Funniest Auction I've Seen Lately

 A few of friends have asked why I'm not as big into baseball memorabilia and cards anymore. My complete answer consists of many layers and is quite longwinded. 

The picture below sums up one of my bullet points nicely. 

Vogelbach's autograph with a "Dingers & Donuts" inscription

Dan Vogelbach is a fun guy. He is big boy and has perhaps an even bigger personality. 

Earlier this season Vogelbach notably said, "I hit my home runs in bunches, just like I get my donuts."

Again, the Vogelmonster has been a favorite of mine ever since I learned of his fun loving ways. 

Yet, ten grand for a Vogelbach autographed baseball got me to snicker and sigh all at once. 

Wow.

Rooting for Buck

 Later this evening MLB Network will reveal the names of those players from the Early Baseball Era and Golden Days Era who are to be enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame.  Each of the ballots consist of ten players, and 75% of the 16 person selection committee needs to vote for an individual to get the nod. You can find more information about the selection process and the different committees at the National Baseball Hall of Fame's website.

 I have opinions about many of the twenty combined names on the ballots, but I'm all-in on one particular individual: Buck O'Neil. 

 I visited the Negro League Baseball Museum in January of 2008, which started me down a rabbit hole about the often underrecognized Negro Leagues. I've learned a lot about many of the greats, like Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige and Cool Papa Bell, but Buck O'Neil has become my favorite. 

 I actually had a somewhat comprehensive write-up on O'Neil's career and influence when I was counting down my favorite bobbleheads in my collection back in 2012.  Buck O'Neil's name is all over the game of baseball. 

Since then I have been tracking down baseball cards which focus on the Negro Leagues and anything Buck O'Neil related which I may happen upon. Yes, in fact, he is represented in my Folder of Fun.

Dreams Fulfilled and artist Graig Kreindler produced a 184 card set celebrating the Negro Leagues during the summer of 2020. I wrote a blogpost after purchasing a copy of the set and the first two cards I spotlighted were of Buck O'Neil. 

Fast forward to this past summer and I read The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America.  This book was just the pick-me-up I needed after a year of pandemic teaching. Buck seemed to have had such a positive influence on everyone he met and he possessed a special talent of being able to put a positive spin on nearly every situation. 

 Recently, I've jumped back into blogging a bit by showing off Mail Day purchases. A particularly special one arrived a week ago, but I saved it for today's post. 

I never met Mr. Buck O'Neil, but Joe Posnanski's book resonated so strongly within me that I felt I needed to immortalize Buck within my own collection. I haven't been this excited about adding a singular card to my handcrafted storage box in quite sometime.  Assuredly, this card was a pricey acquisition, but completely worth it.  

Good luck today, Buck!

My Favorite Manager of All-Time

No mail today, but I do have another card that's been sitting on my desk which arrived over the past weekend.

I don't really remember Andre Dawson swatting 49 homers and winning the NL MVP for the last place Cubs in 1987. I was only nine years old at the time and professional baseball was still a foreign concept to me. 

Two years later I was memorizing the backs of baseball cards and following The Boys of Zimmer as close as I possibly could, as the Cubs were on their way to winning the NL East. What a fun summer that was!

Ryno, The Hawk and Mad Dog were the big names, but they had a great supporting cast in Dunston, Grace, Sutcliffe, Wild Thing, Les Lancaster, Mike Bielecki, Dwight Smith and Jerome Walton.

For the record, I think these movie poster cards from Topps, found in Archives, are a pretty creative idea. Good on Topps. 

Rino? Never seen it spelled that way before!

Don Zimmer seemed to be the glue that kept my favorite childhood team together. I'm not sure if he's my favorite manager of all-time, because maybe that's Joe Maddon's spot, but it's difficult to best memories from one's youth. 

Do you have a favorite manager?

That Went Better Than Expected

 About two weeks ago my guy, Daniel Vogelbach, broke the Cardinals' hearts with a pinch hit walk-off grand slam. 

