Back After a Little Break with Cards from All Time Brewers

I've been away from the blog for almost two weeks. It's that time of year when a little break is pretty common, to be fair -- Thanksgiving means I'm pretty much unable to get to my computer for a few days, after all. Add in the fact that it's also holiday party time and the end of our billing year, and circumstances conspire to make me dead tired.

I mean, I almost never nap because I never feel the need to do so. Yesterday, I got home a little early from work and took a nap. I guess I'm getting old.

Anyway, I took a little break for the basic reason that I simply had no energy to write. I tried a few times, looked at my scan folder, thought about what I wanted to write -- and I came up with nothing.

Now that Georgia's college football season is over (other than a meaningless minor bowl game), though, my focus turns back to baseball. Today, that means I am going to highlight some cards I got from my pal from Twitter, @AllTimeBrewers. He sent me a few cards with the note that he didn't think I had these Robin Yount cards. He was almost 100% correct, and the one card that I had in my Yount collection I still needed for the team set.

So, let's take a look at what he sent -- and let's highlight some musicians from Wisconsin in the process.

1.  Skylar Grey

Skylar Grey is the stage name of Wisconsin singer/songwriter Holly Brook Hafermann, who grew up in Mazomanie, Wisconsin (just outside Madison). She first recorded under the name Holly Brook from 2003 to 2010 on Machine Shop Recordings, the vanity label run by Linkin Park. Her first album peaked at number 35 on the Billboard Heatseekers Albums chart in 2006. 

Then, she changed her name in 2010 while living in Oregon. As Skylar Grey, she wrote "Love the Way You Lie," which became a number 1 hit in 26 different countries as sung by Eminem and Rihanna. Since then, she's done tons of collaborations (including appearing with Machine Gun Kelly at Wrestlemania XXVIII in 2012 prior to John Cena's entrance).

I knew none of this because, well, I wasn't paying attention.

Speaking of not paying attention, I missed this insert in the Topps Finest set last year featuring Robin. That's probably because I wasn't paying enough attention to those sets like Finest, Allen & Ginter X, and the rash of weird stuff that Topps belches out seemingly every other week during the season and thereafter. 


Dang it. I told myself I'd stop bitching so much about Topps as part of my giving thanks for the facts that we still have physical cards being issued. Please sir, may I have another?

2.  Butch Vig

Have you ever heard the name Butch Vig before? If you haven't, I will guarantee that you have heard music he's produced and that you probably have heard his band play.

Vig was born in Viroqua, Wisconsin. Viroqua is in the very western part of the state, about 25 miles from the Mississippi River and about 30 miles from La Crosse. The video above has Butch explaining how he produced the song "In Bloom" on Nirvana's massive megahit album Nevermind. That same year of 1991 saw him also produce Gish by The Smashing Pumpkins. SInce then, he's also produced songs and albums by Sonic  Youth, AFI, Against Me!, Jimmy Eat World, Green Day, Muse, and Foo Fighters. 

Oh, and he also had his own pretty good band too:

There are a lot of men around my age who will tell you that one of their celebrity crushes from the 1990s was Shirley Manson, the Scottish lead singer of the band Angelfish that Vig, guitarist/keyboardist Steve Marker, and bass player Duke Erikson recruited to be the lead singer of the band they called Garbage. Vig, Marker, and Erikson had played together in bands starting in the mid-1970s while attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Vig's a legend. No doubt about it. And Shirley Manson still looks damn good even if she is 50 years old.

Of course Robin Yount is a baseball legend. One of the cards that I got in this package was this 2003 Donruss Studio Enshrinement card serial numbered to 750. It celebrates Yount's enshrinement in the Hall of Fame in 1999 with an appropriately late-career photo of Robin. 

I cringe a bit when I see cards featuring players from the 1980s and 1990s using black and white photography. Even cards of guys from the 1960s and 1970s make me a bit unhappy. By 1963, Polaroid had come up with instant color film. By 1970, prices for color photo processing had dropped significantly. By 1980s, black-and-white film had nearly disappeared (so says Wikipedia). 

So why is it that we get black-and-white photos of guys from the 1980s and thereafter? 

