Dollar Stores 101 #SuperTraders

For a while in November -- while everyone was still shocked that the Earth kept rotating on its slightly tilted axis despite the fact that the Chicago Cubs won the World Series -- I was getting concerned about my collecting. Trade packages had dried up. That was entirely my fault, since I have been very blasé about collecting generally lately. The time I have available for collecting had dried up too, as the real world of work and Thanksgiving and wanting to spend time with my wife all came together to make my card time limited.

Then, just after Thanksgiving or thereabouts, packages just started rolling in. My desk is a mess now of cards needing to be cataloged, sorted, scanned, marked off want lists, and added to player collection lists and binders. I have at least six or seven packages waiting to be scanned right now.

I do have one package that I scanned a while back and which I just haven't gotten around to posting. Probably two or three weeks ago now, I got a package in from Sportscards From the Dollar Store. It was an eclectic mass of Brewers cards, but I only scanned a few of them. Now, whatever else was in the envelope is somewhere on my desk...gah....

In honor -- or should I say, in honour -- of the envelope from the Dollar Store, I thought about dollar stores generally. There seem to be different stores of this nature all over the place. So, here's a few I know of being around where i live.

1.  Family Dollar

Dollar stores often have good deals on items that you buy every day. It's just that most of those stores tend not to be places you go every day. For instance, the Family Dollar near me has $1 rolls of wrapping paper, 88-cent 2-liter bottles of Canada Dry Ginger Ale, and $3 tubes of Colgate toothpaste. Not bad prices. Maybe I should shop at this dollar store?

Appropriately slow in starting out here -- because, well, I'm slow starting today anyway after a 3.5 mile run/walk in 37 degree weather (I know -- I've gotten weak having lived in Georgia for 21 years) -- let's go to 2010 Upper Deck. It's too bad Upper Deck had its license stripped by MLB. Cards like this -- even if it is a typical pitcher-grimacing photo -- remind me how good a simple design can be...unlike pretty much anything Topps has done since it got an exclusive license.

2.  Dollar Tree

I just realized that I have three Dollar Tree stores within three miles of my house and 21 stores within 10 miles of me. Crazy. D

Dollar Tree has the same kinds of deals as Family Dollar -- $1 rolls of wrapping paper seem to be a dollar store staple. Dollar Tree also has the always good 4.5-oz. bag of Cheez-Its for $1. Mmmmm....Cheez-its...

I feel like stores like Dollar Tree have taken over from what Sears and JC Penney used to be -- the local department store where people did all their shopping, including everything from tires to appliances. The reason that they have taken over is that Sears and JC Penney have floundered about trying to position themselves as better than Wal-Mart or as equivalent to a mall department store like Macy's.



Within my Dollar Store package, I got a Topps Chrome and a Topps Update of two pitchers who should be available at a dollar store. The two Italians did not cover themselves in glory in 2016. Capuano came back to the Brewers as a sort of elder statesman innings sponge, but he failed in that role when he got hurt after just 16 appearances and 24 innings in the first two months of the year.

Garza signed for a four-year, $50 million contract after the 2013 season. He's got one year left on that albatross...er, deal. Garza started the year on the DL and did not make his debut until two weeks after Capuano was done for the year. Garza pitched acceptably on occasion -- his first two starts over 10 innings yielded just one earned run, and his last six starts (33-1/3 innings) provided a good run of results as well (2.97 ERA, Opponent's BABIP of .299 means that was right on too). The problem was that those 8 starts bookended an 11-start stretch (58-1/3 innings) of a 6.02 ERA (opponent BABIP: .309...again, nothing out of the ordinary there).

Between Garza and Ryan Braun, the Brewers will spend over half their payroll on two players. Together, they may have a WAR of 0, with Braun's positive negated by Garza.

3.  Dollar General

I have to admit -- I get confused by all these different stores. With these names, you can see why. Unlike Dollar Tree and more like Family Dollar, Dollar General tends to have more items that cost more than $1 a piece or don't cost exactly a dollar. For instance, looking to my favorite gin mixer of ginger ale, two twelve packs of cans of Canada Dry Ginger Ale cost $5 here. Like the other stores, wrapping paper starts at a buck. But, you can also get a Star Wars coloring book here for $1. Can you do that at Family Dollar?

