Ginter Bits and More from Bubba

I really shouldn't post about more cards from Matt of Bubba's Bangin' Batch of Baseball Bits on a night featuring yet another World Series game -- especially Game 7 -- but I have the time to post tonight.  Poor Matt -- my posts about the cards he's sent me are always getting overlooked. Still, at least this time it is baseball cards and not soccer card. I'm sure that will make people happier.

If you've read Matt's blog, you know that he happened upon an eBay listing of a case of Allen & Ginter Black from which the autographs had pretty much been removed (other than a great surprise -- you should read it!). Thankfully, he was nice enough to share some of his largesse with me, along with some other great cards.

Let's ring those cards in with a nominally appropriate song:

It's a nominally appropriate song only, because it truly is a sad song. There are a few songs in my life that I immediately associate with a particular person or time, and this is one of them. In 2002, I had been dating a woman for about a year and things just fell apart between us. She pretty much moved on without telling me -- nice of her to do that, no? -- I had a weekend where I pretty much just stayed in and felt sorry for myself. I listened to this song repeatedly. It was pathetic yet cathartic. 

Baseball cards have much more of a cathartic, nostalgic feel to me. Yeah, I get upset about stuff that Topps does, mainly because we are so reliant on Topps, but in the end I really enjoy collecting. It's brought me back to being a better fan of baseball, too -- I know much more now about the American League than I did before because all I cared about was NL-only fantasy baseball.

So, speaking of nostalgic and nominal appropriateness, here are the four A&G Black cards Bubba sent my way:



I'd appreciate the Molitor more if it weren't the same damn photo we have been seeing over and over again in Archives and any number of other products for the past 5 years. Sucks that Topps relies so heavily on Getty -- and then so heavily on the photos they have already purchased, in order to save money. Otherwise, though, I like A&G black -- it's a good-looking card.

Bubba did not stop with the Black, though, so let's see what else we've got. With music? Yes, of course. You do know whose blog you're reading, right?

Sorry Cleveland fans -- I really do hope the Cubs win tonight. I've probably jinxed them by saying that -- hell, a stiff breeze seemingly can jinx the Cubs, after all -- so it's all Pearl Jam today, featuring Cubs fan Eddie Vedder.

Yellow Ledbetter is a song that Vedder often just makes up as he goes. There are no set lyrics to it. Sometimes, Topps has that same feel -- especially when it comes to inserts and parallels. This is an Allen & Ginter back mini parallel of Jimmy Nelson from this years set. It's nice and all, but the parallels featuring different backs are pretty damn pointless. Who displays a card with its back showing just to show off the variation? No one I know.

This song was written by Vedder when he was a teenager. He wrote it about his own mother's plight with his stepfather, Peter Mueller. As his Wikipedia page points out correctly (and as you can hear for yourself on this Youtube upload of the 1994 Pearl Jam show from the Fox Theater in Atlanta, which was recorded for posterity), Vedder says that the song is "dedicated to the bastard that married my Momma." The song takes on a bizarre, surreal feel when Sugarland sings it, though.

While I wouldn't say that Hank Aaron deserves that introduction, he definitely deserves the chorus -- you really can't find a better man in many respects. Aaron backs up his big name by doing a lot of charitable work and caring greatly for those less fortunate.

"Given to Fly" is one of those songs that you hear and you feel better. In talking about the song, Vedder said that his conception for the song was it feeling like a cardboard children's book -- "it's a fable, that's all." The song revolves around a riff that Mike McCready said he came up with while being stuck in his condo on a snowy day in Seattle.

The great thing: Vedder dedicated the song at Wrigley in August to Joe Maddon.

Sure, it's not Ginter, but I'll take a 7-year-old relic of Rickie Weeks that I don't have any day (or any age relic, or any Rickie Weeks card I don't have, or any Brewers card I don't have, of course).  The photo of Miller Park's roof looming made me think of this song -- that, and the fact that the lack of a solid background makes Rickie look like he's just floating in space here.

