Throwback Thursdays

Last week, I started the week with a post about cards that I got from JT at The Writer's Journey. 

This week, I'm starting the week with a post about a card that I got from JT at the Writer's Journey.

I'll admit it: I had never heard of Bert Kaempfert before this song. Of course, Kaempfert wrote such standards as "Strangers in the Night" and Wayne Newton's signature song "Danke Schoen." Perhaps I should have heard of him before this song.

Anyway, back to baseball cards. Last year, Topps had a bunch of online exclusives that they sold in sets of anywhere from 5 to 8 cards and which were available only for a week. They were called the "Throwback Thursday" collection. While I promised not to rant as much this year, this one's worth a rant. Topps issued a total of 185 "Throwback" cards last year, with designs ranging from the 1988 Topps Glossy All-Stars Design to 1957-58 Basketball (showing guys like Lou Brock and Satchel Paige but annoyingly talking about the card design instead of the player on the back). 

So, these cards look great, in my opinion. It's fun to see old football card designs used for baseball. In fact, that might be a better use for Topps Archives.

Amongst the 185 Throwback cards, there were SIXTEEN cards that had Aaron Judge on it (and 21 cards with the Yankees). There were, though, three teams that only got featured on 1 card. I'm pretty sure the "most disdained" team has to be the Detroit Tigers. The only representation they got was having Michael Fulmer on a 1997-98 Bowman's Best Basketball "Mirror Image" design with Aaron Judge (they shared being rookies of the year, you see, so that makes them mirror images).

Otherwise, the other two team to get the "one-card" shrift both got their single card in the same "set." 475 people purchased the TBT set featuring the 1968 Topps Baseball Design -- a true cop out set in light of the fact that it was the Heritage design already last year -- and those 475 people got the only cards featuring a Cincinnati Red (Johnny Bench) and the only card featuring a Milwaukee Brewer -- Paul Molitor.

The backs of these cards each note that this set -- "Throwback Thursday Set 5" -- all featured players that did not have their own rookie cards by themselves. All of them (Bench, Molitor, Andre Dawson, Nolan Ryan, Carlton Fisk, and Willie Stargell) had to share.

This kind of money grab is where I'm fine with Topps being completely oblivious to the fact that baseball exists outside of New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Even though this is a really cool looking card -- which I am very thankful to JT for sending to me -- I'm 100% okay with Topps soaking all the Judgeaholics and taking their $20 a pop every single week. 

That's right Topps -- just give them The Judge.

My thanks again to JT for the excellent addition to my Paul Molitor collection!

All Cracked Up, with Crackin' Wax and a Cracked Bat

Hey there, everyone. Things have gone crazy here at Hiatus Central, what with all the traveling I've done in the past month -- yes, more traveling -- and work and all that. My time for hobbies has gotten limited somewhat so I'm way behind on website maintenance here, with sorting in my office, and with blogging.

As with my last post, while I'd prefer to post about all of these great envelopes I've received separately, I'm going to combine some things into one big post.

First up: a Topps Chrome half case break with Crackin' Wax. I had the Brewers and the Twins and got really nothing of interest outside of the base cards and the typical inserts, though I did get one Joe Mauer parallel:

It's been incredibly annoying this year to watch Topps trying to pimp Orlando Arcia as a Rookie of the Year candidate. Normally, of course, I'd be okay with a Brewer getting cards in various sets, but in this case I'm not. Why? Because Topps are run by idiots who don't fact check anyone outside of New York long enough to realize that Arcia was not rookie-eligible this year.

Total morons.

Now, that case break was a total disaster. The other half of the case that CW had was opened as part of a different case break of some sort. Not having unlimited funds to buy into every case break ever, I did not participate in it. As that half-case was opened, I got to watch as three Brett Phillips autographs tumbled out. Perhaps CW and his wife felt bad about this. It seems they talked the guys at Buck City Breaks into sending two of those my way anyway:

I'm hopeful for Brett Phillips's future as a top-notch 4th outfielder/guy not stretched to play every day. He played all three OF positions in AAA this season in preparation for that role. The Brewers have great depth with their outfield prospects and current players -- Keon Broxton had a quiet 20 HR/20 SB season, for example, and he almost certainly should be traded to upgrade the rotation if the right deal can be found. Phillips has an absolute gun from the outfield and registered a through of 104 MPH from centerfield -- the hardest/fastest throw Statcast registered all season.

