See HOME RUN DERBY on TV!

So is a reprint of an oddball still an oddball?

I'd say Yes.

This is another fun little piece I picked up at the LCS a few days ago. It was even a freebie, as I had already committed to relieving the owner of some other items by giving him real money for stuff no one else hardly wants - junk wax. It might be awhile before you see that junk, because I have a fun construction project to complete before showing it off.

The other reason it was free was the fine print there along the lower left corner of the image, which reads "C.C.C. Reprint - 1988", which was certainly nice enough of the reprint company to include, back in the 80s.

Of course, perhaps this isn't a true oddball, as eBay searches for these items work better if you use the word "Postcard." But this is is still a baseball picture card then, methinks, even if not issued by T.C.G. Co.

Originals will set you back hundreds of dollars, but these reprints are just a buck or so, before shipping. Or free at your Friendly Local Card Shop, perhaps.

This item came with one other helpful item I had thought to work into a post along with it, but when I learned tonight that the first game of the World Series won't be played until next Tuesday - over 100 hours away! - I figured I'd better get on the wire and drum up some baseball entertainment to tide you (and me) over. So the bonus item will have to wait.

OK, OK, now let's get to the subject at hand here on this promotional type postcard: HOME RUN DERBY.

It's the 21st century now, and any product of all of human creativity, ever, can be summoned in seconds:

This was a delightful find for me. I don't live with a super-deluxe Cable TV package. In fact I hardly watch TV at all, which is especially true now that baseball has completely disappeared from broadcast TV, as it has moved to Fox Sport1 rather than regular over-the-air Fox stations. No more Game of the Week. Boo!

Thus even at home baseball is mostly an audio experience for me. Tonight I listened to the final NLCS game on the San Francisco station, courtesy of my phone rather than atmospheric bounce of the powerful AM stations I would use when I was a kid. And thus I got to hear the great broadcaster John Miller call the top of the 9th, 2 outs, bases loaded. Taveras hits it back to the mound and "Affeldt races to the bag. Touchdown!"

So I still thoroughly enjoy baseball on the radio. But I do also like to see what baseball looks like, which is where baseball cards come in.

But I could not resist the call of this baseball postcard, and I was rewarded with the 24 minutes of baseball sort of history embedded just above there. That video is of the Hank Aaron vs Al Kaline episode of the Home Run Derby TV Show, and it was an enjoyable 24 minutes. Aaron and Kaline were particularly pithy analyzing each other's swing  - I could instantly see what they meant. This is something I do lose just listening to games on the radio. It was just so cool to listen to these Hall of Fame players talk at all, back in 1959, still in their 20s. My baseball cards sure don't talk, well at least not out loud.

All the rest of the details on this show can be similarly summoned in just seconds; heck if you look through the settings on your computer long enough you'll discover that the last operating system upgrade you did probably added Siri-style voice recognition even to most PCs now. So you can just say Home Run Derby TV Show Wikipedia entry out loud and get all the answers to your questions quite quickly.

Episode 1 features Willie Mays vs Mickey Mantle:

I mean how cool is that?

Actually, I think watching too much of these would wear you down pretty quickly, they have been broadcast a fair bit already on ESPN Classic over the years, so some of you might have already fallen asleep now. This is just black & white baseball shot live with just a couple cameras, no instant replay, and isn't actually a baseball game of course.

I also learned that there was a Wrigley Field in Los Angeles, and if you've ever seen a classic baseball movie shot in black & white, it was probably filmed there.

The things you learn from these baseball picture cards...

Lo, Winter is Past?

A rite of spring eluded me today. Every baseball season, I like to listen to the beginning of my team's first broadcast...and their final out, and the final post-game, post-season wrap-up.

Though I am far from home as I type, I have been able to do this the last few years courtesy of the MLB At Bat app, which has generally been a wonderful thing to have in the palm of my hand. Aside from all the coverage of my team, I certainly wouldn't have been able to listen to a legend of the game like Vin Scully, or the man depicted in the dictionary alongside the word 'smooth' (John Miller), or feel like I'm knocking back a few well mixed drinks after the game back at the bar with gravelly Mike Shannon.

