Marking a Milestone: Post #500

I know I sort of did a "state of the blog" post back when I hit my two-year anniversary of blogging. Doing another retrospective so soon after that for post #500 would be a bit lazy, I think. Heck, I even did a bit of a look ahead in that post to try to set some goals.

Nope. Can't do another retrospective.

Also, it would be a little anticlimactic to do a straightforward trade post. I have a bunch to get through thanks to the generosity of SuperTraders and non-SuperTraders alike, but I feel like I need something a little bit more than just that. 

So, what to do? What to do?

I'm actually going to try to do something I have never done before: identify my five favorite oddball Brewers cards or sets. After all, I love oddballs. I love the Brewers. Add them together, and you have what I love in baseball cards!

One rule: the set can only be composed of Brewers players. So, no Kellogg's, Hostess, or Jays Potato Chips discs, even though I do love those cards.

One more thing: it has to have music, right? Yes. It must.

#5: 1985 Gardner's Bakery/Topps Milwaukee Brewers

The colors pop. The design reminds me of a 1980s version of the 1955 Bowman set. All of the cards are horizontal. The only letdown is that the 1985 team was not all that good. 

Still, 1985 was a pretty good year generally. It was the year that saw the team welcome a Mexican lefty to the fold in Ted Higuera. It was Hall of Famer Rollie Fingers's final year in the major leagues, and it was a year that I got to attend a pretty good number of Brewers games thanks to the "Brewers Pepsi Fan Club" and the still reasonably priced tickets.

It was a year that I paid attention to music a lot too, especially this classic by Dire Straits:

#4: 1982 Milwaukee Brewers Police

The first Brewers Police set, which got me to convince my mother that we had to go to that game in May of 1982. Buck Rodgers was still the manager of the team at that time.  It was a team that was playing listlessly, underperforming and playing tightly. It was a team that needed to loosen up, because it was a veteran team. 

It took Harvey Kuenn taking over the reins and basically saying, "let's just have fun and play ball, boys" for the team to start performing the way people expected. I went to several more games that season, including Game 3 of the ALCS and Game 5 of the World Series. We felt utterly over our station financially because we had to pay the king's ransom of $10 (the equivalent today of $25.16) for a Standing Room ticket for that World Series game. 

1982 was also the year that I first won something in a radio call-in contest. Well, to be fair, it was the first luck-based contest that I'd ever won. I was caller #7 one Saturday morning, and my prize was the full 33-1/3 RPM album Rio by Duran Duran. So, I remember the song "Hungry Like The Wolf" with happiness.

#3 2000 Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Brewers All-Decades Teams

This is a set that I've caught up with after getting back into collecting. In 2000, the local Milwaukee paper -- the Journal Sentinel -- used internet voting to allow fans to vote on their teams of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. It is a well-designed set with good, contemporaneous photograph (meaning that 1970s Robin Yount is a teenager and 1990s Robin Yount is a middle-aged man) and even a little gold foil too. 

I quite like them.

The year 2000 saw me having a great job with a good law firm and having more money than I had ever had in my life. As any mid-to-late-20s man who is single and has too much money would do, I blew a lot of it on liquor. 

That differs from today because I'm married and I don't have too much money because I'm married.

Going back to 2000, though, the song Kryptonite brings back a very specific memory for me. I was on a business trip with a young partner at my law firm whom I drank a lot with and hung out with. He and I were in New Orleans for a document review, so we had to have some fun. So, what I recall specifically was a very cute stripper dancing to this song doing a dance for me purchased for me by the partner (he had his own dancer). Seriously, I can't think of this song without thinking of being in a strip club in New Orleans. That same night, we randomly happened to run into Steve McNair in our hotel as he was in town for Essence Festival or something like that.

Strange days indeed.

