Does the person writing the back...

...look at the picture on the front?

This would seem to be an elementary step in the creation of a baseball card.

Sometimes, Topps aces this idea:

When we flip this card over, we learn that Denorfia hit the

and the game logs confirm this.

Then when we flip the card back over it does appear we are treated to a picture of this Walk-Off Home Run, and ever so tastefully, without one of those pile-up-at-home-plate shots that are becoming a bit overdone, particularly if you picked up the Opening Day insert set "Superstar Celebrations" earlier this year. The Home Run in question was a two run shot which also scored Yonder Alonso, who is returning to the dug-out just behind Denorfia there. Nicely done, Topps.

Topps also frequently likes to show off what a player is known for at times, be it their glove work in the field, or slugging prowess at the plate. Apparently they are somewhat fond of an increasingly rare type of player in the game today, a base-stealing threat:

Flipping this card over visually reinforces the point:

Unfortunately Robinson couldn't get any Topps Voodoo to help him here, as he only managed to steal successfully 4 times in 9 tries, despite 113 SBOs, or Stolen Base Opportunites. Dusty Baker at the helm, makes sense to me. Now if only Topps had chosen to elevate Billy Hamilton to the Update set instead....but then maybe with next year's cards having the position on the front again, we can finally get a second "Pinch Runner" card out of Topps. It's been 38 years now after all.

Another great base running Rookie Card is this one:

This is such a great shot of a head-first slide into Home just as the ball is arriving....he could be Out!....he could be SAFE!

And sure enough, the Topps card-back writer is on the case once again:

Perhaps that is only a marginal connection to the front of the card, though Villar did have one successful steal of Home this year.

More often though, the back of the card fails to connect with the front of the card:

which sounds like something that would make for a great baseball card,

particularly in a set that almost always features a pitcher in the actual motion of pitching and generally ignores the classic baseball image of a pitcher holding his glove in a set position just before starting his wind-up. At least we do get to see that on the great Jon Lester card in Series 2.

Will we get to see Ohlendorf's unique new, old wind-up?

Nope, just a nice post-delivery image; a pretty cool Leg Kick card shot at Comerica Park. Bit of a swing-and-a-miss there Topps.

Just as on this card:

Which is also a perfectly fine baseball card. We get a throwback uniform, and a sweet shot of the HICKORY there too. Pretty nice lines as well, but they lead straight to the problem — the back of the card holds the disappointment with what we could have seen on the front, if it hadn't been cropped in so tight like so many of the Sea Turtle cards:

And apparently Topps isn't too careful with reading those minor league statistics either.

As much as the information on the back of that card disappointed anyone who enjoys unique baseball images, this next card is much more of an oh-what-could-have-been:

This card starts out nicely enough; Pena is a journeyman back-up catcher known to be better standing at the plate than sitting behind the plate. In other words, he is a decent enough hitter but not so good on the defensive side, and likely to remain a journeyman back-up as a result. The Tigers released him a few days after their season ended and he quickly signed a 2 year deal with the Reds, where I'm sure we'll see him on an Update card again, after next season is over.

Or maybe not. Journeyman back-up catcher Gerald Laird was let go by the Tigers after last season and immediately signed a 2 year deal with the Braves. But apparently more useless Home-Run Derby cards were more worthy of printing than a new baseball card of a Major Leaguer on a 25-man roster for the entire season, as Laird did not receive any Topps cards at all this year.

Be that as it all may, it is the back of Pena's 2013 card that holds the real let-down:

Now, reading all that, don't you just want to see it all happen? I heard the call of that play on the radio, and it was one of the few times I used the video highlights feature of the MLB '13 app on my phone, which was well worth the effort.

This is one of those rare times where I wish there was more than one licensed baseball card manufacturer. Though I am content with collecting one main set per year, I think a scrappier card manufacturer could likely have exploited this much better. I'm sure Nick @ Dime Boxes could tell us exactly which former baseball card company would have jumped at a chance to put the following image on a baseball card. Although I am not generally a fan of cards that obscure a player's face, after all that build-up on the back this could have been a simply epic play-at-the-plate baseball card:

Card backs could be tough to write in '14

So a while back I was wondering what Topps would do for this year's Melky Cabrera card, mostly figuring I would have to wait for Series Two.

Then my itch to find some sort of cardboard memento of last year's winning of the Triple Crown by a different Cabrera — one would think Topps would have been all over that...wtf? — led me to slowly start acquiring cards from this year's Heritage set. At least that one has great Leader cards, which is what I've been chasing. I do like Heritage, just not a great fan of all head shots, all the time. '64 is a nice spare design, with nice use of color; one of the better sets of the 60s, but there are other Heritage sets I have preferred / will prefer.