But it seems MLB took a few lessons from Topps and didn't release the new version of the app until the last possible minute. So I can get gimmicks like video pitch track overlays. On my telephone.

All I really want is the incredible buffet of every radio call of every baseball game. Instead I got a long morning of software updates, download throttled free wi-fi connections, a critical cable missing at a critical point, new account log-in registrations, and enough techno frustration to swear off telephone computer radios and go back out in the woods for several more weeks.

All just to have the broadcast finally start working in the 3rd inning.

I missed The Verse. 

Of course, in the age of all human intellectual content being just seconds away 60/60/24/7/365, now via voice activation just like on Star Trek, I can read The Verse any time I want.

If I want to read it, all I have to do is go back to the very first post on this blog.

So, yes, this is my one year anniversary of blogging. Happy Anniversary, To Me.

Of course, I didn't hit 365 posts as I would have liked, though I batted .395, hopefully a respectable mark for a Rookie blogging campaign. Just lately I've been staying in another remote location without Internet, though there was here last year. In fact I discovered baseball card blogs from the very seat I am sitting in now. But to celebrate this anniversary I figured I should post via the phone, a bluetooth keyboard, and of course, there's an app for this.

I'll be heading out soon, and I really look forward to catching up on a lot of blogs.

So meanwhile to help assauge my Spring Training Baseball Spring Fever, I stopped by one of my favorite card stores and rip a few packs. Even though I probably didn't need the cards, as you will see soon. I want to pull one of those Topps 75th Anniversary buybacks. I really want to pull one. Really. Mostly to see a piece of actual cardboard in a pack of baseball cards again.

I've purchased 6 of the ten card Hobby Packs so far. Only 12 more to go until I hit a Buyback at 1:18. Right?

I also had to break my Olympics spell. I even cheated on baseball cards and peeked at another sport's cards. I'm sure you'd understand the pull of this card.

Oh the things that happen when I have access to cable TV and eBay (via app) at the same time.

But I didn't pull that trigger. I'll miss Curling for four years though. Sometimes I wonder, though, how much I need 2.5" x 3.5" slices of cardstock when I can summon an image of anything I want in just seconds.

But I still need them. So I bought some today. Three hobby packs, 30 cards. I got 2 inserts, a Red Hot Foil parallel (my only Tiger, the basically nice Don Kelly), and 21 baseball player torsos.

I'm glad I didn't try to play Five Card Challenge with a 5 card pack from the Dollar Tree store today. That would have been very, very challenging. I like the Don Kelly card, it's so basically happy, and I love the action shot of Garrett Jones, though as usual I have to wonder about Topps' decisions on who to put in Series 1, at such an unsettled position as First Base in Pittsburgh this year.

Ahh well. I'll eventually read all the backs of these cards, and I did learn that G. Jones hit one into the Allegheny River last year, thanks Topps. But otherwise, a short pile of boring baseball cards. I figured out why Series One bores me this year....I'll have a post on that soon.

Of course, that random itch to rip a few packs of cards was only part of the reason I stopped off at the baseball card store today. I also wanted to be 101% certain I had my name on something new, coming soon...a Hobby Box of Heritage...

ALCS FLCS pick-up

I like Broadcaster cards. Cards of Broadcasters in action, or ballplayer cards of the ex-ballplayers. I'll show you some of my few prides and joys some day when I am actually at home, where my cards live.

For all of this thrilling edition of an ALCS, I have been traveling, where blogging is difficult. But the other day a both fortunate and unfortunate rain delay (for my work, not for the game that night, fortunately), allowed me to visit my Friendly Local Card Shop. Yes, the one I was worried about in my previous post.

So I have some wonderful new Sea Turtles to babble about. Hobby Sea Turtles at that. Awesome Nomar Garciaparra pull so far.

Hey, wait! He played for the wrong team. Fortunately, I also picked up this long-time desired card:

Only one-fiddy! Not three. Why haven't I started buying these cheap old Vintage cards a long time ago? Oh, yeah, they're not exactly sold on the street corners out in the backwoods where there are no street corners.

