Work sucks. So in the meantime…

I’m slammed at work.  Like my title above says, it sucks.  I miss being able to post much on the blog.  More importantly, I miss my wife and kid because I basically I’ve been leaving for work at 7 AM and getting home at 11 or midnight.

I hope to finish my Heritage posts by the end of April – maybe things will slow down and I can get to posting once a day again.  We’ll see.  Until then… Check out a new blogger who is getting back into baseball cards.  Jason from “Back in the Card Game” just started up his blog recently, so check it out!

http://backinthecardgame.wordpress.com/

A not so Rose-y Valentine’s Day for Topps

I don’t know if it’s a big coincidence or what, today is Valentine’s Day, and yesterday there was quite the controversy in the card blog-o-sphere.  Basically, this dealt with responses to a blog post – which I refuse to call an “article” – was written on a Chicago Blog (one affiliated with the Sun-Times).  The blogger’s basic premise was to attack Topps and their exclusion of the name “Pete Rose” from the back of cards.  Whereas the card back for Alex Rodriguez says he’s 115 homers away from passing Barry Bonds, Derek Jeter’s card back says he’s 952 hits away from “the all-time record”.

Jay Bee Anama, who so graciously runs the Sports Card Blogroll, has a good post summarizing the issue.  I posted on his and a few other sites, and just figured throwing my thoughts out there was worth a blog post today.  So here’s those said “thoughts” on this issue.

• To say the blog post isn’t researched well would be like saying it’s cold and windy in Chicago in February.  I cringe saying the word researched, too.  It’s not really research, it’s more that it’s clear this guy doesn’t understand business.  At least not this business.  Topps paid MLB for the right to produce cards.  Not only that, they paid MLB for an exclusive right to produce cards with logos and in-game photos.  MLB is the only entity that can grant that right.  They have almost all the power in this relationship.  To assert that Topps is the one making this decision just doesn’t make common sense.  But it’s beyond that – both Topps and Major League Baseball  have said it was MLB’s decision to keep Rose’s name.  So, like it or not – it’s not something to blame Topps.  
• So it’s clearly MLB’s decision (and if you want – “fault”) that Rose’s name isn’t on the back of the cards.  That’s their right, but I wish they wouldn’t have made that decision.  They are fine putting Rose’s name and statistics on their website, as I think they should be.  He played the game and got 4,256 hits – they acknowledge the record.  Associating his name to the record (that MLB acknowledges he holds) on the back of a card isn’t the same as printing cards of him.  I wish they had just let Topps do this as part of their plan.
• All that said – I do think the way the chase thing is done on the back of the cards is kind of hokey.  There are really just 2 players who I think it’s even relevant for – Jeter for the hits record, and A-Rod for the home run record (a third could be Jim Thome).  Those are the only players who are close enough to the record holder for such a comparison to be meaningful.  It would seem to make more sense to say “Albert Pujols is 25 homers away from 500″ or “Roy Halladay is 1 win away from 200″ as opposed to comparing them to records they are either still far a way from (Pujols) or will never break (Halladay).
• Topps could have avoided this negative publicity by just not putting hits on the back of the card as one of the records.  That wouldn’t have caused near the sh*t storm where CBS, Fox Sports and other media outlets are erroneously reporting that Topps “stripped Rose of the hit record”.
• Finally, I find it very interesting that Topps inserted a buyback card of Pete Rose into Heritage last year.  See the card pic above (this was on eBay last year for a BIN of $2 grand).  Buybacks are different from printing a new card, but the MLB spokesman did say “Rose can’t be included in a licensed product” – yet he technically was in 2012 Heritage.  I wonder if that’s an oversight on Topps, or just semantics and MLB was OK with the idea.

The CEO of Topps also stepped down today – so it certainly wasn’t all “Rose-y” for Topps on Valentine’s Day 2013…

Go Blue!

I don’t post about it all that often, but some of my first memories of sports other than Reds games come from the Fab Five.  I’ve been a University of Michigan sports fan my whole life, but the Fab Five really got me into basketball.  Michigan has had some down days in hoops since then, and the banners from the 1992 and 1993 Final Four were taken down in Crisler Arena.

Jalen Rose is still my favorite athlete in any sport, and I collect his cards – some of the better of which are shown above.

