Recent Brewers from Matt Prigge

Across the country, the changing seasons often have milestones peculiar to the area. For example, here in the South, spring does not begin in March, or February, or April, or when you might otherwise thing it does. Nope, it only lasts about 30 to 45 minutes after the pollen dies down from yellow hellfury to mere annoyance, as this video explains.

One of the most certain ways that Wisconsinites can tell it is summer is when all the Catholic churches bring in two or three beer trucks, attach taps to the outside, put up a stage, and have a festival in their parking lot. This happens literally only during the months of July and August, but it keeps tons of cover bands, polka bands, and random polka-rock fusion bands busy every weekend. 

Yes, polka-rock fusion. You'd be surprised how many of these exist. And, it seems, Matt Prigge of the Summer of '74 blog and, recently, a man who picked up his second master's degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is apparently an aficionado of Wisconsin-famous band Happy Schnapps Combo. 

Matt sent me a bunch of Brewers cards mostly from 2018 and some from 2019. Rather than write all about those, I'll show some (with a little commentary) but focus here on the Happy Schnapps Combo. While you do, remember that people in Wisconsin follow bands like this around. No lie. 

Here's the stack I won't get to:

Like I said, he sent a bunch. To cover this bunch appropriately, let's go to the first Happy Schnapps Combo song I came across on YouTube. It's called "Fleet Farm (A Love Song)." 

Appropriately, this video appears to have been shot in a parking lot during a summer festival sponsored at least in part by the Port Washington Lions Club. Lions Clubs, in case you're not aware, are service organizations found in chapters around the world who apparently try to help with everything from childhood blindness to disaster relief.

Fleet Farm (not to be confused with Farm and Fleet, by the way) is store that would result if Walmart and Home Depot had a bastard child and, for good measure, they had a mutation that incorporated a Pet Smart. No kidding. Look at the website for it -- everything from guns and tree stands to lawn mowers to tires to Cookie Monster toys to dog beds. 

Of course, making things confusing is the fact that Farm and Fleet does basically the same thing on a slightly smaller scale. I never could tell those places apart. Guess that's why I had to leave Wisconsin.

Why am I highlighting a Neil Walker card? Because I'd completely forgotten that he spent 38 games with the team in 2017. He was a Yankee last year, and he's a Marlin this year. Which all makes sense, I think.

I can't imagine a more Wisconsin YouTube clip than this song. First, it's a polka. Second, you've got the random drunk guy in front of the band (is that you, Matt) in gas station sunglasses and a cut-off t-shirt and jeans dancing and singing the whole song along with the band. Third, it's a polka about Blatz beer and sauerkraut. Fourth, the guy says you can get your "Boone's Farm" by the "bubbler."

Y'all know what a bubbler is? It's a drinking fountain or a water fountain in pretty much the rest of the country, but not in southeastern Wisconsin.

Last year just after spring training ended, I noted that Yovani Gallardo was trying to make the Brewers, failed, and ended up as cannon fodder for the Rangers for a little while. I was hoping he'd make the team so I'd get more Brewers cards of him. Then I stopped paying attention and didn't realize that he did not need to make the team to get a Topps card in Series 2.

This Happy Schnapps song might be the official state song. Wisconsin is well known for its drinking, after all, and there have been a number of times when I'm there that I have wanted to yell this at someone.

It's also what Topps's set production people yell at Wisconsin fans when we complain about the questionable player selection for Brewers players -- like, for example, putting a guy who didn't even make the team in Series 2 instead of people who actually played. 

This may be one of the worst looking cards of 2018. Is Domingo Santana Thor? Look at the size of his hand next to the very small bat that appears over his shoulder. I mean, I get and understand perspective, but that bat is all wrong. It's terrible looking. And his head looks like it's the size of its own solar system.

I gotta stop looking at these new cards. They're getting me pissed off all over again!

An appropriately shitty song for a shitty card.

Okay, it's time for the MVP portion of the package. First off, we have a 2019 version of the 1984 Topps for Robin Yount. It's been said before but I'll say it again -- it's cool to see these old designs being reused, but I'd much prefer having the designs used for players who did not appear on the cards the first time around.

