$30 Habits

Before I jump headlong into this post, I wanted to thank all of you for the kind comments about my dog. It really does mean a lot to me to know that a lot of you cared enough to comment and read that post. I didn't have a lot of desire to write anything the past few days other than to talk about that, so thanks for your patience.

Thanks again.

Before the upheaval last week, I had scanned and planned a bunch of posts to try to catch up on all the great packages that have been arriving from bloggers across the country for me. It's been a great month in that respect, and I have a huge pile of envelopes that will be going out in the next few days to try to catch up on all the trades I've been working on over the past couple of months.

One package came in to me from Robért at $30 a Week Habit.  It's such a good package that it needs musical accompaniment:

Yeah, that's one of Pearl Jam's most repetitive songs with a bit of an anti-drug (probably) bent to it. Last year, Rob Neyer mentioned it as one of the songs that Fox probably would not use in its baseball coverage -- especially with respect to, as he put it, "a certain power-hitting shortstop who joined the Seattle club in the 1990s and became addicted to the fast life and the easy availability of certain (supposedly) performance-enhancing drugs?"

I was a huge Pearl Jam fan about 10 years ago or so -- I spent a bunch of money on collecting their bootlegs from their shows on their 2000 and 2003 tours -- and I still enjoy their music a great deal. That said, "Habit" is, to me, just an okay song.

That does not describe the package I got from Robért. It was excellent.  

It started with a big plastic screw-down holder:

Richie Sexson is a guy who might have been a PC for me if he'd lasted longer in America's Dairyland. A big home run hitter with prodigious power and a birthday two days after mine (though he is 3 years younger than me), the Brewers got him for Jason Bere, Steve Woodard, and Bob Wickman in 2000.  

Then, after the 2003 season, Doug Melvin traded him away to the Arizona Diamondbacks (with Shane Nance and Noochie Varner) for half a team -- Chris Capuano, Craig Counsell, Chad Moeller, Lyle Overbay, Jorge De La Rosa, and Junior Spivey. Sexson played 23 games in his one season in the desert before heading to the Pacific Northwest and hitting 105 homers in three-and-a-half seasons for the Mariners.

Sure looks like the Brewers won both of those trades to me.

I also got a shiny golden K-Rod, happily celebrating a save in 2011:

Now, don't get me wrong. Those two cards were awesome and made the package a very good one.

But the final two cards in the package were what made it an over-the-top ridiculously great package for me.  I mean, how do you top receiving two cards from the 1960s of the greatest third baseman not named Mike Schmidt to play major league baseball:

Mr. Ed Mathews, ladies & gentlemen. Mathews definitely was the player who made putting a strong-hitting and decent fielding player at third base part of the requirements for baseball teams. I mean, the only one close from Mathews's era would be Brooks Robinson -- and Mathews was a far better hitter than Brooks was (Mathews OBP/SLG: .376/.509; Robinson: .322/.401).

Before Mathews came along, the best third-baseman in the HOF was Home Run Baker. Baker now would be hard-pressed to make it to the Hall. He's been surpassed (using the JAWS methodology) by Graig Nettles, Edgar Martinez, Adrian Beltre, Scott Rolen, and Chipper Jones -- and that just the players who either are active, not yet eligible, or not yet elected to the Hall.

Yes, Mathews was better than Boggs, better than Brett, better than Santo, better than Robinson, and better than Molitor. More importantly, he was a pioneer of sorts in the way that Robin Yount and Cal Ripken were -- showing that you could play an important fielding position and still be a power hitter.

Robért, thank you very much for these cards. I've got my eyes peeled for some good Jays cards that you need!

Goodbye to my pal Cinnie

I've been AWOL this weekend. Thanks to a pre-written post, I had something post on Friday.

Friday was a very bad day, though.

It started on Thursday morning, really. As I was getting ready for work, our dog -- which my wife had rescued about 3 years before we met -- had gotten up and peed everywhere all over the living room. That she peed inside isn't always surprising -- she did that sometimes when we didn't get her outside quickly enough. But, the amount was very high and unusual.

Then, during the day, she vomited a lot. Literally every time she drank water or ate food, it came back up.

Let me add some context here. Two years ago, Cinnie -- short for Cinnamon Toast -- beat cancer. In the time I got to know her, Cinnie went from being a scared dog who was afraid of most people to being a friendly dog who loved children and neighbors.

For the past three or four months, though, Cinnie had been struggling. She had some stomach ulcers, and she had some issues where she wasn't digesting her food properly (called motility). This caused nausea problems for her, and it led to her losing weight.

