Post #300: PACKAGES ADDRESSED! And, I Went to A Card Show

This is my 300th post. This being post 300, part of me wants to leap up from my seat and scream:

I have to confess: I've never seen that movie, and the only reason I know that line is because of the incredibly effective advertising campaign causing that line to stick in my head. But, the number 300 could be a unifying theme for this post...let's see where this goes. 

As was the case with my 1-year anniversary of blogging, I almost forgot to celebrate it. I know -- big round numbers usually involve contests.  Instead, I'm going with the SAME offer as the one-year anniversary:

If you would like some cards from me, no strings attached, no trades required, just comment below with what you want and e-mail me your mailing address.  

Rules for this giveaway: you are limited to picking one team or up to five different players whose cards you would like me to send to you.  If you have a want list, e-mail me a link.

And, one more thing: I've spent most of the past few days putting together packages that are already addressed and everything that are all set to go to the post office.  These packages are going to the following ZIP Codes:

62450
77251
60706
61615
55419
35750
80020
60618
26505
34479
55129
02919
16101
and, while I'm still putting these two packages together, I've also got cards ready to go to: 
13601
V9T 5T1

And there are a couple of other people to whom I am way overdue in putting packages together, but those are getting closer to fruition.


On to the (Card) Show

So, I've been to a couple of card shows recently. Two weeks ago, I went to my usual card show that I have attended probably about 4 or 5 times in the past year of collecting. Then, last weekend, I drove south of Atlanta to a show I'd never attended before to check it out. Both shows had their interesting parts, both had their disappointments, and both yielded some great cards, some great trade bait (a lot of which has been packaged up already) and some cool oddballs.

This post is going to focus on the first show -- from which the Topps 3D box came.  I'll post about the other show soon.

With no other unifying them other than, "this is what came up in Google searches for 300", here we go:

The Onion: Travel Cincinnati in 300 Days

Cincinnati is actually a great city to visit for a weekend.  I have friends there, neighbors from there, and my wife's uncle and aunt live there.  But this is still a funny faux travel magazine from the Onion.  This random start to this post deserves a pretty random card, and it comes with a tie to Cincinnati:

A 2001 Topps Archives reprint of Gus Bell's 1964 Topps card.  Bell's Braves career consisted of 85 games over three seasons -- 79 in 1962 and 3 pinch hitting appearances in each of 1963 and 1964.  The majority of his career -- from 1953 through 1961 -- was spent in Cincinnati.  Cincinnati is where son Buddy grew up and went to high school, and Cincinnati is where Gus was laid to rest when he passed away on May 7, 1995.

This card is random because, um, Topps, why 1964 Gus Bell in 2001?  

The Brewery: 300 Suns Brewing, Longmont, Colorado

A Brewer-y angle is an obvious one, and pretty punny too.  Let's celebrate Brewers with this Brewer card:

One of the guys whose tables I always stop at is a guy named Ryan, who's an Auburn fan. Since I hadn't been to the show in a couple of months, Ryan had a couple of great cards for me, including this 2008 Topps Triple Threads Auto-Relic serial numbered 23 of 75.  He also had a couple of more cards for me, and for all of these together, I think paid $25 (but it might be $40 too...either way, it was still a good deal in my book):

The three Seguras include a 2014 Bowman Chrome Green Refractor (SN38/75), a Topps Supreme Autograph (SN11/50), and a Topps High Tek Net Background (not a base background...no clue, obviously, how rare it is).  The very red Braun is a 2011 Finest Red Refractor serial numbered to 25.

That beer in Colorado had better be pretty good to live up to this.

The 300th Win

An obvious milestone for pitchers is achieving their 300th win.  Of all the pitchers to pitch in Milwaukee for the Braves or Brewers, two men have reached the 300-win mark.  The main guy, of course, is the one who achieved his 300th win as a Milwaukee Brave:

And this 1961 Post card of Warren Spahn comes from the very season that he won his 300th game.  Spahn first appeared in a game in 1942 at the age of 20. He refused to throw at Pee-Wee Reese in a game, so Casey Stengel called him "gutless" and sent him to the minors.  Spahn went on to be a war hero who won a Purple Heart while seeing action in the Battle of the Bulge.  