3. Woody Herman

Woody Herman is another legend. He was born in Milwaukee in 1913, and let me tell you, this dude could wail on the clarinet and the saxophone.  He also put together a series of excellent bands. For instance, in 1942, he hired Dizzy Gillespie to write three charts for him -- thus making Woody an early adopter of bebop. By 1946, his band worked with Igor Stravinsky on Ebony Concerto -- a cross between classical and jazz music. 

He then put together a second band that included saxophone virtuosos Zoot Sims, Serge Chaloff, Herbie Steward, and Stan Getz. Due to financial problems thanks to a bad bookkeeper in the 1960s, he had to continue touring and leading his band all the way up to his death in 1987.

I did not have this Gypsy Queen white framed paper parallel from 2014. The more I dig into all the parallels in Topps's world, the less I feel like trying to collect team sets of them. Of course, in sets like Gypsy Queen and Allen & Ginter, the Brewers get so few cards generally that it's not that much of a burden to try to get them all. 

I mean, this coming year, what will the Brewers get? So long as Ryan Braun isn't traded before the end of 2016, he'll be in those sets. Jonathan Villar might be. Topps is so behind that I wouldn't be surprised to see Chris Carter as a Brewer in those sets too. Yount and/or Molitor or both will be in them. 

After that, though, will Topps have any Brewers in the sets? They did not view Orlando Arcia as enough of a prospect to feature his debut in Topps Now (as they did with any number of lesser-rated prospects). I'd venture to guess that no one with Topps could name another Brewers player at this point. So, I'm guessing I'm looking at collecting maybe 4 or 5 players in each set. Maybe. I can do that.

4.  The Violent Femmes

Holy crap this song is 33 years old. I heard it for the first time in 1986, as a freshman in high school, and I was hooked. It spoke to me as a dweeby, poor, too-smart-for-his-own-good kid who decided to join the debate team thanks to having a year off football due to a summertime injury. 

Being a debater was much more my bag than football anyway. I was a 5'11", 175-pound offensive lineman who did not really like to hit people because, well, my brain's thought processes kicked in too much and told me it didn't make sense and I was never going to be a college or pro player anyway. But I knew I would be a professional somehow -- thinking.

I've featured the Violent Femmes on here before. I've seen them play at least two or three times, and they are fantastic in concert. This song has taken on iconic status by this point, what with all the movies and videogames it's been in. They got their start by playing a brief acoustic set at the Oriental Theater in 1981 prior to a show by The Pretenders -- who saw them playing on a street corner in front of the Oriental that afternoon before the show.

The 1984 Donruss set is pretty iconic by this point too. It had a clean, attractive set design with pretty good (for Donruss) photography and a number of good rookie cards. In addition, it also had lower print runs, reportedly, than most sets during the 1980s. 

I had the 1984 Donruss set as a kid. I had the factory version. I ended up selling the set when I was trying unsuccessfully to raise money for me to take a trip with my high school debate coach to the Soviet Union. Being able to go to the USSR would have been pretty cool, but my family's lack of resources always made that trip more of a pipe dream than anything else.

This card was the one card I had already in my Yount collection. I still needed it.

5. Bon Iver

Bon Iver was formed in Fall Creek, Wisconsin -- near Eau Claire -- with its main creative impetus coming from Justin Vernon. The band released its first album in five years -- called 22, A Million -- in September. The critics love it -- Metacritic has it rated at 87 based on 41 critic's reviews. 

The new album is experimental and a break from what came before it. In some respects -- and even as one critic noted -- this new album is akin to how Radiohead's Kid A was received and was released, both pushing the audience away and pulling it closer simultaneously. 

It's the relationship I have with Panini. The Diamond Kings set pulls me in. I want to like it. It's a top quality feeling set. And yet, the lack of logos and the crapload of ridiculous parallels and inserts push me away.

Unlike Bon Iver's work on this concept, however, Panini's work pushes me away far more than it pulls me in. Can a baseball card company create a set that does not feature 20 different parallels? The answer is yes -- one of my favorite sets of 2016 is the Topps Bunt physical card set. The set limits parallels, it limits inserts, and it has a low-end price point. It's everything a card set should be to draw in kids and to bring back the parents of those kids who used to collect.