It's hard to believe that this song was released 14 years ago now. Man, time sometimes feels like it goes by quickly. This song musically feels like an Irish drinking song to me -- like you should be swaying back and forth with a Guinness in your hand. Lyrically, it's much more existential and focuses on internal security. 

It should come as no surprise that this song was written by Vedder just before the first show that Pearl Jam did after the Roskilde tragedy in 2000. If you're not familiar, Pearl Jam was at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. People fell down on one spot as the crowd rushed to the stage. They couldn't get up, and then crowd surfers ended up falling on top of them. This caused nine people to be crushed to death. In fact, Pearl Jam wrote a song on their "Riot Act" album called "Love Boat Captain" in which the lyrics reference "nine friends we'll never know."

Pearl Jam refused for many years after to do any festivals, and now only does a few.

But, "I Am Mine" is about being secure, being able to reassure yourself that things will be okay -- that you can get past the obstacles in life. 

Many of you won't like me saying this, but you have to admit that Ryan Braun has gotten past some big obstacles -- mostly self-inflicted -- that have happened in his life and really turned in a top-notch season this past year. Lots of people hoped he was done, and in 2014 he looked done -- slash line of .266/.324/.453. This year, though, he looked back to himself -- .305/.365/.538. That's a solid season, and for a guy making the money he is making, that is earning his pay. Sure, he may never be the 150-game-a-year guy he used to be, but I'll take 135 games like this past year any day (30 HR, 91 RBI, 16 SB). 

Matt, thanks again for the great cards, and enjoy the last game of the 2016 baseball season tonight.

Mail from Ketchupman36

I'm always on the lookout for new blogs. I remember how long it seemed to take for my blog to get any traction with other bloggers. Some of those earliest posts barely reached double digits in hits -- like the 10 hits for my post highlighting my TTM from the early 1980s of the then-league presidents, Lee MacPhail and Chub Feeney, for example.  A few didn't even get that -- like the paltry five hits for the first and last of what was going to be a series called
Sunday's Strange Set from the 1980s.

Like I said, I know how it feels when you write something and it seems the only person who reads it is you -- and you get five hits because you forget to turn off that setting where your views count as hits and you reloaded the page 4 times hoping for a comment. 

Of course, I am throwing stones in a glass house because, well, I comment on posts approximately 5% of the time when I read them. Sorry.

At any rate, a new blog popped up in May called "Rekindling the Cardboard Flame." Operating under the nom de plume of Ketchupman36 and the nom de Twitter of The Cardboard Flame (so, let me call him TCF), RTCF is a well-written blog that appears about 8 or 9 times a month. 

A name like that deserves a song:




Um, yeah, I must have missed that song when it came out in 2002, but "Las Ketchup" are a pretty hot group of women in that "Spanglish" version. I guess "Las Ketchup" is the Spanish version of "Spice Girls." I guess it's cool that they are from Córdoba in Spain; I spent nearly 2 hours there one day on my honeymoon, so that makes them practically my cousins.

Anyway, back on point...I've exchanged messages on Twitter with TCF a few times. When I heard that he had an inkling of possibly maybe liking basketball cards, I quickly duped, er, offered to send him all the basketball cards I had -- maybe 150 or so, more or less. He told me sure, he'd take them off my hands.

In return, I got two great cards. Trust me -- I'm more than happy with my end of that bargain.

The first card I got was this very nice Robin Yount Insert from this year's Stadium Club -- the "Legends Die Cut" insert. As with nearly every recently issued product, I tend to shy away from buying unopened boxes of cards due to the fact that the Brewers end up with like 5 cards out of 700 in a set. I guess with this one, though, I should have been in the Club for it.

For some reason, this song has been stuck in my head for a couple of days now thanks to a Sporcle quiz that included the word, "Hug" in it. My brain works in ways I can't explain.

The other card that I got from TCF was even more inspiring:

From the 2007 MLB Artifacts comes this Rickie Weeks "Divisional Artifacts" relic with a serial number of 64 out of 199. In many respects, it's been good seeing Rickie Weeks continuing to hang on as a utility player in Arizona. Sure, he's had an almost league average season this year (OPS+ of 98) in 155 plate appearances, but by all indications he's fit in his role fairly well after last year's nightmare in Seattle.

