Back from Out West

I went to a wedding this weekend. My wife’s cousin, who lives in Hollywood, got married in a place called Pioneer Town, up in a mountain out in the desert. It was a beautiful venue, made all the more so because there was no cell phone reception. It was great to get away from things for a night and for the other parts of the weekend that were without email, twitter, and all of those other little tumors that I’ve become addicted to having.

Pioneer Town, CA

It was my first trip to California, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Traffic leaving LA at 4 pm on Friday night was sheer hell, but well worth it in the long run. On Sunday, we hiked a bit in Joshua Tree National Park, climbed around on some rocks, and genuinely had an amazing time.

But, as all trips do, this one had to end. It was another full day of travel back to Milwaukee. And, since me and my babe roll in style, we had this lovely breakfast combination on our return flight…

Damn yeah, we did. On a related note, I am a very uneasy flyer and the three-ish glasses of wine at 9 am actually helped out quite a bit.

TWENTY TTM returns were waiting for me when I got back!

Of course, returning home also meant returning to cell coverage, which brought along all sorts of distractions and responsibilities. I have a stack of cards to sort though, a bunch of trades to post about, a MILLION new Brewers autos to talk about, and boxes of cards to sort out. I’m trying to get my entire collection sorted into monster boxes or binders. This is not a HUGE undertaking, as I only own a few thousand cards not already in binders, but it still takes time. I plan to do most of this week while watching the Brewers try to miracle their way into the postseason. And once I am all set up, I plan to run through some wantlists of fellow bloggers to see what I’ve got for them.

And speaking of getting the best use of their collection…

Here is how little Mavis had her cage set up when we got back home, with her only two cards firmly in place to protect the entrance to her tissue box. Have you EVER seen a Greg Swindell and a Milt Thompson put to better use?

Till next time, everybody…

...drifting along with the tumbling tumble weeds...

A Cruel Game, a Good Season, and a Good Career

Baseball is a cruel game. They call it “a game of inches,” but it’s the same thing, really. My Brewers, in a playoff race that no one expected them to be in, have lost two heartbreaking games in a row. A few inches one way instead of the other and they’d be a game and a half behind the Cubs in the Central and in possession of the second Wild Card spot. But they didn’t get those breaks and now I’ve experienced the misery of a entire season in a little more than 24 hours. The Crew have three more against the Cubs this weekend and, if they want a real chance at the postseason, they need to win all three. I will probably miss all three games. I missed almost every inning of the Brewers’ epic sweep at Wrigley a few weeks ago and, this weekend, I’ll be California at a wedding, way out in the desert away from cable and reliable phone service. And to be honest, I’m almost glad. Having a team in the race is tiring and emotionally taxing. The Brewers will probably win all three, leaving me on pins and needles for the rest of the season as the Brewers scrap all the way to the end. Like I said, baseball is a cruel game.

Cal Eldred knew it. This is a card I got in my recent trade with Brewers792. Eldred came up in the middle of the 1992 season and was a God for 14 starts, winning 11 and posting a 1.79 ERA over 100 innings. He looked every bit an ace, but the Brewers pitched him to death over the next two years – running him over 140 pitches about once a month – and his elbow blew up in 1995. He remained a serviceable pitcher when he came back, but never neared the brilliance of his rookie season.

But Cal probably wouldn’t complain. He had a better career than most, he even got to pitch in a World Series And I can’t complain. I live and die with the Brewers because they’re my team, because they’re my city. It’s a lopsided relationship, but I have come to know what to expect and I stick around anyway. If anyone told me at the beginning of this season that I would crushed by the outcome of two late-September games, I’d have been thrilled to know that things would still be exciting enough to end up crushed. So, I’mma head out west and forget about things for a few days… Monday morning, I’ll pick up a newspaper and find out how much handwringing I’ll be doing next week. I’m nervous, but mostly glad for it all.

...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.

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.