Thanks, Buck City Breaks, for sharing your largesse with me.

I think I'm done with case breaks, though. For what I get out of them, it simply is a better deal for me to find the team set on eBay and buy that and the inserts instead.

Shortly after that case break, I got a huge package from my pal Julie at A Cracked Bat. 

Julie sent me the first National Geographic magazine I've ever gotten in a package:

This April 1991 story on "A Season in the Minors" featured the then Double-A affiliate of the Brewers, the El Paso Diablos. As always, NatGeo had great photographs and a well-written article to go with it.

A second magazine was a Beckett Baseball Card Monthly from February 2001 featuring hot prospect Ben Sheets on the cover with his gold medal from the 2000 Olympics:

A third "new one to me" was that Julie found an old postcard of my favorite baseball stadium of my youth: the dank, beer-stained Milwaukee County Stadium.

Finally, Julie also sent me some great cards. Here's a sample:

There are not that many bloggers who are kinder than Julie when it comes to sending great packages out. There are also not that many bloggers who even own any of those Score Summit Edition cards or even those parallel Panini Prizms. And while Jonathan Broxton and Adam Lind hung around Milwaukee for a very short time, it's always much appreciated to get a card serial numbered to TEN!

Many thanks, Julie, for the great cards!

Post #700: A Cure for What Ails Me

My lack of posting here is indeed a sign. It's a sign that I'm not as engaged in card collecting as I was two or three years ago. I could lay blame for it fairly easily -- equal parts of blame go to the Brewers (for playing well in the real world), Topps (for a multitude of reasons I've said before), and to rookie mania (which is just an unwelcome extension of the "sick hitz" mentality to me). 

So, I've avoided it, and I made some changes too. I stopped following Topps on Twitter, for example. I deleted my bookmark for Topps Now and have pretty much stopped caring about it. I've even changed my Twitter consumption to an extent by no longer following a few people who seemed only to retweet every Aaron Judge card ever seen. 

All of it has helped some. 

Also helping is diverting my own focus away from new products. About the only products that really give the Brewers a fair shot at getting cards in them seem to be Topps flagship, Heritage, and (perhaps thanks to Sooz seeing my continual complaints) Stadium Club. I mean, when a 200-card set like Chrome (which should have more equal distribution based on it being nothing more than a parallel set to Flagship) has just two base card Brewers, it makes it tough to care about new products without getting angry, upset, and alienated.

So, I found a cure: going to eBay and finding police cards and inserts I need. Yes, Post 700 is just a boring "look what I got on eBay" post, accompanied by songs from one of the best bands from the 1980s, The Cure.

Starting off, we have a song from way back in 1979. It seems hard to believe that The Cure have been around for over 40 years now. This song, "Boys Don't Cry," comes from their dark, gothic period early in the band's career. It was their second single after "Killing an Arab," which, by the way, is a song the band has really backed away from in their career.

The song itself is not particularly deep -- it is what it says it is, which is a song about how boys don't cry about their lost loves in the presence of others. Still, the band's place in the post-punk world after the Sex Pistols was solidified with this jangly song. 



Speaking of jangly, let's start with cards from a 1991 Police set of two guys who simply do not compute as Brewers. 

While he started his career with the Minnesota Twins and was traded to the Yankees in 1972 for the recently deceased Brewer #5 Danny Walton in October of 1972 before moving to Baltimore in 1976 in a terrible trade by the Yankees (Tippy Martinez, Rudy May, Scott McGregor, and Dave Pagan with Dempsey for Doyle Alexander, Jimmy Freeman, Elrod Hendricks, Ken Holtzman, and Grant Jackson), Rick Dempsey in my mind will always be a Baltimore Oriole. He spent just the one season -- 1991 -- Milwaukee after signing as a free agent in early April of 1991. Dempsey has his own website through which you can book him for golf and autograph appearances; I don't know what he's talking about, though, by calling himself "The Greatest Catcher of His Era." 

