SI Kids, for Me!

So, I'm reading through the posts on my blogroll the other day and I came across Wrigley Roster Jenga's post about Sports Illustrated Kids sports cards. Often times reading WRJ's material and Wrigley Wax's musing are my favorites, but sometimes they show Cubs cards I wish I could also have in my collection. I wouldn't say it makes me jealous as much as it makes me a little bit sad.

So yeah, I saw the above Ben Zobrist card I was a little bummed. It's not exactly a card I can go and pick up at my LCS or have fall out of a retail pack of cards. I really enjoy Ben Zobrist cards and who doesn't love a nice oddball baseball card?

Then a PWE from out east hit my mailbox, literally a day later. As it turns out, I apparently know people who can hook me up!

My mood cardboard collecting mood did a complete 180 in less than twenty-four hours!

 Not only do I now have the Zobrist, but I also have the Kris Bryant card from the month before. How cool is that?

 Yeah, I'm pretty excited about adding these to my collection. The numbers on the back are #581 and #588, which means they would really fit well in the back end of Cubs FrankenSet, because many of the cards over #500 are from the junk wax era. It's fairly rare when I get a star player with a number that high; so many of the players in those last pages have names like Paul Assenmacher, Hector Villanueva, Greg Hibbard and Chico Walker.

Yet, these two cards would also look good in the their respective player collections. Decisions, decisions. Real first world problems here.  😀

Thanks for thinking of me, AJ. I owe you big time!

She's Baaaaaack!

The author of A Cracked Bat, Julie, re-emerged from her hiatus the other day and immediately invoked a No-Trade Clause with all bloggers. Sometimes life gets in the way of this great hobby of ours. I totally get it, because my baseball coaching season kicks off in just about a month. It can be a very overwhelming feeling when packages start piling up on your desk. Organizing and collating cards into your collection is one thing, but trying to blog about them all can be especially time consuming and somewhat stressful.

Julie, I hope you enjoy the cards I've sent you in 2016... don't feel the need to write up a trade post or anything. Hakuna Matata and all that jazz. Just enjoy the cards when you have the time!

Meanwhile, I have some loyal readers who want to see little cardboard rectangles with pictures of grown men dressed uniformly on them. So, here's the best of what Julie sent me earlier this week!

I'm all in on Carl Edwards. His stuff is filthy.  I really like the painted portrait look and the raised frame of the Diamond Kings cards.

 I almost added the Bowman Platinum Willson Contreras card to my Ebay cart yesterday to take advantage of the seller's combined shipping, but thankfully I opened up Julie's package before completing the purchase.

Shiny! Sometimes I'm surprised there aren't more cards of players taking batting practice. 

Jason Heyward has been retooling his swing this winter in an attempt to get back to more productive version of himself. I still don't like signing players to long and expensive contracts. This one right now looks like it will handcuff the Cubs' financial flexibility for quite some time.

 I Jason hope he turns things around, not just at the plate, but in the minds of all his doubters, like myself.  He works hard, plays excellent defense and is an excellent teammate, but that's not worth $184 million.

National Baseball Card Day!  I hope Topps continue going forward with this promotion.

That Rizzo photo is wonderful!  Look at those stirrups!

Dick Drott?  I had never heard of him, but luckily there was an excellent biography on the back of the card.  This card is from the 1960 Leaf set, and I believe it is my first card from this set. Cool!

 Here's another set which is brand new to me: 2006 Fleer Tradition.

 I like the design and all of the color.  Very nice cards of some very good Cubs players.

Vintage and high end cards in the same package? Wow!

 I don't have many Topps Museum or Topps Tribute cards in my collection.

 I think I prefer the design of the Topps Tribute card (Arrieta), because you know... shiny. I'm easy to please.

Minis!  Score!  I miss Dexter Fowler already. Hmph.

Hopefully Addison Russell takes another step forward in his development this year. 

I'm glad to see Jorge Soler finally get a shot at a full time starting job in Kansas City. I hope he takes it runs with it, because I am flush with Soler rookie cards!

Is it me, or does this Future Stars design take you back to the crazy designs of 90s?  

 Lastly, we come to a 2005 mini from the Helmar Brewing Company featuring Johnny Evers.

 This card is about as thick as they come, which is very different for a mini. I briefly thought about scratching the back side for my prize, and then remembered it's 2017.  Pretty neat card though!

Julie, thank you kindly for all of the wonderful Cubs cardboard you sent my way!  It was a great surprise!

