Trade Ketchup! With Cliff, Nachos Grande, and the Million Cubs Project

I will be posting in more detail soon about the monster box I picked up at Goodwill a week or so ago. But in the meantime, I’ve got a few trades to catch up on…

First, we have a swap with Beau from the Million Cubs Project. Beau is a fellow Wisconsinite who is trying to build a collection of ONE MILLION Cubs cards. Per his twitter, he already had about 75,000. So, he has a long road ahead of him, but I certainly admire his gumption. Whomever donated that monster box to Goodwill must have been a Cubs fan as well, because I found an inordinate amount of North-Siders in the box… about 800 in total. I got put in touch with Beau on twitter and we quickly arranged for a swap.

He sent me this very neatly organized box of Topps base needs and Brewers, a great return (to me, anyway) for a load of stinking Cubs that I wanted nothing to do with.

I also recently got a nice package from Nachos Grande, part of his Season of Giving. He threw in some Topps base along with a nice smattering of Brewers.

My favorite part of the package was this pack of 2006 Topps… which yielded 15 (!!!) cards I needed for that set.

He also sent some Bowman Brewers I didn’t have… always nice to add a Nyjer Morgan Brewers card to the collection.

JUNK WAX! I maintain that there are numerous sets uglier than 1991 Fleer. I am in the minority in this opinion, I think. Anyway, here is a nice-looking Greg Vaughn, with the gold borders matching his uni trim.

A nice league-leaders card from the greatest season of Ben Sheets’ career. Ugh… leader cards with a unique design… I do hope to see these again some day.

Also, some Heritage Brewers I did not have.

And some 90s weird-o stuff. Here’s one of those cards where they pair a new logo with the old uniforms and caps. You can also see Miller Park in the background, and the chest patches commemorating the three ironworkers who died in the crane collapse that delayed the opening of the stadium by a year.

I also got a box recently from @oriolesrise, aka Cliff, on twitter. He is one of my favorite hobby follows for his near-constant stream of posts detailing his latest awesome finds. He started a pile for me a while back and it contained some pretty cool stuff.

Let’s start with this! A Rockin’ Robin RC Cola can. This is one of a few cans in my collection (I have a Graf’s Cola can commemorating the 1975 All Star Game in Milwaukee as well) but the first player-specific can I’ve ever owned. It’s a nice piece. I wish they’d still do cans like this.

And soon-to-be on my bookbag when I head back to school later this month… The Ignitor himself, Paul Molitor.

And the last of the non-card items are this pair of Brewers schedule matchbooks, billing the Brewers as “the team of the ’80s.” That… did not work out.

For the all-time Brewers collection, a dandy Andy Kosco autograph. Kosco appeared in 98 games with the Brewers in 1971, batting .227 with 10 homers.

Oh yeah! METAL cards (are they still cards if they’re metal?) of Gary Sheffield and Kenny Lofton. Cliff broke an entire box of this stuff over the summer. I remember it coming out when I was a kid, but I couldn’t afford it. It’s a decent product, certainly very unique.

BO! I never turn one of these down.

And a nice stack of these oddball “Superstar” cards. These are part of a 45-card set issued in 1980. I really dig the Mantle-Aaron card.

Coming up next: A several-part series detailing my recent Goodwill finds!

...to forget about life for a while: Reflections on a Great and Awful Weekend

GET HIGH ON BASEBALL!

That was the message on a wrapper of 1992 O Pee Chee that I recently opened. And it kinda lined up with a thought that was already on my mind about this collecting thing of ours. Hobbies are distractions from real life. Perhaps the most important thing about a hobby is that it is not that important at all. In proper doses, I think it is very important to devote time to matters of little or no importance. Many hobbies, card collecting included, are multi-sensory experiences. You sit and look, you sort the cards by hand, you SMELL that old cardboard (who among us couldn’t tell 1993 Upper Deck from 1989 Donruss by smell alone?). I prefer to do my sorting with a podcast running or in front of ball game on the TV, adding an audio elements to the experience. You let these things overtake you and you can forget about what you need to forget about for a while. Someone getting high – from basement stoners to your grandpa and his old fashioneds – is probably looking for a similar escape.

This was the best of weekends and the worst of weekends. I went on an overnight to Chicago with my wife to see Billy Joel play Wrigley Field, and spent most of yesterday wondering around the city. I had a great time and brought back some great stuff from some awesome little shops we found. But, of course, I had to keep checking the news and Twitter and followed along with what was going on in Charlottesville. Nazis were marching around like the world owed them something and one of them tried to murder a bunch of people with his car just because they had the courage to stand up for actual morality and justice. And the president hardly cares, mumbling some bullshit that the white nationalist crowd took as a yet another embrace of their support. This is heavy shit, man, and it had me down. Even those images of Nazis writhing in pain after being maced didn’t cheer me up. Well, maybe a little.