Willie Randolph was another one-and-done Brewer in 1991, though he played at a very high level at age 36 in Milwaukee -- putting up a .327/.424./.374 slash line in 512 plate appearances. That .424 OBP was good enough for 2nd in the league, and his .327 AVG was good enough for third. He did a lot of little things well, but was never a "peak" type player. There are worse players in the Hall of Fame than Randolph, though I'm not advocating that Randolph should be there. It is a close call, though.

Jumping from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, "Pictures of You" is from an era when The Cure had made an impression in the US and American radio wasn't as intimidated by the band. As Wikipedia notes, the inspiration for this song came from when a fire broke out in singer Robert Smith's home. He was going through the aftermath and found his wallet with photos of his wife, Mary in them. 

This song peaked at #71 in the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1990. Perhaps showing the fact that The Cure has gotten much more respect and notice in the years since, Rolling Stone put the song at #283 on its list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time."



Whomever designed the 1992 Brewers Police set must have been impressed by 1991 Fleer, I guess. My scans on this one show you two different police sets -- one from New Richmond, Wisconsin, which is only about 40 miles from downtown St. Paul, Minnesota, and one from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, which is about an hour north of Milwaukee. 

The Sheboygan police one kind of hacks me off a bit. I bought the set as being a complete set. I didn't scrutinize it closely enough before leaving feedback, which meant that I didn't notice that the seller decided to strip out the Molitor and the Yount cards from the set. I should have paid closer attention, I guess. 

"Fascination Street" was The Cure's first song to hit #1 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart, which had literally just been created only a few months prior. This song, too, was on The Cure's album Disintegration. I guess you can tell when my favorite Cure songs come from.

Yes, one more set of police cards from New Richmond. If you haven't figured out by now that police cards from random jurisdictions other than Milwaukee make me happy, well, you don't know me at all.

Jody Reed ending up with the Brewers in 1994 was a very strange circumstance. He came up with Boston, of course, but the Red Sox did not think enough of him to protect him from the 1992 expansion draft -- or, rather, they did not think enough of him to go through his final year before free agency with him. The Rockies picked him and promptly traded him to the Dodgers for Rudy Seanez. 

The Dodgers liked Reed, and they tried to sign him on a three-year deal worth $7.8 million after the 1993 season. He would have played out his career there, probably, on that contract. But, he turned it down and gambled that someone would hand him a larger contract. That didn't happen and, instead, he signed with Milwaukee on a one-year, incentive-laden contract under which he earned a total of $1.15 million instead. 

Proving that both Reed and the Dodgers were losers in the deal, the Dodgers filled their newly created hole at second base after the 1993 season by making a trade with the Expos to get Delino DeShields ... and giving up future Hall of Famer Pedro Martinez in the process.

Finally, let's move backwards about 4 years to 1985. "In Between Days" was the first song for The Cure to hit the Billboard Hot 100 in 1985 when it made it to #99. It's weird though -- it's an upbeat, superficially happy sounding song with lyrics about aging and fear and loss. 

I chose this song because of all of these things. It is upbeat sounding, but that upbeat nature belies the questioning, uncertainty, and fear that accompanies life generally. It's good to stay upbeat, even when all that I can think about are fears and difficulties. It can be a lot of work to do that, though.

Let's close out Post #700 with a couple of new releases of Ryan Braun. The 2017 Brewers team is struggling offensively over the last couple of months, and I'm not sure what will solve that. Braun has been good -- .281/.351/.513 -- but the team has tons of problems with getting runners in scoring position home. They are very reliant on home runs to score runs, which means that there are streaks where they just don't score enough. 

The hope is that the team starts hitting and continues pitching well and makes a run in the last 6 weeks of the season. They are close enough in both the Wild Card and the Division to where a quick win streak -- say of 6 or 7 games -- could really make a dent in these races. But, they need to score more runs more consistently to do this. 

Let me close by saying thank you to all of you, my readers. I'm consistently surprised by the fact that most posts these days for me get at least to 100 to 150 hits. I'm even more surprised when I do something new -- I joined Net 54's forum's this week -- and in response to my first post, I get a reply of, "Oh, yeah, I've read your blog for a long time now and really enjoy it!"

That stuff means a lot. Thank you, everyone.

