1993 Phillies World Series Team: Schilling

Curt Schilling - 1993 Bowman

Curt was the Red Sox 2nd round draft pick in 1986. In 1988, he was traded by the Red Sox to the Orioles with Brady Anderson for Mike Boddicker. He made his major league debut on 9/7/88. In January 1991, the Orioles traded Schilling, Steve Finley and Pete Harnich to the Astros for Glenn Davis. The Orioles and Astros used Schilling mostly in a relief role (he did start 5 games for the Orioles). In April, 1992, the Astros traded Schilling to the Phillies for Jason Grimsley. The Phillies made him a starter and he respond by going 14 and 11 with a 3.81 ERA. In 1993 he had the best season of his career with a 16-7 record and a 2.35 ERA. This, in fact would be his best season until 2001 when he would go 21-6 for the Diamondbacks. Schilling would be the ace of the Phillies staff until 2000, with a record of 112-90 for mostly mediocre Phillies teams.

Schilling was fantastic in the 1993 playoffs. In 2 games in the NLCS he posted a 1.69 ERA and 19 strikeouts, and even though he didn't actually win a game he was named the NLCS Most Valuable Player. He was 1-1 with an ERA of 3.52 in the World Series. Phillies fans will mostly remember Curt sitting in the dugout with a towel over his head while Mitch Williams tried to get out of trouble.

In mid-2000, the Phillies traded Schilling to the Diamondbacks for Omar Daal, Nelson Firueroa, Travis Lee (nicknamed by the Phillies fans, Travis Leave) and Vincente Padilla. Schilling went on to have a tremendous next two seasons going 21-6 in 2001 and 23-7 in 2002. Oh and being co-MVP (with Randy Johnson) as the Diamondbacks won the 2001 World Series over the Yankees.

Schilling was traded by the Diamondbacks to the Red Sox in 2003 and the 2004 Red Sox won the World Series.

Through the 2007 Schilling has a career record of 216-146, with a career ERA of 3.46 and 3,116 strikeouts. He has been one of the most dominating pitchers since 1992 and has $106, 158,000 to show for it. He is a 7-time All Star and the winner of many awards (1993 NLCS MVP, 1995 Lou Gehrig Memorial Award, 2001 Babe Ruth Award, Branch Rickey Award, Hutch Award, Roberto Clemente Award, Worlds Series co-MVP and NL-TSN Pitcher of the Year and 2002 NL-TSN Pitcher of the Year).

In my opinion, a future Hall Of Famer.

Schilling has also been a controversial and outspoken person both on and off the field. There is a long article on Schilling on Wikipedia which you can find here.

Song of the Week - Cloudbusting Kate Bush

I have 5,187 songs in my iTunes library. This is one of them.

Kate Bush is an English singer/songwriter who is not well known in the US. She apparently does not perform in public which, I guess, doesn't help her popularity. She is very popular in England, however, and had several hit songs in the late 1970s to mid-1980s. She took a 12-year break from music, recently releasing a double CD called Aerial. The video is one of my favorite Kate Bush songs called "Cloudbusting" from her masterpiece 1985 album Hounds of Love. The song is about a child's love of her father who, for some reason, is arrested and taken away. When I looked up this video I learned that this is only partially correct. It is about a man named Wilhelm Reich a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who promoted many ideas not considered in the main stream of science. One of his ideas was that a machine could be used to harness the life energy within us for, among other things, making rain. This is the real meaning of this song. Reich called this energy "Orgonon" which is in the first line of the song. There is a pretty long article on Reich on Wikipedia. What's amazing to me is that I've been listening to this song for over 20 years and never heard of Reich or his connection to the song. In the video, Donald Sutherland plays Reich and Bush plays his 10-year-old son, Peter. The video is actually an extended version of the song on the album.



I still dream of Orgonon.
I wake up crying.
You're making rain,
And you're just in reach,
When you and sleep escape me.

You're like my yo-yo
That glowed in the dark.
What made it special
Made it dangerous,
So I bury it
And forget.

But every time it rains,
You're here in my head,
Like the sun coming out--
Ooh, I just know that something good is going to happen.
And I don't know when,
But just saying it could even make it happen.

On top of the world,
Looking over the edge,
You could see them coming.
You looked too small
In their big, black car,
To be a threat to the men in power.