Michigan’s hoops team made a big stride last week, reaching #1 in the AP poll for the first time since the 1992-1993 season.  I’ve seen them play once this year – we went to the game here in Chicago when they played Northwestern in early January.  They are the real deal – Trey Burke is probably the front-runner for player of the year, and three sons of former NBA players (Tim Hardaway, Jr., Glen Robinson III and Jon Horford) are all contributing.

They have a huge game tonight against #3 Indiana.  I don’t have the greatest hope for this game – it’s in Bloomington, and the starting center Jordan Morgan may not be able to play after badly spraining his ankle last weekend.  So their stay at #1 could just end up being for a week.  But if they do win, they’d also have a really good chance at overtaking Kansas for the top spot in the USA Today coaches poll (they are just 3 points behind at the moment).  Either way, they are good and it’s been fun to watch after the program has been on a steady upward trend the past few years.

I haven’t watched Game Day yet because I’m working today, but recorded it and will watch it before the game tonight.  Should be very interesting since Jalen himself is on College Game Day this year!

GO BLUE!

Moving to Wrigley Field

Wrigley Field from the El

The title isn’t 100% accurate, but it’s also not that far off.  For the last two and a quarter years my family lived in Northeastern New Jersey.  It’s not my favorite place in the world, but it had two major benefits.

1. It was close as hell to so many cool cities – 45 minutes from Manhattan,
2. They are more into my favorite sport (baseball) in the Northeast than just about any other place in America.

When I moved, my family consisted of a husband, a wife and a dog, Griffey.  We are growing, and now consist of a father, a mother, a son, and the same dog.  I wasn’t allowed to name the kid after a former Cincinnati Red, but I can kind of stretch his nickname to argue that he’s named after either Tom Brady or Brady Hoke (I’m a big Michigan football fan).  Well, my rotation with work is now over, and I’m moving back to the Midwest.  It kind of seems like back to civilization as I know it.  Most of our good friends, the kind of friends you stay friends with your whole lifetime, are back in the Midwest.  Some of them are in Chicago.  More are in Ohio, but Chicago has better opportunities.

We went through quite a process to find a house there.  We’ve looked in Elmhurst, which was way too suburb for me.  We’ve looked at Oak Park, which is a suburb but actually pretty close to the city.  But I decided I wanted to live in the city limits, and preferably to the North.  That’s where many more friends are, and it really hit me that these next few years are the only time when we could still probably do that.  With a kid who is still going to be very young and all.  It’s not like you ever hear of anybody moving to a suburb in Chicago and then moving into the city (actually, I have a good friend who did that, but he lived in a suburb right out of college for less than a year for work related reasons).  Problem was, the combination of dog and child necessitated having a fenced in backyard.  It can be tiny, but my wife, who is taking a 6-month hiatus from corporate America, has to be able to let the dog out without having to pack the kid up every time.  Some people suggested giving up the dog.  They clearly have never met our dog, or just don’t understand, period.  I would live in Saskatchewan or Syberia before considering such a thing.  I would give my right foot before I gave up the dog.  Not kidding.  My ankle’s messed up anyways.

So I get to the title of this post… Moving to Wrigley Field.  The picture above is one I took a few weeks ago from the Addison stop on the CTA red line, just after putting in an offer to rent a place in Lake View.  Which is not moving into Wrigley, but I’ll be damn close – less than 3 blocks.  The movers came last week and bring our stuff tomorrow.  It’s a nice house and has most of what we wanted.  We’re paying an arm and a leg for it, and we will likely only be there 1-2 years.  But someday when I’m in a nursing home talking to Brayden’s kids, I’ll be able to say “when I was your age, sonny, I lived right next to Wrigley Field”.  That’s at least 9 Reds games I can walk to a year (3 are next week, conveniently when we move in – as of Thursday when I scheduled this post, there was an off chance the Reds clinch the division at a game I attend).  Plus, it’s pretty cool because it’s kind of full circle for me from a family perspective.  My mom’s dad, who died pretty young, went to Lake View high school, less than a mile from where we’ll live.  She grew up a few mile North in Park Ridge.  My step-grandfather has always been a big Chicago fan, and I think he still has some wishes (not regrets) that there had been some way to stay in Chicago instead of moving to Cincinnati to be close to his wife’s (my Mom’s mom) family.  He was pretty excited when I told him where we’d be living.