Motion for Reconsideration

Lawyers like to file motions. When we do it, we are asking the Court to do something. We are literally saying to the Court that we would like the Court to act -- to move -- and do something that is to our client's benefit. So, we might file a Motion to Compel Responses to Discovery when the other side in litigation refuses to answer a particular question or produce certain documents. Or we might file a Motion to Dismiss a complaint if we want to test the sufficiency of the facts and allegations contained in the complaint.

Sometimes, we will even ask the court to think about the issues all over again. That is when we file a Motion for Reconsideration. We ask the Court to look at what was argued, try to add some new twist or citation to a case that the Court missed, and say that the Court's original decision -- how the Court approached the issues in a previous motion -- was wrong. 

The thing about these motions is that they rarely succeed. Courts do not simply "change their minds" -- the judge came to his/her decision for a reason. Courts hate these motions, too, because the motion says, in essence, "judge, you came to the wrong decision, and if you weren't such an idiot and found this case, you would have gotten it right."

These motions are not fun, and making a reconsideration of things and admitting that something went wrong is even less fun. 

And yet, I'm at that stage with my baseball card collecting.

I'm reconsidering how I am approaching collecting, what I'm collecting, and why I'm collecting. This is for a few reasons:

1.  Topps's Flagship Flogging 

Topps is taking all the fun out of new cards to me because all Topps seems interested in doing is extracting every last dime it can out of every collector while spending as little as possible.

Earlier this week, I did a count on the number of different avenues this year that Topps recycled the photos from their flagship set and design. Assuming we are talking about a player who appears in every Topps set, we are talking about nearly sixty different variations. That includes (you ready?): 

Flagship, Team Sets, Gold, Vintage Stock, Black, Pink, Platinum, Rainbow Foil, Clear, Framed, Black Printing Plate, Cyan Printing Plate, Magenta Printing Plate, Yellow Printing Plate, Black & White/Photo negative, Factory Set Sparkle Foil, All-Star Game Silver, 5x7 Red, 5x7 Blue, Chrome Sapphire, Chrome Sapphire 65th Anniversary, 10x14, 10x14 Gold, 65th Anniversary, Toys R Us Purple (1st Series only), Mini, Mini Blue, Mini Red, Mini Gold, Chrome, Chrome Refractors, Chrome Green Refractors, Chrome Orange Refractors, Chrome Red Refractors, Chrome SuperFractors, Chrome Black Plate, Chrome Cyan Plate, Chrome Magenta Plate, Chrome Yellow Plate, Chrome Prism Refractors, Chrome Black Refractors, Chrome Purple Refractors, Chrome Gold Refractors, Chrome Sepia Refractors, Chrome Pink Refractors, Chrome Blue Refractors, Chrome Blue Wave Refractors, Opening Day, Opening Day Blue Foil, Opening Day Purple Foil, Opening Day Black, Opening Day Black Printing Plate, Opening Day Cyan Printing Plate, Opening Day Magenta Printing Plate, Opening Day Yellow Printing Plate, Opening Day 10x14, Opening Day 10x14 Gold, Topps Holiday, and Topps Limited.

That, of course, does not include the multiple varieties of Topps's available factory sets -- which includes Hobby, Retail, Retail with an Ichiro Chrome insert, Retail with an Ichiro Coin Relic, Retail with a Mike Trout Chrome Insert, Retail with a Mike Trout Stamp Relic, and Retail with a Mike Trout Gold Stamp Relic. Those don't count separately above because the base set cards in each of these varieties are the same.


This also does not account for the fact that a truly complete flagship set includes one hundred five photo variations. It also does not account for the reuse of the same card design on the Update and Chrome Update sets.

Finally, it also does not account for all of the digital cards that use the same photos. For 2016, BUNT had one base card and 10 base card parallels. So, to be completely accurate, Topps actually used and recycled these photos literally seventy times.

2.  Why Would Topps Flog Its Flagship Photos?

The complaints about photo recycling on cards over the past several years are numerous. We collectors hate it when Topps is lazy like this. Using the same design on multiple products is just as annoying and boring and lazy.

Why would Topps do this? 

It's simple math, of course. Since it has been ages since Topps actually had its own photographers, Topps has a contract with Getty Images to get its photos. Getty charges Topps for each photo. I don't know how much Topps pays per photo -- it may be less than the $575 that you or I would pay for Editorial Rights, though I'd bet it is higher, since getting the rights for one photo for a double page cover spread with 1 million in circulation for 5 years would cost nearly $11,000. 