She had problems breathing. Well, she's always had problems breathing because she was rescued after she pulled herself free from a tree where she had been tied and bred for red tick coon hound puppies probably 4 to 8 times in 4 to 5 years. That caused her trachea to have issues, since she probably crushed it to escape.  But her breathing problems had worsened. She started sneezing a lot and even had one weekend where she sneezed up some blood. Her kidneys were in stage 1 kidney failure.

All this added up to cause her to lose a lot of weight. At her heaviest, she was 45 pounds. At her last vet visit two weeks ago, she was 27 pounds.

So, when she could not keep any food down at all, it was very problematic. We think she may have had a cancerous tumor in her nasal passages causing problems there too. Our last ditch effort was a steroid shot two weeks ago.

In the end, though, she was suffering a lot. She couldn't keep any food or water down. She was lethargic. She wasn't herself. She was in pain.

We came to the decision that keeping her with us longer was only because we wanted her around and not because her quality of life was any good. So, we said goodbye to our Cinnie girl on Friday.

It still hurts a lot. I've immersed myself in sorting through baseball cards, watching college football, drinking too much liquor one night, and otherwise trying to avoid the fact that when I get home from work tomorrow, she won't be there.

My wife is struggling a lot with this. Cinnie was her first dog, and Cinnie was very much her dog. Cinnie followed my wife around the house when my wife would be cleaning, cooking, talking on the telephone, or even sleeping.

The house is a lot quieter now without our puppy around. We're not sure right now whether we will get another dog. We might or we might not, but it's just too soon for us to think about that.

To celebrate her life, here are some photos I took of Cinnie during the 5 years that I knew her.

Every Easter, Cinnie went on a pepperoni hunt rather than an Easter egg hunt. This is from the 2014 version. 

This is the photo I took of her back in 2010 that we have framed on top of our TV.

When my wife and I went out to football games in Athens and stayed overnight to have fun with family and friends, we would board Cinnie. I picked her up in my car and put the top down. She's smiling away here, knowing full well that she was at that point the coolest dog on the face of the planet.

Cinnie's favorite blanket was her Green Bay Packers blanket that she got from me.

Cinnie loved sitting on her orange blanket next to her mommy on the couch.

Cinnie has her lanyard around her neck here, ready to go to a Georgia football game with us.

Cinnie had a very difficult life before my wife rescued her. After her rescue, she was treated like royalty, and she deserved every bit of the treatment she received.

I miss her greatly, and I know I will miss her for a long time.

Like I said, it's been a rough weekend.

Dime Box Additions

For some reason, some bloggers are easier to "buy for" than others. That centers around the fact that some bloggers -- like me, for example -- have huge holes in the collections that they have chosen to pursue. Other folks are much more focused than I am, have been at it for much longer, and/or have want lists that fall right where my card collecting "holes" are located.

Another type of blogger who is easier to "buy for" than most are the bloggers with eclectic tastes. Whether it's because they collect plays at the plate, pitchers hitting, players with microphones, or just oddballs generally, these bloggers are ones who appreciate the random collections of cards that one can harvest from a 1980s-based collection like mine.

I say all that because I really enjoy trading with Nick from the Dime Boxes. I really enjoy reading Nick's blog because it's truly the Forrest-Gump-box-of-chocolates there. You never know what has caught his eye, his dimes, and his attention on a day-to-day basis.

That's a good thing, by the way. 

An envelope from Nick showed up in my mailbox while I was actually in Nick's neck of the woods in Northern Illinois. Nick had shown off some Robin Yount O-Pee-Chee cards that he had bailed out of their dime-box jails, and I asked him if he might send them to me. 

Along with these cards came this note:

I wasn't expecting more, but let me tell you, Nick -- I enjoyed every one of these and needed all of them!

Starting with Eddie Mathews. As I have said on a few of my individual player collection pages, some of these players are ones that I simply haven't focused on in my time back in the hobby. Eddie Mathews is one such guy. It took me until that recent card show to get cards in hand that were from his playing days, for instance. 

Somehow, Nick has found Eddie with his dime box Friends in low places:

To be fair, that 1953 Topps card of Mathews is from the Topps reprint set from 1991. That does not in any way distract from the fact that these are all excellent cards I needed for my Mathews collection.

Nick also ticked a box on the Warren Spahn collection page:

I've only recently mentioned that I added Lew Burdette to the ever-expanding player collections I have. Thankfully, Nick sent these envelopes out after I said that, as this "1953 Topps Card That Never Was" found its way to me. 