#2 1970 McDonald's Milwaukee Brewers

Yes, these last two may seem a bit predictable. But I love the 1970 McDonald's Milwaukee Brewers for being the very first set of the MILWAUKEE team in the American League and not the Seattle Pilots. Some of the drawings look more like the result of a courtroom sketch artist rather than someone actually trying to draw the players -- like this Tommy Harper.

This song doesn't really have any memory from 1970 for me, since I wasn't born until the end of 1971. But, it reminds me of college a lot. I had a good friend in college (he's still a friend, and he lives in Atlanta as I do, but life gets in the way for us and we don't see each other much) who really liked CCR and a lot of other random music. For whatever reason, it allowed me the freedom to like the music without caring if it is "cool" -- it seemed cool because my friend and I both liked it. So, I still like it, though I don't listen all that frequently to it.

#1 1994-1995 Miller Milwaukee Brewers

This was an easy selection as number 1, at least until the Brewers do a complete 50th anniversary or commemorative set in 2020 to mirror the one that came out in the 1994/1995 season to commemorate 25 seasons in Milwaukee for the Brewers. I, for one, would welcome that comprehensive 2020 commemorative set because it will be the only way for me to ever get cards of probably 30% of the Brewers that played for the team in the past 20 years.

"Snoop Doggy Dogg needs to get himself a jobby job."

I love that line, and this song is a classic from 1994's charts to go with it. Snoop had his real fastball in this song. He's been working as a junkballer for so long that it's sometimes tough to remember these 98 MPH zingers.

Special bonus #1: Favorite Custom Card

Again, this is probably no surprise if you can recall the emotions that this custom card from Gavin at Baseball Card Breakdown stirred in me -- once again taking me back to 1982 in a way that only a photo of a specific event that I remember well could possibly do.

No music for this one though -- only the warm feeling of it being 45 degrees, sunny, and the future looking fantastically bright for my favorite team.

Special Bonus #2: Favorite Card Since Returning to Collecting

Maybe this is a surprise, and maybe it is not. I love the celebration on Jonathan Lucroy's 2014 Topps card -- so much so that I have 17 different versions of it including the pink bordered version serial numbered 49 of 50 in that lower right hand corner. As you can see, though, there are plenty of other variations that I am still trying to find.

What do I need?

Well, Lucroy was not in the Opening Day set that year, so what I need are:

Mini Gold, Mini Pink, Mini Black, Mini Printing Plates, Mini Platinum 

Chrome Blue Refractor, Black Refractor, Gold Refractor, Red Refractor, Atomic Refractor, SuperFractor, Printing Plates

Base Parallels: Yellow, Black, Clear, Platinum, and Printing Plates

That's an awful lot of 1/1 cards, certainly, so I know I'll never completely Luc out. 

And music to go with this?

I like the song, and, well, if "Team" doesn't express what that Lucroy card is all about, I don't know what does.

Thanks for putting up with my often self-indulgent writing for 500 posts. Here's to many more trades, many more posts, and a lot more fun. Once it's not fun, I'm done. But it's a lot of fun for me to write these, to look up music, and to be creative.

It entertains me. And, if it entertains you even once every 10 posts, well, that makes me feel good too.

Thanks.

New Stickers and Cards from Mark Hoyle

I've been the recipient of multiple envelopes of fantastic cards from Mark Hoyle over the two-plus years I've been blogging. So, for post 499 for Off Hiatus Baseball, it is appropriate that this post features...new cards and stickers?

Yeah, it isn't appropriate at all considered Mark's reputation around the blogworld for sending vintage cards. 

Still, the set this year features the 1967 Topps design. If you know anything about Mark and his collection, you'll know that one of his main collecting interests is the 1967 Boston Red Sox "Impossible Dream" team. 

It sounds crazy to modern ears, but the Red Sox of 1967 provided the team's first winning record since 1958 -- a nine-year drought -- and featured a three-team race in the unified ten-team American League involving the Detroit Tigers and Minnesota Twins that finished with with the Red Sox winning the league by just one game over those two teams. After 1967, the Red Sox would not have a losing season until 1983.

