It took a Michael Chabon essay from Manhood for Amateurs to remind me just how much baseball card minutiae I packed into my brain between 1993 and 2000. I got my start on my seventh birthday, when my parents decided to give me the collecting bug. Instead of buying me the complete set of that year's Topps set, they bought me a whole bunch of packs. Up on my bunk bed, I spread them out and began tearing at the wrappers. It didn't take much to get me hooked, especially since that year included my favorite player, Frank Thomas, holding three big black bats.
I didn't know then, but the three bats were sort of the thing for The Big Hurt, a la Babe Ruth and all the other boppers, and had actually been featured in the oddly illustrated Fleer set of the year before (top).
But the first card that really enchanted me was for an as-of-yet not hated Chicago Cubs player. I was OK with the Cubs at that point, so when my dad came home with the Ryne Sandberg rookie card, which was the first card of value to come into our home, I started to get a feeling that might be equated with Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. It was part loving the card, part feeling lucky to have it, and part possessiveness. We had it, and nobody else.
Later, through "bidding" at the local card store, my dad would make almost weekly purchases of famous cards. As odd as it is to describe now, the bidding was just the real-life early-90s version of eBay, where cards would be put up on the wall with a bid sheet, and my dad would stop in periodically to check on the cards he wanted. One of my favorites he got was Harmon Killebrew's 1955 rookie card, which besides the really old cards, came out in the first five years of Topps' modern batches cards.
The Killebrew card, at least a little bit, also reminds me of one of the "biggest pickles" I ever got myself into with trading cards. Really, it was more of a screwup than a pickle. It had to do with this card, the Derek Jeter rookie card:
Because my parents bought me packs in my first year of collecting, that brought me many, many duplicates of the same card. We called them "doubles." I had doubles of just about everyone, except for, in a way impossible for me to grasp then, those cards that were by intentionally produced to be more elusive than all the rest. (I never did collect the full set this way, but I came damn close.)
Jeter, overrated superstar that he is now, was not elusive in 1992 card collecting. I had like eight Derek Jeter rookie cards. As you can see, it wasn't a card with a lot going for it. Some scrawny guy standing kind of goofy over a clip art baseball diamond ...
I put my doubles into a special box dedicated purely to doubles (card boxes are special as it is, with their terrific shape and lids). A couple years later, I didn't want those doubles. I wanted more Eric Karros and Carl Pavano cards. I did collect legit players too, like Manny Ramirez and most badassedly nicknamed "Crime Dog" Fred McGriff (that swing!).
Anyway, I offered up a box of about 500 doubles in exchange for a few embossed and faceted (I assume) specialty cards. That day, I probably lost my heirs a few hundred dollars. But looking back on the deal, I'm glad to know that, even as a child, I wanted nothing to do with the Yankees.
1) There are no less than four corn and grain silos in the middle of town— not technically downtown but part of the "skyline" that also includes a giant cross and a few bank buildings. All are right along the train tracks which will take those crops north to Chicago, east to Indianapolis and west to St. Louis.
2) The Urbana-Champaign NPR station reads the farm report every hour, on the hour, right after the local news but before the weather. If you wanted to know anything about wheat futures in Chicago or Kansas City, then you have it locked to the correct station.
3) One bar on the other side of the tracks (literally) is called "Ichabod's Cub and Cardinal." Sorry Sox fans. You do not exist.
This feels very strange to me. I wouldn't think I'm alone in saying this either. What 10 year old kid in the early 1990s DIDN'T love Ken Griffey, Jr.? He's probably the first real superstar to retire that happened to have his heyday in our generation. (It shoulda been you, Griff!)
It makes me feel nostalgic. But I think this means we (and by "we" I mean anyone born between about 1982 and 1992) are officially adults now.
Mid-Week Mix coming tomorrow, but in light of the passing of our great Michigan icon, a fantastic YouTube video.
As I moved to Michigan circa 2000, I only heard two of the seasons before he retired. The Tigers were awful in those days, and I didn't listen on the radio as much as I really should have. But I still get chocked up watching all these retrospectives (the DetNews has a cool interactive one; I like the Freep Tigers beat writer's obit above, however). He's got that effect. This video, however, is all happiness.
Each Friday we share our Web discoveries -- culled (if "culled" had a positive connotation) from our RSS feeds and Twitter accounts, etc. If there's something we should know about, please write to thesadbear [at] gmail [dot] com.
A Kansas man sued the Royals earlier this month, alleging that just such a flying sausage struck his left eye, detaching his retina and causing cataracts.
James Summerlott, 27, was hunting pigeons in the backyard of his home on Pembroke-Oak Grove Road around 3:30 p.m. Monday when he noticed an unfamiliar vehicle in his driveway, he told the Kentucky New Era in a phone interview.