But the odd thing was that when I got home, all I really wanted to do was write a post about the stuff I’d snagged in Chicago. It was like the world had gotten too real all of the sudden and I needed an escape. I needed my fix. I needed to get HIGH on BASEBALL, even if just for a little while. I’ll stop talking about things that matter now. Let’s spark it up.

BILLY JOEL! I enjoy his music enough but my wife, raised on Long Island just like the Piano Man, is a HUGE fan. It was a good show and I had a good time, but Erika had a straight-up BLAST. We sat up in bleeders at Wrigley, but had a pretty decent view. And it was a hell of stage set-up, with lights, video boards, lasers, fireworks… the whole bit.

We went out to a Wrigleyville bar after the show. The place was so swamped with Joel fans that no one was even paying attention to the Cubs game on the TV. Which was fine by me, since they won that night and my Brewers lost (their sixth in a row).

The next day, we went to the Lincoln Square neighborhood to visit a friend. It was a charming little area. We stopped at Quake Collectables, which had dozens of bins of old action figures for sale. I dug through a Starting Line Up bin for about 20 minutes before coming away with two pieces to add to my small and mostly dormant SLU collection.

First up is Randy Johnson. They had a number of the older, late-80s pieces (lots of football and basketball, too) but they were mostly in pretty rough shape. I was thrilled to find a Johnny Bench, only to pull him out and see that he was missing an arm and most of a shoulder. These newer pieces were pretty well intact, however. This was after SLU upped their game a bit on the detailing. I think this pose is actual one made specifically for The Big Unit.

Next we have Greg Maddux, posing next to the baseball that the actual Greg Maddux threw to me at old County Stadium back in 1998. This one isn’t as convincing. It barely looks like Maddux and his glove, cap logo, and pants stripe are all way too big. At 2 for $5, it was still worth it.

I also snagged this aforementioned pack of 1992 O Pee Chee at the shop, a product I had never opened before.

It was a only a buck!

I won’t go through all the cards, but here is what would probably be considered the star of the pack. Yawn.

Brent Gates played seven years and placed 6^th in ROY voting in 1993.

Juan Bell was briefly a Milwaukee Brewer.

Alex Fernandez was drafted in the first round by the Brewers in 1988 but didn’t sign. He was a decent starter for a number of years and won a World Series with the Marlins in 1997.

Here is a backside. This was the first year that Topps went with the white card stock, taking away most of the appeal for the OPC set (which always used white stock) outside of the Canadian market. The backs do have a little extra sheen to them, clearly a different stock than the normal Topps issue. This was the last year before OPC issued their own unique set.

 

We also stopped at a very cool record shop, Laurie’s Planet of Sound. I wasn’t terribly interested in the records, but they did have a great selection of hard-to-find DVDs. I picked up a couple of sets of old Sexploitations films from the 1960s and 70s – a genre of motion pictures that I absolutely adore. This post is edgy enough for a card blog, so I won’t share any more details.

I also picked up a few non-sport packs of a 1993 National Lampoon set that I had no idea existed. The card market was crazy wide-open back then and this set followed a MAD Magazine set issued in 1992. The cards feature a number of Lampoon covers, including this famous one…

Maybe even more upsetting is this one, a Rockwell-esque scene of some kids trying to set a homeless man on fire…

The set is one of those that you really need to collect in full to understand. The stories on the back don’t always line up with the front image and are continued from card to card. Some fronts also require adjacently-numbered cards to make sense. I pulled the right half of this set first and had no idea what to make of it. Even together, it doesn’t really work…

The writing is also microscopic in some cases. Check this out...

Surprisingly, there were some cards that might fall into player collections. I found this Pete Rose cover from 1988, referencing Rose’s suspension for shoving an umpire.

And then this Reggie Jackson comic from January 1982, the same month he signed with the Angels.

Worth noting that has GOT to be the only Jackson card that shows him getting brained by a whiskey bottle and features the word “fuck.”

Anyway, that’s all I have for now. But I’ve got some fun stuff coming up later in the week, including the continuation of my TTM count-down, a HUGE new addition to my collection, and some of my BFG winnings.

Take care, everybody.

Big Fun Charlie!