Even crazier sounding to modern ears is the idea that, in 1966, the Red Sox drew just 811,172 fans -- a number that more than doubled in 1967 to 1,727,832. That attendance -- again, crazy to modern ears with everyone drawing 2 millions fans, basically -- set a record for Fenway.

Let's learn a little more about that 1967 team through strange parallels drawn with the 2016 Milwaukee Brewers -- who will almost certainly not spring out of nowhere and win the National League this year but, then again, you just never know. Just look at 1967.

The Superstars: Carl Yastrzemski and Ryan Braun

Whether you like him, hate him, or are agnostic toward him, there is no denying the fact that Ryan Braun is the best player on the Brewers currently. Similarly, there is no denying the fact that Carl Yastrzemski was the Red Sox best player in 1967 -- and it was not even close. Granted, Yaz was in his age 27 year and was simply transcendent in 1967 --more like Braun in 2011. It's not that much coincidence that Braun and Yaz each won MVPs in those seasons.

But Yaz in 1967 was much better than Braun in 2011.  Indeed, if we look only to post-World War II seasons, Yaz's 1967 season by WAR was the second best. Yaz racked up an incredible 12.4 WAR in 1967 -- literally equal to Babe Ruth in 1927 -- and just 0.1 of a win behind the best season after World War II, which belongs to Steve Carlton's ridiculous 1972 season.  For comparison, Barry Bonds's best two years came at ages 36 and 37 -- post steroids -- in which he had 11.8 WAR.

Braun has never been anywhere near that good, in many respects because Braun's WAR gets very little help from his defense.

The Managers: Dick Williams and Craig Counsell

Counsell is in his first full season as a manager in Milwaukee, though he managed for much of last year after the horrendous start to the Brewers' season caused the Brewers to fire Ron Roenicke. 

Dick Williams had managed only in the minor leagues prior to 1967 and, when appointed, the job was his first major league opportunity. Williams took the opportunity by the reins and ran with it. He instilled discipline on his team -- drilling the team in fundamentals for hours and requiring players to play for the team and not for themselves. It clearly worked.

Traded Away: Don McMahon and Jean Segura

Segura's trade to Arizona for what seem to be parts and further trade bait. There really is no good analogy in 1967 Red Sox story, mainly because teams didn't really rebuild in the way that teams try to rebuild these days. By the time that Don McMahon was traded, it was June 2 and the Red Sox could tell that they might have a winning team. 

McMahon was traded for Jerry Adair -- a thirty-year-old utility infielder who did well for Boston in his 89 games.

The Closers (?): John Wyatt and Jeremy Jeffress

Word out of Arizona is that Jeremy Jeffress and Will Smith will split the closer duties in Milwaukee this year, and that the decision on who will close from night to night will depend on matchups. I'm not so sure -- I think Smith will probably end up as the closer so long as his left-handedness doesn't preclude that from happening. It is nice, though that Jeremy Jeffress is straight Suttoning.

Wyatt saved 20 games for the 1967 Red Sox. While it wasn't his final season, it was certainly his last hurrah as a closer. He appeared in 60 games, closing 43, and finished with a 10-7 record and a 2.60 ERA (3.24 FIP) in 93-1/3 innings.

The Starting Pitchers: Jim Lonborg and Matt Garza

Garza needs to have a major bounceback season this year if the Brewers are going to surprise anyone. Okay, let's be clear: if Garza is doing reasonably well by time July rolls around, I'm quite certain that the Brewers would trade him for a bag of balls and some Gatorade mix. 

The same cannot be said for Lonborg. The 1967 Red Sox were not known for the strength of their starting pitching. Only one pitcher -- the 25-year-old Lonborg -- started more than 25 games. Lonborg was a workhorse. He started 39 games, completing 15, and pitching 273-1/3 innings. No one else had more than 181-2/3 (Lee Stange did that). 