Well, probably. I don't know.

Speaking of Ryan Braun, here's an orange parallel from 2011 Bowman. This reminds me that the reason I have stacks of cards on my desk to sort is also caused by the fact that I got bogged down in 2013 Bowman parallels and ran out of steam on cataloging. 

I guess I should try to get my police cards into sheets instead.

4. five Below

I've gone into this store once about a year ago. I had to stop at the Office Depot next door to pick up some supplies for one of my wife's charity activities. I found some packs of 2015 Topps Series 1 in what might have been a retail or hobby box -- I didn't take a close look. The problem was that half the packages had actually been opened and rifled through. If there were any inserts in it, they were long gone. 

There's pack searching, and there is outright thievery. That was clearly the second.




Putting Molitor and O'Leary together may seem to be a weird thing. But it makes sense here because, under Sal Bando's management as general manager and in Bud Selig's eminent ass-hattery, both O'Leary and Molitor were simply discarded like those commons in the packs at Five Below. And, just like those commons, Bando and Selig made no effort to stop the thievery -- they just watched it happen as their pockets were picked.

This O'Leary card, though, reminds me that I am going to put together a real want list for all Brewers minor league teams. The first step is identifying them. Sort of like admitting that I have a problem.

5.  Ollie's Bargain Outlet

While Ollie's does not have that magic "dollar" word in their name, Ollie's is a big-time closeout store. They buy up huge lots of random things that other retailers can't sell or that the manufacturers or middlemen get overstocked and then sell them at cut prices. Thing is, though, that most of their deals are ones that you just have to go to the store to see. 

I wouldn't be surprised to see them start selling those awful 2013 Panini Triple Play cards soon. I mean, if Dave and Adam can't get rid of cases of them for $44.95 (suggested retail price: $475.20) or a 24-pack box for $3.95 (suggested: $23.76), it would seem that Ollie's is the next step.

Michael Reed played most of his 2016 season at the age of 23 in Triple-A Colorado Springs. He has appeared in 159 games at Triple-A, and in 640 plate appearances, he's slashing at .248/.363/.369. He is a singles-hitting outfielder who, as a prospect, is the equivalent of putting along in the right lane on the interstate driving five miles per hour under the speed limit while the Porsches and Maseratis and Lamborghinis in the left lane (model names: Lewis Brinson, Brett Phillips, Corey Ray, and Trent Clark) go blowing by him so fast that all he feels is breeze. 

I mean, Reed is still listed as the 27th best prospect in the Brewers organization. It's just that there are eight other outfielders ahead of him (add in Monte Harrison, Ryan Cordell, Demi Orimoloye, and Tyrone Taylor to those other guys) just on the prospect list and Domingo Santana and Keon Broxton in the majors. 

So, maybe someday soon, you too can find a Michael Reed blowout sale at your local dollar store.

Many thanks go out for the great cards.

Chasing Kids

My wife and I do not have children, and we probably never will for a number of reasons. Not the least of those reasons relate to the fact that we rather like peace and quiet around our house. I'll admit, as well, that I'd rather not be 63 years old and sending a kid off to college -- which would be the case if we had a newborn show up in our lives in the next 12 months (I turn 45 in a couple of weeks).

There are times I would like to have a child, though. I enjoy working with kids. I've tutored one of the boys from across the street in, of all things, math. I coached high school debate one year, and even helped coach a little league baseball team. I like doing those things.

I feel like I'd probably enjoy going to minor league baseball games more with a kid as well. Here in the Atlanta area, we have the Atlanta Braves, of course, but also the Class A Rome Braves are just an hour and a half away and the Triple-A Gwinnett Braves are 35 minutes away -- or about 7 minutes further than the Atlanta Braves new stadium (for reference, getting to Turner Field would take about 45 minutes...).

