever.

We'll get this started with the underrated Dinosaur Jr. Lead singer J Mascis formed this band in Amherst, playing their first gig as "Mogo" at a party at UMass. While originally this was a band, by the time the mid-1990s hit it literally was just Mascis. Previously, Lou Barlow was a member of the band before he quit and formed two excellent bands -- Sebadoh and Folk Implosion.

Barlow and Mascis have put their bad blood behind them now and began playing together again in 2005 and have since. They are touring Europe right now before coming back to the US to tour this fall.

These 2002 Fleer Triple Crown cards are not anything special or fantastic or wonderful, but at least it is a different look and sound and type of card from what goes on now. This set featured some parallels that sound familiar if you collect any of those "Donruss" cards: they had three sets of parallels numbered to each hitter's batting average, home runs, and RBI.

As Baseball Card Pedia points out, it goes without saying that the pitchers did not get any parallels. Consider the hitting environment in 2002, that's probably appropriate. Otherwise, it appears to be a pretty nondescript set. It's the usual suspects in terms of inserts of that era and features the usual allegedly game-used items being hacked up into little pieces and put into cards, with some dual relics, some triple relics, and some autographs.

1994 was the year that Soundgarden jumped into the American musical collective consciousness. Grunge music -- the "Seattle" sound -- probably hit its apex in 1994. You had Kurt Cobain's death in April of 1994, which caused that band to be frozen in time as my generation's parallel Beatles. Pearl Jam continues on today as the Rolling Stones counterpoint. I guess that makes Soundgarden something like Herman's Hermits or The Yardbirds and Alice In Chains is like the Dave Clark Five or something. 

I am not a big fan of analogies like those, to be honest. There will ever be only one band like the Beatles. I don't know the other bands well enough to make proper comparisons. In fairness, ever since the Beatles came onto the scene, bands have been trying to be "the Beatles meets (fill in the blank)." In an interview I saw very recently, Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters, Nirvana) said that Soundgarden's song "Black Hole Sun" nailed the combination that Nirvana in particular was trying to hit: The Beatles meet Black Sabbath. 

All that said, I know that Chris Cornell's voice was unique, and his lyricism underneath the loudness and occasional angriness of his singing was incredible. 

 

As to falling on Black Days, let's talk about the Milwaukee Brewers farm system for much of its history. The Brewers have had perhaps three to four major influxes of talent based on their own farm system. You had that first successful team of 1978 through 1983, built off the early drafts and a few crucial trades by Harry Dalton. Then, you had the meteoric rise of the 1987 to 1992 teams -- punctuated by inconsistency due to key pitching injuries.

After that, the team farm system lay fallow for the better part of a decade (1992 through 2005) thanks to poor drafts and player evaluation by Sal Bando's GM team. These cards above come from the very midst of that famine of talent. The "Black Days" of the farm system came thanks to a run starting in 1991 and ending in 2002 where the only real major league players that the team drafted in the first round of the draft were Geoff Jenkins and Ben Sheets.

Example: with the fourth overall pick in 1994, the Brewers selected Antone Williamson. Later that round, the Red Sox picked Nomar Garciaparra, the Dodgers selected Paul Konerko, the Mariners chose Jason Varitek, and the Mets signed Jay Payton. Add to that incompetence in trades -- not selling assets like Geoff Jenkins because he was a fan favorite until it was far too late -- and in signing Jeffrey Hammonds to a contract based on what Hammonds might have been rather than what he was, and you have a recipe for ugliness.

To finish the thoughts above, after 2005, you had the group of Rickie Weeks, Ryan Braun, Prince Fielder, and Corey Hart that came of age in 2008 and were supplemented thereafter by Jonathan Lucroy and Carlos Gomez. The fourth influx of talent, of course, is the next one based off all the tear-down trades.

Okay, I talk about Bando's screwups a lot. Maybe I should take just one blog post and destroy his time as GM. I'd probably be the only one who'd read that.

I've featured music from Pearl Jam here probably more than any other artist. I guess that's just an indication that they really are my favorite band.