I hid my yo-yo
In the garden.
I can't hide you
From the government.
Oh, God, Daddy--
I won't forget,

'Cause every time it rains,
You're here in my head,
Like the sun coming out--
Ooh, I just know that something good is going to happen.
And I don't know when,
But just saying it could even make it happen.

The sun's coming out.
Your son's coming out.

Dead Bonsai

Whenever I start a new bonsai planting I'm filled with hope for the future and with a vision of what the plant will look like in a few years.

I learned recently that one way to have what looks like a mature bonsai in less time than it looks is to start with a larget plant.

This is a Shumard Red Oak that I bought at WalMart in November 2006. This first picture was taken in May of 2007 after it grew new leaves. I had seen the tree (which is about 6 feet tall here) in the store and looked it up. Oaks are usually hard to bonsai because they grow slowly. I read up on this one and found that it was a fast grower and that it would shed its leaves in the fall (which most oaks here in southwest Texas don't do). And the fall foliage would be an attractive gold color.




This picture shows it still in its original pot after I had cut it down to about 6 inches. It grew back quickly. The leaves are large, but over time a bonsai's leaves will get smaller. It doesn't look like much except a very short tree, but I had hopes that with smaller leaves it would look more like a miniature tree.

The next photo shows it planted into a bonsai pot. This thing had a lot of roots in the 2 gallon pot it had come in. Oak roots are really hard to work with as they are very tough. One thing that attracted me to this particular tree was that there were roots growing above the soil in a square pattern. I imagine it had originally been in a much smaller square pot for much to long.





Here it is in its pot. If you click on the picture you'll get a larger view and will be able to see the above soil roots. After getting it into this pot I thought that I had probably put it into too small a pot. But I didn't have anything larger and figured I could transplant it later.

After I took this photo I trimmed it back some. It grew nicely over the summer. It lost its leaves in the fall, but I didn't think the leaves were an attractive gold color. It was more like they just turned brown. It sat on my backyard bonsai bench all winter looking like a stick in a pot. We had a pretty wet winter but we didn't have a freeze. This was the first winter I'd left the plants out all winter and I was really worried about a freeze.

Well, here is what it looks like now, pretty much still a stick in a pot. By late April in southeast Texas it is very much late in spring. I'm afraid it's dead. I'll keep watering it for a few more weeks but my hopes for this plant are pretty much dashed.

I've learned two lessons from this hobby. One is that you have to have patience. The second is to not get too attached to a plant when it is young. I didn't have much invested in this (I paid about $20 for it and had spent maybe 2-3 hours of time on it) so the loss isn't great.

I'm still sad that it didn't prosper.

2008 Topps Moments & Milestones - Let's Trade!

I don't usually have enough baseball card money to buy a box of premium cards but this year my baseball card fund is flush and I decided to bid on a box of 2008 Topps Moments & Milestones on eBay. I got the box for $71.00 which didn't seem too bad. This works out to just 65 cents/card. I think the cards are very nice. Heavy stock, nice designs, not too glossy, not too much silver foil. The gimmick with this set is that every card is serial numbered. In theory, that means that every card is limited in edition. That's the theory. The reality is different. The base set is numbered to 150. The card shown is #96/150. But note the big number at the bottom of the card. This is card 142 and honors the 201 strikeouts that Matsuzaka had last year. The card shown specifically honors strikeout number 123. There are 150 cards numbered 1 to 150 with the big 123 on the front. There are also 150 serial numbered cards with a big 1 on the front, and 150 with a big 2 on the front. You get the drift, there are 201 times 150 or 30,150 versions of card #142. I've got 4 of them. This looks to be a tough set for a set collector to complete. There is also another set of these numbered to 25 and a third numbered to 10. There may be more but that's all I saw in my box. I still like the cards even with this gimmick and I'm not a set collector anyway. My problem is what I got in the box.

There were 108 cards in the box. There are 189 cards in the set. Of the 108 cards I got, 37 of them were duplicates (like I said, I got four of card 142). Of course, in this set there are no real duplicates. What I mean is that of the 189 cards in the set, I didn't get 131 of them. I don't necessarily want all of the cards in the set but there are 22 card numbers that I want. I've got 31 cards I'm willing to trade. Send me an email and I'll send you a list of what I'm willing to trade and a list of what I'm looking for.