With both the local Atlanta Braves and my Milwaukee Brewers both in mid-rebuild, my attention turns more regularly to minor league action. I have started getting more interested in Bowman lately -- even buying in for Crackin' Wax's Bowman Draft Picks & Prospects case break. I also decided to buy a hobby box of 2016 Topps Heritage Minors from Blowout Cards to feed this new interest.

This box seemed fated to come my way. This was the first card out of the first pack I opened:

Vanderbilt's own Dansby Swanson in his Mississippi Braves outfit looks suspiciously like he plays for the Milwaukee Braves. You know, except for that whole Atlanta stealing the Braves after the 1965 season and all. 

All in all, it wasn't a bad box. It could have been better, of course -- they always could be better and, say, have a hot pack of all the printing plates for all the Brewers farmhands in the set. But let's take a look at the highlights of the box that were not Brewers.

First, each box contains one autograph. Here's the one I got:

Braves hot box! Braves Hot Box! Allard made it to Rome last season at the tender age of 18 -- he was born August 13, 1997. I think most of us card collectors probably have t-shirts older than Kolby. Allard was the Braves 1st round pick out of San Clemente High School in 2015. I've never been to San Clemente, but I have been to Dana Point, which is only a few miles away north on the Coast Highway.

I also got one relic:

A freaking Cardinal? That's not cool.

But wait -- this one made it to the majors last season and, in 12 games (5 starts) put up a 1.57 ERA in 46 innings while striking out 52 (though walking 23). Not bad for a 21-year-old kid who turned 22 on August 29. And, not bad to get the #7 prospect (Baseball America) or #10 (Baseball Prospectus) or #7 post-season (MLB Pipeline) as a relic. Though I have to admit that this Topps photo makes Reyes look much more Caucasian that every other photo around:

Yeah, are we sure that's Reyes?

Okay, moving on to the short-prints and serial numbered cards:

The Innings Pitched Leaders card -- also known as, "guys who their team thinks very little of" -- is serial numbered to 25, or 3 less than the number of years that Pat Dean will have been on this earth on his next birthday in May. Both Dean and Rogers pitched for the Twins last year, with Rogers proving to be a decent bullpen arm and Dean looking like he was throwing batting practice (13 HRs allowed in 67-1/3 innings...not good). Bleier pitched reasonably well in limited work out of the Yankee pen last year as well -- though, of course, he turns thirty this coming year.

Jacob Faria's card is serial numbered out of 99. He's a Tampa Bay Rays pitcher who made it to Durham for half the year last year at the tender age of 22. He could probably use a bit more seasoning in Durham this year, which the Rays may give him through June to keep him from arbitration for an extra year.

The other three, including new White Sox star-in-waiting Yoan Moncada, are short prints.

So, what Brewers did I get?

Yes, I'm cheating a bit to have Mauricio Dubon in this group since he just joined the organization from Boston in the Tyler Thornburg trade. Dubon is likely to start the year in Biloxi with the Shuckers, though his advanced hitting ability he displayed last year could push him to Colorado. With Dubon being just a month older than Arcia, it is possible that the Brewers could push Dubon a bit to get him to start playing some second base rather than shortstop so as to get Dubon ready to play next to Arcia for the next 18 years. 

That's being very hopeful, of course. That also would mean that Jonathan Villar would move positions -- probably to third or centerfield from second base, where the team is saying currently that Villar will be the starter. 

The guy here I am really, really rooting for -- okay, I'm really rooting for all of these guys...they are Brewers, but this guy is really a favorite -- is Oluwademilade Oluwadamilola "Demi" Orimoloye. Demi was born on January 6, 1997, in Nigeria. His dad is an architect, so he could afford to move his family out of Nigeria if he chose. They did so when Demi was just eighteen months old and moved to Orléans, Ontario -- just outside Ottawa and just across the Ottawa river from Québec. 

If he makes it to the majors, he'll be the first Nigerian-born -- and perhaps the first African-born -- major leaguer. He's got a long way to go -- he struggled last year in Rookie ball in Helena, slashing just .205/.293/.324 in 247 plate appearances. Of course, he is only 19 years old.