Of course, since Yount is about the only former Brewer that Topps has an agreement with at this point (he and Molitor, thanks to the Cooperstown agreements), I'll take what I can get.

You might be noticing a theme here from the Happy Schnapps Combo. I had never heard of them before Matt tweeted about them in passing a couple of days ago. Their whole catalog is either about the Packers or about smelling bad and toilets, it seems. 

Granted, with all the beer and brandy old-fashioneds and bratwurst and sauerkraut that get consumed in Wisconsin, it makes sense to sing about "what you know."

Another Brewer MVP in Ryan Braun. I guess this was an insert last year. 

I'm still trying to figure out where I go with my collecting at this point. I've decided once again to start over on Trading Card Database and catalog all my Brewers cards. I cleaned out what was there previously, though, so it appears right now that I have nothing. That's probably as good a place to start as any. I'm not sure what I'll try to collect going forward -- but Braun, Yount, and the next guy will be part of it.

Wisconsin football fans have long hated the Dallas Cowboys in a full-on, irrational way. There are good reasons for that, dating all the way back to the Ice Bowl in the 1960s, to Dallas's claims to be "America's Team" in the 1970s and 1980s, to the playoff battles between the teams in the 1990s, and then to the present with again meeting in the playoffs and the whining that came about with the Dez Bryant catch/no-catch controversy. 

It's a different hate than that reserved for the traditional NFC North rivals, but it's a hatred nonetheless. So, of course a truly emblematic Wisconsin band like the Happy Schnapps Combo had to write a song making fun of all the criminals on the Cowboys.

The final MVP to feature in the envelope Matt sent to me is, of course, Christian Yelich. I had a feeling he would take well to Miller Park last year, and it turned out beyond my wildest expectations. 

This year has been an odd start to the year for him, though. He hits at Miller Park at a home-field-advantage level not seen since the days of Dante Bichette at Coors Field pre-humidor. On the road, he looks like 2017 Christian Yelich -- a bit of pop, good average, decent slugging, but just a solid player. At home, though, he looks like peak steroid Barry Bonds or peak hotdog eating Babe Ruth -- crushing homer after homer. 

Like I said above, the vitriol reserved for the NFC North rivals -- the Vikings and the Bears -- is on a special and different level than that held for other teams. These two songs prove that some. Of course, that Vikings song needs to be updated since it still refers to the Metrodome as the Vikings home field, but I'm sure they can come up with something.

Matt, thanks greatly for the cards, and I hope you have enjoyed the musical stylings of what must be one of your favorite bands of all time.

A Mystery with Matt

Like all kids who grow up right in Wisconsin, I'm a Packers fan. I was also a Marquette basketball fan like thousands of other kids of that era, thanks in large part to the Al McGuire wins of the late 1970s. Before I left for the South, I was a Badgers football fan too -- again, as is required of sports fans in Wisconsin. 

Thanks to being a band geek, I had a number of friends who eventually did that crazy high-stepping marching stuff at Wisconsin.

In fact, my dislike for the Tennessee Volunteers started thanks to the 1981 Garden State Bowl. Prior to the Barry Alvarez years starting in the early 1990s, the Badgers football team was not a good program -- the Garden State Bowl was only the program's fourth-ever bowl game. It was also the program's first non-Rose Bowl post-season game; the Badgers lost all three of those Rose Bowls (1952, 1959, and 1962).

So, when the Badgers made the 1981 Garden State Bowl, there was a lot of excitement in Wisconsin. Tennessee had other plans, though, and beat the Badgers 28-21. Man, I hated Willie Gault after that game. That win capped off a Volunteer season that started with a 44-0 loss to the Georgia Bulldogs at Sanford Stadium but finished 8-4 for them. This bowl game took place on December 13, 1981 -- crazy how early in December that was.

Perhaps most surprisingly, the entire Garden State Bowl is available on YouTube.