These numbers are what came up for this photo:

If we assume that Topps has a deal with Getty to pay Getty something very reasonable per image -- say $100, since Topps is agreeing to use Getty almost exclusively other than limited situations like that Ben Zobrist Topps Now card -- then your Topps Flagship base set without short printed photos costs Topps $70,000 in image rights to create. With the short-print photos, we're now looking at $80,500. In all likelihood, Topps is probably paying more per image than $100 but we are not privy to that information.

In any event, it is very much within Topps's monetary interest to recycle and reuse each image as much as possible. This includes using the same photos across the various products that Topps issues, which again is something that we collectors have complained about on multiple occasions. 

Then, add in the fact that it costs money for Topps to employ graphic design teams to come up with new card designs or to work on replicating old product designs. Reusing the same card design for multiple products allows the design cost to be spread over those products, including physical cards and the digital platform. This also reduces production costs, as replicating printing plates for the cards is made easier by having a template that can be adapted to multiple platforms fairly easily and reusing the flagship templates over and over and differentiating sets by applying gold foil.

It's lazy. It's all about the money. It's all about extracting as much money from those of us in the collecting world as much as Topps can. While I do not begrudge Topps making money, I do hold a grudge when Topps does it in a way that is ridiculously cheap while trying to play it off as being cool, innovative, and keeping the best interests of collectors in mind. They aren't doing that.

3. Tracking Parallels Is a Pain in the Ass

This goes without saying in many respects. I've been working on cataloguing my Bowman parallels. I was cruising right along up until I got to 2012. That's where things started breaking down and parallels started proliferating like rabbits in a cage. I've been trudging forward in fits and starts ever since.

4. Topps Is Focused on High-End Cards

Another reason that the Flagship images get flogged and repeated over and over is that Topps cares less and less about the average collector's experience and cares more about the "Sick Hitz" crowd who chase the high-end hits and buy stuff like that Topps Chrome Sapphire Edition set that costs just $1,500. 

5. The Fall Is Always a Time When My Focus Is Diverted

I know a lot of you are not college football fans. I am. I have season tickets for UGA Football -- a not inconsequential thing, since the cost for season tickets requires an annual contribution for each of my two seats over and above the actual cost of the tickets. Then, factor in that going to games for my wife and I leads to going to Athens the day before the game to meet up with her uncle and grandmother to have dinner. That means a hotel stay -- 2 days, in fact -- at the highest rack rate that Athens will allow for hotels. 

It's fun, and it's expensive. I wouldn't change it -- especially when you get moments like the one shown at about the 2 minute mark below.

In person, it was even cooler to see. That was our "Fourth Quarter" hype. It actually is pretty quiet in the stands, but the crowd goes nuts after it and so does the team. 

So, What Are You Saying?

What I'm really saying right now is that I'm in my late year doldrums. I am tired of fighting against Topps's continued exclusion of the Brewers from its sets -- such as including just one player in the "Holiday" set at Wal-Mart in a set of 200 cards and having ZERO players in the Chrome Update set...again. 

Topps's exclusive license in baseball has been terrible for collectors and good only for Topps. Topps has put less and less effort into its flagship sets and is more focused on the higher margins of selling JPEG files on its BUNT platform. That's why we have the set designs we have had for this year and next year. It's also why I would expect the number of reuses for the Topps photos/design from the flagship set to increase next year. It will be more and more gimmicks using the same cards -- perhaps a release of just a vintage stock set with the flagship design and incorporating Heritage gimmicks like gum "stains" and intentional errors?

I would put nothing by Topps.

That said, I'm still thinking about where I go with my collecting. One of the things I'm looking at focusing on is trying to add more of those police sets from the 1980s to my collection. In some respects, those sets are no different than the proliferating parallels that Topps has now -- same photo and only a minor difference in what police department/local business sponsored the set. But I enjoy that chase a lot more than the current chase.

The good thing here for me, though, is that I am judge and jury on my own motion. I can reconsider my collecting any time I want.

Yes, I'll still go after the base sets that Topps farts out each year. But, I'm going oddballing more and more now. 