Summerlott went inside, carrying his shotgun, and saw his TV lying on the floor. He had left the front door unlocked. A man walked out of his bedroom, and Summerlott held him at gunpoint while Summerlott called 911, said Chris Miller, spokesman for the Christian County Sheriff’s Department.
“He seemed a little frightened, I’ll be honest with you,” Summerlott told the New Era. “I would be too.”
Find the driver with the fewest teeth, the most gray hairs, and the thickest glasses. He's your man: Anyone who has survived to AARP age with these handicaps, on third-world roads, must have an abundance of caution, or perhaps just a jalopy that can't reach the hundred-mile-per-hour standard of Peruvian and Kenyan pistes.
Former American figure skater Timothy Goebel helped popularize the quad by performing it prolifically during his 14-year career ... his rotations per minute were clocked as high as 946; the average rotations per minute for an NBA player performing a 360-degree dunk is 100.
"'We've had an ACCIDENT!' the children screamed in a frenzy of delight." -Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man is Hard to Find"
Some sound advice: beware Glenstone Ave. in Springfield, Mo., especially between the hours of noon and 1 p.m. Central Daylight Time. You might have an ACCIDENT!
Well, shit. If only I'd known. It was totally his fault though (the guy behind me who pushed me into the car in front of me). Maybe I'll make a diagram later.
Really, though, all this does it pull the City of Springfield even further down a notch. It's been on my "On Notice" list ever since my Bob Barker fiasco.
I have to go back to that godforsaken place tomorrow (in my spiffy new rental Jetta) to get the crap out of my car at the barbed-wire lot on Commercial Drive. Yeah, it's as shady as it sounds ("Floyd's Wrecker Service"— the card the guy gave me had only a number and no address...no surprise why).
Maybe I can find the Springfield Cardinals there after my harrowing experience and they can single-handedly pull the city into my top five (top five cities in the Great State of Missouri, that is...later I'll compile that list, too).
Doubt it, though...they're still the freakin' Cardinals.
Has a baseball team ever so deftly merged its sporting logo and the age-old "baseball as sex" metaphor as seen above? Perhaps not. That, friends, is the logo of my town's collegiate summer league baseball team. It is, in fairness, the outgoing logo. A simple letter G with a swooshing baseball is gaining currency in town.
I went to their home opener this week, finding an atmosphere a notch below minor league baseball, but far more enthusiastic than high school games. And the players are mostly Division I college behemoths. No shrimps or fat guys to be seen. Probably not five dollars good, but my initial ticket was a freebie.
With teams like the Turks, Lumberjacks, and Luray Wranglers, the VBL can't go wrong.
And the fans, oh the fans! Within sight on opening night: a woman reading a "Nauti Nights" novel; a man sporting a forearm tattoo of a naked women wrapped in the Confederate flag; and a little old lady dangling baseball bat and baseball jersey earrings.
"Among other things, Mr. Gewirtz has learned that Kerouac played an early version of the baseball game in his backyard in Lowell, Mass., hitting a marble with a nail, or possibly a toothpick, and noting where it landed."
From a wild story about Kerouac in the New York Times.
I move that Opening Day becomes a national holiday. That way we wouldn't have to take off from work to watch day games, and no one would be allowed to schedule any events, sporting or otherwise, on said day.
Well, by "we" I mean those of us who aren't in the sports journalism industry - I'd have to go to work either way. I'd just prefer it to have nothing else to cover but the opening of Major League baseball.
I have similar designs on making the first weekend of March Madness a nationally-mandated four-day weekend. Who actually does work on NCAA Tournament Thursday? I didn't - and I was covering the high school state semifinal.
Well, that's I lie...my game had ended and one of the girls games had started. It was a really slow and boring game, one of the ones where neither team scores more than 10 points until about halfway through the second quarter. The halftime score might have been 15-10.
Anyway, around this time, all the sportswriters found out that Memphis was losing to Cal-State Northridge. So we gathered in Mizzou Arena's media room and watched, completely ignoring the girls high school game.
If this was a national holiday, we wouldn't have to worry about such things as sportswriters not giving girls basketball its full, deserved, Title IX attention.
I wonder how many people complained to the ACLU about unfair representation of girls athletics that day?
