Song of the Week - Wait So Long by Trampled by Turtles

I got this song from a podcast from Minnesota Public Radio in 2010. Speed bluegrass!

Now With...

You've seen these cards that have "Now With..." printed on the front.

I mostly associate this with Topps cards from around 1985 to 1990. This was after Topps mostly stopped airbrushing caps to show players with their new teams and well before Topps started Photoshopping players into whole new uniforms.

Dickie Noles could be the poster boy for the "Now With..." card. In 11 big league seasons he changed teams 7 times. He started 1987 with the Cubs, but was loaned to the Tigers on September 22, 1987.

Really, loaned? I don't remember hearing about that sort of arrangement before. That's what baseball-reference.com calls the arrangement. Here's what Wikipedia says about it:

"In 1987, Noles became one of only four players in history to be "traded for themselves", joining Harry Chiti, Brad Gulden, and John McDonald, Noles was traded from the Cubs to the Detroit Tigers for a player to be named later. 33 days later, the teams were unable to agree on what player Chicago would receive, and so Noles was shipped back to the Cubs, completing a deal in which he was traded for himself."

Topps would have had a hard time getting a game photo of Noles with the Tigers since he only appeared in 2 innings. He got two saves in those appearances so maybe in a small way he helped the Tigers win the AL East. The Tigers won the division by only 2 games over the Blue Jays.

The funny thing, in relation to this card, is, as Wikipedia noted, that Noles was returned to the Cubs on October 23, 1987. And he actually played for the Orioles in 1988.

End-Of-The-Year Sci-Fi Movies (the last one) - "Apollo 18"

And the reason is moon spiders.

Thought the Apollo moon missions ended with Apollo 17?  This 2011 movie says differently.  After the remaining Apollo missions were canceled, NASA decided to launch one more, Apollo 18, in secrecy. It would be a military mission to place a system that would give the US early warning of a Russian missile strike against the United States.

For some reason, the director decided to go with the 'found footage' genre. I guess it added some suspense but since a lot of the footage shot on the moon was with hand-held movie cameras, it sure isn't clear where the footage was found. Also, the footage was supposedly released on an unofficial website.

I didn't know any of the actors in this. The entire cast of the movie is basically the three astronauts. Warren Christie (Commander Nathan Walker), Lloyd Owen (Captain Ben Anderson), and Ryan Roberts (Colonel John Grey) play the crew. Walker and Anderson descend to the moon on 'Liberty' while Grey stays behind in the obit on 'Freedom'.

Things start to go wrong almost immediately. The first day is spent placing the monitoring devices and collecting a few more moon rocks while glitches start interfering with Earth and Freedom bound communications.

The second day, they look over the rim of a nearby crater and see another space craft. They get into the rover and drive over to it. It's a Russian moon lander!  They manage to get into it. They find some blood but the lander appears to be operational with good supplies of air and fuel.

Then they find a pitch black cave nearby and Commander Walker decides to take a look. For illumination he has some sort of strobe light, which makes for some suspenseful footage but doesn't make much sense. He finds a dead cosmonaut.

Walker and Anderson get back in their lander and things really start to go bad. Communications with Freedom and NASA are completely down. Walker thinks something is in his spacesuit and although they don't find anything, he's got a laceration on his abdomen and something seems to be lodged under his skin. Anderson pulls it out and it looks like a moon rock. Walker smashes it with a hammer.

After another sleeping period (while we watch something small skittering around the lander), they attempt to launch but something goes wrong. Outside the lander they can see that the flag they put up has been knocked down and the rover is sitting on it's side. Still no communications. Walker is sick and clearly infected. And their air is running out.

Anderson decides they have to abandon their ship and make to the Russian ship. He manages to get Walker in a spacesuit, but Walker collapses on the trip and appears dead. Anderson decides to take one more look into the dead cosmonaut cave and sees things erupting from the moon dust. He rushes to the Russian ship and seals himself in. After he powers it up, he manages to establish communications with Grey in Freedom. Grey has been spending a lot of time saying "Freedom, do you read me?" Then they make contact with NASA and then a military guy who says, yea, we knew what you were going to find and you can't come home because you're infected too.

Anderson and Gray decide, against orders, to launch the Russian ship and meet with Freedom, where Anderson will have to make a space walk between the vessels. Just before the rocket goes off, Walker shows up at the window with an ax and attempts to break in. He's got what look like giant spiders running around inside his helmet. Anderson launches and indeed he is infected and passes out after he gets aimed at Freedom. The out-of-control Russian ship crashes into Freedom and the movie ends.

The Game of Wallet Card

Everyone else seems to be doing it.

Baseball Card Breakdown started it with a post on January 2nd. It looks like over 30 bloggers are already in the game. It's pretty easy to play. Find a baseball card you like and have a duplicate of and put it in your wallet. Take it out once in awhile and blog what it looks like.

My wallet. Pretty typical wallet. Brown leather with spaces for money and cards. I've probably been using this wallet for over 10 years. When you get a wallet broken in so it's comfortable against your butt, you are reluctant to change.

Here's the card. Why this card? For one thing, it's Mike Schmidt, my favorite player. It was Schmidt's retirement year. It's a 1989 Upper Deck, one of my favorite sets. Also, I believe the guy holding the microphone is the late, great Phillies announcer Harry Kalas.

There goes the card in the wallet on January 5th.

Future posts to come.

Repack Madness #3

Let's finish up the interesting cards from that repack I started yesterday.

2000 Upper Deck Victory #375 Ivan Rodriguez

Upper Deck Victory was one of the many forgettable sets that Upper Deck has produced over the years. This is from the "Big Plays" subset in the 2000 set. Not especially remarkable except that I collect I-Rod and I didn't have this card.

