A Parallel Universe Post

It's been almost two months since I received an excellent envelope of cards from Robby T a/k/a Boobie Maine. He used to blog -- it's been nearly a year since he did so at his blog, Detroit Tigers Cards and Stuff -- but he's fallen victim to what draws me away often as well, which is just going to Twitter and hanging out.

Around February or so, I almost went up to Nashville for the big card show up there that I attended last year. In the end, I decided not to make the drive for various reasons that I have forgotten by this point. So, Robby sent me cards in the mail. Because all good posts require music, I've mined his Twitter timeline for some help.

Let's start with the oldest cards and work our way forward.

Starting with Chuck Porter from 1984 Fleer. Porter came over to the Brewers as a street minor-league free agent in 1980, after the California Angels released him. Porter was a 7th Round pick of the Angels in what was Harry Dalton's penultimate draft as the Angels GM. He pitched well enough in 1980 at Single-A Burlington and Double-A Holyoke to find himself in Triple-A in 1981. That meant that he ended up on the Milwaukee-Vancouver shuttle (which must have a connecting flight somewhere along the way...maybe it was Minneapolis?) in 1981 and 1982 and made 6 appearances for the Brewers.

In 1983, thanks to various pitching injuries (Pete Vuckovich made only 3 starts,  Moose Haas appeared in only 25 games, and Bob McClure pitched in only 24 games), Porter started 21 games and pitched pretty well. His major league career was effectively ended in 1984 when he suffered a torn medial collateral ligament (a/k/a ulnar collateral ligament) in his right elbow and went through Tommy John Surgery. He came back in 1985, but by then the Brewers had moved on to promote Ted Higuera.

All that pain probably had Chuck Porter saying that he wanted a new drug. As a kid at the age of 12 in 1984, I'm not sure what I thought this song was about -- probably just pills or something. Reading the lyrics, it's pretty much not about any of those other than references to how other drugs (like alcohol, cocaine, amphetamines, marijuana, and barbiturates) wouldn't help him talk to a woman. 

For what it's worth, this song came about here because Robby retweeted Huey Lewis's tweet about how the album "Sports" was one of just 5 number one albums for the entire year of 1984. 

I'm grouping the next three together as "Late 90s Brewers." Obviously, Cirillo and Burnitz made an impact on the franchise enough to be player collections for me. David Hulse, though, has hardly made any impact on this blog. Hulse played 200 games for the Brewers in 1995 and 1996 since the Brewers were duty bound by league rules to play 9 fielders and a designated hitter in every game. He was awful as a Brewer (and not much better with the Rangers, from whom the Brewers got him) -- a slash line of .243/.281/.320 for an OPS+ of 53 (where the league average is 100) is terrible. Hulse did steal 19 based in 23 attempts, so I guess he had that going for him. 

A few days ago, Robby retweeted the fact that in 1987, U2's Joshua Tree began its 9-week run atop the Billboard album chart. And if ever there was a song that best described the Brewers under Sal Bando's general managership, it is "Running to Stand Still." Everyone else in the league was moving ahead, promoting good young players, increasing scouting budgets, and the Brewers were running on the cheap to prove to everyone that Bud Selig was right about small-market teams not being able to compete.

Every time I see one of these gold parallels from 2009, I wonder to myself why it was so important to highlight "58 years of collecting" on the front of the card. Yay Topps? I mean, sure, Topps correctly realized in the late 2000s (after Michael Eisner's private equity fund took Topps back private again) that its best path to profit increases was to suck as much money as possible out of older collectors coming back to baseball cards for the nostalgia. But, really -- who cares about "58 years of collecting" unless they are issuing cards for older collectors who have actually been collecting for 58 years? Shouldn't the caption be, "58 years of selling" or "58 years of collector frustration because they think they can do better"?

How appropriate is it that Robby's next tweet about music that I found is actually a cover song? I was thinking before I scrolled further into his tweets that I should try for covers to go with all the nice parallel cards he sent and, lo and behold, here's a great cover by one of my favorite female singers whose music I was introduced to in college -- Juliana Hatfield. If you don't know who Juliana Hatfield is, find the song "My Sister" from about 1992 or 1993. It's excellent and it's her signature song, I'd say. That, or "Spin the Bottle." She just released an album of all Olivia Newton-John covers, for what it's worth.

