I've Got Some Work to Do

Christmas came early to Off Hiatus HQ yesterday. My wife told me on Thursday that her parents had gotten me a big Christmas gift, and that they were making the 2+ hour drive to bring it to our house yesterday.

To be honest, I had no idea what they were bringing. I theorized that it could be a new grill since the one we have -- though just three years old -- is already looking a little worse for the wear. 

The gift arrived yesterday...in the back of my father-in-law's pickup truck.

I look happy there.  This photo is the realization that I need to go through these and sort them all out:



There are about 75 binders to go through.  Seriously. This is going to take a while.

Here's another view of the binders out of the truck, stacked in my screen porch:



My initial flip through these binders -- in moving them to my office and, then, getting them so they aren't just thrown all over the floor -- is that there is a lot of junk wax with a few oddball early 1990s sets thrown in and, randomly strewn throughout the binders, are cards from the 1970s. 

The man who had these cards passed away, and his wife and son wanted to get rid of them. The previous owner had pretty detailed inventories of what he had, so that's been helpful. However, his definition of star and my definition of star are slightly different. I would not, for example, have included Dave Bergman or Francisco Cabrera or Tracy Jones in a star binder.

Still, that's a lot of the fun.  It's too bad that I have a bunch of work to finish up today, as I might otherwise spend all day blowing through these things.

The best part for my wife and her parents was that this was a huge surprise to me. It's great to have in-laws who like me generally, but to care enough to find this, buy it, and deliver it to me is just unbelievable.

I really am a lucky man.

Burned Out

I'm feeling very burned out today. 

I don't mean that I'm burned out on blogging or sharing the great cards that folks send me. I mean that I've been writing literally all week at work.  A little known fact: the reality of being a lawyer for most people is that lawyers are not people who get in court and argue all the time. Some folks are like that -- criminal defense lawyers, for instance. But, most civil litigation lawyers and generally all other lawyers other than trial lawyers are really professional writers.

That's what I have been doing all week. I have a major court filing due on Monday that I still need to finish my first draft for over this weekend. 

In the interest of putting up a post, though, let me do a quick one-card post. It's just the tip of the iceberg of the cards that Mr. Haverkamp sent my way. And, once I get to Tuesday or Wednesday next week, I might actually have the opportunity to get some packages put together and post all the great cards that have come way over the past week!



This is just a cool card -- it is a 1970 Topps baseball Scratch off card of Mike Hegan, still with the Seattle Pilots.

More to come tomorrow, hopefully, or definitely later in the week.

Thanks for stopping by.

Christmas with Angus

One of the newer bloggers around the blogworld this year is Angus of Dawg Day Cards. He introduced himself to me through commenting here. He then started sending me cards -- here's the first time -- and even aided me in the War with JBF by delivering the final blow which led to peace in our time between Hazel Green and Sandy Springs/Dunwoody.

Around our Thanksgiving Day, Angus started spreading Christmas cheer around by sending out Christmas cards filled with baseball cards. 

From the very beginning of the packages of cards that Angus has sent to me, he's been quick to feed my oddball fixations. The Christmas Present was no different. 

It started a little slowly, though.

I wondered to myself why Angus had sent this card, and then I saw the fine print on the card noting that Parker was listed as "Now With Brewers." I thought then, "wait, I don't recall Topps doing that on Parker's card for 1990."

So, while initially a bit of a question mark, it all became clear once I read the fine print on both sides of the card. You'd think a lawyer would know better than to ignore that small print, but there we are -- a new addition to the O-Pee-Chee collection.

The remainder of my Angus Christmas special were all larger than life Donruss cards:

Donruss Action All-Stars and the Donruss Champions sets are some of my favorite regular-issue oddballs from the 1980s. The postcard size make them perfect for autographs that aren't cramped, and that same size makes it easy to find plastic sheets to store them in.

With such a great package of Brewers greats in large form, it's a perfect time to post my favorite Christmas song again: The Pogues & Kirsty MacColl.

Angus, thanks as always for the great cards. I'll keep an eye out at my local shows for more Cleveland Browns relics and autographs as well. No offense, but the Browns continued failure at being a good NFL team keeps those relics and autographs quite affordable.

Julie's Been Working for the Drug Squad

How else can you explain why Julie from A Cracked Bat would be sending out so many cards to so many people? She must have some kind of "connections" that are allowing her to put such great envelopes of cards together for people.

I have traded with Julie a couple of times already. In fact, my last trade post (called imaginatively "Julie: A Trade Post") is one of my most viewed posts ever (with over 1150 hits). It might be the American Girl part of the post that draws random hits to the post, but it's more likely that the world wants more "Cracked Bat"!

This time around, Julie sent me several very recent cards from a couple of the higher end sets:

Now that's a lot of Lucroy right there -- two of the Museum Collection base card parallels, the Topps Triple Threads base of both Luc and Gomez, the Lucroy Green parallel, and the Red prism card from Panini that reminds me of a Picasso painting for some reason.

