3000 Little Asterisks.

       I have popped in from my long blogging sabbatical to observe Alex Rodriguez's 3000th hit.  The title of this post is a bit of a lark since only the hysterical fundamentalist baseball doofuses want to slap asterisks on things.  See, I like to place Alex Rodriguez in the same category I put Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds.  No, not steroid users, but truly terrible human beings that have been properly hated since day one of their careers.  If you are a wise baseball fan, you should have seen through A-Rod's act since the moment he got called up and given him the infinite scorn he deserves. 

Oh sure, you can respect him somewhat as a player in and of itself.  It is hard to look at his 1996 season and not regard him in some awe.  How Juan Gonzalez got voted the MVP that year and not A-Rod is one of the true mysteries of a process that goes out of its way to mystify.

A-Rod has always struck me as the kind of guy who is so extremely talented and yet so bitterly insecure about it all that he has to shout "look at me! look at me!" in such an awkward manner as to make you get a concussion rolling your eyes at him.  He could have been the Jordan of baseball if he had just let his play speak for itself, instead, well, yeah that stuff happened. Over and over again.  I never looked at his steroid use as anything sinister, merely as just another attempt to stab at his own self-doubting demons and placate his own eternally deflated ego.  His other crimes against humanity are the rare double money-grab, the Texas force-your-way-out-of-town dance, the disrespecting of both the Red Sox and Mets in all that professional catastrophe, eventually getting traded to the Yankees, and then when everything went inevitably wrong generally never owning up to anything.

So what can you make of A-Rod now?  Well, if he is really playing clean, here at (nearly) age 40, then it becomes blatantly apparent that he probably didn't need PEDs at all.  And that is such a fitting epitaph for a player who has put up such mesmerizing numbers yet been such a horrorshow of a human being.  A-Rod doesn't have a fan base to call his own, no style to call his own, and no legacy to speak of.  The worst part of all that is, he did all of this to himself.  And hell, in the end he wanted to be like Jeter so bad, he even had to slug a homer for this 3000th hit.  If he didn't fall asleep on a bed of half a billion dollars every night, you could almost feel sorry for him.

Mail Call: COMC Black Friday.

       Today is the infamous "Black Monday" in NFL coaching circles - the day when poor head coaches find out their (usually poor) fate.  Watching ESPN this morning is like watching a funeral procession, one after another crappy coach after crappy coach is thrown on the fire.  It is schadenfreude at its finest especially when your teams aren't involved.  What better day to check out all my Black Friday booty from COMC (how's that for a segue?) Every year they run a special for free shipping - plus most sellers have kickass sales - so it is the best day of the year to load up on cards.  I nabbed some stuff I have had my eye on for most of the year and broke down and bought a few things I had been aching to have but wanted at my price.

First we'll start with some die cut numbered 2004 eX rookies:

To be honest, I only wanted a page of the base cards and had been striking out in trades or at shows finding any.  As I perused my wantlists, this was the first incomplete page that stood out for some reason.  This set just screams "millennium design" with all its metallic highlights and swoops and blocky modern fonts.  When I searched the site, I saw that these die cut rookies were more readily available (and cheaper) than the base cards.  So I switched gears and nabbed nine of these instead and made this nifty page out of them.  

I also loaded up on some of this year's Mets cards I had not yet added:

In a minor upset, I got many more Zack Wheeler cards than anything else.  That orange refractor is just spectacular, as most Mets cards in orange refractor form are.  That overly ornate die cut Matt Harvey was a must-add as it is so over the top and silly looking, it belongs in 1996.  I also think you could use those cards as shurikens.  I also nabbed a low number shiny 2004 eX rookie of Mets failed prospect Aarom Baldiris.  He deserved to washout just for the silly spelling of his name.  I might own more of his useless cards than any other Mets prospect that never got to the majors (he was big in Japan, though).

I also got some single cards to complete some pages:

I am trying to put together a page of all the Topps Finest and that Livan Hernandez finished off the 2004 page (check my want lists to see if you can help).  I also found that Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds cards are pretty cheap - gee, I wonder why? - and grabbed a couple of those to complete a couple of vague pages.  That Gary Sheffield finishes his page in my retired book; I wanted to get a card for each team he played for and since he only played for eight different teams, I decided on a minor league card to round it out.  The bottom row shows piles of cards I needed to finish two pages I really really wanted to get done.  I suppose it is my love of shiny, but I have wanted to do a page of those 2005 UD Reflections Legends cards for a while.  The other cards were to complete a page of 2001 UD Decade inserts.  I would have done a page for each of the different inserts, but for some odd reason most of the inserts in that set are only 6 total cards and that just doesn't jibe with the Starting Nine theme.  The patchwork page practically works better as a dayglow memorial to 1970's excess and now has a place of honor in my faux vintage book. 