Oh, and it’s a great location for work and all that stuff, too…

With the move will come a new job, one that’s gonna be more stressful.  Tack on the new baby, and I’m probably not gonna have as much time for posting as in the past.  I’ve got about 40 in the queue that I can dig up, so this won’t be noticeable right away.  I have been and will continue slowing down my posts ever so slightly – I was at a post a day and now more like one day off a week.  But my hope is I’ll still be here in some capacity for my 4 year anniversary like a certain nocturnal avian who just hit that same milestone!

The World’s Newest Reds Fan

…AKA – why I moved back my Ginter box post!

Today I had a post ready to summarize the full box break of my 2012 Allen & Ginter box.  I put that on pause – look for it Sunday (taking tomorrow off for reasons you’ll see below … and Saturday I have a post ready for the weekly beer and baseball theme I’m doing).

Why did I move this post back?  Well, yesterday at 2 AM, after 17 hours of labor (epidural for the last half or so – I can’t even begin to explain the difference between when I left the room and came back after birthing’s version of “the juice”), my very tired but very awesome wife pushed out all 8 lbs, 4 oz of Brayden, our first child.

We just liked the first name Brayden; we may decide call him Brady for short when he actually understands words.  His middle name, though, was where the decision was not made well in advance.  His due date was Sunday July 22nd – so, yes, he was 10 days late (!) – which was the day Barry Larkin got inducted to the Hall of Fame.  My wife agreed that if he was born on the 22nd, Brayden’s middle name could be Larkin.  Well, that date came and passed and then some more days came and passed.  So we went with Stephen.  That’s named after my wife’s grandfather, who died in World War II before her mom was even a year old.  So that was a cool way to pass on some family history.

Brayden gets to be the star of my post today!  And for the distant foreseeable future on the “other” blog that the my wife and I have to update family and friends of our comings and goings.

You should own this (under $5) card

I haven’t been able to read much on the blogosphere lately.  I spent all Saturday putting together the dresser / changing table combo for the bundle of joy coming next month.  Then Sunday I had to prepare for this training that work basically forced me to teach last-minute.  I got to watch the US Open and the NBA finals while doing these things, but there was no baseball card or internet time this weekend.  I’m actually getting to a point where I’m going to be done with this retro thing this year.  After that, I’ve got a lot of posts that I’ve done far in advance, as I don’t expect my baseball card / blogging /internet time will be as much once the kid arrives .

Anyways, I caught up on Monday and I noticed a bunch of posts were “you should own this card”, and it was obvious the stipulation was it could be had on the cheap.  Well, there was only one card that came to mind.

Well those posts were for a contest Fuji is doing.  I missed the deadline on this, but I wanted to post on this anyways to change things up for a minute.  And, yes, I realize that he had this as one of 2 cards he mentioned.  But I didn’t know that until after I started writing, and that doesn’t change my mind – this is still the first and only card that pops into my head if you said “you can own 1 card and it has to be less than 5 bucks”.  There isn’t a second place.

If you put together a list of the 20 or 30 most iconic baseball cards in history, I think this card would be on that list.  I was 10 when this card was produced.  That’s prime card collectin’ age.  This was the card everyone had to have.  My 2-year younger brother’s so-called friend, Don Bazashow (name changed to protect the guilty) had to have this card so bad that he stole it out of my 1990 Score set.

This card symbolized so many things at the time.  Bo was the coolest of cool.  He was down the road of becoming the Michael Jordan of football before Jordan was Jordan.  It meant “Bo Knows” – which was the iconic commercial slogan just before Gatorade came up with “Like Mike”.  An All-Star in baseball and an All-American in football.  The real 2-sport star – before Prime Time.

Since that time, the card’s symbolism has changed.  Now I view it and I think of a couple of things.  First, it’s hard to view this card without thinking about what might have been.  Bo’s football career was ended in a playoff game against my Bengals in 1990 (and the Bengals haven’t won a playoff game yet – The Curse of the Bo-bino).  But I also view it as a tale of redemption.  Bo is a great story of an athlete who went through disappointment on the field but didn’t implode.  After retiring, he went back to Auburn to get finish his degree.  He’s been a successful business man and philanthropist.