Lonborg led the American League in starts with that 39, in Strikeouts with 246, in hit batsman with 19, and in wins with 22. His FIP was 2.95 -- right on par with his 3.16 ERA. For his efforts and based in part on his team's success, he was named the Cy Young Award winner with 18 of 20 voters selecting him. Joe Horlen of the White Sox was better, though, and probably should have won the Cy Young based on the advanced statistics.

Of course, Lonborg never was the same pitcher after that. The closest he came to being that good came in 1974 with Philadelphia -- two years after being traded there by the Milwaukee Brewers with Ken Brett, Ken Sanders, and Earl Stephenson in exchange for John Vukovich, Bill Champion, and Off Hiatus PC Don Money. 

Completing the comparison, the pitcher most like Lonborg at the ages of 27 and 28 was none other than....Matt Garza.

And the circle is unbroken.

Thank you, Mark, for the great cards!

Next time out: Post #500 on Off Hiatus!

All Cardinals Sends All Brewers

I've gotten a lot of mail with cards enclosed this week. A couple of those were eBay purchases, but the vast majority were cards from bloggers. After the large pile of envelopes that I sent out in February -- which I'm lucky that my wife takes to the post office for me -- my wife commented to me that all my hard work in putting those together has paid off recently.

I don't view it that way, to be fair. I view it more as just the normal back and forth of blind trades in the blog world. Even the whole #SuperTraders thing to me is just a consolidation of that thought. I enjoyed breaking the boxes that I bought for that group (and, depending how things work out with the group, I may buy a few more to break later this year), but I will always try to trade with whomever is interested.  

Someone I've swapped cards with a couple of times in the past is Ray at All Cardinals All the Time. This time, a great PWE arrived from Ray with a few recent parallels and inserts that I needed either for team collections or player collections.  

We start with the foil parallel of Ryan Braun from this year. This one will go to my team collection, which now features a grand total of about three cards right now. All the parallels can be frustrating sometimes, what with some of the cards barely looking any different from their main set counterparts.

When it comes to team sets and parallels, I am certainly trying to put together team sets of any un-serial-numbered parallels and even those that are serial numbered anything above 100. That said, I have my doubts about trying to complete team sets of parallels from anything high-end. Even the ones numbered to, say, 325 -- which should be at least somewhat available -- can get expensive quickly simply because they come in boxes with a total of 14 cards that will run you around $180 a box.

You know, like Triple Threads....

Funny thing, though. For whatever reason, this card has been very accessible to me. This is my third different amethyst parallel of Braun from the 2013 Topps Triple Threads set. With serial numbers, though, every card is a different addition to the player collection -- even if one may find its way into a team set for the parallel for that set.

Another tricky issue as a team collector are the inserts. Some inserts are easily obtained -- you know, the ones that come in practically every pack of the flagship set, like the ever-present reprints of past cards repackaged as Cards Mom Threw Out, or 60 Years of Topps, or Berger's Best. 

Then, there are the "cross-trainers" of inserts and even the Archives set -- putting current players on older designs. This Braun insert from last year's Topps Finest set reuses the 1995 Finest design but for some reason numbers the cards with a "94F" prefix -- which, strangely enough, is the same prefix that Topps used in 2014 for its 1994 Finest inserts. 

That's a small thing, but we all know that details are important in life. Not paying attention to the details has become commonplace for Topps as of late, what with the issues with the Cubs that Wrigley Wax has detailed and even the reference to Robin Yount's nonexistent 1974 Rookie card ("especially in mini form") on the Berger's Best inserts this year. It seems that Topps is more concerned with coming up with more photo variations than it is in getting things on its cards correct.

And that is truly a shame, because some of the parallels and sets Topps puts out look really sharp.

Like this purple refractor from 2015 Bowman Chrome of Khris Davis serial numbered to 150. As much as Bowman has way too many parallels of the same photo and same card and as much as the Bowman sets would be far better if the parallels were cut in half, the shiny refractors are still quite the draw and look sharp together in a binder.