Pinch hit homers are very cool. Grand slams are most excellent. Combine the two with a walk-off and we have something worthy of Topps's attention. 

For a second I thought about purchasing one copy of the Topps Now card commemorating such a VOGELMNSTER event. And then I saw the back of the card.

I knew right then I must have at least two copies, one for my player collection and one to place in the Folder of Fun. 

Then I thought it might be a good idea to just purchase a lot of ten. Two cards would set me back $20, whereas there's a price break for ten at $5 per card. 

You see, I had my sites on a parallel. Vogelbach has not been included in a major release all year. So it's been a very slow year adding to my favorite player collection. An extra card in the form of parallel would be so sweet!

I could hopefully sell the extra Vogeys on Ebay and/or Twitter, snag a parallel, and keep a few base cards for my collection. In all, I pre-sold five on-line, which left me with five for my collection. I didn't make any money on the five I sold, but knowing the total cost to me was now only $25 and I made some other Vogelbach fans happy was a total win. 

Today the cards came in. 

Wow. I hit three parallels! I'm only missing the 1/1 and the red parallel, which is numbered to 10. Pictured above are the blue (48/49), purple (03/25) and the orange (2/5).  For what it's worth, 524 of these cards were made in all and there are 90 total parallels. Roughly one out of every 5.8 cards is a parallel. I think I beat the odds!

The five pre-sold copies are already packaged up and ready to ship with tomorrow's mail. The other two base cards will slide right into my collection as planned. 

Part of me almost wonders if Topps knows that I'm a Vogelbach super collector. Regardless, it was a fun buying experience which added four more Vogelmonsters to my collection! Woo-Hoo!

Thanks for stopping by!

Expansion?

 Expansion in the sports world has always caught my attention. When I was first introduced to baseball there were twenty-six teams in MLB. The Rockies and Marlins were added 1993 and the whole process was just so fascinating to me. I read everything I could about the player draft, mascot selection, uniforms, team colors, and anything else that I could find in print. None of the luster wore off when the Diamondbacks and Devil Rays were added five years later. 

There have been rumblings about expansion the last couple of years in MLB. I for one would love to see four divisions of four teams each in the AL & NL. Add in a two wild card teams in each league and give the top two teams first round byes and I'd be elated. I Nashville and Las Vegas would make good additions. No?

I'm thinking about expanding also. Recently I was sent a pair of PWEs from Jeff, the author of Wax Pack Wonders, which got my wheels turning. 

Above are a bunch of Cubs cards numbered 672 or higher. Jeff thought he would give me a head start on expanding my Cubs FrankenSet past 671.

You might be wondering why I stopped at 671. Well, there's two main reasons:

1. I originally was going to stop at 650, but I used some page markers for ever 50 cards in the binder. Doing so pushed me to 653 to fill a full page. Argh. I had a bunch of cards pulled that were numbered higher than 653 so I decided to add another 18 cards, which landed me at 671. For what it's worth, I am not a fan of empty pockets. 
2. The higher the numbers the more I thought my set would be dominated by Topps. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I was going for variety in players and card designs. 

Jeff sent 14 cards from Topps and the other card manufacturers were only represented by the four cards below. 

Here's a snapshot of what the backend of the FrankenSet checklist currently looks like: 

As you can see, Topps is king when it homes to the "high" numbers.

I'm not sure if I'm going to run with Jeff's expansion idea, but I'm not going to immediately sort these cards into my collection either. I'm going to think on it. It could be fun to chase down another 100+ cards until I get 792, which would be another hat-tip to Topps. We'll see!

Thanks for cards, Jeff! 

What do you think? Should I expand my Cubs FrankenSet? 

What about MLB expansion? Maybe MLB should focus on settling the new CBA this off season and work on "fixing" baseball before diluting the talent pool?

Corkball Bat

 Last weekend my parents went to an estate sale in their neighborhood, and knowing their son loves anything and everything baseball related they forked over $4 for a corkball bat. 