I saw them play at Summerfest in 1995 for $10, and it was a fantastic show. It was both a great day and a bad day, though. It was a great day because I saw an excellent band with a great opening act. It was a bad day because I got heat stroke that day (probably because of mixing too much heat with too much beer and not enough water) so it ruined a date with a really attractive woman whom I never went out with again.

C'est la vie.

These were the last of the Fleer cards that Matthew sent to me. A reflection on the poor farm system and poor state of the team in the late 1990s and early 2000s is the fact that the Brewers were ignored pretty regularly by card companies. Basically, it was Burnitz and Jenkins, occasionally Cirillo and Sexson, and then add in random young players.

Is this different from the Brewers of 2016? Not particularly, except for the fact that the 2016 farm system seems much healthier and is held in higher regard than those days 16 to 18 years ago.

The waiting right now, though, is driving me mad.

One of the albums of 1994 that reflected perhaps a pinnacle of a band but at the same time showed a band nearing its end was Monster by R.E.M.  When 1994 started, if you had told me that I'd be moving to Athens, Georgia, in August of 1995 for law school, I would have been very surprised.

I had not really considered Georgia as an option until I started looking at the U.S. News & World Report school rankings in the Fall of 1994. Once I saw that it was a top-30 law school and fairly inexpensive for an out-of-state student, I applied. It was the last school to send me my acceptance letter, and it turned out to be my first choice when it was all said and done.

There's always the counterfactual "what could have been" type questions I could ask. What if I'd gone to Wisconsin instead? Would I be working in Milwaukee? Chicago? Somewhere else? I rarely think that way though.

 

 

My "what could have been" questions tend to relate more to things outside my own life. What might Rickie Weeks have been had he not had wrist injuries constantly early in his career which took away key development time and sapped some of his bat speed and power from him? What might Ben Sheets's career looked like had he not thrown so many innings and pitches for teams going nowhere? What might have been in 2008 had Sheets not blown out his elbow just before the playoffs, taking the Brewers down to CC Sabathia as a top-level starter?

Those kinds of counterfactuals are fun. Well, fun to think about and rewrite history, at least.

In 1994 and 1995, I worked with a guy, Bill, who really introduced me into the depths and best of Britpop. It coincided with Oasis becoming huge here in the U.S. thanks to their debut album, "Definitely Maybe." I got to see Oasis play at The Rave in Milwaukee in March of 1995. Bill got a group of his friends together, and we all went to the show. It was a great show, definitely.

But it got better.

One of Bill's friends was this woman who was a DJ for WMSE -- the college rock station broadcasting from the Milwaukee School of Engineering. She talked to some of the guys on the soundboard about where the band would be hanging out after the show, and she talked me into trying to find them. So, we went to the hotel where the manager types said they'd be, and we waited for maybe 20 or 30 minutes. Seeing nothing, she suggested that we go back to The Rave and see if the band was still there.

We parked literally right in front of the front door and walked in. A cleaning guy looked at us and we just said, "We've got some friends backstage that we're waiting on." So, we walked straight back and there was Liam Gallagher (the lead singer) just talking and hanging out. He insisted that we go get a beer, and we started talking to him. Being the geek I was, I brought up the press's reports of arguments with his brother ("Those tabloids love to talk shite, don't they, right?") and his love of Manchester City ("Y'go anywhere in town, right, and no one supports that other team. They're all Citeh all the time!"). The DJ asked for his autograph on a CD liner notes, and I got my ticket stub signed. We got everyone in the band to sign both items, had a beer with the band, and left. 

I learned an important lesson that day -- just act like you belong and you'll go far.

Here's the Upper Deck cards that Matt sent me. Much like my encounter with Oasis, Upper Deck just acted like they belonged. It's too bad for baseball collectors that they have been cut out of the baseball card business by MLB. I'd guess they pissed MLB off with that 2010 effort that didn't do enough to avoid the use of logos and color schemes. Upper Deck did great things in baseball card designs, but all we get now is just whatever Topps throws out there. Too bad.

