Put another juke in the Dimebox

So, last post I was whining about a cardboard deficiency after a slow week, but then Saturday's card show and a few packages waiting for me when I came home solved that problem. One of the packages was a surprise from Nick at Dime Boxes -- The Low-End Baseball Card Collector's Journey that I'm gonna show off today.

Also this past weekend was my wife's birthday. She's less of a sentimental fool than I, and the other day she was cleaning out her home office and threw out her old concert ticket stubs. Upon her relaying this info to me, I was aghast and convinced her to at least let me scan them for posterity before parting with them forever.

And so, here they are, matched up with cards from Nick, as is a fun way to come up with a post.

I must brag confess that my wife is 10 years younger than me. While our musical tastes intersect a fair amount, there are some bands/genres we don't agree on, as I assume is true with most couples. I think I was too old to really get on board with the emo music scene of the '00s, and so the bands on this trio of stubs don't do much for me, though there's a song or two here and there I can appreciate. I don't think my wife even really listens to these bands anymore, though she still has a soft spot for Say Anything (not to be confused with the film of the same name).

The only song in my iTunes by any of these above bands is "Belt" by San Anything. A guy named Brandon Belt plays on the Giants, so here's a photo of cards from Nick including some Giants I collect...

Also my first look at those plain 2017 Topps inserts with the Frank Robinson, plus an older Reggie Jackson insert I hadn't seen before.

Ok, I've heard these guys a bit more. I've got one song by The Get Up Kids in my iTunes and it's a cover of the Cure's "Close to Me". Know who grew up close to me in El Cajon? The Giles Brothers.. so now here's a group of cards including Marcus and Brian.

Some great oddballs here. Dick Allen SSPC, Al Oliver & Rickey Henderson Kellogg's. Nick must've seen the infamous Billy Ripken "fuckface" card on my wantlist and thought maybe this Fun Stuff parody would suffice.. haha, not quite, but neat to check out regardless. Also a couple minor league cards, with Marcus Giles in his days in Atlanta's farm system, and a reprint of an old Bowman PCL card.

And a trio of Padres with a Rollie Fingers reprint, a #'d Trevor Hoffman, and as promised, Brian Giles, featured on a slick acetate card.

Quick aside on Rollie Fingers. I had always pronounced his name like "RAW-ly" rhyming with the dog breed collie, but then I was watching something the other day and they pronounced it "ROLLy" like a "roly poly" bug, and my world was turned upside-down for a moment. A quick Twitter poll helps confirm that I was right, and it is in fact pronounced RAW-ly.

I'm only vaguely familiar with these 4 bands, but I know if you go to see any of them, you'd better wear your dancing shoes because they will get you moving with the upbeat party tunes.

One guy who seems to always have a fun time playing baseball is Manny Machado, and Nick gave a nice boost to my PC.

Some good stuff here, highlighted by the Jackie Robinson manurelic.

A bit jealous of my wife's concert-going adventures here, as I like these 3 bands, though I haven't seen any of them live. I'm especially a fan of TMBG.

Man, trying to link cards to ticket stubs is harder than I was anticipating, even with my half-assing. They Might Be Giants have thousands of songs, so I could probably find a clever one if I really dug in. Plus there's the hole "Giants" angle, but I already showed the Giants cards Nick gave me. I'm gonna take a pass and just show some various cards now.

2017 Topps, Trout and some Padres. "Don't Let's Start" could be the slogan for San Diego's rotation this year.

"They'll Need a Crane" is another TMBG song.. Josh Donaldson is doing a pretty good crane impression on that GQ insert.

You'd figure TMBG would have a song about ambidexterity, but I don't think they do.

Now here are a couple acts I've seen live. I've caught Weezer a handful of times, and I've seen Jenny Lewis solo once as well as several times with her old band Rilo Kiley back when I lived in San Diego. Another guy who lived in San Diego is Adam Jones.

Nice bunch of cards for the PC.

Sleater-Kinney is a band my wife really likes. I like them too, and we caught them on their reunion tour a while back (stub not pictured). I think I'm out of gas as far as linking to cards. Hmm.. these shows were at the Crystal Ballroom. Crystals are shiny. Ok, here are a few parallels, some of which are shiny.

And a couple 2011 Topps parallels. Looks like I already had the Latos refractor, but the diamond Kyle Davies checks another one off my list.

Closing out this post with a couple stubs from comedy shows. I didn't go to the Nick Kroll show, though I did tag along for the T.J. Miller show. Speaking of ridiculous things, a knuckleball is pretty ridiculous.

Very cool Hoyt Wilhelm relic!

Big thanks for the awesome cards, Nick! I'll hit you back with a return package soon.

Aw, here's a note on the back of the Nick Kroll ticket my wife wrote me years ago. "Little M'LuLu" was a nickname for our first dog Lucy, and Lucky Lab is a pub near our old place with a dog-friendly covered patio. Good times.

Anyways, hope you enjoyed this look at ticket stubs from my wife and baseball cards from Nick.
See you next time.