As we move into the 2012 "surfboard" parallels, I will note that Cody Ransom got a card in the Update set as a Brewer that year. Interestingly, Ransom became a Brewer on May 23, 2012 when the Brewers picked him up off waivers after the Arizona Diamondbacks cut him. Then, on August 31 and after he put up a .196/.293/.345 slash line, the Brewers placed Ransom on waivers. He was promptly picked up by...the Diamondbacks. That's some weird kind of seller's remorse going on there.

Also, I was pleased to add a red Target parallel of Ryan Braun's All-Star card from the Update set. 

Since Robby tweeted he was listening to 99 Luftballons, I felt like I needed to keep it accurate to his timeline. Otherwise, it would have been a much easier transition from that Ryan Braun Target Red card to the English version of this song by Nena, "99 Red Balloons."

Alas, transitions are not always smooth in writing.

With the demise of Toys R Us, I wonder if we will start getting inundated with purple parallels in repacks? Or, were there so few Toys R Us packs such that this Nyjer Morgan is rarer than that Braun NL Home Run Leaders card that is serial numbered to 2013? 

I recall going once to a Toys R Us that is sort of near where I live -- about 6 miles away (and for comparison, within 6-1/2 miles, there are four Target stores) -- and going to buy cards in 2014. They had a standalone card display positioned sort of near the toy section and sort of near the kids' sporting goods area with blister packs that included three purple parallels in them. It allowed me to "pack search" in the way we used to look for rack packs with the cards we wanted on the top. But man, to try to put together a team set that way was impossible. 

The tweet that brings this ELO song on is one where Robby said that he'd been listening to the top 100 Billboard songs from 1979 and how he thought it was "interesting how many songs at the bottom should be at the top, and vice versa." Well, not sure if he meant this song, which finished at #81 on that year-end chart, but I had never put an ELO song here on the blog. So, deal with it.

 

Cards from 2014 have sort of a special place in my collection because it's the year I got back into collecting. I have much warmer feelings towards the 800 parallels from that year than I do from, say, 2016. That said, Robby sent me a bunch of great 2014 parallels -- so many that I've split them into two groups. 

I guess the warm feeling I have is in part due to these being the cards I came back to in the hobby. If I had come back in 2013 instead, I'd probably dislike these because of the complete lack of variety in their photographic choices -- a problem which continues to this day. Too zoomed in on action shots, too many action shots, poor cropping of photos -- it's an epidemic in 2014 cards.

Just as 2014 parallels will make up the last two groups of cards, the last two songs come from when Robby posted two "Friday Night 80s Album Reviews" at the beginning of April. The first comes from a band called Easterhouse. I'm embarrassed to say that I had not heard of this band before, because I should have heard of them. 

They are a Mancunian band -- Stretford, really -- that ran in the same circles as The Smiths, but they are named for a suburb of Glasgow that was essentially a huge public housing estate -- council housing, as the Brits put it. Easterhouse the suburb became one of those mistakes that served as a warning to others -- filled with housing and lacking in shops, sports, parks, and transport links, it became a blighted area with high unemployment and a breeding ground for gangs. This ties to the band because the band wanted to promote a revolutionary Communist agenda, so naming the band after a notorious/infamous council housing estate brought that to the forefront.

Also, it's a great song. My listening history on YouTube is such that the next song it autoplayed was "I Wanna Be Adored" by The Stone Roses. Like I said, I should have heard of Easterhouse before.

None of these guys are with the Brewers five seasons later. Of these guys, Scooter Gennett would certainly still help the team in light of the black hole that second base became immediately after Gennett's departure last year. Of the rest, Davis and Gomez would not be upgrades in the outfield, in my opinion, and the players that the Brewers got for Gomez and Mike Fiers from Houston made swapping him out a good deal. 

As for Davis, yes, he's been mashing with Oakland. The guys the Brewers got for him are starting to knock on the door of the big leagues. Jacob Nottingham made his big-league debut this April while Manny Piña was disabled for 10 days, while pitcher Bubba Derby reached Triple-A last year and has been relatively successful despite pitching for Colorado Springs. He's struggling a bit with control this year in limited innings there, but it is still early. Time will tell if these two guys can match Davis's performance, but the trade is not looking all that good right now.