Punctuating that year in music for most alternative music fans, of course, was Kurt Cobain's death followed by the release of the "Unplugged in New York" CD. That Unplugged was a master class of sorts in how lyrical Cobain and Nirvana really were. 

"Pennyroyal Tea" was always one of my favorite Nirvana songs too for its self-centered lines about being on my time with everyone -- I think that was the start of my real understanding that the less that I cared about what others thought about me, the better my own mental health would be. Yes, I still care about what others think -- just not so much that it makes me do things that I'm not comfortable doing.

The final four cards here were well worth the wait. A Milwaukee Braves team card from 1962 and then three autographed cards of PC guys Jeff Cirillo and Ben Oglivie and my personal point of wonderment for 2017 Topps in Chris Capuano on a card that comes from 2006 -- you know, when Capuano was actually a key member of the team.

My thanks to Matt for the great cards, for the great writing, and my congratulations once again for the award!

Thankfully Another Baseball Card Blog Popped Up

Writing all the time is not easy. This is especially true when the writing being done is blogging. It is legitimately difficult to come up with new or different or at least interesting topics or angles or themes for blogs. New voices can be lost in the wilderness or missed entirely. Voices that have been with us for a while lose their enthusiasm, though thankfully they have not left entirely.

For others, life gets in the way. Some folks sign off for a while because they move. Thankfully, Robért at $30 a Week Habit has come back, though posting much less frequently. Others shutter up shop completely only to return in yet another excellent new form.

Still others get new jobs that prevent regular updating. I'm still waiting for Julie from A Cracked Bat to emerge from her slumber, for instance, and I hope she's still collecting and reading.

I was at that point back in late 2014, as I transitioned away from the massive law firm I worked for then to now working in a small firm more for myself. The fall is tough for me generally with college football thrown in too.

Another blogger who has seen his energy and time taken up with a new venture in life is regular commenter Mike from Not Another Baseball Card Blog. Mike is kind enough to comment frequently on the drivel that I post here, often ignoring my horrible non sequiturs and providing insight on Canadian cards that only an Ontarian can provide. I look forward to those comments.

Mike was kind enough to put together a sweet package of cards to send my way. To accompany these cards, let's talk about Mike's homeland about which he is rightfully proud.

1. Mike lives in Ontario. At 1,076,395 sq. km (415,598 sq. miles), it has more land area than France and Spain combined.

Thank you, TripAdvisor, for that fun fact. I mean, all you need to do to see that Ontario is huge is to look at a map. It stretches from almost all the way to Montreal almost due north of New York City all the way to the oddity that is the Lake of the Woods north of Minnesota. Interesting side trivia tidbit: Lake of the Woods features several islands and two peninsulas (Elm Point and Angle Township) which can only be accessed by boat if you do not want to leave the United States.



To accompany the Lake of the Woods and the huge size of Ontario, let's go straight to O-Pee-Chee from 1984. I live so far south that finding O-Pee-Chee is like seeing Ogopogo/Naitaka (an alleged lake monster that some call the Canadian version of the Loch Ness Monster), so I'm always psyched to see the OPC.

2. Until 1999, a popular misconception was that Yonge Street was the longest street in the world.

Yonge Street starts on the shores of Lake Ontario in Toronto about two blocks east of the Air Canada Centre. The reason that I say it was a misconception is that Wikipedia said so -- that Guinness mistakenly gave credit to the rest of Ontario Highway 11 as being part of Yonge Street. Seen that way, the road would have been 1,896 km (1,178 miles) long. In reality, it's just 86 km/53 miles.



Fitting the realm of being something of a mistake are Topps Opening Day cards. Don't get me wrong -- I like the general idea of the Opening Day set, with its limited number of parallels and not being driven by hits. Its problem is well documented, though -- it's the same card as the Topps Flagship, making it just another lazy parallel rather than being something cool and different.

The problem is, though, how lazy Topps has gotten with its exclusive license. I doubt that will change any time soon.