I had never heard of corkball before, but from what I can tell it's a variation of stickball. There are no baserunners in this game and the size of a standard playing field is 30 feet by 250 feet. As few as two people, the pitcher and batter, can play at a time. If the ball is batted between 15 and 150 feet then the batter is awarded a single, 150 to 200 feet is a double, 200 to 250 feet is a triple, and if the ball clears 250 feet then it's a home run. 

The ball itself is the same size as a baseball, but its interior is nearly all cork and it weighs about a third of a traditional baseball. 

This particular bat looks well-loved and from what I find through online searches it appears production started in the 1950's in the St. Louis area. I don't think this one is 60 years old, but I bet it's been around for at least a few decades. This exact model can still be purchased online today from Markwort for $42!

The corkball bat is 36 inches in length and the barrel is only 1.5 inches in diameter. For reference, the picture above shows the corkball bat leaning up against the wall next to my bat collection, which includes my two coaching fungos on the far right. 

I'm not sure if I'll just decorate the man room with the bat or maybe purchase some whiffle golf balls and use them with the bat as a training aide for my sophomore baseball players. 

Thanks for the bat, Mom and Dad!

My 1,000 Mile Jaunt Through Wisconsin

 Typically, I take one baseball themed road trip each summer. I stayed at home in 2020, because attending baseball games was not an option. This year I saw four games in five days, with an opportunity to see the Brewers play on my last day, but with Vogelbach being on the injured list I just kept on driving by Milwaukee on my way home. Get well soon, Vogey!

I started my trip out with a a card show just west of Milwaukee. There were only a dozen or so vendors there and only one had dime cards, but that was enough for me. I purchased around 150 cards from this gentleman. 

It's hard to pass up Ohtani cards for a dime each!

I wish this was a Cubs card, but I'll take what I can get when it comes to Theo. 

Starting Lineup, Canseco pitching, an oddball of Greg Luzinski and The Chicken. The boxes had a great selection!

These cards will go straight into my Folder of Fun. 

Again, just some really neat cards!

On this baseball trip I decided to try something different. Usually I try to knock another MLB stadium or two off my list, but this time I went the amateur and minor league route. 

First up was a game between the Kenosha King Fish and the Battle Creek Bombers. I arrived in the sixth inning of the first game of a doubleheader and watched the King Fish bullpen play spikeball in the outfield between games. 

Here's a picture of their mascot using a zip line during his grand entrance. Pretty cool!

The two teams belong to the collegiate Northwoods League. The rosters were crammed full of players from Big Ten schools and others around the country. I left the nightcap after the 3rd inning (2+ hours for 3 innings, ugh!) when the King Fish jumped ahead 14 to 2. They ended up winning 17 to 5.

My second game was in a western suburb of Milwaukee, and featured the Milkmen and the Gary Southshore Railcats, of the American Association, which is an independent league. 

This ballpark was absolutely gorgeous and I really took to their mascot, Bo Vine. He was extremely interactive with the crowd and I thought his uniform number, 2%, was pretty unique. 

I'm not sure I know what a railcat is, and I'm wondering if the scoreboard operator did either. Each player had a different picture of a cat, like grumpy cat! I got a chuckle out of that. 

I traveled up to Rhinelander and soon found out about the legend of the Hodag. 

In short, it was a publicity stunt in the 1890's, but the Hodag is kind of revered in Rhinelander. It's even the high school mascot!

The next day I played disc golf at three different courses. My favorite, oddly enough, was a local dump not too long ago. 

My main reason for heading north for this trip was to watch a game of Snowshoe baseball. 

Yes, Snowshoe baseball. If you're looking for more information here's the article which initially caught my attention. It does a great job describing the events of an evening in Lake Tomahawk. 

Dinner. Mmmmm...

I went for a cheeseburger and two slices of pie. 

Everything is donated, from the buns, to the meat, to the pies, to the wood chips on the field. All the proceeds are donated to a local cause and the entire community supports the effort. This demonstration of support and community kind of actually makes me want to move to Lake Tomahawk. 