The other 300-game winner to pitch for a Milwaukee team was, of course, Don Sutton.  I didn't get the card below at the card show (I got it at the 1983 game at which they were given away) but it is an example of a lesser pinstriped side-Suttoning [(c) 2012 Garvey Russell Cey Lopes]:

Mathematical Properties

This is a direct headline quote from Wikipedia in which it is noted that the number 300 is "the sum of ten consecutive primes (13 + 17 + 19 + 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47)."

So, how about ten great vintage cards, which may be in or near their respective primes?

That 1961 Covington has been blogged about before by Commishbob, Shoeboxlegends, The Chop Keeper, Night Owl, and Commishbob again, and that's just from a quick search. My version is off-centered, which kept the price for it down to just 50 cents.  In fact, all of these except the team card were all 50 cents.  The team card was a dollar or two.

There are others, you know.

Other vintage, I mean:

There were 14 of us, you know.

The Lowest Possible FICO Score

FICO stands for "Fair, Isaac, and Company." FICO was the originator of the 300 to 850 credit score on which nearly every lender in America now relies.  As you can see, you are in the absolute pits if you have a 300 score.  300 is bad.  So is the card for which this is being used.

I was alive in the 1970s -- for most of it, in fact, having been born near the end of 1971.  I remember the 1970s.  The look for most adult men featured lots of hair and lots of facial hair, right Mr. Stallone?

Paul McCartney agrees.

As a result, I guess that some kid felt like a baseball card of four grown men from 1976 that featured four men without facial hair was just not right.

So, that little kid 39 years ago took the pen into their own hands and gave Larry Anderson, Ken Crosby, Mark Littell, and Butch Metzger the facial hair that each deserved.

I needed this card for my 1976 Brewers team set.  I would not turn down this card, since the price of FREE was right, but safe to say that I am looking for a less hirsute card.

The Perfect Game

Okay, last one.  In bowling, a 300 game is a perfect game. Twelve straight strikes, from frame 1 through frame 12. My final vintage purchase of the day qualifies as being a baseball card version of the Perfect Game:

Ed Mathews in all of his 1959 Topps glory.  This card is in excellent shape, is not nearly as off-center as it scanned, and, with the 1961 Post Warren Spahn cost me a total of $25. That's a lot for me to spend on two cards, but when you're getting two cards that each are well over 50 years old of guys in the Hall of Fame and which are in very good to excellent condition, I think that's a fair price.

Thanks for reading this post and the 299 that came before it -- or as many as you could get through before giving up!

The First Lifetime Movie I Ever Liked: A Trade Post

My wife loves a good tear-jerker movie.  She also seems to enjoy a lot of cheesy dramas, true-crime stories, and even some romance movies. That's probably why she regularly sets the DVR to record a lot of random sounding movies from the Lifetime Movie Network. Amazingly, the Wikipedia category for "Lifetime (TV Network) Films" includes 197 different entries.

Now, this post thankfully isn't about all the Lifetime movies I've had to watch (I've avoided that generally), nor is it about all the Lifetime movies my wife has watched (thankfully). Instead, this is a post about baseball cards -- specifically, a trade with Charlie from Lifetime Topps Project for which I must still put together a return package.  

Charlie e-mailed me a few weeks ago and offered up some cards off my want lists.  I'll be sending off some nice inserts to him shortly, but in the meantime, inspired by Lifetime Network Movie titles -- and yes, these are all actual titles -- here are the highlights from the stack of cards Charlie sent.

Flirting with Forty
This movie from 2008 featured Heather Locklear (then aged 47) as a forty-year-old divorced mother whose 40th birthday trip to Hawaii found her playing cougar with her young male surfing instructor. She hooks up with him, starts traveling back and forth to Hawaii to visit him, and earns disapproval from everyone in her life.