So along the way I eventually pulled this card:

[ huhh, a little off-kilter there Mr. Scanner. Apropos, methinks. ]

And as soon as I saw it I knew I would find out if my hunch that Topps would gloss over the whole PED topic on their glossy shiny happy baseball cards, possibly via just filling the back with Melky's complete professional statistics all the way back to the Instructional Leagues. Gee, no room left for comment.

But, I was wrong:

That salmon print can be tough to read, I know. The anonymous Topps scribe wrote:

"Melky signed with Toronto after a big, if abbreviated, year in San Francisco."

Topps could have gone any direction with this, due to their 21st century ability to change the font size any way it wants; Melky would have had 10 more lines of minor league stats, and the quiz question at the bottom isn't on every card. The card could have been created without any text comment at all, easily. So my fount of baseball knowledge somewhat rose to the occasion for me.

And say you're a National League fan and you're wondering if un-enhanced Melky is contributing to Toronto's implosion so far this season? I checked the website for you, since the baseball cards won't tell till next year. Melky's stats so far this year are right back to his career averages. Which aren't too bad actually - career .284 hitter, it says there in the salmon, if you squint hard enough. Good thing kids don't have to squint to read card backs, huh?

But I think, given tonight's news, that Topps might not be able to tip-toe around this subject in the future. What's that? Melky's return to the City By The Bay didn't go well? No, Melky did OK with that, going 2-for-4, though he flied-out in the 9th with a man on 1st and the Jays lost again. The home crowd, in baseball tradition, booed him steadily — I could hear that through Jon Miller's always steady-steady radio call, courtesy of the MLB At Bat app on my phone. I'm not gonna bother checking the interviews, etc., on that. That's why I like baseball cards, as you mostly get to skip endlessly repetitive sports clichés, since of course, baseball cards have their own special sets of those anyhow.

OK, OK, dear reader, I'll cut to The Chase (groan). I don't really want to Debbie Downer you away from incipient Puig mania (such a great baseball story), but I'll just say that I don't think Ryan Braun will get card #1 any more, or even card #8 either. And I think I will be sure to get Uecker's take on things tomorrow afternoon, that will be interesting. Sorry, I promised to make my point....it appears that the Biogenesis bomb just might finally go off.

What will Topps do? It will be interesting. We won't know, cuz in baseball cards, as in baseball, there's always next year.

A Town Without Baseball Cards

Well hello there. Long time no read, etc. Hopefully the title of this post will explain myself a little.

But we'll start with baseball cards themselves first. Is baseball card fever dragging me all the way back to the 2010 Fish-Eye Lens set I never liked? No, no, I can easily way overspend on packs of 2013 cards without going back to that terribly framed set, even though William @ Foul Bunt suggests I would like the photography in that one too. I do like the use of orange on the Tigers cards - which led me to recently acquire an Austin Jackson rookie card for a buck. Buying single baseball cards for real money now....what is happening to me? I'm pondering collecting all of his "In Action" type cards as they come out, and I think there will be a lot of them as he may develop a better long-term classic center fielder career than the almost-Say-Hey player Detroit traded to get him, Curtis Granderson. An 'Action Jackson' set. Another post for another day.

And I think I might track down that Andy Oliver card though (and in multiple copies), it has A Lot Going On after all. We've got a spring training shot it appears; chain-link fence is always a give-away for that. Oh dear, I think I just launched another mental Frankenset. It's starting to get a little crowded up there in the noggin, I think I better run out and buy some more blank binder pages. This one would end up in a lot of nooks and crannies of my head collection as we not only have Great Sox here, but on 3 separate people. Lurkers. One of them is wearing Shades too. Looks to be a bullpen session perhaps. 'cept that one serious looking dude (a Tigers minor-league coach methinks) has a baseball bat. In the bullpen. Don't mess with that guy.... he'll show you whether that stuff you can throw is good junk or bad junk. And there's a chain-link fence, you won't escape easily. Are we sure this isn't some sort of Ultimate Fighting nonsense card?

Andy Oliver never really panned out for the Tigers, and he was traded to the Pirates last December for a minor league catcher. I was more interested in the trade as an indication that the Tigers are nervous about their starting catcher's long-term longevity, and a possible need for multiple back-ups, as they added several in the last year or so, at all levels of their Farm. A sticky situation there a little. I'm sure Tiger's GM Dave Dombrowski doesn't look forward to the day when he will someday have to end their current catching set-up.

Oliver is still at AAA Indianapolis, where he is on a tear so far this spring. I'm not that up to speed on the 2013 Pirates Opening Day rotation, but I expect to be, especially when Series 2 comes out and the all-too known "small market" teams get their baseball card due. I'm returning to my youth a fair bit this year, perhaps inevitable when you pick up the baseball card habit again. A good thing, I think. Where I am taking this paragraph? Ahh, we'll see....in my youth I was a Pirates fan. Rooting for the Yank errr, the Tigers, is becoming less appealing to me, and I'm starting to set the Pirates as favorite team on my iPhone app a little more often. There are some other Tiger<>Pirate connections, and I'll be showing you some great recent Pirates baseball cards in the months to come. I live near an actual scanner now....

