In Honor Of ‘The Office’, Here’s Dwight Bernard!

Many of you are aware that tonight is the series finale of The Office…. but instead of Dwight Schrute or Andy Bernard, I’ve got Dwight Bernard.

Before I get into The Office, I should say something about Dwight Bernard and this card. Dwight Bernard pitched out of the Mets bullpen in 1978 and 1979. After the 1979 season he was traded to Milwaukee, he pitched for the Brew Crew in 1981 and 1982, and got to pitch an inning in the 1982 World Series. He’s currently the pitching coach for the Mariners’ AAA team in Tacoma.

The card itself, which is about as oddball as oddball gets, is from the 1983 Gardner’s set, a regional issue from Topps. I believe that Gardner’s is a bakery in the Midwest; I’m sure someone can correct me if I’m wrong.

The front of the card is… um… colorful. The back is pretty much identical to 1983 Topps.

Getting back to The Office, I’ll definitely be watching tonight… possibly even something approximating real time so I don’t get spoiled. Will Steve Carell make an appearance? I don’t really care, but then again I never liked Michael Scott all that much… he doesn’t hold a candle to Ricky Gervais’ David Brent.  Brent was an idiot and completely misguided, but he was likeable at some level and you couldn’t help but hope that he’d see the error of his ways and be a decent person.  Michael Scott is more of an ass.  Dammit, he made Pam cry in the first episode!  Pam! America’s sweetheart! That bastard.

At any rate, I’ve always seen the show as being about Pam and Jim and Dwight…

…and Creed and Meredith and Angela and Stanley and Erin and Phyllis and so on. It took the show a while to find its footing after Carrell left, but I think that this season’s been pretty good and I’m looking forward to seeing if there are any twists left for them to twist.

So congrats to The Office… it was sometimes great, sometimes crap, but always kept me watching.

The Mystery Box Of 1970 Topps Makes Its Last Stop In Cleveland

A couple of months ago I bought a box of 100+ 1970 Topps card from my semi-local card shop. I’ve been sharing the cards for quite a while now, and I’m going to wrap it up with a bunch of Cleveland Indians.

We’ll start off with a beat-up team card.

The Tribe went 76-86 in 1970, finishing in 5th place in the AL East, 32 games out of first but ahead of the lowly Senators.

Chuck Hinton was an All-Star in 1965 and had originally signed with the Orioles, but was selected by the Senators in the 1960 expansion draft. Aside from the Sens and the Indians, he also played one year for the Angels. In 1962 he hit .310, which made him the only player on the “new” Washington Senators (the team that started in 1961 and moved to Texas for the 1972 season) to hit .300. By the time this card came out, he was serving in a utility role, and 1971 would be his last season. Hinton passed away earlier this year.

Dennis Higgins pitched for 7 years in the majors, but 1970 was his sole season with the Indians. He made 58 appearances in 1970 with a 4-6 record and 11 saves. He’s the cousin of recent White Sox & Twins third baseman Joe Crede (Yes, indeedy).

Larry Brown played from 1963 to 1974 with several teams, and had been a starter with the Indians for much of the 1960′s, but was in a utility role in 1970. His brother is former MLB catcher Dick Brown.

Larry Burchart pitched in 29 Major League games, all in 1969. That year he was a Rule V draftee from the Dodgers organization, and he stayed with the Indians all year, but the rest of his career would be two seasons pitching for the Indians’ AAA team in Wichita.

Max Alvis was an All-Star in 1965 and 1967 and lead the A.L. in HBP in 1963 and 1965. He played for the Indians from 1962 to 1969, but was traded to the Brewers on April 4th, 1970… Just a couple of days after they officially became the Brewers (having gone through spring training as the Seattle Pilots).

According to Wikipedia, there was an attempt to move the Indians to Seattle in either 1962, 1964 or 1965, depending on which article you look at. I don’t remember ever hearing anything like that before, I wonder if it’s true. Does anybody know anything about that?

I also found out from a January, 1970 article in the Spokane Daily Chronicle that Dallas had also made a play for the Pilots, but would lose out to Bud Selig and his Milwaukee group.

…and you thought this was going to be all about the Indians!

Here’s the best cartoon of the bunch, from Larry Burchart’s card:

…And that does it for the Mystery Box… It put a good dent in my 1970 needs, and was a lot of fun to go through and write about. Hope you all enjoyed it!

Oddball du Jour: 1982 Cracker Jack “Old-Timers”

Night Owl recently wrote about a copy of Baseball Cards magazine he has, and that issue had an article about “regional issues”… a.k.a. oddballs.  One of the sets featured in the article was the 1982 Cracker Jack set put out by Topps.

I own this set – which is actually 2 uncut sheets of 9 cards each – and had scanned the sheets over a year ago, but never got around to posting them.  I figured that Night Owl’s post is a sign to get off my lazy butt and do something.