I like this card thanks to the lurking light-tower and a stadium's upper deck (such comforting photo elements, so.....Vintage) also because of the back:

Which brings you some reminders of a few of the stories Jim likes to tell during his broadcasts - he is from Hershey, PA, and he enjoyed playing 2 sports in high school, doing well at each.

Tomorrow night I will be listening intently to the Tigers broadcast, from the opening interview with Jim Leyland to Dan Dickerson's final sign-off. Well, hopefully I can skip the sign-off, because they will play again on Sunday.

Whenever the Tigers are playing a possible elimination game or game 162 of the regular season, I absorb the radio broadcast, which mean a lot to me. Probably to save it all up for the offseason. I don't like the offseason. The Hot Stove League just doesn't do it for me.

I'll write more on the Tigers' radio team some other time. Hopefully when I finally pick up the other 2 Jim Price cards that I believe exist from his playing days. I would love to discover some new ones from the 21st Century though I doubt any exist.

Who listens to the radio anymore anyway?

Withdrawal Symptoms

It was a very long week in a baseball-less black hole. About an hour in any direction from any store that sold baseball cards. Although my phone worked as a phone, data service in total boondocks is mind-blowingly amazing in some places, and non-existent in others, such as where I kept ending up.

Even worse, the hour-to-the-baseball-card-store was also the distance to the same small outposts of humanity that hosted an AM radio station hosting a baseball broadcast. Which is not close enough for low-power AM radio stations any more. Oh how I miss the days of my youth, when I could measure the distance to a baseball broadcast by how many state lines there were between me and the radio station.

Some teams still have games on such stations of course, but not the Tigers. I will never ever forget being in northern Michigan in October, 2006, and having to listen to a Tigers playoff game on a clear-as-day station from New York. With the Yankees announcers. Because where I was sitting in Michigan, none of the Tigers radio network could be pulled in.

But all great jobs come to an end, and along the way home I was ever so happy to find a Wal•Mart. I'll ponder the place tomorrow. For now, let's see what I found inside:

Yep, a sticker I have been chasing. To ease back into the 21st Century and some cheap baseball picture products I went with a few packs of 2013 Topps MLB Stickers. I had a hunch buying them in a different locale might shake up the Topps sorting machine enough to get me several I need, and my managerial instincts were correct. Kaline at last. Still just a few Tigers to go. And logo stickers. I forget just exactly which right now. At least I already have Scherzer, though I hope next year Topps sees fit to celebrate like I do when pitchers get a W _and_ a GWRBI.

A surprising sticker though. Almost every team in the set has a fan-beloved veteran in their short checklist. But all of them I have seen so far included an image from their playing days. Instead we see Kaline acknowledging some sort of tribute right there at Comerica Park, with his old TV broadcast partner's name there next to his left ear. But somehow appropriate for a fan-beloved veteran still very much involved in helping his baseball team win games every day.

And as usual, even in a pack of 16¢ stickers, Topps hooks me up with baseball player pictures I haven't seen before, amidst all the many stickers I already have, and the many I have already seen on their other products.

Why here is a skinny Oakland "A" that somehow seems familiar. Skinny like Billy Beane. Long blonde hair like Brad Pitt. I'm so confused now. With a frame like that, how in the heck did Reddick hit those home runs last year, and for that one week this year? Beware the Topps Voodoo, Josh. Leave it to Topps to reveal the real deal on those baseball players. Topps, always bringing me closer to the game and its leading players, just like they pledged to me on the back of that Fernando Rodney relic they CONGRATULATED me on receiving twice last year.

It seemed to be a bit of an Oakland A hot box of stickers with Reggie Jackson about to swat one all the way, way up there to the southern shore of Lake Superior, a baseball purgatory if there ever was one; yet every little town still with a Little League diamond. One of the stickers had more official MLB news from Topps, as it announced that a Little Leaguer is all grown-up now:

Bye Tommy.

Another sticker shows us what happens in a perfect world after Superman slides into 3rd base:

He simply trots home when the next batter smacks a home run and all the fans ignore him while they stand up to watch the ball fly. A perfect world being the world of baseball stickers for kids that don't need to have anything at all on the back, such as stats for a season with 50 less games played than the year before. But I am a sucker for baseball cards, err, pictures including a standing crowd.

