A Winner in my (crooked) Contest and a Stack O' Brewers from Fuji

At long last I have finished my BIG BREWERS SORT. Which means we have a winner in the HOW BIG IS MY CREWNEVERSE contest. But before we get that...

Look at that! What a beautiful sight... everything so damned orderly. What you see there are my all-time Brewers binder, which now is home to a COMPLETE set of every player who ever appeared with the Pilots and Brewers, my oversized Brewers stuff, and my two Brewers monster boxes, with players sorted by name (plus some spillage). Each of these cards is now entered into the Trading Card Database... which gives me a little demographic info about my collection.  

1.	Ryan Braun	262
2.	Robin Yount	238
3.	Paul Molitor	168
4.	Prince Fielder	162
5.	Ben Sheets	154
6.	Greg Vaughn	126
7.	Rickie Weeks	121
8.	Geoff Jenkins	120
9.	Dave Nilsson	112
10.	B.J. Surhoff	99

There you see the top ten players in my collection. Not a lot surprising about that... although Dave Nilsson ranks a but higher than I would have thought. 

Anyway, I don't plan on keeping all of these cards in these boxes long-term. I ended up having some issues with the monster box set-up. First off, I have come to hate penny sleeves. You notice that most of these cards are in penny sleeves. It makes them slick as hell, and it's almost impossible to pick up a stack of these from the top without sending them flying out in all direction. I also erred on the player dividers. They look fine, but they are printed on normal printer paper and tend to slide down between the cards. In short, this is not a good set up to actually LOOK at the collection. My plan is to start binders with my favorite players - a Braun/Prince binder for example - which would make everything much more accessible and fun. But many players will remain in the boxes... Jose Valentine for example... not someone I regularly need to browse. Perhaps a Franken-set or something like that will also soon be in the offing. 

So what about that total???? Well, about that total...

I remembered as I was doing this that in the original post for this contest, I said that I would not count Brewers cards that I got DURING the count. Well, I did. I totally forgot my own rule and lumped it all together. Anyway, since I have no idea how to undo that, I'll just stick with changing the rule mid-way through the game.

So, now, getting to the winner of this crooked contest...

But WAIT! There are some Brewers cards in my collection that I have not yet added to this total. Cards I just got yesterday from San Jose Fuji. I had won a contest of his (not crooked, I assume) a while back and my prize lot was full of Brewers!

Here is Lorenzo Cain, the backbone of this year's team, in a great-looking SP from A&G.

Hey! And a Dan Plesac card from the Topps TV All Stars set... I've been wanting one for a while.

And.... yeah, that guy. He's... certainly on the team.

Here's a Ryan Braun I wasn't even aware of... signed by the artist! Very cool.

And a couple of Greinkes from this brief time as a Brewer. The blue-bordered cards in numbered to 199. Sweet. 

And HELL YEAH! The best of the bunch, a clear-cut Greg Vaughn. Thanks, Fuji!

Which is, oddly enough, from the same set as the Lenny Dykstra in the prize pack for the Crewneverse contest. Let's recap that prize pack.

There's Nails and some UD stickers...

... and a signed Tom Selleck card...

And that's all I'd gotten around to including. But, since I now know the WINNER of this contest, I can craft the rest of the prize package around their interests. 

(which includes a lot of football)

To the guesses one last time...

Laurens – 2,200

Angels in Order – 4,444

Sportscard Collectors – 4,444

Doug Hoback – 6,500

Mike Matson – 6,700

Gavin – 6,969 (nice)

Bo – 7,676

GCA – 7,955

Trevor P – 8,100

Adam Kaninger – 8,750

EP – 9,009

Nick – 9,219

Rob 792 – 9,482

Jon – 9,700

Fuji – 9,887

Adam Sanders – 10,100

ARPSmith – 11,111

The Lost Collector – 12,224

 

and the final tally is...

 

8,162!!!!

Which means Trevor of Bump and Run is our champion!!!!

I know I've got a few Packers somewhere around here that I will include in your package and I'm sure I can find a bunch of other fun stuff from your lists. In the next week or so, I'll put something together... if you can send me your address, I'll get it out ASAP.

Thanks again everyone for playing and for sending me so much great Brewers stuff over the past year-plus. 