"Flirtingwithforty" by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flirtingwithforty.jpg#/media/File:Flirtingwithforty.jpg

For this film, I'll go with a more direct version of flirting with forty -- forty home runs that is.

Greg Vaughn never hit forty homers in a Brewers uniform. In 1996 -- at the age of 30 -- the Brewers traded him away to the San Diego Padres in exchange for two mismatched shoes and an old mustard and brown SD hat...or, at least the equivalent of that in terms of players (Bryce Florie, Ron Villone, and Marc Newfield)...in a classic "two dimes and a nickel for a ten-dollar bill" trade. At the time Vaughn had hit 31 HR for Milwaukee.  After the trade on July 31, he hit 10 more homers in 1996.  Over the rest of his career through four stops and parts of 8 seasons, Vaughn hit 186 more home runs with a decent OBP and an OPS above league average.

In return, Florie threw 94 innings in Milwaukee (4.79 ERA, 4.56 FIP).  Villone stayed in baseball until 2009 and pitched for basically every major league team in that time (3 years in Seattle split over two stays was his longest stint anywhere) and chipped in 77-1/3 innings (3.38 ERA/5.24 FIP) for Milwaukee.  Newfield -- another former Mariner who, with Villone, was sent to San Diego for Andy Benes -- played 192 games over three seasons for the Brewers with a .259/.319/.379 slash line.

Great job, Brew Crew.

Not Like Everyone Else
This "based on a true story" movie told the tale of a high school girl, Brandi Blackbear, who was a Goth-girl who wrote horror stories.  One day, Brandi checked out books about Wicca, and kids thought she cast a spell to get a teacher sick.  The ACLU sued on her behalf and was made to look stupid when the court dismissed the lawsuit and ordered Brandi's parents to pay fees and costs to the school instead.

Dark Backgrounds are Required for Lifetime Movie Posters

Another person who was not like everyone else -- but in a distinctly less gothic way -- is Dave Nilsson. 

And is that 1995 Topps of Nilsson not like anyone else either.  Thank God.

Nilsson's excellent SABR Biography details how an Australian kid in the 1970s and 1980s got interested in American baseball thanks to his dad being a baseball player of some renown in the 1960s.  One quote mentions that most Aussies with the size and athleticism that Nilsson had (6'3" tall and 185 pounds as a teenager) would almost always go into Rugby League, Rugby Union, or Australian Rules Football rather than American baseball.  

Instead, after the 2004 Olympics in which the Aussies stunningly took the Silver Medal in baseball after losing to the Cubans in the Olympic finals, David ended up being inducted into the Sports Australia Hall of Fame in 2008.  

Held Hostage
Another true-crime story, this time about a mother who was coerced into robbing a bank at which she worked by armed gunmen who strapped fake bombs to both her and her 7-year-old daughter.  

Again with the black

The Brewers held themselves hostage on several occasions with terrible contracts. One of those contracts was handed out to a personal favorite pitcher of mine, Ted Higuera.

Higuera was excellent in the mid-to-late 1980s, even winning 20 games in 1986.  In 1989, however, he was limited to 22 starts by back surgery and sprained ankles.  In 1990, at the age of 32, Higuera started 27 games and threw 170 effective innings.  Rather than seeing that as a lucky return to health for Higuera, the Brewers instead signed Higuera to a four-year, $13.1 million contract -- at the time, the largest-ever contract the Brewers had given a pitcher in their history.  Higuera tore his rotator cuff in 1991, missed all of 1992, and, over the life of that contract, pitched 125 innings at a 6.34 ERA (5.06 FIP).

Not good.

Homecoming
"A 2009 American independent thriller film, directed by Morgan J. Freeman . . . ." It's basically a movie about a scorned, stalker girlfriend in high school (played by the then-23-year-old Mischa Barton) who gives her old flame's new girlfriend a ride home after a car accident after the homecoming dance. Rather than taking the girl home, Mischa Barton's character goes all Misery on the poor new girl and tortures her.