A final song from Robby's timeline comes from the other album he reviewed a few weeks ago. This band is Rhythm Corps and the song and album are both called "Common Ground." Rhythm Corps was from Detroit, but they sure sound like they could have fit into the Manchester scene or whatever alternative scene you might identify from the mid-to-late 1980s. As their Wikipedia page points out, they played shows with The Psychedelic Furs, The Jam, Billy Idol, and toured with The Romantics. Yeah, those fit pretty well.

My thanks go out to Robby for the great cards, the patience in waiting for me to write this up, and the excellent musical offerings on his timeline!

Cards from Night Owl

I had a slow day at work yesterday. It wasn't because I did not have anything to do, but it was just one of those days common before a long weekend when I have mentally declared myself on a break. Despite the desire to leave the office pretty much at any point after 10 AM (having arrived at 7 AM), I ended up staying until 3 PM. 

Because I had no desire to work, I ended up doing a little project that I've been meaning to do for quite some time: catalog all the songs that I've posted here. I mean, what good is a collector if he or she can't handle another spreadsheet to catalog a collection?  

The results of my work surprised me somewhat -- I didn't think that I had posted 16 different songs twice, for instance. In total and to date, I've posted a total of 766 different songs, including 22 different songs by Pearl Jam, 6 different songs by REM (including posting "So. Central Rain" twice), and 7 different songs by Weird Al Yankovic (inflated by a theme post...what can I say?). 

Shockingly, though, I've only posted 3 songs by one of my favorite bands of all time -- a favorite that I share with the man who sent me the cards in today's post. That band is U2, and that notable collector with good taste in music is Night Owl. Now, Night Owl has led me before to an all-Foghat post, but today's U2 post is definitely going to top that one. In no particular order, here are some of my favorite U2 songs and some Brewers cards.

"Sunday Bloody Sunday"

I could relate to what Night Owl was talking about with how good the album War is on his post about "The Last Beloved Set of the Masses" comparing 1987 Topps to music in the 1980s. To be fair, I could relate to the whole post, but it was especially true about War. I was an isolated kid in the country 35 miles from downtown Milwaukee -- which, in the era before the internet, might as well have been somewhere in the middle of Montana. So, I was a little late to the U2 bandwagon, but I still caught it before U2 got huge in 1987.

It took participation in high school debate starting in 1986 and interaction with a whole different group of people to open my eyes to all the good things the city had to offer. If I think more deeply about it, I probably would not have become a lawyer without debate, and, going even deeper, I probably would not have joined debate had I not accidentally put my foot through a window playing baseball behind my house a week after my grandmother passed away in 1986. I would have been playing football instead -- badly, mind you, because, even in the 1980s, a 175-pound offensive lineman was destined for backup duty at best.

At any rate, one of those eye-openers was meeting people whose musical tastes were different from mine. A teammate of mine introduced me to The Dead Kennedys and The Dead Milkmen, while another introduced me to Depeche Mode and U2. I'm grateful to both of them for those introductions.

Speaking of introductions (and 1987 Topps, which our friendly neighborhood monopoly is beating so hard into the ground that they are trying to make sure none of us ever wax nostalgic about it again), Orlando Arcia is quickly growing in my estimation as a player whom I may decide to make a player collection. 

The thing about my player collections at this point is that I am trying to stay away from that early commitment mistake that occurred with Jean Segura. Looking at their batting eyes in particular, there is a distinct possibility that that could happen. At the same time, that minimizes the mental aspect of Segura probably needing to get out of Milwaukee so he could stop being reminded of his young son's death in mid-2014. 

So, while I have my eye on Arcia as a possibility, I continue to focus on looking long term. When the position player with the second-most tenure on the Brewers team behind Ryan Braun is Domingo Santana -- who made his Brewers debut on August 21, 2015 -- you can see why I'm hesitant to jump in feet first. There are still a lot of players to sort through, to develop, and see what impact they make on the team's history. I mean, I'd have left Jimmy Nelson for dead last year, and look what he's doing this year.

"Pride (In the Name of Love)"

It's probably a bit of a cliche to say that the two songs I've listed so far are my favorite U2 songs. Yet, these songs hold up -- much better, it must be said, than Bono's massive mullet in the video for this song. A song about the impact that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made on America and the world has nearly as much relevance today as it did thirty years ago. 