Pabst n' Player Collections

Last year I went to the Project Pabst music festival the same day as a card show and it made for a fun post. This year, we decided to go again (it was yesterday). While there wasn't a card show this weekend, I did get just a big ol' 400-count box from friendly reader Adam E. a day or two before which felt like scoring a hot dimebox at a card show, hitting a bunch of guys I collect. So let's try to do a concert review -slash- trade recap.

First band of the day for us was Alvvays (pronounced "Always" though it looks like it should be "All Vays"). They played a good set with dreamy, summery pop song stylings.

And one group of players I'm alvvays happy to receive cards of are Pads in the Hall. When I got back into card collecting a few years ago, my first "focus" was collecting any former Padre inducted into Cooperstown, so I've pretty much alvvays been collecting these guys.

None of these visible cards are Padres cards, but these guys all suited up for San Diego at some point on their way to the HOF (Sparky as a coach, and Perez with the PCL Padres, but I count 'em). Nice stack of Gooses (Geese?) including both his 1988 Fleer and 1988 Fleer Update which you can kinda see poking out behind the 1978 Topps card that airbrushes him into a Yankee uniform from Pirates gear. You can kinda tell that was a pillbox hat.

Next was The Both.

They're lead by the power duo Aimee Mann and Ted Leo, each accomplished musicians in their own right. They sounded pretty good, though we couldn't see them from our spot in the shade. Snapped this photo while briefly checking them out during a trek to the portapotties. Aimee was improv'ing a song about Ted changing a guitar string. Marcus from the blog All the Way to the Backstop has mentioned the band on his blog a time or two, so let's dedicate this next bunch of cards to him.

Lots of Padre favorites of yesteryear.

Passion Pit was the next band, as you can see from the display behind them. They put on a fine show, but didn't blow you away or anything. Honestly, they're probably better on album than live. My wife mentioned the singer seemed to be struggling to hit the high notes. But I do consider myself a fan of the band and it was a fun set, so I don't mean to be too negative here.

There weren't many cards of active players in Adam's box, but here we've got current Padre Wil Myers and former Padre Jake Peavy. I guess you can say these two guys still have passion for the game (--ok, not all these bands/cards pairings are golden!) Wil is about to start rehabbing and hopes to be back in the lineup soon. Peavy also had some injury issues this year, but I believe he's back pitching with the Giants now and just picked up his first win of the year a couple days ago.

And here are a few more random cards, including a Gavin, a Dock Ellis, and a Jordan oddball.

Did I mention it was nearly 100 degrees out? Hot as fruck. Nary a cloud in the sky, so shade was a valuable commodity. Luckily we scored this table which thanks to a couple strategically placed umbrellas kept us reasonably shaded through the hottest part of the day as the sun gradually made its descent. And yes, that's a unicorn statue back there.

Here we are. Note me flying my baseball card geek colors via the Topps shirt. We're generally a bit more of "beer snobs" than to slum it with PBR (her more so than me), but seeing as how Pabst sponsored the event, they were pretty much the only game in town, and the price for tallboys was very reasonable (by festival alcohol standards). So needless to say.. "when in Rome".. we had a few.

We used a rideshare (Lyft) for the first time, so we didn't need to worry about driving. Getting there went off without a hitch. Getting home, however, was a bit more nerve racking. My wife's phone was on the cusp of dying and the guy hadn't shown up.. apparently getting lost around the area. It all worked out fine after about 15 or 20 stressful minutes, just ended up being a bit more expensive than it should have been.

But back to the concert...

The Buzzcocks. They're a punk band who've been around forever (--well, 1976). As with The Both, they were on the South Stage, so we could hear them but not see them, instead having dinner in the form of a couple pieces of pizza in our spot in the shade. For a bunch of old guys, they sounded great. They played personal favorites "Why Can't I Touch It?" and "Ever Fallen In Love" among others.

For a band revered as legends to followers of underground rock, they're surely not a household name to the general public. And to extend that to baseball cards, here are a few players who are remembered fondly by many baseball fans, though they never got a plaque in the HOF...

Fat stacks of cards of Vince Coleman, Darrell Evans, Dwight Evans, Dave Parker, Charlie Hough, Jesse Orosco, and Julio Franco. These PCs got very nice pushes toward triple digits!

Time for the headliner:

Weezer! By this point in the day, the sun was setting so we abandoned our shady table to get closer to the stage. By the second song, the sun had mercifully sunken behind the mountains and we were no longer melting from the heat. The band sounded great and it was a lot of fun singing along to their hits with the rest of the crowd. I've been a Weezer fan since their first album in 1994 and I've seen them a handful of times over the years, including once in a small club that I love to brag about at any opportunity. I showed off my Weezer autographs and memorabilia on the blog a few months ago.

Weezer is a pretty big name in the world of alternative pop-rock music (or whatever you wanna call them), so let's close the trade post with some big names in the baseball world.

Great stuff! Not pictured is a stack of Frank Thomas cards.. which I'm pretty confident have helped me get to the magic total of 100+, including a bunch of cool oddballs. Stay tuned for those in a future post. Also, several Griffey's didn't make their way into the post; my bad.

Once again, big thanks to Adam for rocking my PCs with hundreds of needed cards! Very appreciated!