And even after perusing a couple-three thousand baseball picture cards the last couple-three years, Topps also hooked me up with a baseball image archetype I don't think I have seen:

That's binder material there. Though of course, that would be stuck on the outside of the binder. If only we could have got a bit of red in the image so we could have a perfect touch of the irony of a foreign-born player so perfectly honoring our own country. I feel bad for Topps sometimes having to try and make good looking baseball image products with the materials the Brewers give them to work with. I predict many more throwback uni cards in the Brewer's roster's future. They did hook up Gallardo with a great card in Series One though, totally worth the 14 ~ 20some¢ it would cost you to acquire, if you don't count the costs of all those doubles.

Now maybe those of you with a couple-three score thousand baseball cards have seen a great National Anthem deal like that one before. Either way, we all like classic baseball images, like this one:

Red, White, Blue. Can't be beat. Fly your own flag, Anthony. Roll that logo back up the hill, again. Playing in Chicago must surely be one of the more Sisyphean tasks in the Universe. Everything I need to know about baseball, I learn from Topps.

Spring Treat

I think this is an annual treat on the Tigers Spring Training broadcasts....Al Kaline sat in the booth with Dan & Jim on Tuesday for the first 4 innings or so.

I did not know this was to happen; I caught most of the game on Monday and did not recall them mentioning this ahead of time, but it is easy to miss a sentence or two in a baseball broadcast. I'll be paying better attention this time next year, and I'll Be Prepared. For Realz. Cuz I sure punted it today.

The above is my only Al Kaline card, I think. I'm not sure I'm looking forward to trying to acquire his '74 Record Breaker card from '75, but I have been banking up trade items to publicize eventually. I'm not that into the '87 mini from last year; I've never been a fan of the wood paneled cards, nor the gimmick mini sets, so I'm not chasing the rest of that set either. I am doing the '72s this year because I like colorful cards, and I know the Night Owl will get Ultra•Pro to make us nice binder pages to display them eventually. The backs are so hard to read I might make them double fronted pages with 2 cards per slot.

I have also been lukewarm on reprint cards of past stars. The Kaline is another one that thawed me, after the '11 Kimball Champions I guess. What baseball fan dislikes any kind of Babe Ruth card? But do I really want a card of every Hall of Famer in every Topps style ever designed? No, not really. I'll just keep random examples I like. And how long until a player has more post-retirment cards than active career cards? I'm sure that already happened to some. I pulled a sweet Carlton Fisk retro recently that I do look forward to Googling and babbling.

I don't really plan on chasing any other Kaline cards either (I know they'll fall out of packs whether I want them or not), although I root for the Tigers now and have tremendous respect for Kaline. Currently he plays an important not-just-a-figurehead role in the Tigers organization. Last year he was sent to the Double-A affiliate in Erie, PA, to evaluate top Tigers prospect Nick Castellanos and help in the coaching process of converting him from playing Third Base to the Outfield. The result was the promotion of Avisail Garcia to The Show instead, based on Al's visit. Both are still prime prospects for the Tigers, though I wouldn't be surprised to see one of them traded away by early summer if the Tigers bullpen needs shoring up. The Tigers are under tremendous pressure to erase memories of being swept in the World Series last fall, and there is only one possible way to do that. Just Win, Baby. Now!

I moved to Michigan in the winter of 1977, 2 full seasons after Kaline retired. I wasn't a Tigers fan before that, and the Tigers were a very unlikely selection to see on Kubek & Garagiola's Game of the Week in the mid-70s. And that was pretty much the only game in town for Baseball on the TV back then.

Not long after I was all settled in the Mitten State, I discovered Tigers TV Broadcasts with Al Kaline and George Kell. They were on a local broadcast station. As in over-the-air. For Free. All you needed was any ole TV set and probably a pair of rabbit ears antenna. I sure miss those days. Sure, a baseball game wasn't on your TV for free every single time your team played. But the occasional games were marked with some buzz around town all day long - "Hey, the Tigs are on TV today....whatcha doing later?"