Here's the pie board. Town members would walk up and donate their pie and the volunteers would divide it into eight pieces and place it in the refrigerators. The white board would see a LOT of action during the night! I had one piece of raspberry for dinner and one piece of peanut butter.

Then I went back and bought a piece of lemon meringue for dessert. I mean, hey, it was all for a good cause!

Here's a picture of the home team strapping on their showshoes. 

Below is a snapshot of the infield from my seat. By the time the game started there wasn't a seat to be had and there were more folding and camp chairs than I cared to count. 

I'm hoping this short video will give you an idea of how the game was played.  

They played nine innings and used a sixteen inch softball. My biggest take away was that everyone was there to have fun, including the umpires and announcer. Just a tremendously fun outing!

The next day I played another disc golf course in Manitowac, right on Lake Michigan. There were 36 holes in all, but #26 was definitely the highlight. Certainly not your traditional basket!

That evening I saw the South Bend Cubs play against the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers in Appleton. 

The Timber Rattlers have the best minor league ballpark I've seen for the A-level, and I've seen many. It could easily host a AAA team if given the chance. 

How about this for a carrying device for your concession stand purchases? Innovative. It was $2 beer night, so these boards with four holes cut into them were a pretty common around the park. 

My hat goes off to the scoreboard operator again. The Cubs had a fellow by the name of Ryan Reynolds in the lineup. Every other Cub had their head shot on the board, except for Mr. Reynolds. Good stuff. 

On the last day of my trip I played my sixth different course of the trip. 

Like many of the courses there were two tee pads and two basket locations. I knew going into the trip my arm wouldn't be able to take 135 holes of golf from the longs, so I played the shortest distances during each outing. I scored fairly well and came back to P-town with a nice boost to my disc golf ego!

What's gcool is I was able to play the three top rated courses in Wisconsin, according to the Udisc app, and each one was quite noteworthy in their own way. 

Here's a summary of my trip by the numbers:

Miles driven = 1,274

Days/Nights = 5 days and 4 nights

Aunts Stayed With = 1 night with Aunt Beth (Thanks, Aunt Beth!)

Ball games attended = 4 (Kenosha King Fish, Milwaukee Milkmen, Lake Tomahawk Snowhawks, Wisconsin Timber Rattlers)

Disc Golf Courses Played = 6 (Adeliade Park, Rookery Run, Sandy Point, Brandy Lake, Silver Creek, Rollin Ridge)

Disc Golf Holes Played = 135

Discs Found & Lost = 2 found & ZERO lost (Woo-Hoo!)

Mosquito bites suffered = Zero (but I used a bunch of bug spray)

Pie consumed = 3 pieces (raspberry, peanut butter, lemon meringue)

Beers consumed = 3 total (the best was Blue Bobber by Fox River Brewing Company)

Culver's Visited/Seen = Only stopped at one, but saw at least two dozen of the restaurant

Favorite Food (non-pie category) = Deep Fried Cheese Curds at Franklin Field, home of the Milkmen

Baseball Card Shops/Shows = 3 shops & 1 show attended 

Best Card Related Purchase = I finally found a 1985 Topps baseball set for a good price! Woot!

Consecutive days seeing Great Blue Heron = 4

Books Read = 1 

If you need a pick me up, then I would like to suggest The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America. 

Buck O'Neil was such a positive person. What stuck with me most through this book was how he could take any hardship, slight, or negative situation and always find the good in it. It's a quick read with many great stories about Negro League players. If you have the time, then I highly suggest. 

So, that's my summer trip. I feel more or less rejuvenated, although not quite ready to get back in the classroom. Lucky for me I still have a little time to get myself prepared. 

Thanks for reading about my trip! I hope you were able to take a summer vacation that made you smile as much as I did on mine!

A Post because Vogelbach was Trending

 I was out in the yard helping my wife set up soaker hoses in FIVE different beds when I came inside and saw a Twitter notification on my phone. 