The Day ToppsNow Died

My complaints about Topps Now are regular. They are numerous. Some of them are entirely unfair. Most of them relate to perceived slights from Topps for my Brewers.

They are tired of me tweeting at them. They don't respond to my tweets. They probably have me muted. They wouldn't block me, I don't think, since they still like my money and want me to spend it with them on the incredibly rare occasion that they acknowledge that the Brewers (a) are still a major league baseball team, (b) employ real live major league players, (c) have real live baseball Hall of Famers, and (d) Ryan Braun cheated but so did A-Rod, David Ortiz, Roger Clemens, Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire and any number of other players who have been lionized by Topps.

That last one was to see if you're still paying attention.

Anyway, Topps gave up their pretense of caring about Topps Now being about "celebrating baseball's greatest moments...as they happen" and, instead, decided to highlight "man rides bike to work two days ago."

You may have heard about Ben Zobrist. He did something pretty cool -- he rode his bike about one mile from his home near Wrigley in full uniform and wearing PF Flyers. He did this on Saturday, before the Cubs lost to the Brewers 11-3 thanks to a 3-for-5, 2 HR, 5 RBI game from Ryan Braun (taking Braun to 30 HRs and setting a team record for most seasons with 30 HRs) and with 2 SBs for Jonathan Villar (taking him to 56, 2 behind Billy Hamilton).

And yet, today is when this happened.


Yes, today was the day that Topps Now became "Topps sometime this weekend." After yesterday's six card orgasm that, in fairness, mostly deserved the Topps Now treatment (though again Topps decided on another "walk-off single" card after telling me when the Brewers' walk-off wasn't celebrated that, "not every walk-off is a Topps Now card") Topps decided that it would give a Topps Now card today to something that actually happened on Saturday. 

Topps stole a screencap from Ben Zobrist's wife's Instagram page -- hey Topps, does that violate your exclusivity agreement with Getty Images? -- and made a card out of it. If you're interested, here's the original post from Instagram:

My man is an old soul who plays old school baseball. @cubs

A video posted by Julianna Zobrist (@juliannazobrist) on Sep 17, 2016 at 10:41am PDT

Hey, it was kind of cool that he did it. Don't get me wrong. But this has been on social media since Saturday afternoon at 1:41 PM Eastern time. So, I guess it's okay now for Topps to decide that "Now" really means, "hey, when we get around to it and when we finally see something, we can print a card and call it 'Now.'"

Also, has anyone at Topps ever been to a game outside of their 5 boroughs? Or, rather, do they employ a web designer that knows how to spell important places?

Spelling is optional in Brooklyn, it seems. 

The real issue this raises to me isn't so much that this moment wasn't cool. The fact is that if Topps can decide that something is worth putting on a "Now" card a little later, why, then, couldn't Topps rectify clear oversights from earlier in the year? 

I mean, it's pretty well known that I got muted by Topps (probably) about the time that Topps ignored a TRIPLE PLAY by Milwaukee in favor of a David Ortiz homer in the middle of the game that allowed the Red Sox to win a game. 

Or maybe it was the time Topps decided that the Brewers' walk-off win wasn't worth a Now card. 

Or it could have been the time that Jonathan Villar hit homers from both sides of the plate to beat the Cubs 2-1 and that wasn't worth a Now card.

Not that I "deserve" an explanation as to why those particular events did not merit a Topps Now card. Or, maybe I do. I mean, I am a Topps customer, and customer service is supposed to be high on a company's list. Well, most companies, that is. 

And, if it's all about selling cards, why does Topps bother with cards for Jeremy Hellickson (print run: 204 cards) and his shutout Saturday, or Jose Ramirez's walk-off for Cleveland (221 sold) or Khris Davis's big game on September 4 (print run: 188)? 

Because those events matter and they tell the story of the season. Just like a triple play -- of which there have been 6 this year (3 of them by the White Sox, amazingly enough) matters. Just like a guy who is close to leading the league in steals who homers from both sides of the plate should matter (that's only happened 10 times this year, five times in each league).

And maybe like a guy who rides his bike to work matters.