A couple of things I’d like to point out about Bo.  The first is from the time frame of this card.  Just check out the most amazing video game display of all time!

The second is something really cool that Bo did to help disaster relief in his home state of Alabama.  This was highlighted on ESPN at some point, but I didn’t realize that my favorite player was involved and did some of the riding alongside Bo!

A couple of new shows – Baseball IQ and All-Star Dealers

Before I get into the subject of this post – I wanted to note that I haven’t been able to post on many blogs lately.  Apparently, there’s some issue with open ID verifying WordPress users where it says you typed the word verification wrong no matter what.  So, I’ve been reading blogs, but mostly unable to comment.  Kind of sucks.

That said, there’s 2 new shows that have caught my eye.  One is Baseball IQ on MLB Network.  The other is Discovery Channel’s “All-Star Dealers”.

Baseball IQ

I’d like to point out how awesome the MLB Network is.  When it started up 3 years ago, no one was as excited as me, and shows like this never disappoint!  The show pits one employee from each team (plus a Hall of Fame employee and an MLB network participant) in head-to-head matchups in a tournament that will air over 31 shows.  The contestants are playing for charities; the winner of each of the first round matchups wins $5,000 for his team’s charitable foundation.  The players pick from one of 8 categories – the trivia questions are always questions where you can name multiple (between 8 and 20) players.  It’s like hot potato – whoever gets stuck on their turn without an answer loses and the other player gets 1-4 runs for the inning, depending on how far they got. That’s the first 8 innings.

In the 9th inning, the player who is ahead can either bid himself or defer to the other player.  They bid on the question, and basically the winner of the whole round is determined by whether or not the player who bids the most can reach his number.  I don’t really like this format – because you could be winning 13-1 after and there is only a slight advantage.

The show started last Tuesday and is airing two shows a night Tuesday through Thursday.  I’m kind of behind (on both shows actually), so I’ve been DVR-ing it.  (DVR – something even better than MLB Network)  Tonight I watched the second show from last Thursday, which was the 6th show overall.  Here’s my scientific recap of the more interesting categories with me playing along.

This matchup featured the Brewers vs. the Nationals.  The opening question was who was the most recent pitcher to reach his 300th win – and I would have beat these guys to the punch knowing it’s the Big Unit!

Category #1 – Closing Time.  Name the other 8 pitchers other than K-Rod to have posted 50+ saves in a season.  I knew Thigpen, Eckersley, Myers, Gagne, Rivera and would have correctly guessed Trevor Hoffman.  They actually outdid me here – they got John Smoltz but the Brewer guy missed Rod Beck.

Category #3 – Oakland Aces.  Name the 8 Oakland 20-game winners since Vida Blue.  I’d go (in order of how sure) Dave Stewart, Bob Welch, Barry Zito, Catfish Hunter, Mark Mulder and then I’m just guessing between Rich Harden, Dan Haren and Tim Hudson as “maybes”.  Hudson would have been right.  They got Steward, Mulder and Zito but not Welch or Catfish.

Category #4 – Tom’s Terrific Teammates.  Name the 8 Tom Seaver teammates in the HOF.  This one was a bit of a softball for me – from the seasonal summaries I’ve been doing, I knew quite a few of these.  First, Nolan Ryan from the Mets days is the easiest.  Then, you’ve got to know Willie Mays finished his career there.  After that, with the Reds he had Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan (but Perez was gone before he got to Cincy).  Carlton Fisk caught his 300th win in Chicago, and finally he pitched for Boston, so that would have to include Jim Rice.  They got 4 – missing Rice and Bench.  The other 2 were Wade Boggs (which I should have had) and Steve Cartlon (tough).

Category #7 – Tapping the Rockies.  Other than Dante Bichette, name the other 10 Rockies with 30+ HR in a season.  I went with Helton, Larry Walker, the Big Cat, Tulo, Castilla, Ellis Burks and Car Go.  My bigger miss here was Matt Holliday, and I also neglected Preston Wilson and Jeromy Burnitz.  They missed them and Castilla.

The guy from the Nationals had a 10-1 lead going into the 9th, and it could have been worse, but he narrowly missed a big inning that would have made it end 14-1.  But, there’s still hope; the 9th inning category was game 7 World Series losers in the last 50 years (since 1961).