 

1992 Eclipse True Crime - The Mega-Controversy the Card World Forgot (plus a contest!)

Look through a Tuff Stuff Magazine from the early 1990s once in a while. It is a real trip. I have a June 1992 copy and paging through it is like a damn time warp. There is just SO MUCH product being advertised, discussed, sold and traded.

SPORTS! The big four, boxing, golf, track and field. NON-SPORTS! This is where is really gets crazy.. cars, movies, motorcycles, wars (seriously), tractors, comics, TV shows, pin-ups… everything that anyone could have a passing interest in what given a damn card set in 1992.

And people had more than a passing interest in serial killers in 1992. Milwaukee’s own Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested in the summer of 1991, sparking international fascination with his horrific spree of murders, mutilations, and acts of cannibalism. It was one of those moments where true crime goes mainstream for just a bit, and all the so-called “respectable” news outlets get to thrash around with the slop with those who write gory and sensationalized stuff for a while before returning to their ivory towers. So, with carnage and blood all over the news in 1991, it seemed natural that a True Crime card set would hit in 1992.

In that same issue of Tuff Stuff, there is a short column on a set that was due out in May from Eclipse, a comic book publisher who specialized in edgy material. In January 1992, the tv program Entertainment Tonight (one of those schlock-centric garbage shows that lived on sensationalism, but never owned up to being a  schlock-centric garbage shows that lived on sensationalism) aired a segment on the set, which they claimed would be dedicated to serial killers. The segment caused an uproar, but only got it half-right. The set was to be dedicated to True Crime, and it would include gangsters and crime-fighters as well as mass murders. But the outcry was enough to get legislators in eight states to introduce legislation to ban sale of the cards to minors or to prohibit them altogether – a bill in New Jersey would have given a penalty of 18 months in jail to anyone who sold the cards to kids. And this was all before even a sample card from the set had produced.

 Victims’ rights advocates and free speech supporters debated about the cards on TV. Larry King hosted a segment on the cards. Newspapers all across the nation wrote about the controversy. Meanwhile, Eclipse Co. upped their initial print order for the cards – which would sell for $1 for a 12 card pack – from 10,000 cases to 25,000.

And the cards sold like mad. Only one of the efforts to ban the cards came to fruition… Nassau County, on Long Island, banned sale of the cards to anyone under 18. A lawsuit by Eclipse, supported by the ACLU, eventually overturned the ban. By the end of 1992, with a second, 110 card series rushed into release, the New York Times reported that the company had sold $1 million worth of the product. The cards gained such a high profile that in early 1993, the Hillside Strangler – Kenneth Bianchi – who raped, tortured, and murdered at least 10 women, brought suit against Eclipse for using his likeness for commercial purposes. The suit was thrown out.

The booming success of the cards didn’t seem to do much for Eclipse’s trading card efforts. They had been in the game since 1988, issuing tongue-in-cheek sets on the Iran Contra scandal and political corruption. In 1990, they printed a set on the Kennedy assassination and a “Friendly Dictators” set and, in 1991, issued sets on the drug war and the savings and loan scandal. Although they had announced plans for an “AIDS Awareness” set for 1993 – which would feature Magic Johnson – the concept seems to have been scrapped. In 1993, Eclipse issued a handful of movie sets – including a National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon set – and then bowed out of the card game for good.

I picked up a lot of the second series on eBay recently. I was pretty impressed. The artwork is great and the backside have plenty of copy. There are far fewer “star cards” in this series. Dahmer, HH Holmes, John Wayne Gacy and the like all get their due in the first series. I’d like to pick up some of those to try to complete this set. It’s weirdness and controversy are just too much to pass up.

So what do you think of this set? The uproar seems kind of silly in retrospect, but it’s easy to forget that in 1992, trading cards were seen by many outside of the hobby as something strictly for kids. But so what? I was ten years old in 1992 and read plenty of Milwaukee Sentinel articles on the Dahmer case as it unfolded. No one was suggesting that kids not be allowed to read the newspapers. There is a definite double-standard at play in all of this, the kind that is found when people try to deny the fact that – in general – people are pretty interested in those who do wrong. And if they read about it in the papers or in books (like the books I write) or if they read about it on a trading card… isn’t the real difference in all this just the status of the medium?

And, for the record, no one said boo about the Civil War and World War II trading card sets… and that depicts something that killed more people than a caseful of Jeffrey Dahmers.