This set was produced to promote a Cracker Jack-sponsored “Old-Timers’ Classic” baseball game played in RFK Stadium in Washington D.C.

I got these in 1982 through a mail-in offer involving proofs-of-purchase from boxes of Cracker Jack.  Regardless of what I might sing during the 7th inning stretch, I’m not a fan of Cracker Jack, so buying and eating a number of boxes was something of a sacrifice for me.  Don’t buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack, you can just buy me a brat and a Coke, thanks so much!

…Yes, a hot dog will do just fine.

The design of the set borrowed as much from prior Topps designs as Upper Deck Vintage did!  Check it out… You’ve got the script team name borrowed from the 1978 set, the little pennant-y box that the name and position go in are lifted directly from 1979 Topps.  Hey, they paid good money for those designs, they’re gonna recycle them!

Many of the photos used appeared on other cards, like the 1953 Ralph Kiner and Bob Feller, and the 1958 Larry Doby.

Here is the back of the AL Sheet… The card in the middle plugs the Old-Timers classic.

For a better look at the design of the cards, I cropped the image to highlight just the Brooks Robinson card.  The photo used here is the same one used in the 1969 Deckle Edge set (except that one was in black & white, of course).

Brooks Robinson is wearing the only Orioles home uniform which didn’t feature “Orioles” in script… This style was worn from 1963 to 1965.

Here’s the back of Brooks…

…and since I got my inspiration from Night Owl, the least I can do is feature the Duke Snider card from the sheet.

Now that I look at it closely for the first time in a bunch of years, it’s kind of odd that they airbrushed a Brooklyn Dodgers cap on him.  I didn’t think too much about it at the time, but now I wonder if the photo is from Duke’s time with the Mets.  I’d also considered if it might be from when he was a coach with the Expos, but I think he had some 70′s sideburns when he was in Montreal.

Post #500: How I Play With My Cards

This is an entry I’ve been meaning to write since the beginning of The Shlabotnik Report… But the 500th post will do just fine.

I’m sure that there are a number of you who keep a binder just for the players currently on your favorite team’s roster.  I know I’ve seen a couple of you comment on doing something like that.

Well, I do that too… but I do it for every Major League team.

Jemile Weeks and the Beatles
Yoenis Cespedes, a Simpsons Wacky Pack parody and a Fleer sticker
Seth Smith

…and I’ve been doing it since the mid-1970’s.

Like most kids, I was always arranging and re-arranging my cards in different ways… by team, by card number, by the state where they were born, by the team that drafted them…  At some point I arranged my cards not by the team they were shown with, but the teams they were currently with… and they pretty much stayed that way.

My collection’s first permanent home was a drawer in my dresser, set up so that I could sit on the end of the bed, slide out the drawer and have easy access to my cards.  Each team had its own stack, with American League teams on the left, National League teams on the right.  Each day I’d look at the transactions listed in the paper and dutifully move cards around as players moved up and down from the minors, or from team to team.

Somewhere along the line this arrangement was changed by a new technological advancement:  The 9-pocket sheet.  The drawer morphed into a set of binders, still organized by current rosters.  I decided to take advantage of the 9-pocket format and gave each player a three-card row in a sheet.

Of course, I didn’t have three cards of every player, and that left empty pockets, which in turn resulted in a weird sort of auxiliary collection:  filler cards.

YABBA.
DABBA.
DOO.

I began to acquire non-sport cards, interesting cards from other sports, whatever was available to fill in the empty spaces.

Along with accumulating these filler cards, I also started to keep an eye out for cards of players who weren’t yet in my collection.

2011 Bowman Duane Below… a recent example of what I’m talkin’ ’bout

It was during the 1990’s that this unwittingly became a long-term problem… Just to pick up cards of guys I didn’t have in some form, or to get a card that showed a guy in a more current uniform, I’d buy cards from sets that I normally wouldn’t bother with… Leaf, Bowman, Ultra, Stadium Club, Pinnacle, Upper Deck and an assortment of fringe-y sets.

Adding to my joy at the time (and my dismay now) was the advent of the nationally-distributed minor league sets from Classic Best and Upper Deck and CMC… The predecessors of Topps Pro Debut.

No real reason for this particular card, other than I’ve always liked the Denver Zephyrs’ uniforms…

I really liked those sets because they filled in a lot of gaps in my binders, and when a guy got called up to the majors for the first time, the chances were decent that I already have a card of him.

The end result of all these accumulating is that my collection grew tremendously in the 1990’s, and since I never really purged anything, things got waaaaaaaaaaay out of hand.

So, if it’s so much work and results in so much clutter, why have I been doing it for 35+ years?