Oh, Yeah?  Let's goooooo!  (Big time hat tip to PKS!

Guess which shirt I'm wearing today? My sister gave me this gem for my birthday two years ago. 

I think I wear this shirt every weekend. 😁

Also, the shirt is right on the mark, as the VOGELMONSTER went deep twice today. 

If you're into watch big guys destroy baseballs here are the links to home run #1 and home run #2.

Just for good measure, here's the latest Dan Vogelbach card I added to my collection this past week. It's another one of those parallels from the 2011 Donruss Elite Extra Edition set. 

A ten year old, pre-rookie auto of my favorite masher for under a five spot (including shipping) on Ebay. 

Man, I'm living the good the life. Thanks for reading and have a great week!

Vintage Scorecards from Mom

 During my last visit to my parents' house my mom handed me a file folder from her youth. Mom & Dad have been making their way through the many boxes housed in their storage space in their basement. I actually have a stack of boxes, from my childhood, which I need to retrieve, but today's post will focus on some baseball related content from Mom's childhood.  

First up is a couple of pages from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from July 12, 1966. 

Thousands of "A" students had their names published in the paper. Hey, look! There's my mom!

Also, within the paper are messages from the MLB Commissioner, the AL and NL presidents, and August A. Busch, Jr., the president of Anheuser Busch.

14,545 students were given a ticket in the reserved seating area for the efforts in the classroom. Very cool.

Next up is a St. Louis Cardinals score card from the 1965 season. 

The first thing I noticed when opening up the scorecard were the penciled in attendance numbers at the top of the page, "22,003 people - 8,100 A Students."

Other things to note are some of the names from the game on August 18th, 1965, which include Felipe Alou, Hank Aaron, Joe Torre, Lou Brock and Curt Flood. Unfortunately, all of those honors students went home disappointed as the Milwaukee Braves defeated the Cardinals 5-3 on this day. Lastly, check out the "special plays" section at the bottom of the score card. I've never seen anything like that before. 

Here's another scorecard from the same year, but this one drew my interest a little more as the Cubs visited St. Louis.

Billy Williams, Ron Santo and Ernie Banks came to town and defeated the Cardinals 12-4, on June 25th, 1965.

Inside the scorecard was a 50+ year old relic: 

Aren't peanuts around $4 in a stadium these days?

Here's a slightly older scorecard from August 24th, 1964.

The Cardinals were able to turn the Pirates away, by the score of 5-1.

The Pirates had Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell and Bill Mazeroski in the lineup, but the late Bob Gibson put together this line: 9 innings, 6 hits, 1 earned run, 2 walks and 12 strikeouts. Wow. 

One more side note: The Cardinals began the day in 4th place (65-58) and 11 games behind the Phillies in the NL, but they would rally the last month of the season and eventually defeat the Yankees in the World Series. 

There were four more scorecards in Mom's file folder.

June 17th, 1966 - Phillies 6 and Cardinals 5. The Phillies had Dick Allen and Bob Uecker in the lineup.

June 29th, 1966 - Cardinals 2 and Giants 1. The Giants started Juan Marichal, Willie Mays and Willie McCovey. 

July 8th, 1966 - Astros 6 and Cardinals 1. Jim "The Toy Cannon" Wynn and Rusty Staub were the big names in Houston's lineup, which handed Bob Gibson the loss.

July 13th, 1967 - Pirates 8 and Cardinals 5. The Pirates bested Steve Carlton in this match-up. The Pirates' lineup was loaded with recognizable names, Clemente, Stargell, Maz, Manny Mota and Maury Wills. 

The Cardinals were a force to be reckoned with during the middle part of the 60's, winning it all in 1964 and 1967, but they only managed to win two games of the seven my mom attended during this time. Sometimes that's the way it goes I guess. 

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with these scorecards, but I sure did enjoy flipping through them and seeing my mom's handwriting throughout. 

Thanks for stopping by!