Let's close with a little bit more rap -- Rickie's walk-up music this year in Arizona. Rickie is surrounded by a ton of very questionable song choices by his teammates, with Luke Bryan (Andrew Chafin), Florida Georgia Line (Chris Owings & Shelby Miller), Brantley Gilbert (Jake Barrett), Randy Houser (Paul Goldschmidt), and Eric Church (Phil Gosselin) all making games in Phoenix sound like a dried-out Nashville bar. Thankfully, Rickie has stuck to his guns and uses Lecrae:




Many thanks go out to the Ketchupman a/k/a The Cardboard Flame for these two great cards. I hope this is the first trade of many more.

Binders for Brewers, Part II

Back in February, Dave the Card Junkie and I made a trade where I gave Dave binders and pages from the massive Christmas Horde in exchange for my getting cards. We did the same thing last weekend.

With Roger's one-man show in town on Dave's side of town, I convinced him to drive the twenty minutes to meet me at the hotel where Roger sets up and take more binders and pages off my hands. He then handed me a massive stack of Brewers in a paper bag. It wasn't exactly clandestine or furtive, but it was still exciting for me to get those cards!

So, to thank Dave, I scoured his Twitter feed for songs that he had posted there. After all, doesn't 44 minutes of prog rock featuring a flautist deserve as much publicity as possible?

Of course it does.

I can think of no player better suited with an introduction of a self-indulgently long prog rock song than Jeromy Burnitz. I'm not sure why that seems appropriate, but it does. Burnitz reminds me of an outfielder version of Dan Uggla -- very much a bro -- who would apparently empty out bottles of shampoo in the showers on road trips after the last game of the series and pee in them. 

Oh, you're such a funny guy, Jeromy!

Burnitz was still a very good homerun hitter in his travels around the major leagues playing with seven different teams (four in Flushing, bits of two seasons with Cleveland, a year each with Colorado, Pittsburgh, the Dodgers, and the Cubs, and six in Milwaukee). He was an All-Star once in Milwaukee and actually started the 1999 game in place of the injured Tony Gwynn. He even finished second in the Home Run Contest to Ken Griffey Jr.

A little morning Black Sabbath is a great way to wake up. Geezer Butler on bass really runs every Sabbath song. Yeah, Tony Iommi's lead guitar is really distinctive, but when you hear that underside of each song -- the thumping bass -- you know who is really in charge.

These three guys tended to be the understudies for the Brewers' stars of the time during which they played with the team. Of the three, the only one who ever led any Brewers team in WAR was, perhaps surprisingly, Corey Hart in 2007. Augustine really had only two decent seasons -- his first two in the major leagues -- while Nilsson was always behind Jeff Cirillo, or John Jaha, or Ricky Bones, or Greg Vaughn, or B.J. Surhoff, or all of the above in his years in Milwaukee.

Watching the MLB Draft's first couple of rounds on Thursday night was like watching NBA Draft coverage from about 15 years ago or so. I say that because the random assortment of "experts" that MLB Network compiled engaged in the most obvious of lazy comparisons when talking about players. The tall, African-American centerfielder from Atlanta had to be a Jason Heyward comparison. The good-hitting catcher with questions about his fielding was, of course, Kyle Schwarber's younger twin. If a player was white, he would only be compared to white players. If the player was black, then only black players would be comparable.

If MLB is going to be that way, then I will post Rickie Weeks cards with Robert Johnson's music. To be fair, posting old blues songs and then putting up cards of Ryan Braun just doesn't feel right.

Here's a new one on me. Well, okay, to be fair, I'd never listened to that Jethro Tull song before, but at least I'd heard of the band. I've never heard of the The Avalanches before. This video is just incredibly weird. Perhaps, to appreciate the song, it might be better to read something else and not pay attention to the video at all. 



Sort of like how I pay no attention any more to any of the Ryan Braun haters out there. I could get all worked up and point to the fact that Braun just took steroids rather than beating up his girlfriend or wife, or being a swimmer-rapist with a Stanford scholarship, or being a racist presidential candidate or a lying dissembling presidential candidate, or being any number of far scarier, more morally reprehensible people. 