In other words, it's unlike nearly every other set out there.

Thanks go out to Neosho, Wisconsin, for these cards from @AllTimeBrewers.

Ugliness in a One-Card Post

I have other cards I could write up, but those cards are going to take a little more time and effort to write up than I can muster today. So, I'm going with a really ugly one card post. It's okay that I say that, because Peter -- the man behind the Baseball Every Night blog said it himself when he sent the card to me.

See? I never knew that Peter was a cheerleader in his past, though. It's amazing the things you can learn about your fellow card collectors just by interacting with them. Granted, based on his "cheer" in his letter above, Peter must have cheered in the 1870s.

Still, with an introduction like that, I was halfway expecting a crime scene photograph from the Manson Family or something. Nope -- it's just Graeme:

1995 Fleer is one of those sets that really creates a split in the hobby. Some people will tell you it is one of the ugliest sets ever made with all the busy crap going on here. Then, there are some baseball card collectors who are blind and cannot see how ugly it is.

That's the split, really. 

Peter sent me this in response to an email he sent to me where he listed out a bunch of cards that he had in his possession that he wanted to get rid of as not fitting in his collection. I looked at his list, and this one was the only card on the list that I needed.

Today, I was doing some sorting and cleanup around here -- finally getting cards into their binders after being lazy about it for a little while. I went to put old Graeme away, and things got even uglier. You see, I already had this card in my binder -- I just hadn't updated my Fleer Want List to reflect it. Thus, things got even uglier for me because, well, this one is just a duplicate.

Egad.

At least I had the opportunity today to get some organization done and to talk to a friend on the phone for a while. It's one of the fundamental things as a collector -- trying to stay organized enough so that you do not become the place where people dispose of their ugly children.

Next time, it will be different.

Many thanks, though, to Peter for adding some ugliness to my life. 

This Way to a Trade Post

It will be a trade post with Mark Kaz from This Way to The Clubhouse soon.  In other words, I will be getting a package out to Mark soon, that is, once I get everything put away from the JBF Monster packs. I'm almost done with it too. All that sorting puts trade packages behind, but I have to admit -- the sorting part is probably the most fun part.  It's even cathartic at times. 

But, in between monsters arriving in Georgia, I received a stuffed envelope from Mark filled with Brewers. Mark was kind enough to send these cards my way -- perhaps partially in thanks for my research skills in chasing down his Mike Piazza 1999 Fleer Tradition kite. Mark sent me a number of cards that I needed for player collections along with a couple of minor league cards too.

Let's start with those minor leaguers:

Matt LaPorta might be a familiar name to baseball fans for being part of the trade that brought CC Sabathia to Milwaukee just prior to his free agency. The Brewers pretty much knew that Sabathia wasn't signing with them, so they abused the living hell out of his arm -- and why not? No need to worry about the future if the future for the pitcher did not include the Brewers.  LaPorta is pictured here with the Helena (Montana) Brewers. 

Mike Farrell was an undrafted free agent out of Indiana State University who made it all the way to Triple-A New Orleans in 1993, 1994, 1995, and 1996. He never struck out enough guys to make it past Triple-A, though.  After his playing career, the Brewers signed him on as a scout as soon as his playing career ended in 1998, and he is credited with signing two players who made it to the major leagues -- Eric Fryer (who played 28 games with Minnesota last year) and Mitch Stetter (who last pitched in the major leagues in 2011 with Milwaukee).

Beyond the minor leaguers, Mark also sent me three Ryan Braun cards that I did not have. For whatever reason, 2009 seems to be a dead zone for me. I never find cards from 2009 at the card shows -- 2010 to the present, sure...2008 and before, yup, those too...but not 2009. So all three of these were greatly appreciated:

Some guys seem to have the same photo on every card.  Like the Braun "puffed out cheeks in his swing follow-through" photos above, it seems like Dave Nilsson is always looking up at something:

Unless, of course, he's looking down to try to block the plate.

Apropos for Nilsson being an Aussie, here's a photo of some kangaroos from, yes, 2009.  