Some ramshackle baseball linkage: -SportsDesigner's baseball preview pages from around the country -Interactive graphics from the New York Times: New Yankee Stadium and Citi Field -Some Opening Day history in St. Louis -Paul Lucas' UniWatch baseball preview -UniWatch blog goes over Japanese baseball uniforms [day 1, day 2] -The Kansas City Star has a pretty good Royals' blog. And although you may be thinking 'Who cares about the Royals?', apparently, the New York Times does - they picked them to finish first in the AL Central -Cardinals lost today in the 30 degree very light dusting of snow. I listened to the game on the radio and remembered why the Cardinals annoyed me: their announcers and fans are self-righteous a-holes ("Don't throw the ball back," said one announcer after the Pirates homer. "You know who does that? Those North-siders! We're better than that!") -Also, unrelated to baseball, but the Post-Dispatch had a pretty good blog called "Speaking Visually." Looks like they got rid of it, or at least, the main graphics guy will be starting his own blog not endorsed by the P-D sometime soon. I hope so, because I always thought it was pretty good.
John Updike, the author of such classics as the Rabbit series, died today at age 76.
I'll admit, I never read much of him, but I always enjoyed his short fiction (although, truth be told, whenever I want to read stories about the sexual frustrations of New England WASPs, I reach for John Cheever and not Updike). But this piece, on Teddy Ballgame's final game at Fenway Park, makes me think I need to read more of him.
The beginning of this article somehow reminded me of some of our best ballgame impressions: "HOT chicken!"
"Panchos! Panchos! Git yer panchos HEAH!" "HE'S rattled!"
It reminds me that ballpark chatter might be my favorite form of nostalgic jargon (can we call it jargon? Or is it something else entirely?), juuust beating out another perennial favorite, "1930s newspaperman-speak."
I also realize that one can very easily replicate the sound of ballpark chatter simply by writing it down - if you've been to a ballgame, you know exactly how it's supposed to sound.
There's a website called Web Pages That Suck, which, according to them, teaches good web design by looking at bad web design. Simple enough. I found it when looking for something to compare this website to. Still can't quite find anything that compares. You'd think a fairly established major league baseball player would have a website in which the flash pictures did not show up on the other tabs you're using. And maybe that a major league outfielder would use a font other than "Sand." Or is that "Chalkboard"? Or even the font that shall not be named? Either way...Christ. I already hated this guy for having the "Sizemore syndrome" among female Astro fans. But this is unforgivable.
At least he gave me more bad websites to make fun of. I mean, seriously...can anyone make sense of this?
When the rock & roll professionals roll into town you know they're well paid (You got it) They'll meet you and they'll greet you and then after the show someone will get laid (You got it) Press the flesh and maybe they will make nice (You got it) Press the flesh, but only for the right price -Local H, "Rock and Roll Professionals" (featuring Josh Homme, singing the "you got it" parts
My first post at Bugs and Cranks is now up. It might suck. I have no real editor. And it turns out that I actually get paid for this, from ad revenues. I doubt it's that much. But we'll see.
Once upon a time, Conan O'Brien and Robert Smigel (aka Triumph) wrote and created a TV pilot. That TV pilot starred Adam West as a washed-up actor who thinks he can solve crimes. It never made it past the pilot stage, but it's actually pretty funny. It's on YouTube:
(I found this out from the commentary on the Simpsons season 5 box set I just purchased.)
So is Conan's pretty funny interview with John McCain, but you people can search for that yourselves.
Which reminds me that Gogol Bordello are on Conan tomorrow. Don't miss them, they kick some major ass live (and I assume on TV that translates fairly well).
Also, I think I'm going to be blogging about the Astros for this baseball website. They already had a Tigers guy but they didn't have anyone to cover the 'Stros so I figured I'd apply for it for the hell of it. They gave it to me.
At least I'll be doing some sort of writing while I look for a real job.
Once upon a time, Sportscenter was actually funny and insightful (it still is, sometimes, but most of the anchors these days are lame):
Yes, that actually happened. Rich Eisen was one of the better anchors on Sportscenter, and baseball actually tried wearing those things. UniWatch (my favorite ESPN column/ blog) has an entire column dedicated to them (he did an extensive blog entry as well. Quite possibly the worst designed things ever. I can't find the Tigers or White Sox versions of the uniforms online but if they look anything like this then we're in for a treat.
In honor of tonight's game, I present to you the 2008 All-Star batting stances:
Yes, Batting Stance Guy probably needs more to do with his life. But then again, don't we all? He has almost every damn team on there, and he imitates them pretty well.
(I think I top that list of those who need more to do.)
Oh, and I think the NL might actually take it this year. No real reason, other than I just really like Lance Berkman these days. So let's saaaay....10-8 NL. Aramis Ramirez...no, Nate McClouth gets a go-ahead double in the 9th and then Wood closes it down in the bottom. Thoughts?
(Also, FOX is going to try and splurge all over Yankee Stadium tonight, so be ready for a sickening display.)