Maybe.

Anyway, Julie also treated me to some relics and autographs too.

Coooooooooooooop! Dave Parker was a Brewer for just one year, but apparently the Brewers kept every one of his old uniforms to let Upper Deck cut them up into little squares. Finally, there's Carlos Villanueva, who was last seen in the bullpen for Baseball's Best Fans (who really seem to believe that Jason Heyward should have felt more kinship to St. Louis after 1 season than he would show for any other team in baseball).

Finally, Julie hooked me up with a few random cards for a couple of my other player collections:

Each of these great cards -- including the Gallardo Chrome Heritage up top -- were ones I knew that I needed for my player collections.  

This last one, though, was not.  I mean, I'm not a Scott Fletcher collector, except for his cards with the Brewers, of course...

...well played, Julie! Well played.

Thanks again for the great cards you've sent this time. And, guess what? I've been collecting up cards to send your way soon!

Brewers From Brad's Blog

When people move houses, it is often one of the few times in their lives where they strongly consider whether some particular item, box, or piece of furniture is worth keeping. My wife and I moved into our house three years ago. Even though we were moving into a larger house, we still made choices on what to bring along and what to let the vultures that were our neighbors pick through.

Brad of Brad's Phillies Blog is moving this weekend. To aid in his move, he asked the blogworld to help him out by taking cards off his hands. Many of us -- all in the interest of helping a fellow blogger, of course, and not from any selfish desire to get more cards...of course -- signed on to help. I was the recipient of a fantastic load of cards mostly from my Achilles' heel of collecting: the late 1990s.  

There were other, more recent cards too, though. In fact, let's start with cards from this year:

I'm still playing catch-up with some of the run-of-the-mill sets from Topps from 2015. I picked up a case break and box break of Heritage, so I'm good there. And, I have most of the Topps flagship set covered other than short prints and needing one more copy of the Brewers Team card. Now, I'm starting to get closer on Ginter.

By the way, farewell to Adam Lind, who was traded today to the Seattle Mariners for three teenaged pitchers. Basically, the Brewers picked up Marco Estrada off waivers, flipped him to the Jays for Lind (where Estrada suddenly became a competent pitcher again), and now flipped Lind for three international-signing pitchers. I mean, it's not the Braves stealing ex-Vanderbilt Commodore Dansby Swanson, but it's a pretty good trade for a rebuilding Brewers team.

Now the Brewers need a first baseman. Rumor has it that they might sign their bench coach's son-in-law -- former Vanderbilt Commodore Pedro Alvarez. Damn, if that happens, I kinda hope Alvarez tears it up and forces the Brewers to re-sign him. I kinda want a Vandy guy to collect.

Okay, we need music:

That is "Twist" by a late '90s/early '00s Atlanta band called Ultrababyfat. The blond you see playing bass in that video is Britta Phillips. Her claim to fame is that she was the singing voice for Jem in the original cartoon series in the late 1980s in addition to later being in the bands Luna and Dean & Britta (with her husband Dean Wareham). 

The lead singer is Shonali Bhowmik. Shonali is both a fellow Vanderbilt graduate and a fellow law school grad. She went to Emory, and I went to Georgia (though I started at Georgia the year she graduated, and she probably graduated college before I started there too). And, she also hosted the NPR show "Ask Me Another" before current host Ophira Eisenberg.

...

Wow, that was a digression. I always wondered why Ultrababyfat never got bigger than they did -- which was being a really good local band. I saw them a couple of times here in town and loved their sound.

Anyway, I'd better show y'all some cards before you leave.

How about a couple of prospects? Or, perhaps non-prospects. Giacalone was a 16th round pick in 2012 out of Neosho County Community College. He hit very well in the Pioneer League in both 2012 and 2013, but struggled a bit in the Midwest League to start 2013. When you're a 16th round pick, you don't get second chances, and the team just discarded him. Now, he's 23 and just finished his second season in the independent Frontier League in Joliet, and he's trying to pitch.

Nicky Delmonico started with Baltimore in 2012. He came to the Brewers in 2013 in the trade that sent Francisco Rodriguez to Baltimore for a half season. Delmonico missed time in 2014 for some personal issues, then got spanked with a 50-game suspension for amphetamine use (Adderall, in fact).  The Brewers then cut him because, as then-farm director Reid Nichols said, "We couldn't contact him. He wouldn't return calls. We couldn't find him." Delmonico now has clearance to use the Adderall for his ADD, and he played in the White Sox organization last year.

Now, how about the 1990s?



How about THAT mid-1990s goodness? Everything from 1996 Circa to 1995 Score Gold Rush to 1994 Score to those Topps knockoffs of Kellogg's cards that Topps called "IIID". These are awesome and awful and cool and car crashes all at once. Just like the mid-1990s really were.