3. Ontario is Canada's most populous province with over 13.5 million people -- about 40% of Canada's overall population.

Most people live along Lake Ontario -- from Brantford to Kitchener through Brampton and Toronto and all the way east to Peterborough (Mike's hometown). This "Greater Golden Horseshoe" area (I didn't make that title up -- the Ontario Provincial website did) has more than 9 million of the 13.5 million people in Ontario.

Outside of that area, Ontario is probably about as populated as Alaska is outside of Juneau and Anchorage. Including everyone in the equation, Ontario has approximately 32.5 people per square mile (sorry, using miles here for ease of comparison). If Ontario were a U.S. State (no jokes, folks), it would be less densely populated than Kansas and Utah and would rank 42nd overall -- ahead of Nevada, Nebraska, Idaho, New Mexico, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Alaska (which has 1.3 people per square mile). 

In terms of pure size, Ontario is still dwarfed by Alaska -- in fact, the difference in acreage between Alaska and Ontario is nearly equivalent to the area in the State of California (about 155,000 square miles) but it would be second overall. One more odd comparison: the difference in square mileage between Ontario and number 3 Texas is 154,366 square miles -- again, nearly the size of California. And yet, between California and Texas, there are over 67 million people.

That got a little too into the weeds for most of you, I'd bet, but stuff like that kind of fascinates me. My weird, trivia-filled head thrives on crazy information like that in a way that my collection thrives on receiving great serial numbered cards like this one from people. It's actually my third one, but since all three are serial numbered, they all count as separate cards in my Yount Collection, which has ballooned to 910 as of Saturday. I still need 90 more new items to get to my goal of 1000 by the end of the year, though.

4. Newfoundland is where the first Europeans settled in North America -- around the year 1000.

I know most of you are educated sorts such that you realize that Christopher Columbus's "discovery" of America was less like discovery and more like finding a new restaurant because you took a wrong turn, got hopelessly lost, and ended up stopping because otherwise your partner would kill you. I think most people understand that the Vikings -- perhaps an offshoot from Vinland under Leif Erickson around the year 1000 -- came and settled at a place now called L'Anse aux Meadows.

While not a good analog in anyway, I think this 1959 Topps Wes Covington is a worthy way to finish out this fantastic envelope of cards from Mike.

I hope some day to visit L'Anse aux Meadows where the first settlement is located. It's at the very northern tip of Newfoundland and it's truly a place that is difficult to reach -- basically, it's at least two or three flights even from a major metropolis like Atlanta, and even flying into Deer Lake still puts you nearly 5 hours away driving.

I guess R.E.M. had it right, though. You really can't get there from here:

Mike, thanks a ton for these great cards. Sorry I didn't choose Canadian music to go with this post, but this R.E.M. song leapt into my head!

#SuperTrader Mark Hoyle

Mark Hoyle was the first person I ever traded with who simply commented on my blog and who does not have a blog of his own. Part of me is envious of that, since the time it takes to write blog posts is not inconsequential. 

But, I enjoy the creative (okay, sort of creative) writing that I get to do here. I get to let my madman run wild here, so to speak, and just let the posts go where they go based on the cards I get, the music in my head, or the music that the cards lead to.

I have a post brewing inside me coming up that has nothing to do with the cards I've received or traded away, but I think I need to cogitate for a while on it. At least until after this post is done.

So, let's stay light and happy and highlight the cards that Mark sent my way!

That's right -- clap along if you feel like that's what you want to do! Even if the scan of this first card is really dark and the card itself is a bit dark in hand thanks to Topps not doing a very good job with the card's concept and printing in the first place:

When the light catches this "Diamond Stars" insert of Derrick Turnbow from the 2007 Opening Day set just right, it's a really cool card. Looking at it directly without any reflected light, it looks like a bad attempt at an Upper Deck hologram logo sticker from 1991. 

Wait, that's not Happy!

Let's try again.

That's it! Let's be happy together! What makes everyone happy? Cards of legends, that's what. Everyone appreciates a Hall of Famer, or at least respects the Hall of Famer, right?