I'm not as sure that the same can be said of the Gold Parallels over the past two years.



With the very colorful borders in 2015 and the general lack of borders in 2016, these cards just are not very attractive. I have a particular worry, though, about the honeycombed look on the 2016 Topps Gold Parallel cards.

My concern is that Topps is going to use the pattern to create more parallels that we don't need in the hobby. Maybe not this year, but next year, would it surprise anyone if suddenly we had a short-print variation in the flagship set based around these textures or backgrounds in the fashion of Topps Hi Tek or the old school Topps Tek? This year it's honeycomb in flagship, next year it will be spiral icebreak parallels.

Or worse -- I could see this coming up later this year in Topps Chrome, where the white clouds in the corners are transformed to even more parallels beyond simply the color parallels. We'll have orange honeycomb, orange spiral, orange brick, orange peel, and orange Kool-Aid refractors, each serial numbered to between 123 and 129 or something ridiculous like that.

In the end, though, I definitely appreciate these cards greatly from Ray. It's a great day when an envelope arrives, and it's an even better day with over half the cards being serial numbered and needed for team sets and player collections.

Thank you, Ray!

A PWE From the Shoebox featuring Flogging Molly

I recently packaged up a bunch of cards that I didn't want and didn't need -- they weren't Brewers, after all -- and sent Shane at Shoebox Legends an envelope that he wasn't expecting. It had been a while since we had swapped cards, so it was good to surprise him with a bunch of cards that he needed.

With it being St. Patrick's Day and all, it would make sense if I put the PWE I got in response from Shane to music. Spotify tried to help me out with a playlist called "Greatest St. Paddy's Day Hits."  Then I looked through it, and it's nearly useless. Yes, there are songs by The Pogues, Dropkick Murphys, House of Pain, and even Macklemore & Ryan Lewis's "Irish Celebration."

But what, pray tell, does the Van Halen song "Runnin' With The Devil" have to with St. Patrick's Day? Or "Take On Me" by a-ha? Also, how can you put together a 12-hour playlist for St. Patrick's Day without a single song by Flogging Molly?

Seriously, check out this 185-song monstrosity for yourself.

Just unbelievable.

I have to do something about that. So, featuring cards sent by Shane, here's your Flogging Molly playlist.

"To Youth (My Sweet Roisin Dubh)"

Let's start with a song featured on the FIFA 2005 game soundtrack. I played the hell out of that game, and the music EA picked for that game was just excellent. This one, "Irish Blood, English Heart" by Morrissey, "Fit But You Know It" by the Streets...just a crazy good soundtrack that included this great song that is an homage to youth and to a very old and famous Irish political song.

By the way, "Roisin Dubh" is a reference to a black rose.

To go with this song, I go to a player from my youth -- Ted Higuera -- who made a huge splash with the Brewers in 1985 and was Milwaukee's best pitcher in the second half of the 1980s before shoulder injuries from all the mileage on his arm in the Mexican League caught up with him.

"Salty Dog" & "The Lightning Storm"

"Salty Dog" was the first song on Flogging Molly's first album, Swagger. and this is Irish-punk done as it should be to me. It doesn't hurt that the lead singer is actually Irish. As he says mid-song, 

"It could be worse, California. It could be worse. 

We could be Welsh!"

BONUS: Watch after "Salty Dog" ends for a toast to Johnny Cash just before they break into "The Lightning Storm."

These were the oldest cards that Shane sent me, to go with the oldest Flogging Molly song on the playlist. I'm midway through opening a box of 1992 Fleer Ultra, and the design is close enough that I thought that these cards belonged to that set. They don't -- they are from 1993 -- and they reminded me what full-bleed cards without distracting smoke effects can look like.

Good, that is.

"Drunken Lullabies"

One of my absolute favorite Flogging Molly songs is the title track. This appeared on a video game as well -- "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4." It's a song about how as much as things seem to change, we still seem to repeat the mistakes of the past -- "Has the shepherd led his lambs astray to the bigot and the gun?"