I have a couple of unopened True Crime II packs left... leave a comment below with your thoughts and I'll random them off. I'll give you until 11:59 pm on Wednesday, May 30.

Down on E-Street: A Crew-neverse Update

This is going to take a lot longer than I first thought. I guessed about a month, but that's probably a pipe dream. Anyway, there is still time to get in on the contest to guess how many different Brewers cards I have in my collection. 

Visit THIS POST to get an idea of what I have and enter your guess. And since it has been slower going than I anticipated in doing these updates, I will give everyone an extra week to enter... so make your guess by 11:59 central time on April 3. 

And I promised prizes for this great guess-off, to be reveled as we go merrily along. Here is the first item from the bundle the winner will take home:

That's a TTM autograph of Tom Selleck on the (sorta) famous 1992 UD SP4 card promoting the film "Mr. Baseball." That movie was ok, nothing fantastic. But not awful.

As for the update on the count, I am now through the "E" pile in my sort. My scoreboard tally is 1,719 different Brewers. The Mayor of E-Street is pitcher Cal Eldred, who runs away with the title with 82 different cards. It really wasn't even close, second place was Johnny Estrada with 13. Overall, Eldred's card tally is as impressive as his workload as a starter - he ranks #2 so far behind Ryan Braun, who continues to lead the pack with 178 cards.

 

Rob Dork sez, "IT'S CONTEST TIME!"

Want a crack at winning some stuff from my parent's basement that I didn't deface? Now is your chance... the Basement Fun Game sign up is now LIVE! The first 13 to comment will get a spot. And please be sure to send me your email if I don't already have it or it is not easily accessible via your comment. 

Don't be a Dibble. Enter NOW and share NEXT. 

Cleaning out the basement, Rob Dork, & and a BFG Contest!

This past weekend was my first wedding anniversary. To celebrate, we went north, to Door County (for those unfamiliar, that would be the “thumb” part of Wisconsin). On the way, we stopped at my parents’ house in Manitowoc. My old man has been in the process of cleaning out the basement for, oh, about 10 years now, and finally got me to go downstairs and check through the boxes I had there to see if there was anything I wanted not to be thrown out or given away. Before I get to the meat of this post, I wanted to share one item with everything. Just to show how WAY COOL and TOTALLY DUMB I was as a little kid.

Hell Yeah!! That’s TOPPS MAGAZINE, fools! With free baseball cards inside (they were long ago removed)!! But there’s also that odd image down in the lower right…

Oh! Of course, that would be the former Cincinnati Reds’ fire-baller Rob Dork. Well-known for his terrible complexion and devil beard. Here he is on his 1992 Topps card, holding a baseball that he has signed, “Rob Dork.” Why wouldn’t he? It’s his name, after all.

I actually REMEMBER doing this. It was in school when I was in fourth grade, with Mr. Marinello as a teacher. I don’t recall WHY I did it. Evidently, I had some beef with Rob Dibble that led me to deface his picture on the cover of a magazine. Dibble had a number of incidents during the 1991 season, including heaving a baseball into the bleachers after a save and hitting a woman. I had to look this stuff up, so I can only assume that had something to do with my little artwork here. Odd thing is, as an adult I’ve long held the opinion that Dibble was a pretty tremendous dickhead (a “dork,” if you will). I guess that opinion has deeper roots than I thought.

ANYWAY. I didn’t come here today to tell you about Rob Dibble. I came here today to tell you about a contest. It’s been a while since anyone in the blogosphere held a BIG FUN GAME. I’m going to call this one the BASEMENT FUN GAME. That’s right, all the crap I hauled out of my parents’ basement is up on the block. I’ve got 13 BIG BASEMENT FUN prizes up for grabs.

Here’s how I’ll do it… I’ll do an official entry post on Wednesday at 5 pm central time. The first 13 people to comment will get a spot. I’ll start the contest later on in the week. The names will be randomized and each prize will be assigned a number. Pick a number, steal a prize, or pass to the back of the line. You can only pass once and prizes can only be stolen twice. I’ll give you 24 hours to make a choice (and please, contact me so I have your email for the game, mine can be found in the ‘complete profile’ link).