Bring back Topps Stadium Club Baseball

Topps started issuing Stadium Club baseball cards in 1991. 1991 saw some of the first cards printed with full-bleed technology (meaning that the photograph is printed right up to the edge of the card). Although there had been some cards (minor league sets and some insert) before 1991, I think 1991 was the beginning of main-line sets being printed this way. Stadium Club from Topps and Ultra from Fleer were the first.

I also believe that the 1991 Stadium Card is the first major issue card to be printed with a high gloss and with gold foil. Both trends which pretty much took over baseball cards in the next few years. While the Ultra cards were full bleed (at least on the sides) they did not have the gloss or the foil.
Stadium Club has also been known for it's photography. The pictures were always crisp. The action shots were exciting and the posed shots were well framed.

Stadium Club was one of the first sets to produce a serious parallel set. Parallel sets of course were nothing new by 1991. Topps, Fleer and Score had produced high gloss parallels of their main sets since about 1980. In 1993, Stadium Club introduced First Day Issue cards. These had a foil seal which proclaimed that the card had been produced the first day that Topps started printing the cards. Since then we've seen an explosion of limited issue parallel cards which come packaged with the regular cards.
Over the years Stadium Club got more and more bloated with multiple parallel sets, inserts and relic cards. For whatever reason, Topps stopped making Stadium Club baseball cards after the 2003 year. I was sad to see it go but I'll admit to not being very impressed with the 2003 set. It seemed the Stadium Club designers had lost their way.


Trader Crack is starting a petition drive to urge Topps to bring back Stadium Club baseball. Go read his posting. You'll know what to do.

Cliff Walk Postcard - The Breakers

The Breakers is probably the largest of the mansions along The Cliff Walk in Newport Rhode Island. It has 70 rooms with approximately 65,000 square feet. It reportedly cost $7 million to build in 1895. That's about $150 million today. That works out to about $2,300 per square feet. It was built for Cornelius Vanderbilt II. Among other things, Vanderbilt is the great grandfather of CNN's Anderson Cooper. He also had a stroke the year after the Breakers was completed. You can read a short article about him here.What does $2,300 per square feet buy you. Something like this next picture which is the mansion library. According to the back of the card, the Library is "paneled with Circassian walnut stamped in gold and decorated with bas-relief carvings in High Renaissance style". I have no idea (and neither does Wikipedia) what Circassian walnut is but it's got to be something special.
The mansion is a National Historic Landmark and has been owned and operated by the Preservation Society of Newport County since 1948. It is open to tours by the public during summer months. If I ever get to Newport this is one of the places I really want to visit.

Song of the Week - Worn Me Down by Rachael Yamagata

I have 5,176 songs on my iPod. This is one of them.

This song is from her 2004 CD Happenstance. According to her Wikipedia entry, she doesn't seem to have recorded much since then. Too bad. I really like this song and the entire album.

This is a video which appears to have been made for the song. The video is interesting but what it has to do with the song is entirely beyond me. YouTube has several live versions as well but I liked this better.



Gone, she's gone
How do you feel about it
That's what I thought
You're real torn up about it
And I wish you the best
But I could do without it
And I will, because you've worn me down
Oh, I will, because you've worn me down

Worn me down like a road
I did everything you told
Worn me down to my knees
I did everything to please
But you can't stop thinking about her
No, you can't stop thinking about her

And you're wrong, you're wrong
I'm not overreacting
Something is off
Why don't we ever believe ourselves
And I, oh, I feel that word for you
And I will, because you've worn me down
Oh, I will because you have worn me down

Worn me down like a road
I did everything you told
Worn me down to my knees
I did everything to please
But you can't stop thinking about her
No, you can't stop thinking about her

She's so pretty; she's so damn right
But I'm so tired of thinking
About her tonight

Worn me down like a road
I did everything you told
Worn me down to my knees
I did everything to please
But you can't stop thinking about her
No, you can't stop thinking about her

Worn me down like a road
I did everything you told
Worn me down to my knees
I did everything to please
Worn me down like a road
I did everything you told to me to do
But you, you can't stop thinking about her
No, you can't stop thinking about her
No, you can't stop thinking about her
No, you can't stop thinking about her