George and Al were both so smooth I can barely recall who did play-by-play and who was the Story Guy (you know, the job called the "Color Analyst"). The Story Guy gets to say "Back in those days" a lot on a baseball broadcast, and it seemed to be a common lead phrase for Kaline. I got to hear him say it several times today. But really I know Kell (RIP) was the smoother one and he handled play-by-play. Kaline was a very enjoyable broadcaster though.

[Even though that is an image from a 'baseball card' from the 1983 Story of Al Kaline set by some minor publisher, I'm not posting this to get that set. That single card above I would like, yes. I like broadcaster cards and will type about them another time. But I doubt singles from that player-specific set float around much.]

They called games in an era quite different from the Baseball on the TV landscape today, where I always think we could be eventually headed towards a pay-for-each-game model if we want to watch one on TV. I would be partially OK with that if it included a pick your own camera angle menu, and a live mic placed just behind the Home Plate umpire, but I doubt that will ever happen.

At least now, all the cable subscribers in the country are helping prop up ball player's salaries through the mandatory inclusion of sports channels in expensive cable packages, whether the subscriber watches sports or not. Houston, I predict turbulence ahead. Seems all those subscribers heard about this thing called the Internet...

But not really for me. I mostly listen to Baseball on the Radio, courtesy of the mobile Internet usually. If I want to see Baseball on the TV, I reach for my baseball card binders. And I discovered one helluva great TV looking card today, but it needs a perfect presentation on the web for y'all to enjoy. A quick phone-camera shot wouldn't do it justice.

I wish I could tell you more of what Kaline discussed on the broadcast. Plenty of stories from Back In Those Days (no, not one of my goofy Frankenset titles. Yet.), and a delicate discussion of the Tigers final roster moves, considering that Kaline gives input to Tigers GM Dave Dombrowski on those moves. I think they are down to 30 players as I type.

Kaline did mention that it used to be a sign of dis-respect to the pitcher if the batter took such a huge swing at the plate that the batter fell down, and tensions in that particular game would rise a little bit. I wasn't clear on whether this happened in the Tigers<>Braves game today, but I think so. Now it is just shrugged off by everyone as a failed attempt at a huge rip. That was an interesting story.

The Amazing Al also told the story of a pitcher who would do his warm-ups and for the final pitch would deliberately throw a heater wildly up into the foul ball screen, just to keep the batter thinking about what could happen on each pitch. I missed the name; I was working adjacent to a school playground and the recess shrieking was extra loud right then.

And I missed many other bits of the broadcast unfortunately, and if you have read along this far, I hope to help someone who has the otherwise wonderful MLB At Bat App '13 on their iPhone app. I will write up a little bit more on it but I was waiting till Opening Day for that - such a great app.

Why did I screw up such a great day for catching some Baseball on the Radio? Yesterday morning I was perusing the general MLB headlines (see, I told y'all I knew there was a techie solution for that) over a cup of coffee, and I set the phone down in the truck before closing the app. And then several hours later I learned the hard way a slight flaw in the At Bat App - it won't put the phone to sleep if there are x minutes of inactivity, like other apps do. And since MLB action seems to be a 24/7 proposition with possible score changes and headline articles to read, it is constantly pinging the cell towers for more MLB data nuggets. The app user must have constant brand-new baseball info. The app user must have constant brand-new baseball info. The app user ....

So when I picked up my phone to catch what turned out to be one of the best broadcasts all spring, it was nearly out of juice in the battery. And I couldn't afford to just sit in the truck and listen to the game. Some jobs I could have slid my schedule around for that one, but not yesterday's.

Sunk on loving some baseball broadcast action by my love of baseball news. Thanks MLB app designer. That's baseball of course. You win some, you lose some. And there's always next year.

In the beginning, there were no Baseball cards

So I've wondered for a long time how Dan Dickerson, the play-by-play radio announcer for the Detroit Tigers (that's him on the left with his broadcast partner Jim Price) would open his first Spring Training broadcast.

His famous predecessor, Ernie Harwell, read this poem every year to open the season on the radio:

For, lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

But of course Dan could hardly just repeat Ernie, now could he?