Finally, there's David Denson. For what it's worth, he started out like a house of fire in 2016. In his first 38 games, he had 3 HRs and was slashing .306/.388/.455. That was built, though, on an unsustainable BABIP of .409. In his next 55 games at Wisconsin, he hit .178/.285/.325 on a BABIP of .225. He's 21 years old and, in his four minor league seasons -- only one of which has been spent above rookie ball -- Denson has hit .229/.338/.368. He's a good story, and the team's treatment of him as just another player rather than being "the guy who came out" is commendable. Still, at this point, Denson probably is nothing more than organizational filler -- even at the relatively barren position in the organization of first base.

In the end, I find myself liking the Heritage Minors product. That's probably because of the eternal optimism and the analytical attempts in my head at projecting who will be good and who will not that springs with the youth of the minor leaguers. I'm not a big prospect hound by any stretch of the imagination -- and, by that, I mean I'm not looking to turn a profit on these cards by hoarding some player's cards -- but I really enjoyed opening these.

I guess the minor leagues is probably the counter to the cynicism I feel for Topps and its efforts in producing cards of major leaguers. I mean, I don't love the set enough to collect it as a set, but it whets my appetite for more minor league sets.

A One-Card Wonder Post

Over the past few months, I've kept up an email correspondence -- and even spoken on the phone one time when I had a spare few minutes -- with former Brewers pitcher Ray Peters. Ray is a wonderful gentleman. He's been very forgiving of me when I go missing for several days and don't have the chance to respond reasonably quickly.  

He is also a font of incredible information about the early days of the Milwaukee Brewers. I haven't done so yet, but I will be sharing soon some minor league team photos he scanned and sent to me. He's also been kind to me with his time and energy in reading and giving me more information about my "Meet the Brewers" series. I'm looking forward to bringing that knowledge into my series.

Recently, he topped himself. I got home from work late last week and found a package from Ray waiting for me. I was not expecting anything from him, so it was a surprise. 

Now, if you have read about Ray, you know that he is a graduate of Harvard University. His major at Harvard was Latin American History -- unlike what this otherwise good biography from author Chris Zantow said, where it tried to limit Ray to studying only South America. I was going to ask Ray his position on the thesis I wrote in college -- specifically, whether Brazilian populist Getulio Vargas's policies of trying to play the US and the Allied Powers and Germany and the Axis powers off one another in the 1930s and early 1940s was a good policy or whether Vargas could have done better by siding with one earlier in the war. But I keep forgetting to ask.

I bring up Ray's historian side, though, to emphasize the fact that he knows how to research. Certainly, it does not take much digging on my blog to find that I like oddballs, but it takes at least a bit of reading. As an oddball lover, though, I greatly appreciated and enjoyed opening the envelope from Ray. It contained just one card -- but it is a doozy:

This is one of the Dayton Daily News "Bubble-Gumless Cards" that the newspaper issued in 1970 and 1971. Like all good oddball things, the Dayton Daily News cards have had things written about them elsewhere before. The blog "Uncataloged Baseball Cards" features a post from 2010 (just highlight the text so you can read it, since the black text on black background does not really work too well) which mentions that the author SSchauer spent a significant amount of time going through microfilm to document the whole set -- all 357 cards (other than card 196, since his library was missing that microfilm roll).

My research also led me to the frequently excellent Net54Baseball Forum, which posed the question I had: why is this considered a "card"? Hobby icon and Big-Book compiler Bob Lemke responded by saying that:

Back in the day' when the Standard Catalog had two people working full-time, virtually unlimited page counts and the notion of building up a database for non-card baseball player memorabilia for future catalogs, we routinely sought out this type of item. Today, not so much. If the need arises to cut back vintage pages on the print edition in the future, this type of listing would be among the first to go onto some sort of rotational publishing basis.

And that kind of thing is a shame. As our hobby has changed and become more corporate in nature -- with profit motives outweighing hobbyist enjoyment for many and for the corporations issuing the cards and cataloging them on websites (like Beckett) -- these types of cards will fall by the wayside or will become relics of a foreign history that, perhaps, our children may never know.