Book Review: Ahead of the Curve

Title: Ahead of the Curve: Inside the Baseball Revolution 
Author: Brian Kenny 
Genre: Nonfiction/Educational

Ease of Reading: I knocked out this 368 page book in a little over two weeks. Actually, it's closer to 310 pages once you ignore the glossary of sabermetric terms, the index, and references at the end of the book. The book is broken into quite a few chapters and each chapter is often broken into subsections, which makes the book very easy to pick and put down. I often found myself thinking, "Oh, I'll read just one more section." Sometimes one more section turned into entire chapters, but that may speak more to my interest in the material than the ease of reading. 

Synapse: Sabermetrics are finally taking the baseball world by storm. Kenny discusses the history behind statistics and their use in managing a baseball game or running a front office. He uses statistics to show why major league managers should never bunt a runner over to second base. He debates how baseball's year end awards are given out and specifically examines the 1941 MVP decision between Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio. One of the chapter looks at players who should be in the Hall of Fame and he makes a strong argument for Tim Raines, who was voted in a week ago. My favorite chapter has to with Kenny's idea of bullpenning, which is really similar to the way the usage of pitchers is managed in the All-Star game. 

Comments: I've been forcing my way through another book in my Kindle during the last seven months and it's been a really boring read so far. I'm very much a completest and I'm having trouble giving up on the book.
Enter my sister. She gave me Ahead of the Curve as a Christmas present and once I started it I kept thinking about it. As a baseball coach, I found some ideas I could potentially apply to my high school baseball team. As a fan of numbers and baseball, this book really captured my interest and challenged the way I think about the game I love.
I really enjoyed this book and it now has me thinking, "Life is too short to read boring books." Now I don't think I'll ever finish that other one.

Grade: Kenny's work earns an A+ from me, and I've already begun passing it around to some of my friends who either enjoy Kenny's work on the MLB Network or who think baseball with a numbers slant like myself. I'm also thinking about trying out bullpenning through an OOTP simulation. Good stuff!

Testing Out MLB's Authentication Program

I've kind of talked myself into picking up at least one autographed card or relic card of every member of the 2016 Cubs.  I don't really have any rules, but ideally I'd like all the cards to have the players wearing Cubs garb, but I'll take what I can get.

I like the little MLB Authentication sticker on the jersey swatch of this Jason Hammel card. I went to MLB's Authentication page and typed in the information on the sticker. I found this particular jersey swatch came from a 5-4 win over the Giants on August 6th of 2015. Hammel couldn't finish the fifth inning so he wasn't credited with the win, but it was a game the Cubs won!  It's nice to know the relic is actually from a jersey Hammel wore at some point.

I picked up the above 2015 Strata card of Jason Hammel the other day and it goes down as my first and only card purchase so far in 2017.  White jersey, auto, and numbered 11/50 for under ten bucks. That's a win in my book!

You may be thinking, "Four weeks in to the new year and only one card?"  Well, it is the slow season for sets to be released. Things will surely pick up down the road!

Ben Zobist Night at the Rivermen

The Peoria Rivermen, a member of the Southern Professional Hockey League, honored Ben Zobrist this past Saturday night. For thirty dollars fans would get a ticket to the game, a food and drink voucher, and get to quickly meet Ben Zobrist and obtain an autograph. I hadn't been to a Rivermen game in the last decade, but this promotion got me through the door, along with 8,300+ other fans for their biggest crowd of the season.

Here's a picture of Ben signing autographs at his table just off the concourse.

As always, he was approachable, humble and kind.  He shook my hand and thanked me for coming out. I thanked him for coming to Chicago and making a lot of Cubs fans really happy.

He autographed the same 8" by 10" photo for everyone. After we bough the tickets to the game we learned that he would only be signing an 8" by 10" for everyone and I bummed because I wanted to get this card signed:

Yeah, I guess that seemed to work okay! LOL

Ben had many autographs to sign. I believe the number was 6,000, so I think he enjoyed giving his hand a rest in the middle to walk out onto the ice.

He was introduced by a city councilman and given a key to the city. Once the teams were introduced and the other preliminaries were held he then donned a Rivermen jersey and dropped the first puck.

 Afterward Ben returned to the concourse to sign more autographs and we were entertained by some good ole minor league hockey.

The Rivermen scored the first goal, but the Columbus Cottonmouths stormed back with four of their own. The crowd was pretty shocked, because just two days before the Cottonmouths bus turned over on the highway on its way to Peoria and the last place team was without much of its top talent.

The Rivermen fought back and eventually tied the game and won in overtime. Three-on-three hockey is fun to watch!

I also had fun watching one of my former students on the ice.

Alec was one of my freshmen baseball players back in the day. I also had him in my Algebra 1 class for a year. I thought he was going to be one of the top baseball talents in the area by the time he was a senior, but he chose hockey instead. It seems to be working out for him!

It was a fun night with my sister and my good friend, Jim!

Thanks for reading!