I knew for sure of the ’68 Cardinals, the ’75 Red Sox, the ’85 and ’87 Cardinals, the ’86 Red Sox, the ’91 Braves, the ’97 Tribe, the ’01 Yankees, the ’02 Giants, and the ’11 Rangers.  The ’73 Mets, ’62 Giants and ’79 Orioles were guesses I’d have made.  Others were the ’65 Twins, the ’67 Sox, the ’71 Orioles, and the ’72 Reds.  The Brewers guy didn’t make 9 correct answers, but he certainly had a decent shot, so the guy from DC moved on.

Again – this is a great show, I just don’t love the way they do the ending.

All-Star Dealers

This is a show about a guy who used to be a bookie then went into the sports memorabilia business as an auction house – Grey Flannel.  He’s got his 2 kids involved as well.  They do it in the style of lots of other reality shows – the cameras follow them around, then they head back to an “interview setting” where one of the 3 family members discusses what they’re doing – “We can’t afford to lose another jersey”, “we need to get him to agree to consign this with us”.

They start off with a shipment of stuff they got in, which included a Ronnie Lott 49ers jersey and a Marino jersey.  They get a call from Dennis Rodman’s agent about a warehouse in California with a bunch of his memorabilia he’s thinking about selling.  The guy goes out there and then meets with Rodman to discuss some of the items.  The big thing he’s searching for, though – the infamous wedding dress – isn’t there.  But he does sell Rodman’s defensive Player of the Year award, which is his big seller.

Meanwhile, the Lott jersey fails inspection with an expert as it’s from a year Lott was with the Raiders and it was clearly altered.  The Marino jersey does pass game-used inspection, and the autograph on there passed James Spence’s authentication look at it.

The thing I’d heard about the show was that the guys do seem overly hell-bent on how much money they can get for the items.  I guess this puts the sports memorabilia in a somewhat negative light, but, to be honest, these guys don’t seem as bad as some of the shade-balls I’ve seen at autograph shows.  Overall, it’s a somewhat interesting show.

Jefferson Burdick collection at the Met – Breaking the color barrier

My parents were in town this weekend – since I moved to New Jersey, this was only the second time they’ve been able to make it up here.  It was good to see them – we got to go to some nice dinners, they helped us finally take down the X-mas tree (yeah, we waited forever on that) and just hang out, which I now appreciate more since I moved much further away.  We also went down to NYC on Saturday.

When we’d visited New York before I lived close by, we almost always went to a Broadway show.  But Katie and I have been to plenty, and there isn’t one that we’re dying to see that my parents were.  So we checked something off the “Northeast bucket list” – we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  I’m not the biggest museum kind of person, but this museum is enormous and there were actually some very interesting areas.

Unknown to me at first, this is where Jefferson Burdick donated his baseball card collection and then spent nearly 2 decades cataloging it.  Burdick came up with the cataloging that we know of today for older sets (i.e., the Honus Wagner holy grail is in the “T-206″ set).  They never have his whole collection displayed, but they tend to have a small showing of different cards at different times.  Right now they have a wall of his cards honoring the integration of baseball – “Breaking the Color Barrier”.  The display talks about Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson being the first to blaze this trail – and they had a 1914 Cracker Jack of Rickey as a player and a 1948 Swell Sport Thrills (a card I’d never heard of) of Jackie.

There was also a framed display of the 3 black players who initially broke the color barrier in 1948 – Jackie, Larry Doby (the first black player in the history of the American League) and Satchel Paige.  These are their 1949 Bowman cards.

There was also an impressive wall of 1951 Bowman cards – the most impressive being the Willie Mays rookie card.  I was surprised at how small the ’51 Bowman cards were – they’re bigger than Tobacco cards, but not nearly by what I’d thought.

And, there were a few early Topps cards as well.  There was a wall with ’54 Topps Aaron and Banks cards, but this frame of 1953 Topps cards caught my eye the most.

Trey Griffey commits to Arizona Wildcats

This goes in the totally non-baseball card department – but I read about this on ESPN just now – Trey Griffey has committed to Arizona to play Wide Receiver for the Wildcats.  That’s Trey Griffey as in the son of Ken Griffey, Jr.  Trey is a 3-star wide receiver out of Orlando who apparently wasn’t on the college football recruiting radar until he transferred high schools for his senior season and had a breakout year with nearly 900 yards.  After that, and after a great performance at an Under Armour All-American game, he got even more notice.  Before that, he was ranked just better than the 100th best receiver in the nation.  He’s Rich Rodriguez’s first bigger name recruit.