It's thanks to historians like Ray and Bob Lemke and the folks at Net54, though, that we hopefully will not lose our hobby's past.

My thanks to Ray for this awesome piece of Milwaukee history. I don't think I've ever seen one of these before, so it's truly a pleasure to have it.

Highly Arbitrary and Completely Subjective

I have gotten cards on numerous occasions from Brian at Highly Subjective and Completely Arbitrary. Weirdly enough, despite my penchant for music posts, I have never done a Minneapolis music post to thank Brian for cards. 

First things first -- this post will not contain any Prince songs. Even in death, the Purple One and his lawyers kept nearly all of his music off the internet, and any music on the net gets removed very quickly. 

So, some of you may wonder what is left once you take the Prince out of the equation. The answer: a TON. Perhaps it's the need to be indoors all the time, but Minneapolis has produced many, many top bands. 

Like, say, this one:

Semisonic was a great alt-rock/power pop band from the late 1990s from Minneapolis. Their one big hit was this song, "Closing Time," which was apparently written by Dan Wilson about the birth of his second child and not about a bar's closing time. Weird. 

Wilson is now known almost as much or more for producing Adele's album 21, which won a Grammy for Album of the Year in 2012.

To go with this big 1990s hit are three big 1990s cards. With each passing day of seeing Topps caring less and less about Brewers fans and me looking for ways to get reinvigorated about collecting in the face of this, I find myself actually thinking that cards from the 1990s are cooler and better than what we have now. Yes, card companies had parallels and inserts, but they didn't swallow up the main set. The base cards in the 1990s were still collectible and companies tried hard to make them interesting as opposed to being an excuse to make 70 different versions of the same damn card.

It was a simpler time. It was a better time because there was competition. And, it was a worse time because some cards had to carry warnings that kids with epilepsy should not buy the cards thanks to the flashy mirrored stuff on them -- like these three cards.

I'm cheating a little bit here because Hüsker Dü is actually from St. Paul rather than Minneapolis, but it's my blog so I'm cheating. Hüsker Dü featured noted alternative rocker and recluse Bob Mould as its singer. Mould was a freshman at Macalester College when he got the band together, and the group formed because Mould and drummer Grant Hart bonded over a shared love of the Ramones.

They got the name of the band from a board game of the same name that means "Do you Remember?" in both Dutch and Norwegian. They gigged around Minneapolis for a while and became hardcore punkers -- attracting the attention of the Dead Kennedys Jello Biafra, who then signed them for his label Alternative Tentacles.



Baseball these days can be a cruel business. Even though Chris Carter tied for the National League lead in home runs in 2016, the Brewers chose to non-tender him. The move makes a ton of sense in many respects: the team tried to trade him, designated him for assignment, tried trading him again, and then signed Eric Thames out of the Korean league for about half or less what Carter would have made. Carter is going to land on his feet somewhere, but it is a strange thing to see a guy with 41 homers cut.

Nelson and Broxton are still Brewers as of this writing. I feel like I need to say that about everyone on the roster with Slingin' David Stearns as the GM. 

As I think about it, it really makes sense that Minneapolis/St. Paul would churn out incredible music -- especially alternative music. You have a huge city that is cold -- turning people slightly off kilter. Add in a major university with tens of thousands of students who need entertainment. Throw in the artistry and imagination that universities tend to draw as well, and you have the recipe for all kinds of great stuff.

Like The Replacements, who were sort of an early incarnation of a cross between grunge and emo. They were very heart-on-sleeve -- as "I'll Be You" shows. Westerberg went solo after the band broke up and wrote a couple of songs for the 1992 Cameron Crowe movie Singles -- the biggest one probably being "Dyslexic Heart."

Both of these cards are from the 2016 Topps Update set. It's Lucroy's swansong card, essentially, as a Brewer player thanks to his appearance as an All-Star. The Boyer is one of those foil parallel things that scan nearly indistinguishably from the base cards. 

As this year has gone by, this design has grown on me like a weird mold growing on cheddar cheese. It's not attractive. It's kind of greenish. You know it is something you probably should just throw out. Eventually, someone else probably will throw them out. No one will miss it, and once you realize it's gone, you end up buying another.