I can't leave out Matt Scott's favorite steroid user, though. This Hobby-shop-only card is from 2010. I did not even know this card and a similar Prince Fielder card existed a month ago. Now I have both Prince and the Ryan Braun card.

This Jose Valentin card surprised me because it's one really horribly ugly base set card from Fleer in 1995. 

It's as if the graphics designer who wanted to give ESPN2 that "jaunty, young 1990s look" lost his/her job in Bristol and went to work at Fleer.

Back when Keith Olbermann was viewed as pulling in the "younger" crowd...

Another random gap in my collecting is from the 1980s and involves anything not named "Topps." I think I just haven't broken up the sets from that era that I collected, but I just don't have much in the way of Fleer from that era.  Nick fixed that some, sending a number of members of the PC brigade from 1984 to me.

Charlie Moore

Jim Slaton

Ben Oglivie

Cecil Cooper

Don Money

Bob McClure

Finally, while I'm not a Rollie Fingers "collector" like Cynical Buddha is, I don't mind getting a 2005 SP Legendary Cuts base card of the mustachioed one. Especially since I did not own one before.

As with his blog, Nick's PWE to me displays the gems that people with enough patience and sticktoitiveness to plow through dime boxes can find.  And Nick -- a return package is coming your way soon.

Thanks again!

No Disguise for That Double Vision

After all that rich, fattening blog fodder from the card show, I was worried that I would once again run out of things to write about. I've been terrible the past few months about getting packages out in the mail. The usual result of that is that packages don't come to me in the mail.

Strangely, though, a number of bloggers have sent me cards anyway. One of the odder sights, however, was getting not one but two PWEs on the same day from Gavin at Baseball Card Breakdown. 

As Lou Gramm sings in this song, he wants his eyes filled with double vision. Weirdly, Gramm said the song resulted from watching New York Rangers Goalie John Davidson getting a concussion and experiencing double vision as a result.

I rather thought it was about getting drunk, or maybe pitching like Bill Wegman.

Gavin personalized that Collector's Choice card for me on both the front and the back:

Now, I opened the envelope with this Breakdown special first and saw that Wegman DUR. My first thought was to laugh, and I did. My second thought was, "Oh God, I think I still need that card for my Brewers collection...I hope that there is another one in this envelope."

There was not.

My third thought was, "I can imagine what is going to happen years from now. Some baseball card collector -- one of three left who still cares then about paper cards and not those wonderfully easily transferrable 'BUNT' cards that everyone else will be collecting because 'technology WHEEEE!' -- will be looking at that Wegman card and think, 'why the hell did someone do that?' I mean, first there was that George Sherrill card that someone optimistically crossed out and wrote Hall of Famer Clayton Kershaw's name on it, and now this?"

Okay, maybe I didn't have the George Sherrill thought, but my mind did wander and think about this card's potential future owners.

Of course, being the strange collector that I am, this personalized card now becomes a Baseball Card Breakdown 1 of 1 in my collection.

Thankfully, in the second envelope, this was the first card I saw:

Also thankfully, Bill Wegman was not the only player whose cards showed up in the PWEs from Portland.

One card making its debut in my collection was this 2000 Bowman card of Ben Sheets. It is the first Ben Sheets rookie card to find its way into my possession as well.

Gavin also fed my maudlin side about the life and times of Rickie Weeks, about whom I seem to be waxing nostalgic on a semi-regular/nearly daily basis.

Perhaps my tortured soul with respect to Rickie will be the start of my novel:

"It was the best of wrists, and it was the worst of wrists."

Gavin jammed -- carefully, of course -- a number of other similarly well-aged Brewer cards from the late 1990s and early 2000s into those two PWEs and sent them to the ATL. Here are the cards for guys who don't get links because I don't have player collections for them.

That does not mean that they are less important to me than any other Brewers. It just that some Brewers are more equal than others.

Levitating Spiers

J.J. Hardy was traded for Carlos Gomez.
The Twins turned that into Jim Hoey and minor leaguer Brett Jacobson.

The easy highlight of the two envelopes, though, belongs to the rather well-fed face of Jeromy Burnitz. His chiseled chin from earlier years went missing by the time that 2000 rolled around. Taking its place was a rounder, plumper, more....Milwaukee physique. Still, his home run power was prodigious, though no one wanted him stealing bases any more.

More to the point and what the scan above does not make clear is the fact that this was a Bowman Gold Parallel, serial numbered 63/99. See, I can prove it:

These two great PWEs gave me Double Vision that got the best of me.

Thanks, Gavin -- they are greatly appreciated, and your return envelope is on my desk awaiting the time when I get to a post office to mail it.