It's about time I got around to posting about my haul from Gavin's recent BIG FUN GAME at Baseball Card Breakdown. The main part of my prize was an encased Charlie Hayes auto from 2005 Topps Retired. Not to sound like I'm denigrating Gavin's generosity, but this was a prize that was not exactly in dire threat of being stolen. Charlie had a decent career, but he never made an All Star game and was mostly role player. His biggest claim to fame was probably catching the last out of the 1996 World Series. He did, however, get some MVP votes in 1995. This is pretty baffling, actually. Hayes had a pretty run-of-the-mill season for the second-division Phillies and led the league in nothing more than grounding into double plays. 

BUT! Charlie Hayes spend a year with the Brewers, the second-to-last of this career. He got into 121 games as a corner infielder and put up mostly pedestrian numbers. Still, he this prize allows me to cross another Brewer off my all-time autograph list. Charlie is my 208th Brewers autographed card, putting me at an even 25% of the all-time roster.

But I keep those cards in binders. And this fellow is in some big-ass case. Hmm.

A little help from the Milwaukee Tool Company will solve this.

I've broken the seal! 

This case was actually a big harder to open than I anticipated. I switched tools at this point to avoid slicing off a finger. 

Charlie is home! Right between a couple of other also-ran Brewers and just above Jamey Wright, who was still pitching as recently as 2014. 

There were a few other goodies in the bundle Gavin sent. Including this oddball Mickey Mantle reprint. It has since found its way to a Yankees fan. 

Gav tossed in some Brewers as well. Jeromy Burnitz was a pretty fierce slugger for a few years, and this card captures his helicopter swing nicely.

I cannot get enough oddball Brewers, and one-year stop oddballs are even better. Willie Randolph had a hell of season in 1991 for the Crew, batting .327 in his second-to-last year.

I really dig this Archives card of Beej, done in the style of the 1985 #1 picks subset. 

And this Braunie, done in the 1991 style, is instantly one of my favorite cards of his. 

Jeff Cirillo was one of my favorites on the cellar-bound Brewers of the late-1990s. I don't think I've ever seen a Gold Label card in person. They are very impressive. 

And We'll close with a minor league card of Ben Sheets, who is by far the greatest right-hander to ever take the mound for the Brewers. 

Thanks for the big fun, Gavin! I've actually got a PWE headed your way right now. Keep looking up!!!!!

I've Flipped for Flipp Tipps!

I've been getting my Goodwill binders at their Oakland Ave location here in Milwaukee. Although the store is terribly cramped, it is the nearest one to my apartment and generally has a good supply of binders, bobbleheads, and even the occasional Something Weird video DVD. But I found myself at the Goodwill on Capitol Drive yesterday and decided to see what they had to offer. 

It was a binder bonanza! I picked up four that will fit the 700+ card sets, each with the clear plastic coating that allowed my set shelf to retain its precious uniformity. 

Beautiful!

Cap's Goodwill was lacking in the bobble department, but I did score a very cool item that I had ever actually seen in person...

That would be a Brett Butler "Baseball Flipp Tipps" issue. Bound by a plastic handle, the item is essentially a two-sided 72-page flip book with a brief, instructional commentary on each page. The Butler Flipp features a drag bunt with images taken from game footage on one side and a staged sacrifice bunt on the other. 

Here is one of the Flipps in action, with a little Hawkwind in the background to set the mood. It's hard to tell from this, but the action actually looks pretty nice. It has a sorta-3D effect to it.

Butler played with the Giants from 1988 to 1990, playing centerfield and leading off. He was a speedy baserunner and a pretty good hitter who posted high OBP throughout his career. The fact that they show him laying down a sac bunt is pretty ironic in retrospect, as modern baseball junkies would be aghast at the idea of using a hitter like to Butler to bunt a runner over. 

Pretty much everything I've found about these, including the copyright date on the package, gives a 1989 release year. However, this article here suggests that they actually might not have been released until 1990, or late 1989 at the least. In addition to the Butler, the series also featured Giants Will Clark and Kevin Mitchell, as well as Mickey Mantle, Nolan Ryan, Don Mattingly, and the soccer great Pele.

I remember vaguely seeing something about these when I was a kid. My dad, for a brief time, sold sports apparel at flea markets and other such places. He got a few of the trade journals and catalogues in the mail, and I think I saw these listed in one of those. I thought the idea was pretty cool at the time, cool enough that it lingered with me for twenty-five years or so. When I found the Butler at Goodwill, I knew immediately what it was. Flipp Tipps originally retailed for $6.95. You can find any subject in the series for less than that, shipped, on eBay.