I am very surprised that Information Society is from Minneapolis. They just felt and sounded so damn British. Maybe it was just that I was listening to a lot of Depeche Mode in 1988 when this song, "What's on Your Mind (Pure Energy)" came out. A lot of folks call it "pure energy" only -- and what with Leonard Nimoy saying that phrase over and over, why not?

Lead singer Kurt Harland has scored numerous video games outside of his work with Information Society. I don't know any of the games, but he worked with Crystal Dynamics and Electronic Arts.

I have yet to catalog all of the cards I need from insert sets from all the years that Topps has issued them. Eventually I will. Maybe I will. Hell, I don't know. Maybe I never will. I just know that I have not seen this Record Breakers card before. At least I don't think I have.

Lyle Overbay. Yup. That's him. Good guy. At Wrigley. Looking confused as to why anyone wanted to take his photo. 

Good guy though. Smashing bloke.

No, I have no idea where that line of thinking came from either. Just went with it.

Some people think that Courtney Love was in the band Babes In Toyland. In a March 2015 interview, the band confirmed that Love was never in the band. As drummer Lori Barbero stated, "[Love] lived in my house, and one time I think when we were rehearsing she came down and probably picked up something and tried to play and we were just like, 'get out of here.'"

Babes in Toyland never got as big as Hole did, though you can definitely see why people think the two are related outside of the whole coincidence of Love living with the band's drummer. Babes in Toyland had much more of an impact in the UK thanks to John Peel's love for the band. When Peel loved your band, you got known. Seriously, just find anything as a "Peel session" on whatever music streaming source/iTunes/YouTube and you will hear fantastic music. 

Michael Ratterree never had a chance, really. He was a 10th round pick in 2013 out of Rice University. As a 22-year-old when drafted, he had to show a lot quickly. He did play very well in Helena in the Pioneer League -- but he was old for the league so he should have destroyed it. Then, he moved up to the Midwest league and, for a brief stint, Double-A Huntsville in 2014. It did not go well -- .228/.344/.442 slashline. 

It went even worse in 2015. As a 24-year-old in the Florida State League, he slashed .150/.260/.221 in 282 plate appearances and, then, retired with a broken hamate bone problem in his hand. He's now a construction superintendent in Houston and he is a 3rd degree connection for me on LinkedIn. Hey Michael, if you ever find that you need a good construction lawyer, you know how to find me here. 

Many thanks go out to Brian for these cards.

More Cards from My Mom's House

It has become a holiday tradition for me to come back from Thanksgiving either with boxes getting shipped to me or with at least some baseball stuff in my luggage. 

In 2013, I made the fateful decision to pay to ship all 350 pounds of my old card collection from my mom's house in Wisconsin to my house in Georgia. It's been nonstop complaining about parallels and Topps ignoring the Brewers ever since.

In 2014, my mom unloaded a bunch of stuff on me, including an old Philadelphia Athletics pin (that I think I've sent off to someone else by now), the early 1990s Brewers team photos from fan appreciation nights, and an old Topps Magazine from Spring 1990 with a Robin Yount card still inside. 

Last year, my mom and brother came to Georgia with a car trunk full of stuff that they had found randomly within the boxes and bags that populate my old home. That stuff included a full set of police cards from the Village of Jackson, some Dover reprint books, a few yearbooks, and a Baseball Cards Magazine with the cards still in the magazine.

This year was no different. My wife stayed back in Georgia because my cat pal Gus pulled his hamstring pretty badly (no kidding...apparently I need to teach him how to stretch before he tries being athletic and jumping around the house) and the vet said to watch him. So, I went up to Milwaukee solo this time. And, as usual, I came back home to Georgia with an assortment of oddballs and cool things.

Let's start with police cards, because everything Brewers starts with police cards.



Every time I think I have gathered up all the police cards hanging out around my mom's house, more seem to emerge. It's worth noting that apparently the folks who decided how to design the police sets made the choice in 1992 to copy the 1991 Fleer color scheme. After all, what could possibly look better than a bright yellow baseball card?