Yet every late February I am never in Michigan, as I work in the south-eastern states that time of year.

A couple years ago I found a great solution for catching Tigers broadcasts while traveling - MLB's "app" for smartphones. For a one-time fee (this year one can pay in monthly installments), every MLB game is streamed to your phone, from either team's broadcast.

Finally this year (perhaps last, but not in 2011), this app carries Spring Training broadcasts.

Normally Tigers broadcasts start 25 minutes before the First Pitch time. So last Friday I had spent the morning buying an iTunes card and installing the 2013 version of the app. I was running errands before heading to a meeting with a client, nebulously set up for "a little after lunch", to give me time to catch the beginning of the broadcast.

Many of these errands revolved around baseball cards. First I attempted to visit an official Topps dealer based on the dealer map on the Topps website. I have two "Spring Fever" redemption cards to turn in for packs of a special set of cards. This was a FAIL. The dealer had moved to a new address.

Next I drove over to a Toys R Us attempting to purchase some of their exclusive packages with purple parallel versions of the new 2013 Topps baseball cards. Another FAIL - all sold out there.

Then I caught up on some mailing and copying tasks at an office supply chain store. While doing that I finally sent in some of the 2013 wrappers for the special wrapper redemption cards. In my heart I knew it was probably too late, another FAIL, but I hoped maybe the karma of sending them minutes before my team's first game of Spring Training might rub off on the envelope and some Topps employee would have mercy on me.

Upon leaving the office place, I found myself across the parking lot from a Target store. By this time it was nearing 12:30; First Pitch was scheduled for 1:05 in Florida. A little more than ten minutes till the broadcast, I thought. So....might as well run in and pick up, yes, more baseball cards. Target has the red parallels of course. I literally ran to the store, hurried to the wonderful card section, and grabbed a 'blaster' box.

I made it back to the truck at 12:39 - perfect! I got the MLB app up and running and streaming over the truck speakers and heard: Nothing. More FAIL? I couldn't tell. Maybe the broadcast just hadn't started yet. Fortunately, I had the ten new packs of cards to occupy my time. I don't need much more of the 2013 Topps "Flagship" set, or what I call the "Base" set, but I do like extra copies of the cards to play with in various ways. (These will be revealed in the months to come on this blog).

But the new cards were just one more case of FAIL on this day now going rapidly downhill. I thought all blasters in Target had some of the red parallels. But no, only the 'specially marked boxes' have them. Definite FAIL.

Just as I was thinking it was time to hit the road to my client meeting, the static on the speakers cleared and Dan Dickerson's voice came across loud and clear:

"In the beginning, there was no Baseball." The verse from B.J. Phillips continues "But ever since, there have been few beginning as good as the start of a baseball season. It is the most splendid time in sport."

Dickerson explained a bit more of the source last year:

"I don't even know who B.J. Phillips is. But I found this saying in Time Magazine in 1980, liked it, and open every year with it."

I could of Googled all this long ago, as I have writing this post, but I have always wanted to hear it for myself. And now I know.

The actual first game of Spring Training was a nice one for the Tigers, though like all Baseball games, it could not have been well predicted in advance. I kept my client meeting short and got back to my truck and the game as fast as possible. The steady stream of various Braves pitchers actually had a No Hitter going until the 8th inning. Has there ever been a No Hitter in Spring Training? Dan & Jim weren't sure. They weren't too excited about trying to find out either. I still don't know.

Finally Tyler Collins, an A/AA prospect in the outfield, hit a triple. Then Jeff Kobernus, a Rule 5 pick-up, knocked him in. Always nice to see a Rule 5 player do well. Collins had another hit his next time up and also had some nice defensive plays.

The Tigers won the game, but that isn't important. Some potential future Tigers did well, and that is always good. And baseball is back!


Oh, and while I plan to write about baseball cards as well as occasionally the Tigers, while following the season via radio broadcasts and baseball cards, I won't be able to show you cards all that often. Unless taking pictures of them works out. I will be working on the road until a bit past Opening Day sometime, and thus unable to scan in the images of my beloved little glossies.

So, in the beginning of my blog, there are no Baseball cards.