I'm really excited for when Mets fans have to hold their nose and cheer for him when the Brewers trade Braun and Lucroy to New York for Zack Wheeler, Travis d'Arnaud, Dominic Smith, and a lottery ticket like Jhoan Urena or Andres Gimenez (who are both so far away from the majors at this point that they can be nothing more than a lottery ticket)...or, when the Yankees trade Aaron Judge, Luis Severino, Domingo Acevedo, and Gary Sanchez for the two and turn Lucroy into a first-baseman to replace Teixeira.

Hahahahahahahaha!

WARNING: 

If you have epilepsy, you shouldn't watch this next video. It consists of 3:39 of the photo above repeatedly illuminated by strobe lights.

Les Claypool is another notable bass player, having come to prominence in the 1990s with the band Primus. This song is not going to be everyone's cup of tea, as it features a lot of overdubbed vocals, a fair amount of repetition, lots of self-sampling, and it isn't exactly melodic.

Not exactly melodic describes Milwaukee Brewers baseball perfectly in the time that Ben Sheets was in his pomp. The team did well in 2008 with him -- and that was his last season of making a regular rotation turn. Indeed, that season almost certainly was the death knell of Sheets's career. He threw 198-1/3 innings and got the team to the playoffs, yet he did not get to enjoy pitching in the playoffs due to a torn elbow muscle. After that injury, he threw just 168-2/3 innings over the rest of his career in 29 starts -- 20 in Oakland in 2010 and 9 in Atlanta in 2011.

A little Radiohead to close things out here. This is from Radiohead's newest album, "A Moon Shaped Pool." In typical Radiohead-fashion, it's a bit abstract. The video looks like the old Rudolph shows with stop-motion animation going on, though this is probably done with computers, if I had to guess. 

When Dave handed me the bag of Brewers, he said, "I hope that you like Geoff Jenkins." Now having 170 Geoff Jenkins cards in my PC for him, that answer is "yes, I do indeed." I have to admit, though, that my favorite card amongst these Jenkins cards is that minor league card of Jenkins with the Tucson Toros. 

For whatever reason, I'm starting to get drawn more and more to the minor league cards. It's probably the rebuild that's ongoing in Milwaukee currently that has me scouring the minor leagues. But, even as a kid, I loved reading the old Baseball Digest prospect wrap-ups each year. I'm not a rookie-card chaser, to be fair, but I love reading about and finding out about prospects.

Thanks, Dave, for the great cards. I hope you enjoy those binders.

Angus Sends Me More Cards

Angus of Dawg Day Cards has sent me cards so many times by this point that I'm running out of new or innovative ways to write blog posts about the cards. Today's angle:

A movie "from the Producer of 'Cool Runnings' called Angus. The movie came out in 1995 and was sort of the typical high school movie -- fat geeky kid who is good at football and science gets picked on by the jocks but, in the end, the geek wins the heart of the hot girl at the high school dance and the jock gets his comeuppance. By 1995, I was a bit old to be in this movie's target market -- I mean, I was 23 years old and started law school in 1995, so I was more about Clerks. 

But Clerks didn't have a character named Angus, so I'm not writing about that movie today.

All those high school movies seem to have stock characters. So, let's compare the cards I got from Angus to the characters in Angus.

Also, please note -- if you haven't seen the movie, this post will ruin it. Probably.  

1.  The Wise Old Man Providing Advice

In Angus, George C. Scott (an Academy Award Winner for his role as General George Patton) played Ivan, Angus's narcoleptic grandfather, who counsels Angus that he shouldn't worry about fitting in and, instead, he should just be himself and let people decide whether they like him or not based on that. Ivan dies midway through the movie, and his death is the turning point for Angus. 

The wise old man in the cards that Angus sent is none other than Warren Spahn. Completely unrelated information tidbit: Spahn grew up in Buffalo, New York, and attended South Park High School.