One more card on that last scan deserves to be seen in its rightful place:

I am kind of a sucker for all of the Upper Deck Heroes sets and subsets, so when I saw a couple of years ago that Martin Brodeur had one, I had to have it.  Getting the first 8 was easy enough, but Upper Deck being Upper Deck, the ninth card, the fancy painting checklist card, was severely short printed.  The thing cost $20 or more on ebay if you could find one.  I love #30, don't get me wrong, but this nonsense seemed a bit extreme.  So there sat a hole in the very front page of my hockey binder for a long long time.  I just couldn't/wouldn't give in to short printed extortion.  But as often happens during these kinds of shopping sprees, you get on a roll.  I plugged that card into the search and came back with a few hits, one of them for $8.20 - a 50% sale that would only last Black Friday weekend.  So I sighed, swallowed my pride and bit; it is by far the most expensive card I bought.  I'm sorry but I'm not sorry. 

I filled in holes old and new in my Topps All Star Rookie needs:

I grabbed those two 1964 and the 1963 cards on the super cheap and finally added the 2012 Brett Lawrie which had somehow eluded me.  My modern needs have now been whittled down to (mostly) parallels and inserts.  I have plenty of vintage ones yet to go, though.  Also in this scan are a couple more faux vintage pages finishing cards.  The Eck and Bench cards are from the Shoebox set back at the height of retro reprint mania.  The 2004 retired set page leaves only the 2005 Topps retired page left to be completed. 

A few more odds and ends and some non-baseball cards:

That Bob Gibson finishes off one of the first pages of faux-vintage cards I had made but it had a Cal Ripken card in it, who at the time was technically a current player.  If you are going to have rules about your pages, you have to be a stickler and I just don't like to mix current and retro players (unless I feel like it, of course).  Those top two football cards are from an obscure Collector's Edge set that I had to have a page of just because of its 90's see-thru acetate goodness. The Gene Sykes completes one of my last 1960's football pages (hopefully that post will happen soon) and that Wayne Babych is an OPC hockey card that finishes off that vintage page.  I think those old school hockey cards work so much better in poorly cut Canadian style, don't you?  Finally, the last four cards all have something in common and 64 silver dollars* to the person who figures it out.

*may not be actual silver or dollars

They Arrrrrr Goin' For It, Matey.

       I do not like the sports teams of Pittsburgh.  The Steelers seem to think they are the best team ever, when before 1970 they were, quite literally, the worst team ever.  Six championships in 40-odd years is impressive, but forgetting the 40-odd years before that seems selective at best and delusional at worst.  The only thing I like about the Pittsburgh Penguins is their cute little logo.  Every other single thing can die in a fire.  And that brings us to the Pittsburgh Pirates.  The Pirates replaced the Cardinals in the early 90's as my most hated team.  Sure, the Cardinals certainly had more hateable players, but the Pirates were far more infuriating - quality over quantity, I suppose.  It was a joy and a comfort to me that they have been invisible for the last 20 years.  Now, suddenly, they are back.  After a couple of near misses the last couple years, they are loaded up and ready to make a run to and through the playoffs.

Currently, they are led by NL MVP candidate Andrew McCutchen:

He is a fine enjoyable player to watch, except for the uniform.  I look forward to 2018 when they trade him because he wants too much money (of course, it will probably be to the Yankees...yuck).

The embodiment of my hatred for the Pirates can be stated quite simply:

Most people hate Barry Bonds now.  Like some kind of music loving hipster, I was a Bonds hater way before it was cool; my dislike for him started his rookie season (1986) and never waned. 

I have to admit, I didn't always hate every single Pirates player.  Willie Stargell was pretty awesome.

He won the MVP in 1979 as a fat 38 year old.  That is a feat I can get behind.

If you have read my required posts, you know that I am also a huge fan of Roberto Clemente:

I covered this a while back.

The most striking reason I hate the Pirates, other than the fact that they stole 2 or 3 division titles from the Mets, is they gave the world - and more specifically the Mets - Bobby Bonilla.

This is the only Bonilla card I have highlighted anywhere in my pages and that is only because I love the look of that insert set.  The worst part of the saga of Bobby Bo?  Because of the Mets stupidity - or Bonilla's incredible business acumen *eye roll* - he will be getting over a million dollars a year from the team until 2035.  Yes, I am probably just jealous I am not clearing all that cash for doing nothing myself, it's just that the Mets make me sad sometimes.

So why spew all this hate for the Pirates?  I mean, they are gonna make the playoff after two solid decades of utter futility after all.  Well, I am not wishing them well nor am I rooting for them, but...

Today, September 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day.  And while I think I have certainly made my point that I hate baseball Pirates, I love plank walking, keelhauling, sword fighting, ship ramming pirates.  So raise the mizzenmast and a cup of grog and tell your mateys you be lovin' them today...and root for the Red Sox in the playoffs.