I got a pennant signed by the 8 members of the Big Red Machine a few years back, and I remember Griffey Sr. was sitting with his wife (aka “Junior’s mom”).  It’s often a little awkward at those signings – I never know exactly what to say – and Senior was by no means surly but he wasn’t super-friendly, either.  Even though Senior is the dad of one of my 2 all-time favorite athletes (Jalen Rose is the other) I just figured I’d move on to the next Red, who I think may have been Tony Perez, without asking him much.  But my wife was with me, and she asked “are your grandchildren playing baseball”.  That kind of perked both of them up – definitely Mrs. Griffey.  She said “oh, he loves football much more”.  Ken kind of chuckled and said something to the same effect – but it was interesting to see how asking about their grandchildren (by my wife, not by me the creepy 25-year old guy who wanted autographs ) got them much more interested.

Junior never did a ton of interviews – he’d do them with Joe Nuxhall if he was star of the game, and he did a good one with Dan Patrick on Dan’s last day on ESPN radio.  I read he turned down most that wanted to ask him about his place in the game and things about his career – but he’d always answer questions if you wanted to talk about his kids.  I have admittedly foggy lenses when thinking of Griffey, Jr. – we named our dog Griffey – but I always respected that about him.  I wish Trey the best for his time at Arizona!

Griffey in Topps next year – excitement and a little sad

Topps made a pretty surprising announcement yesterday that it has signed Ken Griffey Jr. and will include his cards in its 2012 products.  This is a pretty big deal – right up there with adding the notoriously difficult signer Koufax last year – for a few of reasons.  One is that it’s kind of hard to get Griffey signatures through means not facilitated by Upper Deck - the best way in the past has been by purchasing something from Upper Deck Authenticated or on an Upper Deck insert card – I don’t know of him ever signing at a show or anything.  So his autograph is pretty valuable, period.  Also, this is the first time you could get a Griffey card in a Topps product.  The biggest reason is just what Griffey represents – to baseball card collectors, Ken Griffey Jr. IS Upper Deck.

I think I’ve got a bit of a unique perspective on this – I’m a huge Ken Griffey Jr. fan.  Griffey wasn’t the first athlete I idolized, but he’s my favorite.  When I was 12, I remember staying up late to watch his at bats every chance he was on TV.  When I went to college, I hoped against hope that it would be him and not Mark McGwire in 1997 and 1998 that would break Roger Maris’s record.  I have a 3-year old Dachshund named Griffey, most because I don’t think my wife would be OK with me picking that name for our first-born son. 

I can remember the excitement when he was traded “home” to Cincinnati.  To have your favorite player traded to your favorite team is pretty awesome.  I still have the article in the Cincinnati Enquirer that describes the trade and compares it to the Babe Ruth Sox-Yankees deal.  Obviously nothing on that level materialized, but I appreciated being able to watch him play for nearly a decade and seeing about 10 of his 630 home runs live.  Even when he was older and produced less, I didn’t want the Reds to trade him.  There’s something about having your childhood hero on your hometown team (even after you’re not a kid any more) that even trumps giving that team the best chance to win.   

So, on that level, I’m really excited that I can find Griffey Jr. in next year’s products.  Plus, the card above looks amazing!  I hope they do some cards with him in a Reds uniform, but I also hope Topps doesn’t go completely overboard – having too many Griffey cards could make me go a bit overboard.

In another way, though, this is a little sad.  Griffey’s rookie card is one of the most iconic cards in all of sports history.  If you asked me, it’s behind only the ’52 Mantle and the T-206 Wagner as the most influential baseball card of all-time.  A surprise pick as the #1 card in a fledgling set that changed the game (kind of like Topps said it’s going to do in 2012 :}), and a photo that captures the essence of “the Kid”.  This kind of signifies the nail in the coffin to Upper Deck’s run in baseball – and I’m sure that fact isn’t lost on Topps.  From everything I’ve read, Upper Deck kind of deserves it, but as someone who collected their products in the mid-90′s, I can’t help but be a little sad.