2001 Stadium Club #117 Marquis Grissom

Stadium Club cards I don't have are always welcome.

2001 Upper Deck MVP #5 Tim Salmon

Another forgettable Upper Deck set. Too complicated looking to every really like. Did you know that Salmon played his entire 14-year career with the Angels and never was an All-Star?

2003 Fleer Double Header #88 Luis Gonzalez

This was a weird set from Fleer. The entire set was composed of undersized cards. There was a parallel set of sorts called Fleer Double Header Double. These cards were taller than the regular cards but the top was folded down so it was the same size as the regular. On the flap appeared a player and a different player was printed under the flap such as the legs of the player under the flap formed the legs of the player on the flap. That must have been a complicated design and photo selection problem. No wonder it only appeared the one year. This was one of the BONUS cards in the box.

2004 Justifiable #81 Huston Street

Just published minor league sets in the mid-2000s. I've only ever seen them in repacks. It's always a bit difficult to figure out which set a given card is from. You might think this is from a set called "Just" or maybe "Just Minors" but the set is actually called "Justifiable". I always have to look the cards up on Beckett.com to be sure. I don't mind getting these cards, especially when the player turns out to be someone.

2008 Upper Deck Goudey Mini Red Backs #230 Stan Musial

This was the other BONUS in the box. In 2007, Upper Deck Goudey were all cards this sized. In 2008, the base set were normal sized cards with smaller sized parallels. The parallels came in blue and red. In 2009, the set got really weird and it's best to forget about it.

Repack Madness #2

2014 may be over but I still have to deal with the boxes of repacks I bought in 2014 and just left laying around. I want to get these cataloged and put away before the new cards start coming out.

This was a Fairfield repack that I bought back in June. It promised "4 packs, 50 cards plus BONUS".  I had opened the box back then but I'm not completely sure what was the bonus. It was some extra cards which I'll identify below. The 50 loose cards were a wonderfully diverse group of cards. Usually repacks with loose cards are larded up with 1989 Topps and early '90s Upper Deck. Not that there weren't some of these cards but still lots of different stuff. Altogether there were 90 cards in the box and I needed 50 of them.

2012 Bowman Platinum #45 Mariano Rivera

One of the packs was 2012 Bowman Platinum. I didn't buy much of this so I needed all 4 cards in the pack. The other cards were Evan Longoria, Mark Teixeira, and Cory Spangenberg. The other 3 packs were 2012 Topps, 2012 Topps Opening Day and 2012 Topps Update. There were cards I needed from all the packs but nothing special from any of them except this.

2012 Topps Update #85 Jacob Diekman

Diekman's been an important part of the Phillies bullpen for the past 2 years and this is the first card of his I've seen.

1982 Donruss #78 Paul Molitor

I never mind some 1982 Donruss, especially when it's a player I collect like Paul Molitor.

1985 Topps #227 Danny Darwin

I also don't mind 1985 Topps. 1985 was the first year as an adult that I bought baseball cards but I didn't buy many, and only Topps. I'll complete this set someday. Did you know that Darwin pitched for 21 years and that his nickname was Dr. Death?

1991 Toys R Us Rookies #29 Greg Vaughn

I have 19 of the 33 cards in this set and everyone of them I've gotten in a repack.

1991 Ultra #330 Jose Uribe

Fleer's first attempt at a premium level card. There were 3 in the box, all of which I didn't have. I didn't know until I got this card that Uribe died in 2006 in a car crash.

1991 Upper Deck #207 Jose Uribe

There were 2 Uribe cards in the box that I needed. Some day I will finish these early 1990 Upper Deck sets through repacks.

1992 Upper Deck Comic Ball 3 #129 Jim Abbott

Upper Deck published these Comic Ball sets in the early 1990s. This is only the second one I've ever seen. The other was a Nolan Ryan from the 1991 set. A combination of baseball players and Warner Bros. cartoons, how can you go wrong?

1993 Fun Pack #176 Andres Galarraga

Another early 1990s attempt by Upper Deck to crack the kid's market.

1995 Donruss Top of the Order #220 Pete Schourek

This is the 3rd card from this 330 card set that I've pulled from a repack. With only 3 cards it's impossible to tell how you play the game. The cards originally came in 10-card "starter packs". I see a box with 80 starter packs on sale on eBay for $99.99. No thanks. But I was able to snatch up the 6 Phillies cards I needed (one of the three I already have was a Phillie) for a reasonable price.

2000 Topps Chrome #196 Roy Halladay

These early Topps Chrome cards tend to get kind of of tacky over the years. This one wasn't too bad. I imagine if you've had one of these in a 9-card album page for the past 15 years I might be hard to get out today.

Weird Photoshop Twins

Welcome to my first post of the new year. It's just a quick one.

We've all seen what I call Photoshop twin cards. That's where Topps uses Uses a photo from one card and Photoshops the player into another uniform for another card. This is most often done when the player has changed teams and a photo is not available of the player with his new team. Topps has been doing this for many years, back when air brushing was the tool of choice.

I was scanning cards from a recent repack box when I found this card.

2012 Topps Opening Day #24 Bruce Morrow

Compare to this card I already had:

2012 Topps #304 Bruce Morrow

Clearly the same photo is used for both cards. And clearly, Morrow is shown in a Blue Jays uniform in both cards. What possible reason could Topps have had to Photoshop Morrow into a different Blue Jays uniform for one of these cards?  Any thoughts? My guess is that the Opening Day card is the original as the cap in the Topps card looks a bit off. And what is that orange (red?) cap on the Topps card?

This was going to be a short post but after I finished it, the very next card I scanned was this.

2012 Topps Opening Day #150 Jose Bautista

 Compare to this:

2012 Topps #100 Jose Bautista

One card is an anomaly, two cards is a conspiracy.