Yes, I took this photo.

Anyway, Mark Kaz didn't send me to Australia, but these cards took me there.  

Back to the USA for a few more cards that scream "1990s".  

Why do these cards scream, "1990s"? Vaughn with the hat backwards, for example, reminds me of the joke we had about the Vanderbilt frat boy uniform in 1990: blue shirt, khaki pants, navy blazer, yellow tie, and backward dirty white hat with a Milwaukee's Best Light in his hand. Of course, Vaughn would not have fit in that well with that frat boy look because, well, Vanderbilt was 92% white at that time.  

B.J. Surhoff would have fit in at Vanderbilt, other than not having a name that sounds like two last names.  You know, like Walker Buehler or Dansby Swanson or Carson Fulmer -- all first round MLB Draft picks from Vanderbilt this year.

And, to close out, nothing says the 1990s quite like 1995 Fleer or a Pinnacle card of any kind.  Yes, I realize Panini resurrects 1990s brands from time to time like a lurching middle-aged man revisiting his Vanderbilt 1990s frat days -- and it usually comes off similarly. It starts kind of fun -- everyone's having a good time, people overlook the flaws for a little while...then it starts going wrong. No logos for Panini or too much Scotch for Vandy Frat Guy starts wearing on the folks around them. Panini throws in 84 different parallels, Vandy Frat Guy starts thinking he can pick up like his 19 again -- and it all goes off the rails.

And, wow, where the hell did that stream of consciousness come from.

Mark -- please ignore my vacant stares and accept my sincerest thanks for these great cards and all the other cards you sent to me.  I have your address now, and I have the URL for your Zistle Wantlist, so I will be returning the favor soon.

I promise.

Perhaps This Year is The Year?

Before King Bud decided to relive his childhood by forcing the Milwaukee Brewers to switch to the National League back in late 1997, I actually cheered for the Chicago Cubs as my National League team thanks to my aunt, my uncle, and my cousin from Chicago loving the Cubs.  I even attended a game there in 1984 and cheered for the Cubs. 

In those days before interleague play, Brewers fans really didn't mind the Cubs, I don't think. In fact, if you'd have asked me in, say, 1989 to name the three teams I hated the most, my answers would have been easy.  Number three would have been the St. Louis Cardinals. 1982 took a long time to get over.  Number two would have been the New York Yankees. 1981 also took a long time to get over.  Number one, though, would have easily been the Chicago White Sox. 

Going to a White Sox/Brewers game at either stadium was akin to taking your life in your own hands. I've seen mosh pits at concerts that weren't as physically intimidating or as harrowing as sitting in the bleachers at County Stadium for a Friday night game between those two teams. You mix a day of tailgating with full stands and throw in, perhaps, some heat and humidity if the game was in July or early August, and it was like a tinderbox. Dozens to sometime hundreds of arrests would occur.  Seriously, it was dangerous at times.

I know that the 17 years of being in the National League in the same division as the Cubs and not often playing the White Sox has changed the dynamic in Milwaukee.  Cubs fans are viewed as obnoxious -- which they can be, but so can every single fan base of every single team on the planet in some way.  I still carry that soft spot in my heart for the Cubs, though.

That's a long way of introducing Eddie Vedder's paean to being a Cubs fan to honor the envelope of incredible items from Tom at Waiting 'til Next Year.

In that video -- an excellent HD-quality video from the Pearl Jam show at Wrigley in July of 2013 -- Eddie Vedder explains that he wrote the song "All the Way" because Ernie Banks asked him to do it.  Eddie thought that the idea of writing a song to try to capture the feeling of being a Cubs fan was impossible, but since it was Ernie Banks asking, Eddie has to do it.

I view trying to thank Tom for the excellent cards he sent as being impossible, but I have to try.  Let's start with a card that I'm still trying to identify with a bit more specificity other than simply them being "Brewers cards."

So, I think these are cards from a Brewers yearbook or program. I based that on the fact that they are slightly oversized in a size similar to the Brewers yearbook cards from 1989 and 1990, and they are perforated on the edges again in a manner similar to the yearbook cards from 1989 and 1990.  For the obvious reason of this being the '82 Anniversary Collection, the cards must be from either 1992, 1997, 2002, 2007, or 2012.  But, I don't know which year.  