Really? I'm a @Cubs fan and THIS gets a @toppscards NOW and we're supposed to take NOW seriously? #comeonman @TimHargesheimer pic.twitter.com/ypYjXKhDhc

— Matt Saltzman (@mattsaltzman) September 19, 2016

Then again, maybe not.

An Envelope from Cards on Cards

When last we spoke, I was saying that Just Commons made a couple of mistakes in putting my most recent order from them. Well, unlike the customer service from other card operations....

Unsurprisingly I've received no response from Topps. https://t.co/h8vALnPtYP

— Tony L. (@OffHiatusBBC) September 9, 2016

...Just Commons responded the very next business day, and they made things right. They sent the two cards I was missing in a well-protected PWE nearly immediately and made sure I was okay getting the parallel version of the cards they had missorted from 2001. Kudos to Just Commons for great customer service.

As for Topps....well.....

But I beat that drum like a dead horse, so perhaps, some day, I'll stop. Or Topps will listen.

I'm thinking that I'll stop first.

At any rate, there are more important things in the world than my raging against the machine that is Topps. For instance, Kerry from Cards on Cards sent me a mailer jam packed with Brewers cards. Most of the cards in the envelope came from the 1990s:

Like this gloriously ridiculous (or, depending on your point of view, ridiculously glorious) 1994 Score Rookie & Traded card of eventual Red Sox stalwart Troy O'Leary. O'Leary played 46 games for the Brewers and didn't look bad doing it. 

For whatever blisteringly stupid reason, Sal Bando cut O'Leary outright -- waived him -- at the end of spring training in 1995. O'Leary believed it was to protect a younger player, but from the transactions report it appears that the Brewers wanted David Hulse instead. Hulse lasted a total of 200 games in Milwaukee and in the majors after the Brewers got him, hitting .243/.281/.320 (OPS+ of 53). O'Leary spent another 9 seasons in the majors. Great job, Sal! 

The Red Sox employed Dan Duquette as its GM at the time. Duquette was the Brewers' Director of Scouting when O'Leary was drafted out of high school and was instrumental in the Brewers' decision to draft O'Leary. As the Boston Baseball History website noted, it took Duquette about ten minutes to claim O'Leary and promote him to the majors.

If you ever wondered why the Brewers were so damn bad in the early 2000s, look no further than decisions like this.

Thankfully, most of the cards that Kerry sent to me were either more recent cards or were from the 1980s. Let's see the recent cards:

That Matt Garza card is the first Topps Chrome card that I've added to my collection so far. Part of me thinks that this year's Topps design was meant more for the digital apps and the Chrome design than it was for the flagship set. That's not necessarily a bad thing. 

A lot of folks get themselves in a tizzy whenever people are successful in selling digital cards for a lot of money on eBay. The complaint is, "why the hell would anyone pay money -- any money -- to buy what is nothing more than a JPEG?" There are others, of course, who egg those people on and who view collecting actual cardboard as a dying hobby.

Both of them are correct and incorrect at the same time. Collecting cards in physical form will always be around. Someone will collect them. After all, people still collect stamps, postcards, Depression glass, perfume containers, lamp -- any number of items that make no sense whatsoever to collect and are far more difficult to store, showcase, and sell than cards are. As long as people like baseball, there will be card collectors.

At the same time, people collecting digital cards is probably more of a fad that will fade off into the sunset than collecting cardboard. Digital cards are more of a fad because of their ephemeral nature. Topps could cease to exist tomorrow, or its profit-loss analysis on running the apps could change from positive to negative and the app could be shut down tomorrow. The thing is, no one will ever go into an attic 30 years from now and find a secret stash of digital cards. It's more likely to be the introductory collecting drug for kids than it is to be the final end point for the addiction.

Speaking of addiction, let's look at the cards from the 1980s:

Cards and stickers like these are the addiction. There is something inherently cool about getting miniature cards that were printed 30 years ago by a card company that no longer exists. There's also something inherently cool about 1981's Gorman Thomas sticker featuring his fat sideburns, bushy mustache, two-day stubble, and the painted-on eyeblack that doesn't contain a Bible verse, an area code, a message to mom, or an advertisement for a shoe company. And, there's something inherently cool about getting kids to eat fat-filled snack cakes by throwing baseball cards inside the package.

Kerry, many thanks for the great cards that plugged some big holes in my collection.