"Homecomingfinalposter" by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Homecomingfinalposter.jpg#/media/File:Homecomingfinalposter.jpg

Here, I'll use this title for a guy who started in Milwaukee, was traded away, came back eventually, and left again:

Jeff Cirillo was an excellent player whose value as a hitter came both from a good batting average and a good OBP.  Never much of a power hitter -- his best year featured 17 HR while playing half his games in Coors -- Cirillo's lifetime OBP was .366.  It was almost as if Cirillo came along about 5 years too early for Billy Beane and Moneyball.

On the Second Day of Christmas
This absolutely horrendous sounding movie featured a girl and her aunt planning their next heist as pickpockets in a mall after Christmas.  To show you how unrealistic the movie is and how terrible these two pickpockets are, Wikipedia says that "[t]hey are caught by the mall security guard Bert." 

Yes, Bert.  Ernie was off that day.

Oddly enough, the aunt falls in love with the mall security guard. The Aunt confesses her bad deeds to Santa and eventually gets Bert to quit being a mall security guard by agreeing to marry him.  

Seriously. 

I can find nothing about the dog in this movie. 

In the spirit of giving and taking, I'm using this title, though, for the final two cards/players:

Both Eldred and Valentin were part of a trade which saw them go to the Chicago White Sox in January of 2000 in exchange for Jaime Navarro and John Snyder.  This trade was one of then-GM Dean Taylor's big splashes in his first offseason as General Manager.  It showed how completely out of his depth as a GM Taylor really was.

Eldred broke Higuera's team record for largest contract given to a pitcher when, in 1997, he received a $14.2 million, 4-year contract in 1997.  In typical Brewers front office fashion, the Brewers under Sal Bando as GM engaged more in wishcasting than in forecasting future outcomes and statistics for players.  Eldred was coming off a two-year run in 1995-1996 where he pitched 19 games and 108-1/3 innings.  For the four-year contract, the Brewers got 417 innings of 5.48 ERA (5.34 FIP) pitching and got to make a trade to dump the over $5 million albatross for the 2000 season. 

So, either it came down to "Bud Selig the Cheap Bastard" who destroyed the Brewers, or "Dean Taylor is an Idiot" or both, but someone there in Milwaukee thought it would be a good idea to bring the compost-like remains of Jaime Navarro's career -- along with a 25-year-old starting pitcher (John Snyder) who, in 215-2/3 innings with the White Sox prior to the trade, had an ERA of 5.93 (5.62 FIP) with 263 hits and 41 HR allowed.  Batters hit Snyder to the tune of a .299/.371/.475 slash line (versus MLB averages for those years of .269/.342/.430).  AND, the Brewers took on Navarro's $5 million salary.  

In other words, for the opportunity to employ a pitcher who made every batter look like an all-star, the Brewers traded away a player who hit 159 more HR over his career (just 69 more than in his years in Milwaukee!) with a slash line of .246/.320/.468 -- right about league average.  As a shortstop, that's a productive player.  

But not, it seems, to Dean Taylor.

There were a bunch more than plugged gaps in my want lists for my team sets, but these are the guys from my player collections.  

Charlie, thank you very much for the trade, and I hope you didn't mind my going all weird-out Lifetime Movie here.

At least I couldn't find a way to use "Sexting in Suburbia".  

#WalletCard Goes to Court

Like many bloggers, I jumped on board the "Wallet Card Frenzy" [(c) Breakdown Cards, All Rights Reserved. Void where prohibited by law] in January.  I did it in hope that it would provide me with some blog fuel for times when I needed it.  

Well, I have plenty of things I can be writing about right now, but I have hardly done anything with Robert Edwards The Wallet Card.  That's mainly because I really haven't gone anywhere that interesting, and otherwise I've gone places where taking a card out of my wallet and snapping a photo would have been a bit odd.  