These two cards were needed for my Paul Molitor collection. Can you tell that the Topps Magazine card of Paul Molitor is from the early 1990s? Really, you could? What was the give away? Oh, yeah. The very 1990s design, of course. Surprisingly, this card's back notes that it is "Design-a-Card Winner #1," which means that someone at Topps not only had to wade through all kinds of crappy designs, but it means that there were all kinds of crappy designs far worse than this one!

The other card shows Molitor suited up and giving his induction speech in 2004. Man, that was 12 years ago already? Molitor turns sixty years old this year? Gah. And, he's married to a woman named Destini? Really? Now I'm getting depressed again.

Dang it, I was trying to be Happy! Let's try this again...

If there is anything that is almost always guaranteed to make me happy, it is music from Athens, Georgia. In my time there for law school, I ran into/saw (and left alone) Michael Stipe several times. He was a strange guy, no doubt -- wearing clothes that no one else on the planet would wear -- but everyone in Athens really just let him live his life because, well, the guy is a legend. 

Even better is that Kate Pierson is stunningly gorgeous in this video. I freely admit that I had a pretty huge crush on her around this time...and here's a little secret: in this video in 1991, she was forty-three years old! Wow. Even today, now that she is married to her longtime girlfriend and is sixty-seven years old, she still looks pretty good...which sounds weird to say but it's true.

These cards are a bit like Kate Pierson in that B-52s video -- they are forty-two years old now, but they still look damn good. Sure, Felipe Alou's card has some writing on it -- probably some youngster trying to fix that satiny hat and giving up -- but Tom Murphy has sharp corners on it. It's a very rare card in my collection that is over 30 years old and has sharp corners! So, Murphy is definitely a condition upgrade for the one currently in my Brewers collection.

Okay, now I'm feeling better...gotta keep things light and happy, right? Light...

Wait, The Smiths tend to be universally depressing, what with Morrissey's never-ending yearning and with lyrics like, "And if a double decker bus, crashes into us, to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die."

Wow, that got dark. But if we are talking about baseball and lights that will never go out -- and to be completely serious for a moment -- there is no better personification of overcoming years and years of racism, ugly treatment, and demonization than Hank Aaron.



Hank truly is a light that will never go out, in many ways. He is, of course, a legend in Atlanta and Milwaukee. I chose not to collect him as a player collection in large part because he really is identified much more with Atlanta despite spending more of his time in Milwaukee thanks to breaking Babe Ruth's record as an Atlanta Brave. Of course, he also resides here and is a special assistant to whatever general manager the Braves have at any point in time. Still, these cards are excellent and much welcomed.

We've gotten a bit wistful here now. Let's pick up the pace again for the last song:

What Jeremiah the bullfrog was doing with mighty fine wine, the world will probably never know. Also, I'm a little suspicious of Three Dog Night as well since they want to throw away cars and bars with wars. I like going to bars. 

Still, I can't argue too much with this song, such that it glorifies being a straight-shootin' son of a gun.

And it's joyful, so let's be joyful about my original "main" player collection from the 1980s alongside my "main" player collection now:

That Gary Carter collision at the plate is pretty cool. It must come from the late 70s or early 80s, because that sure looks like a Padre-clad Ozzie Smith there. Still, I don't know why the card refers to Carter blocking the plate in the 1979 All-Star Game with this photo/drawing on the front...since Smith and Carter would have been on the same side in that game, of course.

Finally, that Robin Yount 3000th Hit card. Sure, no logos, but still a great action shot. If cards simply showed players playing baseball with normal photos -- not overly redone, not overly painted up, not overly airbrushed/photo shopped, not overly blurred in the background such that the player could be playing literally anywhere, and not overly zoomed in -- maybe we collectors wouldn't find as many reasons to complain as we do.

Oh, who am I kidding? We're a cantankerous bunch of old guys (and gals). We're programmed to complain and not to be happy.

Mark, thank you very much for these and all the rest of the cards you sent my way. They are very much appreciated. 

And to the rest of you?