For whatever reason, this Bowman Platinum card seemed appropriate for this song. The Bowman line of cards expands and contracts fairly regularly, it seems. Topps never learned its lessons from the overproduction era, though. Rather than cutting back on the number of sets and the number of cards printed, instead it chases artificial scarcity and buzz about crazy photo variations and 24 wacky parallels each serial numbered to numbers ranging from 599 to 1.  "Catch the collecting fever, kids!"

"Float"



Float is another great song that is catchy and sad all at once. It's especially sad watching the paperclip man walking sadly through the dirty streets looking for who-knows-what to make himself happy. Then, he builds himself a boat, only to get buried under the first wave that comes along.  

It's tough to explain, but I get legitimately sad for that little guy.

See, that's the thing about real punk music. Yes, there's a lot of upbeat aggressive music, but it's also about a mentality that things need to change for the better. 

Then again, I guess that doesn't go as well with drunkenness off crappy green beer as "Hotel California."



To go with this general sadness, here are cards from two guys the Brewers traded away. Vaughn was traded ostensibly to assist with a rebuild in 1996. Getting Bryce Florie, Marc Newfield, and Ron Villone didn't build anything, though.

Matt LaPorta was the Brewers first round draft pick in June of 2007 out of the University of Florida. Thankfully, the Brewers ditched him with Rob Bryson, Zach Jackson and a player to be named later for CC Sabathia. Weirdly enough, the PTBNL ended up to be the best piece of that trade for the Indians since they received 2014 All-Star and the third-place finisher in the MVP race that year: Michael Brantley.

"Requiem for a Dying Song"




This song is upbeat, though it still has the punk in it -- "Does the Government whip crack across your back? Is the Order of the Day don't listen, attack?"

Still, it's a fun-sounding song. It puts me in a better mood than before.  

Just as a new addition to my Prince Fielder collection puts me in an even better mood. This "Upper Deck Elements" was a new one on me -- I'd never seen it before. 

I criticized Topps earlier for blowing through different "brands" or products regularly. Well, Upper Deck might have been the king of doing that. You would get the flagship and Sweet Spot about every year, but otherwise, you could end up with just about anything -- Goudey, O-Pee-Chee, Baseball Heroes, The Ballpark Collection, even Fleer one year.

Upper Deck should get a lower-priced license to release two sets a year -- one with current players, one with former players (or a mix of current and former players). Impose discipline on them, and they'd be a fantastic addition.

"Rebels of the Sacred Heart" (NSFW language)

Careful -- there's a bit of cursing here.  But it is punk, so tough f**king luck, right? Now THIS is a proper Irish punk jig -- tin whistle and all. Just an awesome song, done live with a ton of energy. And I mean, come on, it talks about being drunk (Three sheets to the wind), being human (aiming for heaven, probably winding up in hell), and being free in the end ("no ball or chain, no prison shall keep!")

To go with it? The exuberance of youth -- or, more particularly, of a prospect still on his way up in Tyrone Taylor. 

For Tyrone and for all of you on this St. Patrick's Day -- when we're all a little Irish:

May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind always be at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
and rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of your hand.

Failing all that, just send out a lot of PWEs to your blogging friends no matter who they may be. That's what makes our hobby fun and great -- and my thanks to Shane for the great reminder.

A Two-Card Post

As COMC's prices started getting out of whack a bit, I started frequenting eBay a little bit again for cards. Mainly, I have focused on getting some cards that just don't appear on COMC -- or at least I don't see them there.

Plus, there is also a little bit of the immediacy thing. Because eBay is so vast in its listings, it is seemingly much easier to find a card that scratches the particular itch I might have at a particular time. It's that whole "give it to me now" thing that we have turned into as a culture, I suppose. 

Anyway, enough of the lede. Let's start with a little mood music.