A word on these prizes… they are all things that I actually took out of the basement. And the circumstances around those basement boxes means it’ll be an interesting kinda game. I moved out of the house in 2000, so everything is at least that old. It’s stuff that I haven’t bothered to take out for my current collection, so it’s not exactly Cadillac material. On the other hand, it’s stuff that has survived numerous purges over the years (this was not the first time I was called on to get rid of some of my shit in Manitowoc), so it’s all – for whatever reason – stuff that I have yet to toss in the trash. And, of course, it’s been a basement for nearly two decades, so some of the stuff isn’t exactly in pristine shape (although none of it is damaged too badly).

It’s mostly baseball and football stuff, with a tiny bit of hockey thrown in. So, all in all, none of these prizes is gonna make your year, but it’ll be a fun bunch and I think some lots will inspire some spirit stealing and strategizing.

Anyway, check back for the entry post and SHARE this with others. If we fill all 13 spots, I’ll toss in some bonus stuff with each prize based on your interests (if I can meet them).

Now go to it, you dorks!

Introducing: The Fun-At-A-Time Book Chain!

Here it is, ladies and gents, the very first step in what I am sure will become a card blogosphere-wide phenomenon. The rules again for those might have missed my last post: to play, all you need to do is leave a comment below. If you mention the contest on your blog or via twitter, leave a link below and you will get an extra entry. The cut-off will be Wednesday, June 28 at 10 pm central time. I'll do a randomizer list and the person in the first spot wins their choice of the three books below. I'll mail you the book and all you need to do in return is to set up the same type of give-away on your blog. You can vary the method of picking a winner or the number of books offered however you please, but you gotta offer up a sports or hobby-related book you adore. Then, the winner of that book will do the same and so on and so on and so on. 

UPDATE: So, it occurred to me just after posting this, but it might be a de-facto requirement of any winner to have their own card blog. I imagine you could also do a book give-away on twitter, as well. Just so long as you have a means of doing your own give-away that is open to the card collecting community, that'll work.

Easy enough, eh? 

THE BOOKS: 

Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession, by Dave Jamieson.

A thorough and lively history of trading cards from the earliest tobacco issues to the modern-day obsession with grading, this is a book I got for Christmas and absolutely tore through. I think I finished it in less than two days. With Pete Williams' Card Sharks and O'Keefe & Thompson's The Card, it is one of the three indispensable books on the history of the hobby.

Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy, by Jane Leavy

One of the better baseball bios I've read in some time (the Ben Cramer book on DiMaggio and Leerhsen's Ty Cobb might be the two best), this book does a great job to get inside one of the game's most illusive characters. 

The Pine Tar Game: The Kansas City Royals, the New York Yankees, and Baseball's Most Absurd and Entertaining Controversy, by Filip Bondy

And in-depth and very entertaining look at the famous George Brett pine tar game, tracing the many fascinating people involved in the incident and the sorta-now-forgotten rivalry of the Royals and Yankees. It's another quick read, but very worth while. 

So there you have it. Go crazy, folks.

A Whole New Game...

So I've had it in my head lately to try some kind of BIG FUN type game here at the Summer of '74. But, to be honest, I don't really have the card backstock (or the money for postage) to put on anything that would be worthwhile to the participant. I also the idea to do something involving baseball books - as I have quite a backstock of those. But again, shipping costs made me a bit wary.  So I put some brain on coming up with a new kind of contest and - behold and lo - it came to me while walking back home from Goodwill, where I had just scored FIVE awesome binders.

So here's the idea - I will post a sports or hobby-related book tomorrow and give it away via some kind of to-be-determined contest. The only requirement of the winner will be to post a favorite sports/hobby book from their own shelves and give it away in a similar manner... the winner of that required to do the same thing. And on and on and on this will (hopefully) go, with bloggers getting to check out great books for nothing more than the cost of a media mail stamp. And hey, if you wanna throw in a few cards appropriate to the topic of the book or the nature of the winner, go right ahead, you crazy SOB! If you wanna hijack this idea and start your own give-away, go ahead and do that, too. The more balls in play, the better.

I've decided to call it the "FUN-AT-TIME BOOK CHAIN!" I immediately apologize for coming up with such a stupid name.

So, check back tomorrow when I'll post something that I really enjoyed and get the whole thing started! 