Arguably, his message of nonviolent protest in the face of injustice should be even more important today with how fractured American society has become thanks to highly publicized Neo-Nazi demonstrations being met by alleged anti-fascists looking for violence. Who knows what those two groups really are trying to do -- if they are true believers or if they are lost souls who will grow out of their violent ways or what have you -- but Dr. King's message is to meet these protests on both sides with civil disobedience. . . . Let me stop there, because I didn't come here to try to solve our current situations, and you probably didn't come here to read about my thoughts on it, so I'll get back to the cards now.

Night Owl cleaned out some Allen & Ginter minis that he had stored up in his upstate New York baseball-card bunker. Everyone from Prince Fielder to Corey Hart to K-Rod to Segura to Mike Cameron was included. 

Mike Cameron's 20-year-old son Daz was in the news recently for being a part of the bounty that the Detroit Tigers extracted from Houston in exchange for Justin Verlander. Daz has spent parts of the last two seasons in the Midwest League, which sounds like he's stalled except for the fact that, again, he's just 20 years old. He's likely to hit High-A Lakeland next year in the Florida State League. He apparently has a defensive profile like his father -- meaning that Daz is one hell of a good centerfielder.

"A Sort of Homecoming"

Okay, so here's where I stray from the "big" songs to one of U2's slightly lesser known songs. Because I couldn't always afford the complete cassette tapes, I bought U2's Wide Awake In America, which included four songs: "Bad" and this song live and two B-sides of "The Three Sunrises" and "Loves Come Tumbling." 

This song is the perfect album-opener, which is its place on The Unforgettable Fire. It starts softly and slowly, only to build to something akin to a church praise song -- loud, happy, joyful -- and then resolves itself at the end with talk of "coming home" in a decrescendo, slowing to a stop. Much of U2's music has interpretations that could be put in the context of Christianity. That, itself, is an important backstory in the band's history, and it is one that many Christian websites glom onto -- with, for example, a countdown of U2's "top 10 faith-fuelled songs." This song didn't make the cut for that list, but it could be read that way.

This card gets written up by itself because it was the one and only Milwaukee Brewers card in the 2016 Topps Holiday card set. 

Bunch of snowflakes.

"I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For"

In my high school days, this song really hit me as a search for more meaning in life. You know how you are as a teenager -- everything in life is on the table and the idea of being the one person to make a huge difference in the world is not as remote as it becomes later in life. As a 15-year-old when the album came out, it made me happy that even Bono hadn't figured out what his search in life was going to yield.

It's a catchy song, too.

Stadium Club cards sort of remind me of this song in some respects. I really like the product. I really like the photos. Even the fact that more than just a couple of Brewers made the setlist makes me like it. Yet, while it is a good set, I am still looking for something to grab me, to shake me and make me say, "Yes, this is it. This is the modern set of cards that I have been waiting to collect." While I like Stadium Club, it's still not what I've been looking for.

"One"

This very well may be my favorite song -- single song -- of all time. When I first heard it on Achtung Baby!, it grabbed me immediately. Again, I'm a guy who loves lyrics. This song is such a great breakup song, but in an introspective way. The internal questions that everyone goes through when a relationship seem to come spilling out in this song. Match it with the building guitar line from Edge and the light touch on the drums, and it just seems like a perfectly constructed song to me.

On the other hand, Topps Opening Day is far from being a perfectly constructed set. Any number of improvements could be made to it to make it a far more collectable set. I know I talk about it frequently, but if this is the set intended for kids to collect, then make the set one that kids in every major league city will want to collect. Not every kid is an Aaron Judge fan. Not every kid is a Bryce Harper fan. Some kids are Twins fans or Brewers fans. I've even heard rumors that there are 12 kids that are Rays fans. 

If the intent for this set is to be one to draw in the youngsters, then make it draw in the youngsters and not say to them, "we'd care about you if you were a Yankees fan or a Cubs fan."

"Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own"

The one song beyond U2's true heyday that grabbed me by the heartstrings and made me listen is this one. If you're a U2 fan, you know that this song was written by Bono in the wake of his dad's death. Just listening to it with that little bit of context makes it far more personal. Literally, the song makes me tear up if I haven't heard it in a long time because I can put myself into the position Bono sings about with respect to family members who have passed away. 

It's a beautiful song.