I mean, I had to put a song from Brad here, right? Everyone's heard of Brad, right? You know, the Stone Gossard/Jeff Ament side project? I saw them play in a basement club here in Atlanta on a Wednesday night in 2001 before about 50 people. It was a great show -- well worth it.

Brad, thank you very much for all the great cards and good luck with the move. One hint: make yourself and your wife empty all the boxes and get them out of the house and THEN figure out where stuff goes. Seriously -- it works!

A Few Random Items from Milwaukee

It's been a busy week. On top of being busy, my mental capacities with respect to sports have been focused more on the selection of the first new football coach for the Georgia Bulldogs in fifteen years than anywhere else. Granted, it didn't take much more than a third-grade education to figure out who would be the Georgia head coach (so long as Kirby Smart wanted the job, it would be his). Still, with Georgia, there's always an element of thinking that they could still screw this up somehow -- and that nagging suspicion will continue until Kirby signs on the dotted line.

At any rate, my mother and younger brother came to Atlanta for Thanksgiving. They brought with them a few things that I didn't know I had remaining at my mom's house -- in large part because, well, the stuff mostly wasn't mine to begin with but really belonged to my younger brother.  

Such as, for example, a complete set of 1999 Milwaukee Brewers police cards issued by the Village of Jackson Police and Volunteer Fire Department.

And, hey, thanks, Blogger for the update that allows me to drag and drop scans into my blog posts over the three-step system of having to click the little photo icon, select the cards I want to use, wait for them to upload, then rearrange them in the post! Now, perhaps they will work out a way next to embed videos by using a URL rather than having to find them on YouTube. Then again, why would they do that, since Google owns YouTube and Blogger?

But, I digress.  I like these 1999 cards for their backgrounds. Using photos from old Milwaukee County Stadium as the background in what was supposed to be the old Stadium's final year (before the Big Blue Crane fell and killed people and damaged the work in place) was a nice touch. 

Also found in the box from Wisconsin were some of those Dover Reprints. For my interests specifically, I got a couple of great perforated oddballs from the early 1980s books on which Bert Sugar put his name:





Reprints of Warren Spahn's 1950 Bowman card and of Lew Burdette's 1952 Bowman card. I'm disappointed that the book didn't include a 1952 Topps Eddie Mathews.  With the cost of that card being what it is, a reprint may be as close as I'll ever come to owning it barring some sort of lottery-like windfall in my future.

My next find came in the form of a 1989 Milwaukee Brewers yearbook. In 1988, 1989, and 1992 (I think this is true for 1992), the Brewers inserted pages of perforated cards that are slightly larger than the regulation size cards we are all used to. I decided "to hell with it" and pulled all the cards from this yearbook apart.  Here are the pages in their unperforated glory:

I like how there are only 18 cards that they issued. Imagine being one of the eight guys on the 25-man roster (since one of these cards is manager Tom Trebelhorn) from the year prior who was still on the roster who didn't get a card issued. "Yes, we love your skills. You've got a spot on this roster. It's just that, well, none of our fans really like you or care about you or know who you are. No, we're not planning on cutting you for that non-roster invite guy! Not right now, anyway..."

One last Brewers item, and then one last oddball.  First the Brewers item.  Back in 1984, the major-league minimum salary was $30,000 a year. According to this inflation calculator, that salary today would be just shy of $70,000. For comparison purposes, the minimum salary in 2015 was $507,500 -- the equivalent of $218,940 in 1984.  Baseball players are doing a lot better these days financially than they did in the 1980s for sure.

But, does it excuse dressing like you shopped with Macklemore at the thrift shop?

Former Brewers reliever Tom Tellmann is captured in this night photo in action, signing a card for me or some other kid. You can tell it's from the mid-1980s because he still thought a bubble perm and massive mustache was a good fashion idea. Then again, the way he looks in this photo, perhaps he was a hipster before his time with the track pants and tavern t-shirt.

Even more humorous is the fact that, at some point in my life, I thought it was a great idea to have him autograph this photo.

Finally, the box from Wisconsin yielded one more Baseball Cards Magazine complete with the baseball cards inserted:

Other than the Cardinals Rookies card complete with Brian Jordan and Dmitri Young, this was clearly from the Closers Edition. What great early 1990s names we have here -- Lee Smith, John Franco, Brian Harvey, Tom Henke, Bobby Thigpen, Dennis Eckersley, and Jeff Reardon.  It's a Who's Who of the early 1990s fascination with Jerome Holtzman's pet statistic, the save.

I feel assured that these oddballs will find their way into a few trade packages soon. I just know it.

I haven't the foggiest idea what the hell anyone is saying in this video other than "Oddball Song." But hey, I couldn't figure out what Barenaked Ladies said in "One Week" either.