I’ve never been content to just collect cards, put them in a binder and leaving them there… or, heavens forbid, graded and sealed away forever in a case.  I enjoy going through my cards, looking at them, pulling them out of the sheets and doing stuff with them.

Ryan Kalish
Stephen Drew
Jackie Bradley, Jr., Kate from “Lost” & Spider-Man 2099

As a visual thinker, keeping my cards organized this way helps me remember which player is on what team.  It’s easy enough to keep track of guys like Zack Greinke and Jose Reyes, but I can also remember that Stephen Drew is in Boston because I remember seeing his cards in the Red Sox section of my AL East binder.

One other thing it really helps me with is remembering which cards I have.  If I’m constantly in and out of binders, moving cards around, replacing a 2010 Marco Scutaro with a 2013, then I’m interacting with my cards and having fun with my cards and, in the process, remembering my cards.

One final affect it’s had on my life, and one which you will hopefully appreciate, is that maintaining these binders got me started making custom cards.  Back in 2008 I got tired of the handwritten placeholders I was using for cardless players, and I started making 1974 customs to fill out some binder pages.  I realized that I enjoyed the process and the end result so much that even when my color printer died, I kept making customs just for the fun of it. (FWIW, the death of my printer is the reason why you don’t see any of my customs in these binder pages)

Mike Adams & a Fleer team sticker
Michael Stutes & Paul McCartney
Joe Savery, the Phillie Phanatic & a 2004 Phillies Team card.

So that’s a quick view into my team binders…. I think that the particular way I have fun with my cards has made my collection become more unwieldy than most, and since the underlying theme of this blog involves bringing order to an out-of-control accumulation of cards, I always meant to explain what got me here in the first place.

Whaddaya Know… There Really Were 1987 Minis… Kinda… Sorta…

Last year, when Topps had the 1987 Mini inserts, a common theme among bloggers was that it ain’t any such… That the only minis in 1987 was the Topps Leaders set, and they only shared the general woodgrain theme and not the same design.

I was on board with that line of reasoning until I ran across these in the “accumulation” part of my collection:

I’ve had an empty 1987 Topps wax box since… well, probably since 1987. I don’t remember for sure, but I probably was in a store that had a couple of wax packs left in the box and I asked the friendly neighborhood storekeeper if I could take the box if I bought the remaining packs.

This box was one of my “attic finds”… is it a “find” if it’s in your own attic?… At one point I was going to write a post about this box along the lines of “Should I keep it as an intact box, should I cut out the one side of the box and leave it as a panel, should I cut it into individual cards?” But there was a major need for cleaning in my man cave, so the “box” is gone and now it’s just a panel.

After I scanned this panel, it occurred to me that these cards are smaller than standard. I took a 2012 Mini and compared them, and glory be, they’re the same size. The backs are different, but I’m not going to quibble with Topps about that…

So now we’re just left with the bogus 1972 minis… and to quote the preacher in Blazing Saddles, “Son, you’re on your own.”

Aw, Man! I Want A Fairfield Repack, Too!!!

I’ve been seeing a bunch of posts lately for repacks, and it lit a fire within me.

MUST…
HAVE…
REPACK!!!!

I had to go to Target anyway, so I went through the repacks they had on hand… Unfortunately, the ones they had made no promises of vintage, just 5 rookie cards. Whoop-dee-doop-dee-doo.

Didn’t matter, I needed a fix. Into the cart it went, and into my blog it goes…

The particular repack I bought was one I picked out because of this Jason Bay card I didn’t recognize… and it turned out to be a 2007 Topps Wal-Mart insert. Despite his less-than-stellar time with the Mets, I like Jason Bay and hope he turns it around with the Mariners.

Just like most Fairfield repacks, I got some 1980′s Topps glossies… Usually my favorite part. Unfortunately, this time around the only one I needed was this Clemens…

…and naturally, I ended up with two of these. Sigh.

I like the late-1980′s parking lot in the background.  I believe that’s a big ol’ Cadillac just over Clemens’ shoulder.  It’s too bad it’s not a pink Cadillac, crushed velvet seats, ridin’ in the back, oozin’ down the street, wavin’ to the girls, feelin’ outta sight, spendin’ all my money on a Saturday night, honey I just wonder what it feels like in the back of your pink Cadillac… pink Cadillac…

Huh?  Whuh?  Oh, sorry, drifted away for a minute…

Woo-hoo! I got Bipped! I think that’s almost becoming a point of honor…

Huh. I didn’t know Star did a Keith Hernandez set… I’ve got a couple of other player-specific Star sets, but I don’t recall running across Keith before.

The problem with doing these player-specific sets in the colors of the player’s current team is that you get bad combos like a Cardinals uniform framed with Mets orange. This would’ve been a nicer card with different colors… but it’s Star, it’s only going to get but so nice… I’ll just distract myself by admiring Keith’s stirrups.