To close on a lighter note, here are some of the extra 1975 Topps buybacks that Night Owl received in his quest to build a buyback set from 1975. I can envision that the Robin Yount and George Brett rookie cards will be very difficult to find.

The weird thing is that I don't listen to U2 now all that much. I loved this band 30 years ago -- still know all the words to every song on War, The Unforgettable Fire, Joshua Tree, Rattle And Hum, and Achtung Baby! -- so why don't I listen to them more? To be honest, I wore myself out on them. I have listened to War on cassette and later on CD enough times to number into the thousands. Same goes for the other CDs/tapes of those other albums. Plus, U2's foray into electronica with Zooropa and all that stuff kind of lost me for a while. I really did not like that album, even though it's eminently more listenable today than it was at the time.

Nonetheless, the fact that one of my favorite albums of all time is now 30 years old is a bit frightening in a mortality sort of way. 

Night Owl, thanks for the great cards.

COMC Black Friday #4: Ryan Braun

After yesterday's rather sobering history lesson -- one which led me down paths I did not expect at all -- I need a more frivolous post tonight. I'm about to get on a plane tomorrow (actually, 2 planes, connecting through Minneapolis) to go to Palm Desert, California, for one of my American Bar Association trips. 

So, in the interest both of frivolity and of posting some more of the Black Friday cards I got, I thought, "songs about the desert/California!"

Of course. 

I mean, after all, Ryan Braun is a Californian -- born in Mission Hills, California -- so why not? Especially since one of the cards I got is this one:

Let's start with an obvious one:

Hopefully I don't end up on a dark desert highway with cool wind in my hair on this trip. It will mean that something went terribly wrong, I'd say. I do hope, though, to get out and run a little while I'm out there. The temperatures are a bit better than the mid-30s we've had here in the morning lately.

Some buy cards to remember, some buy to forget. I still need about 3 more of this 4-in-1 card from the 2009 Goudey set that Upper Deck put out. I think I still need one more of the 2009 Chrome card too. Those folks hoarding these cards must be living it up.

To be honest, this song is almost more obvious to me to be tied to the Palm Desert area than Hotel California. That's because this song is on the Joshua Tree album. Palm Desert is about 50 miles from Joshua Tree National Park. The only time I've been in the Palm Desert area -- the Coachella Valley -- a couple of friends of mine and I went to the National Park. It's incredible.

That's a younger me amidst some really awesome cacti.

These are Bowman cards of a younger Ryan Braun -- from five or six years ago now. I have trouble at times telling the difference between various years of Bowman cards. Their designs are not memorable or very distinctive, and that makes it difficult to recall whether something is a 2011 or a 2012 or a 2013 card since I wasn't around to learn it the first time around.

So, this song is new to me, though the band, My Chemical Romance, is not. MCR was huge in the era of emo and shortly thereafter -- I mean, their first major label album called Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, an album with a couple of great songs in "I'm Not Okay (I Promise)" and "Helena," was 14 years ago. The band broke up in 2013 and released a greatest hits album in 2014. 

If I had to guess, I'd estimate that they will reunite for a money-spinning tour at some point in 2018. Just guessing, though. 

In keeping with my snarkiness about MCR -- and let's be honest, I really enjoyed their music on both Three Cheers and their next album, Welcome to the Black Parade, but they got to be a parody of themselves after a while -- I turn to an old standby of Panini Prizm. I swear, Panini goes through product ideas faster than NFL Games can take.

Perhaps they'll stick with Donruss for a while. Who knows. The way they keep bastardizing old Donruss designs, they'll run out of original ideas at the same time that My Chemical Romance reunites.

I've always liked this song. Yeah, it's "soft rock," but lyrically and musically it remains interesting. It tells a story -- which I always appreciate in my music. Sometimes that story is depressing -- how else do you account for my predilection toward The Smiths? -- but often it's just a song giving a feeling or building a picture. That's what this song always feels like to me. 

These cards seem to fit that "soft rock" mentality. Just as Panini goes careering through card designs like a car on an icy mountain road, Topps seemingly just dredges up old designs from other, more original card makers from years gone by. Perhaps it fits to follow a horse with no name to have the card company with no new ideas.

That's harsh, and not necessarily true. After all, Topps has had a number of new ideas lately -- Topps Now in particular. Okay, I can't come up with any more than that, but that was a good idea.

I hope y'all have a great week, and I'll be back on Sunday.