Yeah, that's no excuse, but it was time that RETWC got a run out.  This week, I had a hearing in Federal Court here in Atlanta.  The day prior, I went to the courthouse to get an ID card so that I could take my phone into the building with me. So, I thought it would be a prime day to get RETWC out of the dark and back into the light

And there he is.  Robert's looking worse for the wear already -- corners are peeling back, edges are wearing away, creases are forming. But, he's still got his Georgia G intact and on a brilliant red helmet.

In the background is the Richard B. Russell Federal Building.  It's the location for the U.S. District Court in Atlanta, and it's right around the corner from where the new Falcons Stadium is being built. Thankfully, it has been decent weather-wise here lately -- though overcast, it has been consistently between 65 and 75 degrees.  It could be a lot worse.

Thanks for reading, y'all, and I promise that I'll get around to some more posts about bubble mailers and boxes and card show trips that I've made recently.

Hanging Around in a One-Card Post (A Card From My Cardboard Habit)

In October of 2004, I went to a rock concert at the Fabulous Fox Theater here in Atlanta. At that time, I lived and worked in the City of Atlanta proper -- Midtown, in fact -- and was able to walk to the show.  The main act for the show was the reunion tour of seminal alternative band The Pixies, and they put on a great show -- all the old stuff, one new song that was decent, and all the original lineup in its pomp.

Opening up for them was this Irish band that, in honesty, I hadn't heard of before that show. The Irish band was called The Thrills, and I found their music to be catchy without being annoying and musical and earnest in a way I appreciated.  As it turns out, The Thrills were big in Ireland, pretty big in the UK, and barely made a dent in the US (despite an appearance on David Letterman's Late Show) before their third album went *thud* everywhere in the world and EMI dropped them from the label.  

For being an Irish band, The Thrills had a very laid back, California vibe to their music. One of their catchier, more enjoyable songs to me was this song:

As much as the song laments the fact that hanging around in a one-horse town is a bad idea, I'm not as sure that a one-card post should carry any shame.  This is especially true when the one card being posted is a great one, as is the case with this beauty from J. Meeks at My Cardboard Habit.  A few weeks ago, he broke a box of the 2015 Series 1 Topps, and he found a card that was right up my alley:

I know.  All y'all Braun haters are gonna hate, and I wonder myself if he has ever been clean in his career when he's been healthy -- time will tell, and even then, he probably won't ever get the benefit of the doubt from anyone (nor should he).  

But, he's about to become the top home run hitter ever for the Brewers, and he is undeniably one of the best players to put on a Brewer uniform.  With those facts and my PC for him in mind, this card is an excellent addition to my Braun collection, which is rapidly approaching 300 cards/items.

Mr. Meeks -- thank you very much for this card and for thinking of me immediately when you got it!

Trade with Reader John Hazen: A Paean to 1980s Fleer

Last month, my one-year blogging anniversary came and went with little fanfare on my part. I should have had this fanfare in the post in which I recognized the anniversary:

But I didn't.  Instead of Copland, I said that anyone who wanted cards from me should let me know and I'd send them some.

Perhaps it was because I owed so many cards to so many people already at that point, and perhaps it was because I had fallen so far behind in sending cards out that no one believed me any more, but only reader John Hazen took me up on the offer.  He sent me a link to his wantlist on Zistle, and away went a bunch of cards that he needed.  

In return, John sent me a stack of cards which hit a number of my needs:

 

My collection of Big Prince still has some appropriately large holes.  These four cards helped plug a few of those.

Black borders are good.  Always.  Well, unless it's those ridiculous looking Wal-Mart all-black cards from about 5 or 6 years ago.  Those look terrible.

I haven't said much about the late 1990s Pacific sets here, mostly because it's taken me a while to have an opinion on them.  Pacific had sets that were as gimmicky as any bad Topps gimmicks of recent years, and it had sets like this Paramount set that feature a subdued-for-the-1990s design and excellent photography.  In other words, it is almost as if Pacific was presaging the way that current companies -- especially Topps -- have approached issuing cards. 