I was a Pirates fan because of AAA baseball. There was no major league team in West Virginia, but the state capitol had a AAA team, the Charleston Charlies, who could easily enough feed players right up the freeway to Pittsburgh. So the players in the headlines in the best major newspaper my family could acquire on Sundays would then sometimes appear in the discussions of Kubek & Garagiola every Saturday afternoon, albeit a year or three later. So knowing those players a little, I pulled for the Pirates. Oh how glorious it all became when We Were Family, especially when a player's card listed a stop in Charleston on the back. A certain logo on a baseball card can still tee off a certain audio chord structure in my mind. Nowadays, the owner of the sports memorabilia store in Charleston can't even recall what Major League team the Charleston minor league baseball team (no longer the Charlies) is affiliated with. A sad post for some other day.

In that long ago fondly remembered youth, I lived in a very small town there in West Virginia. Was it smaller than John Cougar Mellencamp's? No, probably about the same size - they both had a Tasty-Freez. Perhaps it was just a stroke of luck that I discovered baseball cards at all. There I was one day down at the gas station, probably checking the air in my bicycle tires. This station otherwise only sold motor oil and little bags of Lance peanuts. The Coke machine was out front, hot food came from the diner across the street, and groceries came from the grocery store. Where did baseball cards come from? I didn't know. Until I saw this:

You know the rest, or you wouldn't be wasting your time reading yet another overly long blog post.

I will never know why that one gas station owner decided to sell baseball cards. There was nowhere else in town to get them. Occasionally, he ran out. Then I was stuck waiting with my allowance money burning my pockets till a big family shopping trip to a town so big, it had a 7-11 store. They had baseball cards, mixed right in with the boxes of candy bars in the candy aisle, if you looked closely, and I knew just exactly where to look close.

I just finished a week of work in a great little town — New Lexington, Ohio. Population 4 thousand, 7 hundred something. Zero baseball cards for sale. These places always sadden me a little. No, nor for me, I know all too well how to sniff out baseball cards wherever I go, and it is only getting easier in the 21st century. I just think about the kids growing up in these towns. I knew there was probably only one possible store that had baseball cards - the CVS Pharmacy. But they don't seem to be one of the ℞ chains that carry baseball cards. I did buy some this winter at a Rite-Aid I believe, in New Ellenton, South Carolina, not quite a place as small as they come, and a place with all the big boxes just a half-dozen miles away.

Before New Lexington I worked in Lewisburg, KY for a week. Population one thousand. On the dot. I didn't even bother looking for  baseball cards there. Retail in micro towns focus on life's essentials, and baseball cards aren't one of them.

The rest of the economic activity in New Lexington centered around Kroger, and Kroger grocery stores have never had baseball cards that I can recall. All pretty cashiers in that one though....I think the manager of the place is up to something. There were the usual 2 dollar store suspects - Family, and the General (as in Lewisburg). No Dollar Tree with their unique packs. I used to haunt Family Dollar stores quite a bit as they were the very last bastion of buying regular Topps cards complete with bubblegum. No, not the last year of Heritage + gum. About 2009 or so Topps put their regular cards in Family Dollar packs with gum. I always liked the gum, and I have the dental records to prove it.

Andy Oliver is from a small town in Ohio (Vermilion), one that probably doesn't have baseball cards for sale either, though the nearest WalMart is a mere 9 miles away. Today's blog posting research saga has me possibly wanting my first minor league card ever - the MiLB Heritage issue for his stint with the Toledo Mud Hens, just up the lakeshore from his hometown. I like the thought of a small-town baseball start playing for his nearest local minor league team, and a high level team at that, closely tied to The Show. I just can't stand those wood-paneled cards like the one he is on though. And all this is moving a Bucket List item closer to the top of the list - attending a Mud Hens game in person. I watched a lot of M*A*S*H when I was younger. I'll spare you any more tangential digressions on that one and how it relates to baseball, though not really to cards. For today at least.

Now until you cross the Mississippi, there is almost always a Wally World store within 23 miles (the distance from New Lexington to Zanesville) or so of every point in the eastern United States. So unless some small business owner in New Lexington wants to return to his baseball card youth and ring up Topps for some micro-level wholesale activity, the kids of New Lexington will have to wait til Mom makes the run to Zanesville to get some things at Wally World that just can't be had there in wonderful New Lexington.

And then they can discover baseball cards. But to get some more baseball cards, how can kids ride their bikes 23 miles?

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.