If I had to guess, I'd imagine it was 1992 for a couple of reasons -- card stock quality isn't great, the close proximity in time to the previous yearbook cards, and the fact that the Brewer name is both so huge across the card and reflects the new home jersey look for that year, which is circled below:

But, as the Violent Femmes said, "This is only a guess."

Okay, back to the Brewers now. Not only did Tom find those cards for me, he also helped fill in some more recent gaps -- such as 2015 Bowman:

So, that's a base card of Jason Rogers, who's Adam Lind's platoon partner currently, a Yellow parallel of top prospect Orlando Arcia, a "Farm's Finest Mini" of last year's #1 pick Kodi Medeiros, and Taylor Williams (who hasn't pitched this year due to arm problems) on the Prospects Chrome parallel.

Another item from 2015 also arrived with this envelope, but it's not a card:

Of course, it was slot right into the Lucroy collection in my binders, but this is a schedule.  I love schedules that show real Brewers player photos on them!

If Tom had stopped there, it would have been an incredibly generous package.  But he didn't stop there. But, nope, there's more. 

Super-vintage Kellogg's! That's Bill Parsons on a 1972 Kellogg's card!  Parsons was a true prospect -- well, as much of a prospect as a pitcher can be -- for the Pilots (drafted in the 1968 draft in the 7th round).  He was tall and thin -- 6 feet, 6 inches tall but just 195 pounds. He tore through the system quickly. The Brewers jumped him from the Single-A Midwest League in 1969 to Triple-A Portland in 1970, which they had to do to keep promoting him since none of the new 1969 teams (the Royals, the Expos, the Padres, or the Pilots/Brewers) had Double-A teams that year. 

The thing is, Parsons only pitched in 4 games that year before missing the rest of the season.  Despite that, as a 22-year-old rookie in 1971, the Brewers put him on the mound for 36 games (35 starts) and 12 complete games over 244-2/3 innings.  He finished 13-17 with a 3.20 ERA, which was good enough to have him finish second behind Chris Chambliss for Rookie of the Year honors (and Parsons deserved to win it according to WAR).  And yet, two years later, the Brewers traded him to Oakland for Deron Johnson, and after the 1974 season -- at just 26 years old -- Parsons was done in the majors.

And yet, even a 1972 Kellogg's card is not the topper.  You see, a few months ago, I sent Tom a Ryne Sandberg Topps Tribute Blank Bank 1/1 that I bought last year on eBay for a price far below what I thought it should have sold for. Tom's a Ryno collector, so that card belongs in his collection.

In return, Tom asked me what he could possibly send me to repay me for that card in light of the fact that he would be going to a card show in Milwaukee in May.  I told him, well, if you really feel like you need to look for something there for me, look for non-Milwaukee-Police Police cards.  

When this package showed up from Tom, the first thing to pop out was a note apologizing -- saying that the card show was a huge bust.   But how could the show be a bust when you found these, Tom?

From the Wauwatosa Police Department and the Schmidt & Bartelt Funeral Service, it's your 2007 Milwaukee Brewers!  Even though the full set came in a shrink wrapped package, I had to rip that package open immediately to flip through them.  These are excellent!

And yet, there is still one more item.  In his note, Tom said he went to a Brewers game and played Plinko at the stadium on one of the concourses and won something for me.  I didn't realize that the Brewers now feature parts of the set from the Price is Right, but I am not questioning this win:

It's a Ben Oglivie bobblehead from 2007 2014 (oops!)!  That is awesome!  

Tom, thank you so much for the incredible cards, the bobblehead, and all the thought that went into this box!

Tomorrow, it's back to war...hopefully, I will continue to play better against JBF than this former Auburn quarterback ever could:

In the season in which Gross played the most -- 1998 -- the Auburn Tigers went 3-8 and Coach Terry Bowden a/k/a Tater Tot was fired before Halloween.  Gross is lucky he was a far better baseball player than he was a quarterback.

Let's hope I don't get sacked.