Back ten years ago, I decided to go on a vacation by myself. I hadn't met my wife at that point -- wouldn't for another three years -- so I said, "enough waiting around...it's time to live life and see the world that I want to see." Because I had gotten totally sucked into the Premier League at that point, I said, "London it is." Now, I should have gone to Manchester to support "my" team, Manchester United, but instead I went to London and saw three games there instead.

Plastered all over the Tube Station walls were ads for this album called "Inside In" by The Kooks. Intrigued, I bought the album and really liked it -- and, in fact, recognized this song as one I'd heard before.

Still, it's always fun to be introduced to something -- someplace -- entirely different and new. 

I think that extends to new players in the minor league system as well. The Brewers' draft in 2015 was widely praised as one in which the Brewers got a significant infusion of high-end talent into the system. One of the potential steals in the draft came when, at pick 55, the Brewers selected Division II standout Cody Ponce from the Cal Poly Pomona Broncos. You can't tell it from this photo, but Ponce has looked a little more like Kenny Powers in the past.

Anyway, Ponce is 6'5" tall and weighs 235 pounds. He fell to pick 55 because of a sore shoulder during his junior year in college, but the guy has serious stuff: a legit fastball that can hit 98 MPH and, apparently, it now has real cut action on it...as Ponce shows here against Yasiel Puig (through a fence):

Cody Ponce vs. Yaisel Puig. 98 with slight cut actionhttps://t.co/V7FHKNCIIe

— Chris Kusiolek (@CaliKusiolek) September 30, 2015

I have been hearing tons of great things about Ponce coming out last year (after 46 innings in the Midwest League with 36 Ks and four walks and a 55.1% ground ball rate, I'm not sure how bad things might be said) and again this spring. After reading this scouting report on the Brewers SB Nation site Brew Crew Ball, I decided I needed a Cody Ponce autograph. 

I got the one here for $5 -- and I know I probably overpaid, but come on, it says "Go Brewers!" After seeing all the cool cards with inscriptions like this that Matt at Bob Walk the Plank has gotten, I was sold.

The second of the two cards here isn't nearly as cool or have as much of a story -- other than featuring a manu-relic of a logo that still says, "1970s Brewers" to me.

It's another Braun for the Braun collection with a cool commemorative patch that was maybe $2 or something like that. 

And because I can't end on such a seemingly boring/uninspired note, how about one more song?

Inspired by 1970, it's the #52 song of that year, but it might be the best one all year in my book.

Thanks to a huge mailday on Monday, I have a ton of trade packages to catch up on, so look for me again tomorrow.

You Bought Cards Where?

When I first got back into collecting, I bought a fair number of packs at Target and Wal-Mart. That was because I was trying to collect the same way I did when I was a kid: collecting literally everything.

A month or so later, as I was looking at what a "complete" or "master" checklist looked like for just the 2014 Topps set, I began to despair. There was no way I could ever get everything -- not even every Brewer card, since there are others who collect the Brewers -- so I started drawing lines. Those lines have been refined and expanded over time out of necessity, since I do not have infinite money to spend on baseball cards.

One of the lines I drew is that I stopped buying unopened packs of new products unless I had some reason for it (like my SuperTraders break). This was a reaction to the fact that Topps loads up its products with teams that the Manhattan-based Topps sees as more saleable and drawing more money than the Brewers. I think it was the 2014 Archives hobby box I bought that spring -- a box I bought before realizing that Topps had included a grand total of four or five Brewers and twelve Yankees including John Ryan Murphy, a backup catcher who we will probably never see on a card again because he's now a Twin.

Yesterday, though, my wife and I went out to a late lunch to use a gift card we had and then to run some errands. Those errands included stopping at Target, so I bought a few packs/repacks there.

I didn't get a lot of great cards, to be fair, but here are the highlights.

The first thing I got was one of those 20-card packs of Heritage. I engaged in a bit of pack searching, to be honest. The packs are red cellophane, so you can see what the first card on the pack was.  When I saw one with "Brewers" peaking through, I grabbed it.  