Weezer autographs and memorabilia

If you'll excuse the occasional tangent away from sportscards onto other collectables, I wanted to post some other autographs n' stuff I've got. I originally thought about doing a week of posts dedicated to non-sports/non-card autos in my collection, but I think I'll instead just sprinkle in these posts here and there.

Today I'm featuring the band Weezer. They just put out a new album a few days ago, so seemed as good a time as any to feature them. I sure loved their first album (The Blue Album) when it came out in 1994, and it has held up very well over the years, still an all-time favorite of mine. "Buddy Holly" and "Say It Ain't So" are probably the biggest hits from it, but it's awesome all the way through.

They followed that up with Pinkerton, which was a little weirder but still pretty awesome once you got used to it. After an extended hiatus, they returned with The Green Album in 2001 which wasn't quite as legendary as their first two offerings, but in hindsight is a quality album. Then there were a few albums that weren't too good, but had a catchy tune here and there (and some embarrassingly bad songs in there, too). The new album is called Everything Will Be Alright In The End. While not up to the high standards of the first couple albums, the consensus is it's actually a pretty decent return to form.

Personally, my fandom hit its peak from mid 2000 till mid 2001, seeing them live 3 times within a year and following them pretty close online. While no longer one of my top 10 favorite bands, I'll always have a soft spot for Weezer-- the first 2 albums in particular-- and will always check out their new stuff when it comes out, hoping for the best. Some of their greatest songs were never properly released, such as the old demo at the top of this post.

Anyways, here's my cool Weezer stuff.

This one's actually my wife's. She got this at a Weezer show when she was a teen. They sold these pre-signed CDs at the merch table, so she didn't actually get it signed live-in-person by them, but still cool.

Here are my Weezer CDs. The trilogy! The Green Album is the Japanese import with 2 bonus tracks.

Here's a guitar pick I think I got at a Weezer show once, though I honestly forget the story behind it. I think it was Rivers' and I picked it up from the stage after the show ended.

Here's the other side.

Here's a cool piece! Back when the band regrouped after a few years off, they began by playing small, secret shows under the pseudonym Goat Punishment. I think this was only their 2nd or 3rd show since the hiatus, so there was a lot of excitement around these shows. I was lucky enough to snag a ticket to see them at my favorite club, San Diego's Casbah. The tiny place was packed! The band sounded great and I liked the new songs a lot (again, some of their best songs never got released, with "O Girl" and "Preacher's Son" fading into obscurity after this tour.) I hung around outside for a little while after the set and Rivers came out to say hi to fans. I got to tell him it was a great show and have him sign my ticket for me. I can't remember if the smudge at the end was his fault or mine. I was a newb to getting autographs, so it was very likely my thumb that was the culprit. Still though, love this signed stub.

Finally, here's a "game used" setlist. This was from their show at another of my favorite venues in San Diego, 'Canes (RIP). That place was so cool because it was literally right on the beach. This show was just a month after the Casbah show, happening 7/17/00, but it was not a secret show, so there were a ton of people there. But unlike the prior show, I was able to get nice and close to the stage for this one. (This was the show where I got the guitar pick, I believe.) Great vantage point from the right of the stage. After the set ended, other fans grabbed up the setlists that were in reach, but Pat the dummer's setlist was still up there. The band's drum tech/roadie at the time was Adam Willard, whom I was familiar with because he had been the drummer for Rocket From The Crypt, one of my favorite bands. Knowing his name worked out for me, because when he came on stage to start taking the drumset away, I was able to yell over the house music, "Hey Atom, can I get a setlist?" and he kindly obliged. You can see the band came up with silly versions of their song titles ("Surf Wax America" became "Smurf Waxxxxxxxxx"). You Weezer fans can have fun decoding the titles. This show was the debut of a new song called "Mad Cow", another really good song that never got released.

I also saw the band a third and final time (so far) 3/18/01 at the RIMAC Arena in La Jolla. I've got no mementos from that performance, but I believe that was the tour where my now-wife bought the signed CD pictured above. It was a solid show, but being at a large arena, it was a much less intimate show than the first two I saw, and I was way up in the nosebleeds. Quite a contrast from the club shows, but still a solid rock show. From then on, my fanaticism in the band waned and I stopped following them as closely by the time Maladroit was released in mid 2002. But again, I still listen to them from time to time and always have high hopes when a new album comes out. Again, Everything Will Be Alright In The End is a solid album if you like the band, though it won't blow anyone away.

Oh! I almost forgot. One last thing.. this doesn't count as memorabilia or anything, but back in 2001, I made a silly "webcomic" type webpage where the band encounters Mr. T. You read that right. Back then there were a lot of "Mr. T Vs..." pages.. like Mr. T vs. Spider-man, Mr. T vs. Chuck Norris, etc. They were all somewhat similar and very dumb. I wanted to get in on the fun, so I spent some quality time on Photoshop over a few days and whipped up Mr. T vs. Weezer. It's still online and you can check it out here. As the disclaimer states, "if you are not a Weezer fan, this page will likely be a waste of your time." Lots of Weezer references and tomfoolery. I thought it was pretty funny, at least!

So there you have it. Anybody else out there a Weezer fan?