2.  The Mom Trying Her Best to Help Her Son

The truck-driving mom is called Meg and is played by a second Academy Award Winner, Kathy Bates. Meg and Ivan disagree as to the right things for Angus to do to succeed, though both only want the best for the boy. Meg and Ivan disagreed about whether Angus should transfer to another school to get away from the toxic atmosphere in his current school. Meg believed he should while Ivan believed that Angus needed to stand up for himself and get tougher.

Buck Rodgers was named the permanent Brewers Manager late in 1980. He had filled in on an acting basis during the 1980 season when George Bamberger suffered a heart attack. Bamberger stepped down in early September, and Rodgers took over the reigns again at that point. In what was the turning point of the 1982 season, Rodgers was fired on June 1 with the team record at 23-24. The team won 72 of its remaining 115 games to win the AL East and go to the World Series. I put Buck here because, well, what he was urging the team to do in 1982 was pretty clearly wrong and not working.

3.  The Mean Jock Antagonist

In the movie, the football king of the high school always dates the hot girl, calls the fat kid names, hurts others physically and mentally, and, in the end, he gets shown up. In Angus, James Van Der Beek of Dawson's Creek fame gets his major motion picture debut as the jerk jock. 

Because none of the players on the cards Angus sent to me really fit the "jerk jock" mold -- at least that I'm aware of -- I'll show this cool Fleer fabric logo patch from some time in the early 1970s. 

Anyone have any idea as to the specific date?

4.  The Geeky Sidekick to the Main Character

Another actor famous for another role played the part of the geek sidekick. His name is Chris Owen, and Owen became much more well known in the late 1990s for his role as Sherm -- "the Sherminator" -- in the American Pie franchise of movies. Owen has remained close friends since this movie with his co-star lead in the movie, Charlie Talbert.

While Cecil Cooper probably is not a geek, the oddball 7/11 coin from 1984 with its magic motion discs is sort of the geeky sidekick to the rest of the cards Angus sent. 

5. The Jock's Yes Man Sidekicks

James van der Beek's character Rick had two fellow jocks who followed along with him everywhere to help belittle all in their wake. These two characters were Mike and Andy. Mike was played by Salim Grant, who in recent years has produced music for Snoop Dogg and performed under the name Autobotic. Andy was played by Kevin Connolly -- who is far better known today as E from "Entourage."



The two yes-men in Angus's envelope to me are played by a John Axford mini from 2011 Allen & Ginter and a Bowman Heritage certified autograph of Rickie Weeks. These are both cool cards generally, but these guys are supporting characters and not the main star.

6. The Hot Girl Love Interest Who's Dating the Jock But Ends Up with the Geek

Ariana Richards played Melissa Lefevre, the girl on whom Angus had a crush. Richards was better known at the time as the "Jurassic Park" girl. She quit acting to attend college, and now she is as much an artist as she is an actress.



These two Robin Yount cards definitely were the "pretty girl" in the envelope from Angus. Both are numbered to 1000, and both were needed parallels from the parallel-happy Donruss sets/inserts of the mid-2000s.

Angus, thank you very much once again for the great cards. To take us out of this post, let's go to the big song off the Angus soundtrack -- "J.A.R." by Green Day.

Cards from #SuperTrader Play at the Plate

I'm a bit behind on seemingly just about everything these days in collecting. I have packages that arrived over two weeks ago that I have not posted. I have at least two packages to put together that I should have gotten to several weeks ago. It's not a fun feeling.  Of course, I feel like I'm always behind when it comes to sending out packages thanks to the generosity so many people have shown toward me. 

Today, I'll be highlighting an envelope I received from veteran Rangers blogger Brian at Play At The Plate. Brian is one of the members of the SuperTrader group, and it had been way too long since he and I had swapped cards. 

Just as my "nom de plume" is either Tony L. or "Off Hiatus", Brian is the Play at the Plate Dude or, on Twitter, @patpdude. So, let's look at the cards that Brian sent my way through the lens of nicknames!

Jenks 

Starting things off unimaginatively, this Phillies website says that Geoff Jenkins's nickname is either "Jenks" or "Brett Favre." I've talked about how he may have been more popular in Milwaukee than he perhaps should have been due to his uncanny likeness, so I'm happy to see that I'm not the only one to think that. I needed this Fleer Authentix card for my PC.  