It does not bode well, however, that Pacific went bankrupt in 2000.

I miss Fleer cards. I might be alone in this regard, but once Fleer got its feet under it -- somewhere around 1983 in my book -- they put out some of the best cards that the 1980s had to offer.  I throw out 1981 because it was issued haphazardly in the wake of the court ruling regarding Topps's then-monopoly. 

Then, 1982 was an abomination.  It featured photos only a 10-year-old in the midst of a sugar bender could have taken and were printed on card stock that often felt unfinished -- rough.  And, it was still plagued with stupid errors like John Littlefield's card having a reversed negative so as to show him throwing left-handed:

That card pretty much sums up 1982 Fleer -- weak design, terrible photography, and muted colors.  

But that Richie Sexson card -- knocking off the 1987 Fleer design -- is everything good about where Fleer went in the mid-to-late 1980s.  Clean designs, crisp photography, and bright colors -- everything I like in a baseball card.  I know, some people prefer lots of colors and designs all over their borders.  And, don't get me wrong -- I love some of the loudest Topps sets out there like the 1972 and 1975 sets.  But the clean, simple designs -- say, 1974 or 1978 Topps -- are among my very favorites.  

Thank you very much, John, for the great cards.  I hope that we can trade again soon.

An Ode to Want Lists (Cards from The Prowling Cat)

Despite having several packages to post, lately I have been thinking more about how I blog, how I trade, and with whom I am trading.  For much of the fall -- no doubt thanks to college football season taking up more of my attention, but also just because I got wrapped up in my own little world -- I failed as a trader.  I promised a lot, and delivered little to nothing.  

It took me several months, for example, to put together a package to send to The Card Papoy. He claimed a card that I found cheaply at my local card show in October -- a 1976 Topps Dave Winfield.  It took me until February to get around to finally sending that card out to him. To make it up to him, I took a look at his Want List of Blue Jays cards and tried to hit a bunch of his needs.  Thankfully, I did so.

Spiff at Texas Rangers Cards sent me two packages for fun late last fall. He told me that no return package was necessary, but when a blogger sends you two large packages of cards that contain a lot of cards you need, you should return the favor.  I finally got around to that in February as well. Once again, thankfully, Spiff had a big want list so I could pull together cards for him that he needed -- as he put it, I sent 34 cards and "batted 1.000 with all the cards hitting holes on my Rangers wantlists."

I spent a ton of my December trying to get more want lists posted. For a long time, I had only posted the 1970s and early 1980s as a want list. So I put in some time and effort into getting another 15 years of want lists put together.  It's not easy to do when you're like me and have to figure out not only what you have but what you don't have.

That effort paid off recently for me. Yet another blogger I had been meaning to send stuff to -- The Prowling Cat -- collects schedules.  I finally went through my old schedules from the 1980s and sent a bunch off to him in mid-February as well.  In return, The Cat was kind enough to come off the Prowl for a moment to send some cards my way.  Clearly, The Cat was prowling on my want lists, because nearly every one of these cards crossed off a need. 

The package included a number of cards I needed either for team sets, player collections, or both.  There were Pinnacle Rookies:

There were Donruss cards of guys in throwback uniforms to the 1920s Brewers:

One of the games was so bad that the local paper said that the play was like a throwback to 1972.  That team -- in the club's fourth overall season -- finished the year at 65-91 and went through three managers.  That sportswriter, though, was fairly prescient -- the next time the Brewers would see .500 would be 2005.

The Cat even sent some mid-1990s Stadium Club:

There were others too.  And the great thing is that all of these cards were on my want lists. Now, I just have to go back and make sure that they are OFF my want lists.

Seriously, though, if you have a want list, it helps.  To me, it makes me feel like I am sending you something you truly need as opposed simply to sending you cards that I just want to get rid of.  

Unless, of course, you really want all 1500 of my junk wax Red Sox.  