I got a number of 2010 cards, including this Aaron Laffey. Laffey was on the Mets earlier this month, and I didn’t have a single card of his. Last week the Mets put him on waivers and he was claimed by the Blue Jays… and NOW I have a card of Aaron Laffey. Ain’t that just…

In case you hadn’t noticed, the Blue Jays will put a waiver claim on ANYBODY. Don’t believe me? Keep an eye on the transactions column… seems like half the guys who go through waivers get claimed by the Jays, even if the Jays then turn around and DFA the guy.

No, I don’t understand it.

…and for what it’s worth, the Jays did turn around and DFA Aaron Laffey.

Among the promised rookies I got were a 2005 Bazooka Melky Cabrera (which seems to actually have some value), a couple of uninteresting 2010 rookies and this 2007 TriStar David Price, which is at least shiny even if it is kinda ugly.

Not one of the better repacks I’ve gotten, but still $4 worth of entertainment.

…And for the record, 36 cards went straight from the repack into the recycling bin… Just doing my part to keep America safe from Junk Wax.

I’ll Bet The Kids In 1968 Loved This Card…

I never experienced this card as a kid, but I’m pretty sure I would’ve thought it was cool… The fake action pose is pretty good, but what really sells the card is Mike Hegan staring right into the camera. Dude, he’s looking right at us!!!

Regardless of this awesome card, Mike Hegan would have a place in my collection solely because he played for the Seattle Pilots.  He must’ve been one of the earliest members of the Pilots, because baseball-reference.com lists him as having been sold to the Pilots in June, 1968… Close to a year before the Pilots would take the field.  He spent all of 1968 in AAA, so maybe that was part of the arrangement.

Here’s a 1969 Topps Scratch-Off I’ve previously featured…

Mystery Box Of 1970 Topps: Pretty Fly (For The White Sox)

As I’ve mentioned before, I’d bought a box of 1970 Topps cards from my semi-local card shop… We’re coming down the home stretch with these cards.

Buddy Bradford played 11 seasons for 4 different teams, and also played for the Kintetsu Buffaloes in the Japanese Pacific League. The White Sox liked him so much, they acquired him three times: As an amatuer free agent in 1962, purchased from the Reds in 1972 and acquired from the Cardinals in 1975.

…Of course, the flip side of that is that the White Sox got rid of him three times…

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This next card features a player who turned out to be more interesting than I’d expected… but “interesting” is not always a good thing.

Paul Edmondson pitched just one season in the majors, having 13 starts and one relief appearance in 1969. In his debut on 6/30/69 against the Angels, he hurled a two-hit complete game. Although he ended up with a 1-6 record, his 3.70 ERA was second only to Tommy John among White Sox pitchers with 10 or more starts.

This card is his rookie card, and he never saw himself on it. Edmondson and his girlfriend were killed in an auto accident on February 13, 1970; He had turned 27 just the day before.

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I was a bit surprised to find out that Walt “No Neck” Williams is only 5’6″… I always recognized from his cards that he was a stocky guy, but I didn’t realize just how those proportions shook out.

While with the Indians on 8/21/73, Williams broke up a no-hitter by former White Sox teammate Stan Bahnsen with 2 outs in the ninth! Yow!

I love how much he put into posing for this photo! You can almost hear him saying “I’m gonna pose the @#$%^&! outta this card…”

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I kinda like this cartoon from Tom McCraw’s card, but I’m guessing that Tom McCraw wasn’t terribly fond of it.

1970 Fleer/Laughlin World Series: 1966 Dodgers vs. Orioles

I was in Baltimore yesterday to see the Dodgers playing in Camden Yards… While I had a good time despite the Oriole loss, an all-day event like that didn’t help me with regard to being behind in my posting. In an attempt to tread water, I thought I could do worse than featuring this card…

Hostess Card Of The Week: 1976 Fergie Jenkins

On this date in 1966, the Phillies traded Fergie Jenkins, John Herrnstein and Adolfo Phillips to the Cubs for Bob Buhl and Larry Jackson. At the time, Jenkins’ Major League career consisted of 8 relief appearances.

This card shows Fergie airbrushed into a Red Sox uniform after a late 1975 trade that sent him from Texas to Boston for Juan Beniquez, Steve Barr and Craig Skok.

Everybody knows that Fergie Jenkins is Canadian, won the Cy Young in 1971 and is in the Baseball Hall Of Fame, but here are some random facts you may not know . . .  He played with the Harlem Globetrotters during the offseason . . . Lead the league in complete games 4 times and had 267 CG’s over his career . . . His 284 wins are the most all-time for a Canadian . . . Hit 13 homers over his career, and gave up 484, which is 3rd on the all-time list behind Jamie Moyer (522) and Robin Roberts (505).