Also, while I know it's been done before, an insert set with actual ticket stubs (not reprints) that go along with a particularly impressive/important day in a player's career would be quite cool, I think.

Uncle Phil

 

I'm guessing that Prince Fielder got this nickname thanks to his own resemblance of James Avery, who played Uncle Phil on "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air." Do you see it?

Maybe...other than the whole bald-head thing. James Avery died a little over two years ago at the age of 68. So if there ever is a Fresh Prince reboot starring Will Smith's son Jayden, perhaps Prince will take up the reigns as Uncle Phil.

Yankee Super Prospect

Jackson Melian was an incredibly overhyped prospect when he was a part of the Yankees Minor League system in the late 1990s. Before playing a single game and at the age of 17, he was rated the #40 prospect in baseball (all rankings by Baseball America). 

In fairness, he did play acceptably in the Gulf Coast League in 1997 at age 17 (.263/.323/.376), but his ranking then dropped to #98. He moved up to the Southern League in 1998 and hit .255/.322/.353 with a poor stolen base rate (15 steals in 27 attempts). That year saw his stock rise according to BA, with Melian moving up to #72. He moved to Tampa for his age 19 season in the Florida State League, and he showed a more patient batting eye there -- .283/.358/.413. Despite that, he stayed as the #72 prospect. 

The Yankees then shipped him to the Cincinnati Reds for Denny Neagle in what the New York Times called "sticker price" as the Reds gave up Drew Henson, Melian, Ed Yarnell, and Brian Reith. As soon as Melian was traded, he dropped off the prospect charts, never to be seen again there.

Oddly, the folks at Fleer gave Melian a Brewers-logoed card showing him in a Reds uniform -- likely from 2002 spring training. He only played 56 games in the Milwaukee system at Double-A Huntsville in 2002. I had no idea that that was even the case.

The Brewers traded him to the Cubs for a minor-league catcher. Melian never reached the majors, though he played in the Winter League in his home country of Venezuela as recently as 2015.

Junior

I just gave Weeks this nickname today. He doesn't have one listed for him anywhere that I can find. But, perhaps in an effort to sound younger than his 33 years (and, ostensibly, because he had a son that he and his wife named Rickie so he wanted to "keep [the name] alive"), he added the "Junior" to his name this past offseason.  

It's good that there aren't any other famous people nicknamed "Junior," right?

The Professor

This is another made-up nickname, but it fits for reasons I'll describe below. I feel like I've talked about Khalid Ballouli before here, but I guess not. Now I will.

Ballouli was the Brewers 6th round pick in 2002 out of Texas A&M. He pitched in five seasons in the minor leagues for the Brewers but never got higher than Double-A -- and for good reason. His results simply did not show that he should advance. Ballouli continued working on his degree at A&M in the meantime, and he graduated from there the same year he was released by the Brewers -- 2006. He earned his master's degree in 2008 and his Ph.D in 2011 -- all from A&M. 

Currently, and as the link above shows, he is an Assistant Professor in Sport and Entertainment Management at the University of South Carolina. He teaches "Sport and Entertainment Marketing," "Sport Media in Live Entertainment and Sport," and "Research Methods and Applied Statistics." I have to admit that his field of study is really interesting to me, though I've never taken a single business class in my life. Maybe that's why it's interesting.

The Kid


The highlight of the envelope from Brian came with the inclusion of the "Ultimate Star Materials" relic card of Robin Yount. I needed it for my Robin Yount collection, so that was an excellent addition.

But, I have to take issue a bit with Baseball Reference saying that Yount's nickname was "The Kid." Yes, he was called that from time to time. But those of us in Milwaukee in the late 1970s/early 1980s really did not call him that. To us, he was "Rockin' Robin," complete with that 1958 song from Bobby Day of the same name.

None of that Michael Jackson remake for us. We want that old-school stuff.

Brian/PATPDude, thank you very much for the great cards, for #SuperTrading, and especially for the Yount Relic!