To give you a little geography for these: all three of the police departments represented here are located within 15 miles or so of my mom's house. Menomonee Falls is about halfway between my mom's house and downtown Milwaukee. It is where Kohl's Department Stores is headquartered, and there is a pretty big Harley-Davidson plant there (which is located in a factory that Johnson Controls used to own). Finally, it is also where actress Jessica Szohr grew up (who has appeared in a bunch of things I've never watched, like Gossip GIrl).

Germantown is basically right next to Menomonee Falls. Menomonee Falls is in Waukesha County in the very northeast corner of the county; Germantown is in Washington County directly adjacent to it. Both of these villages are located along Interstate 41 traveling northwest from downtown Milwaukee.

Kewaskum is further north. It is at the very northern border of Washington County just south of Fond du Lac County. We used to play against them in baseball in high school, and the obligatory "scum town" references were made regularly. 

Isn't geography fun?

Okay, one more Brewer item, and then I have three non-Brewer items which could be yours if the Price is Right (i.e., if you make me an offer in trade).

I bought another copy of this pin earlier this year. Well, rather, it got thrown into another purchase by the seller for maybe $5 more. I knew I had seen one of them before in my possession as a kid, but when I couldn't find it in my stuff, I assumed it was lost. Nope, it was just misplaced. 

By the way, that is a weird legalistic construct -- the difference between lost and misplaced. Seriously, I recall a class in law school where we covered that difference for a half an hour. I am pretty sure that we spent that much time on it not because people did not understand the difference, but rather because the law professor was emphasizing the need for precision in language. 

I am still bitter about that fact, because it is 30 minutes of my life I will never, ever get back.

Now, onto the non-Brewer stuff. Like a Topps oddball:

This is a Topps card from 2001 that was stuck in a package to the back of a Post Cereal box of some kind. These cards are relatively still available for about $1 through COMC and eBay. This one, as you can see, is still in the package in which it came complete with the cardboard torn off the back of the cereal box it was affixed to.

If you're interested in it, let me know.

Next, another Topps oddball:

It's a little rusty, but it is a 1964 Topps Coin of former Dodgers, Phillies, Tigers, Red Sox, and Indians outfielder/third baseman/first baseman Don Demeter. Demeter was a member of the 1967 Impossible Dream Boston Red Sox for 20 games and two months before being traded along with Tony Horton to the Indians in exchange for Gary "Ding Dong" Bell. 

Demeter also was a member of the World Series winning 1959 Los Angeles Dodgers, playing in all six games -- the first two as a late-inning defensive replacement for Gil Hodges in centerfield, the next three as the starter in center, and then appearing in the sixth and final game by coming in as a pinch runner in the fourth inning for right fielder Norm Larker.

Demeter grew up in Oklahoma City and moved back there after his retirement. He was always a religious man, and for many years he has served as a pastor there. He is still the pastor at Grace Community Baptist Church, and he has a few videos of his playing days on his pastor's biography page for the church.

So that item is pretty cool. The last one is very beat up -- which sucks -- but it's also very cool:

This is a 1956 Topps pin of Chicago Cubs great Ernie Banks. I wish it were in better condition, of course, but it's tough to keep things in pristine condition when the things are strewn haphazardly in boxes, drawers, on floors, in shelving units, and in plastic ziploc bags. Still, if you're a Cubs fan looking for a starter version of this pin (after all, ones in better shape are priced above $100 on eBay), this one will come much less expensively than those other ones.

Now, if I can just find where my packrat grandparents stashed the Goudey cards from the 1930s, which I've never known to exist there...aw, who am I kidding? Those were probably stuffed into the walls to use as insulation there.

After all, packrats keep stuff because they might need it someday or it might be worth something someday. It just depends on whether the need to use it comes before someone tells you it might have value.

Back After a Little Break with Cards from All Time Brewers

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

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

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

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

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

1.  Skylar Grey

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

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

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

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


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

2.  Butch Vig

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Woody Herman

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

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

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

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

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

4.  The Violent Femmes

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Bon Iver

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

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

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

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

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

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