The Brewer I got was Wily Peralta. Just as Heritage pays homage to the 1967 Topps design, it appears that Peralta is paying homage to a Hall of Famer who appeared in the 1967 Topps set: former Brewer, Astro, Dodger, Angel, and Athletic pitcher Don Sutton.

Peralta has some work to do to emulate Sutton on the field, but he has the Sutton pose down pretty well already. But he does need to get that bubble perm too.

A second pack/box I got was a blaster of 2014 Topps Update with two packs of the Update Chrome in it. I don't need any Brewers from the Update set except for one of those ridiculous sparkle variations of the now-long-gone Tom Gorzelanny, and unsurprisingly Topps decided that there weren't any Brewers that merited inclusion in the Update Chrome set. I got the box, though, because it was only $10 instead of the normal $15, and, I mean, it was a good deal thanks to two great cards that I needed that came out of those packs:



The Molitor came out of the regular Update packs, while the Aaron is a Chrome card that came out of those packs. So, even though I really didn't need anything from those sets that I knew of, I needed something anyway.  Can't complain about that!

Next, I bought one of those "four packs" of the 2016 Topps product that comes in a blister pack with an "Amazing Milestones" card showing. Knowing that I needed the Spahn Amazing Milestones for my Milwaukee Braves collection, I chose one with him on the front.

Having participated in a case break for 2016 Topps, I once again knew that I would not get anything in the regular cards that I needed.  But, still, I got something pretty nice in the packs -- though this time, it was not a card I need.

After pulling a Yoan Moncada autograph from the Panini Contenders box I opened a couple of weeks ago for the SuperTraders group, I'm starting to wonder if the cosmic powers are trying to tell me that I need to become a Red Sox collector.  Geez.

But, this does highlight the beauty of those blister packs. By keeping the packs safe from pack searchers behind plastic, everyone has an even chance to get a relic card. 

Finally, I decided to get one of those "four packs, 50 cards, and a surprise" repacks. My surprise was one of these:

To be specific, I got Adrian Gonzalez. Does anyone happen to have the Ryan Braun out there? Does anyone want this Adrian Gonzalez thingy?

The packs I got were all 2015 cards: Opening Day, a couple of Bowman packs, and a Gypsy Queen pack. Probably the best card I got out of those packs was a mini Bowman Chrome:

The remaining cards had a few duplicates for me, but there were a couple of cards that were interesting.

First, there was a former Brewer farmhand from the 1990s:

Boze was nothing special. He was a 12th round pick in 1990 after his first year of junior college. He worked his way up to the majors slowly but surety, putting up decent numbers in Single-A and Double-A in 1992 and 1993.  He spent 1994 through 1996 at Triple-A New Orleans where his strikeout rates shriveled up and died. But, because the Brewers sucked in the mid-1990s, he got to the major leagues anyway in 1996. In his 32-1/3 innings in the major leagues, he had an 0-2 record with a 7.79 ERA and a 2.227 WHIP, giving up 13.1 hits per nine innings and walking 7 batters per nine innings. 

I'd call that ugly, but that would be cruel to ugliness everywhere. That's just positively diabolical.

Finally, there was an excellent mid-1990s card in the repack:

Sophie Kurys was truly a superstar in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Indeed, as her excellent SABR biography notes, Ms. Kurys -- who passed away in 2013 at the age of 87 -- is still the holder of the all-time professional baseball record for stolen bases in a season. In 1946 and in just 113 games, she stole an incredible 201 stolen bases. Indeed, in just 914 games over her nine-year career, she stole 1,114 bases. Sure, Rickey Henderson has broken that record with his total of 1406, but it took him 25 seasons to get there!

All said, it wasn't a bad bunch of cards that I got yesterday. Still, I don't think I'll go back to buying a bunch of packs. I'll save my money to buy Brewers.