Oddball from the Card Show

Sometimes, I think I'd rather be a type collector rather than being a player collector. I love seeing and having oddballs, regional cards, and random items almost as much as I love collecting Brewers cards.  Maybe in the future I'll go down that path.  

I'm a total sucker for oddballs. If you've ever gotten a trade package from me, you know I like to stuff those oddballs I have for your collection.  So, when I ran across an unopened box oddball at the card show, I had to get it.

The massive 2011 Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards describes these as follows:

These 4-1/4" x 6" cards were something new. Printed on plastic, rather than paper, the player picture on the card is actually raised above the surface much like might be found on a relief map; a true 3-D baseball card.

At my local card show, I started talking to one of the guys who is a vendor there. Turned out he and I had graduated from college a year apart at the same school, though I didn't play the name game too much with him.  But, he sold me a completely unopened box of these 3-D Stars -- 24 packs in total -- for $5.  

I wasn't really familiar with this set before buying it, and one look at the checklist told me why:

No Brewers.  That explains a lot.  But it's a very good checklist for a 1985 set. Outside of perhaps a few guys (maybe Mike Boddicker -- who, in fairness, was coming off two seasons in which he went 16-8 for the World Series Champion 1983 Orioles and 20-11 and an AL ERA Title in 1984, or Dave Kingman) -- the checklist is fairly packed with stars and superstars.  

I have only opened a few of these so far -- I found my Gary Carter in the first few packs I opened -- and unsurprisingly they don't really scan all that well. But, here are a couple of examples.

Cal Ripken Jr.

Rickey Henderson

Darryl Strawberry

Boy, is that Strawberry scan an unflattering view.

Like I said, when it comes to oddballs, I just can't help myself sometimes.

I've also opened packs containing Jim Rice, Pete Rose, and Don Mattingly in addition to Carter.

So, anyone want one of these?

Beer Can Braves

Are you an aficionado of good beer? Do you like baseball -- preferably the Atlanta Braves? Then local Atlanta craft brewer Sweetwater Brewing Company has got a deal for you.  Sweetwater has teamed up with the Atlanta Braves to issue special commemorative packaging and cans for this summer.  Here's a look:

You might be wondering why, on a baseball card blog, I'd sound like a complete shill for Sweetwater Brewing.  Well, there's the obvious baseball tie-in for the Braves. But, I have been seeing a lot of Braves tie-ins lately to beer and beer-related items.

So, while I sort through all of the cards I've gotten recently from friends in the blogosphere and from the my local card show, I wanted to pose this question:

If you are a team collector, do you collect these types of items?

If you are a player collector, do you seek out oddballs like this?

From my perspective, as a Brewers collector, if something like this were to pop up and was readily available, I would probably pick it up or seek to have a relative in Wisconsin get it if they could.  If the item was one of my main guys -- Spahn, Mathews, Adcock, Carter, Yount, Molitor, Braun, Segura, Lucroy, or Gomez -- I'd probably try to get my hands on it.

Now, my question to you out-of-town Braves fans who might not have Sweetwater available to you:

Should I sacrifice my liver and drink some beer so you can have a nice Braves collectible box like this?

Note: I would happily drink this beer with or without the Braves logos on them!

Let me know your thoughts!

A Card from The Hot Corner

A quick post before I head out first to my local card show for the first time in four months and then helping to entertain my wife's aunt, who is coming to stay with us tonight.

With the recently threatened winter weather here in Atlanta -- and, for the most part, it stayed as threatened rather than real -- I was home on Wednesday afternoon when the mail came. And what to my wondering eyes should appear but a PWE from Michigan with one tiny .... well, the story works better if it were a Rob Deer card.  But, instead, it was a Green Gypsy Queen parallel from 2013 of the PED Man known as Ryan Braun:

As you can see from this scan of the back of the card, it was numbered to 99:

The PWE came from Pat of Hot Corner Cards, who has been spreading the PWE love around the blogosphere as of late.

I'm glad that Pat included me in the mail day -- thank you very much!