Move forward to the 1990s. From 1990 to 1994, I was at Vanderbilt -- a school whose football history prior to 1990 was close to Wisconsin's history. While the Badgers went to three bowl games in the 1980s to make it 6 total, Vanderbilt made it to just three bowls total in the 20th Century -- beating Auburn in the 1955 Gator Bowl, tying Texas Tech 6-6 in the 1974 Peach Bowl, and losing 36-28 to Air Force in the Hall of Fame Bowl. After that Hall of Fame Bowl, the team went on probation because they were found to have engaged in significant steroid use. No kidding.

Barry Alvarez started at Wisconsin in 1990, and by 1993 he had the team winning the Rose Bowl. Had I not decided to go back to the South and go to Georgia, I probably would have gone to the University of Wisconsin for law school and been a Badger fan for life. 

With all that said, I was still surprised when I got a PWE from Matt of the Summer of '74 blog. It came with a ticket stub and a note.

Here's the Ticket Stub:

As you can see, this ticket stub dates from 1955, and it was good for the game between the No. 16 Fighting Illini of Illinois versus the Badgers at Camp Randall. Needless to say, I had no idea why Matt was sending this to me when I saw it.

Then I read his note:

 

Huh. This was the "Dairy State Debut" of an "All-Time Great." And, it's something that Matt thought "a Packer fan" would dig. 

So, let's start with logic first. Obviously, we're talking about a Green Bay legend and one guaranteed to be a member of the Lombardi Packers. That's true because otherwise the player wouldn't be a Green Bay player and he wouldn't be an "all-time great." 

Next, since this game took place in November, I immediately guessed that whomever the legend would be had to be an Illinois player because the Badgers had already played four home games at Camp Randall, including their opening game against non-conference foe Marquette.

Thus, I'm now looking at who was playing for Illinois. The minute I pulled up the Sports Reference roster for the 1955 Illinois team, it became obvious. 

Raymond Ernest Nitschke -- a Chicagoland native -- started at running back and linebacker for the Fighting Illini. Nitschke was named the #47 all-time greatest NFL player in 2010 after having the distinction of being the only player named to the all-time NFL 50th Anniversary team in 1969 and the 75th Anniversary team in 1994. 

Nitschke had a rough life growing up -- his dad died in a car wreck when Ray was only 4 years old, and his mom died of a blood clot when Ray was just 13. As a result, he was raised by his brothers.

In college, he was a smoker, a heavy drinker, and a barroom brawler. He was not taken seriously by his professors because of being on a football scholarship. He started as a quarterback, but due to injuries, he was moved to fullback. In those days of the starting 11 being the starting 11 whether on offense or defense, he also played linebacker -- which is where he blossomed. 

Nitschke grew up a Bears fan, so it had to rankle him that the Bears did not selected him before the Packers did in the third round of the 1958 NFL Draft. That draft was incredible for the Packers since the team also selected running back Jim Taylor from LSU and guard Jerry Kramer from Idaho. Taylor and Nitschke are in the Hall of Fame, and Kramer is a senior committee finalist this year who should be in the Hall of Fame. 

Nitschke played for 15 years with the Packers. He retired in the 1973 preseason, in late August. His last game was a first-round playoff loss to the Redskins.

He settled in Green Bay to live during and after football, splitting time between Green Bay and Naples, Florida. His wife Jackie served as a calming influence, getting Ray to settle down off the field. He was beloved in Green Bay -- so beloved, in fact, that he kept his phone number and home address listed in the Green Bay phone book because he just did not mind having fans say hello.

The Packers retired his number 66 in 1983. The other retired numbers for the team include Bart Starr's #15, Tony Canadeo's #3, Brett Favre's #4, Don Hutson's #14, and Reggie White's #92.

Nitschke died young -- aged just 61 years old -- in 1998 of a heart attack. He was driving to a friend's house with his daughter Amy when it happened. The Packers have named one of its two outdoor practice fields for him, and the US 141 bridge over the Fox River in Green Bay is also named for him.

Matt, many thanks for the opportunity to dig into a little Packer and Badger history!

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!