Back in the Saddle Again

Hola Amigos. I know it's a been a long time since I rapped at ya, but your old buddy Matt's been a busy fellow lately. My wife and I just returned from New York. We went out to see her old hometown of Hampton Bays (among the lesser Hamptons of Long Island, she tells me) and visit her sister. Just before leaving, I got a few nice trade packages in the mail and had a few more waiting for me when I got home. Unfortunately, and because I am stupid, I deleted all the pics of my trade goodies just before before I left without first uploading them to dropbox. Yikes. I get a bit frazzled traveling, I guess. 

So, I'm going to try to cobble together all the trades into one post, and share a bit about my trip in the process. I just hope I can recall who sent me what. 

The first leg of of the trip was without incident. We flew into Philadelphia and had a two-hour layover before the flight to MacArthur Airport in Islip, LI. The Phillies were also in town that night, currently one of the worst teams in baseball. And hey, back in 2003, the Brewers were one of the worst teams in baseball. And Mark Smith was briefly a member of that team.

I had been missing him from my all-time Brewers collection. Bo, himself a resident of Long Island who blogs at Baseball Cards Come to Life, hooked me up with a '95 Donruss Rated Rookie card of Smith. He appeared in 33 games for the '03 Brewers, batting .238 and a .275 OBP. He never appeared in the bigs again. 

But all was not Sunny in Philadelphia that afternoon. Our plane was broken and the flight was canceled. With the only other way into NY going through Laguardia (which is about four days travel from Hampton Bays in bad traffic), we were stuck in Philly for the night. 

I wasn't really mad, shit happens. And it gave us a chance to see Philly... except it didn't. They stuck us at a weird hotel in some little suburb. It was nice enough, and we got real drunk at the bar and watched SVU all night long. But we didn't buy our tickets to see some Philly-area hotel. Just like someone who bought Brewers tickets this year to see Ryan Braun. He's on the DL right now, just as our plane was. And also, the "Asian-inspired cuisine" the hotel restaurant promised was a bit of an over-sell (it was your basic low-end takeout stuff). Just like calling Braun a "Five Tool" player. Anyway, this is a pretty cool looking card, from AJ at The Lost Collector.

The next morning, I woke to a text from American Airlines saying our re-booked Islip flight was ONCE AGAIN canceled and we were ONCE AGAIN put on a flight into Laguardia. Fuck that shit. We got on a train. 

So-long Philly

If nothing else went awry, we'd be at our destination in three hours. However, this trip involved the Long Island Railroad which (I'm sure Bo can back me up here) is what the locals call a "shit show." Out connecting train broke down and we were stuck in some damn place called Babylon. 

BROKEN! Like Bo Jackson breaking his bat on this mega-cool 1991 Score BO BREAKER card. This beauty arrived in a very nice package from Tom at Angles in Order. It was a follow-up to the wildly popular 1990 Score shoulder pads card, which I actually wrote an entire post about for the SABR card blog. It didn't have quite the same effect as the original, but is still a very boss card in my eyes and I'm glad to add it to my Bo collection.

We arrived a day late, but had a great time none the less. We saw the Icelandic band Sigur Ros at Forest Hills Stadium, which ended up being the place where Richie Tennebaum melted down in The Royal Tennenbaums. 

I got to see the ocean for the very first time.

And we had a great time going through old photos. Childhood photos of the wife! Not unlike this bad-ass 1972 childhood photo card of Willie Stargell that came in an eclectic package of stuff from Adam Sanders at The Cardboard Clubhouse. 

 
And, for what it's worth, this also happened to be among my sister-in-law's photos... 

Yeah, that's a young Stephen Tyler of Aerosmith with his grandmother. Hence the title of this post. 

Parting is such sweet sorrow, but we had to do it anyway. Thank heck our trip back was much less adventurous than the trip out. I also had to part with a pretty awesome part of my collection last week, when I mailed out that Highland Mint Brooks Robinson that I won in Johnny's Big Fun game to Trevor P at Bump and Run. But just as our troubles were well worth it in the end, the return on that trade was terrific. 

Here she is...  the bronze 1975 Rockin' Robin Yount. Just like the Brooksie, it's heavy and shiny and beautiful. 

So, that's been the last week or so of my life. I'll have plenty more in days to come. I've got a couple of rando Target breaks to yak about and a big lot of 2017 series 2 Topps Jumbos that should arrive today. I am also thinking of doing some kind of contest... maybe involving baseball books.

Anyway, I'll do a mini-mini contest right now. First one to leave a comment that correctly identifies what the first two sentences of this post refer to will get a fun little package in the mail.  

Adios.