When you were young: Chris Richard

I found this card in a dime box at the local a while back:

For a dime you can't do any better. Chris Richard was a hard hitting OF prospect with the Cardinals who homered in his first MLB at-bat in 2000. Twelve days after his debut he was quickly shipped off to the O's for Mike Timlin, whose rubber arm would keep him in the majors until 2008 and through 2 Red Sox WS. At the moment you would have thought it was a case of two guys crossing paths, one going up, the other down, the kind you frequently see around the trading deadline.

Drafted in the 19th round, Richard is one of those guys who aren't supposed to make the majors. I was thinking about this the other day when the Rays released 14 minor league prospects recently. Several of those guys were drafted THIS year. If drafting guys you'll soon release is a scouting failure, it's also a scouting failure that a guy who stays on the draft board for 18 rounds goes on to make the majors. 

I've written about this before, but I arrived in Baltimore in 2001, right after Chris Richard did. I remember the commercials, the excitement, the expectation surrounding the youngster from San Diego. The O's weren't supposed to contend, but a young core of guys like Richard and Jay Gibbons who were coming into their primes, the O's were on the cusp of contention. Richard responded with 15 HRs and a 127 OPS+ in 2001. I was finishing my MA at Johns Hopkins and contemplating going on for my PhD. The future was now and it was bright. 

It was a little strange, then, when many years later I found myself at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park (DBAP) with Chris Richard starting at 1B. At that point expectations of the future were somewhat murky if not tarnished, and I had learned several difficult lessons about what people in my racket euphemistically call "the life of the mind." Once again, Chris Richard was playing a major role for my local 9, only it wasn't the 9 Richard had envisioned back in 2001. 

I never met the guy or shook his hand, but like EJ he's one of the Bulls who looms large in my pantheon.    In 2009, all the way up where I live now, the compa and I were stoked to see Richard get called up at the end of the Rays' season. Dude had MASHED at Durham for 4-straight years, and here he was in the majors again. Things did not go as planned as he hit .222 with a .300 OBP in 27 AB. He also made an error at 1B which I remember vividly because both compa and I sat in silence for a few minutes afterward, the game moving on without us. 

Richard retired this past March from the Rays organization, the all-time franchise leader in HR. Cue up the Crash Davis references, which are wholly appropriate given he played for the Bulls, but I'll say Richard taught me a lot (again, I never met the guy).

Things change. We might come up short of the ideal. But we all owe it to ourselves and to those to whom we are responsible to grind it out everyday, to do our best, to shine wherever we find ourselves. Not bad for a 10 cent card.

Have a good one everybody and goodnight Pumpsie Green, wherever you are!

Has someone brought home the bacon!?!

Just for kicks I went to check out the EJ black printing plate and saw this.

Who bought it? GCRL? Moose? Someone else? Maybe a completely different ebayer that'll keep me from completing the rainbow? It sold for almost 3X what the other two went for, so I almost can't imagine it's the last of these. Guess I'll know soon enough.

That said, if this was successful it'll be the first of many CCC headhunting expeditions to come, and with much more difficult to find cards.

Have a good one everybody and goodnight Pumpsie Green, wherever you are!

Headhunting Part I: Who Wants This Card?

OK, so here's the deal. I'm working on EJ rainbows. 2005 Bowman Chrome will take a while, but should be fun.

Over the past few days I've acquired the lion's share of the versions of the 2011 Topps Update Elliot Johnson Cards. I'm still missing the regular issue (go figure!), the gold (emailed someone who posted one), the Diamond sparkle edition, the Target Red Border, and two printing plates, one of which is here.

Here's where this card comes in.

It's probably a Topps furniture leg, but still, it's a Jackie Robinson relic. If you can get the plate away from that guy, I'll flip you the Robinson for that plate and some assorted Rays (your choice, just assorted fun cards). 

Why am I doing this? Well, for starters I'm on a budget, a budget which is tapped until December. I made this dude several offers, but he took none of them and ignored the last one. Keep in mind the BIN on that plate is $20 plus s/h, and I scored my two other plates for about $16 TOTAL. Maybe you'll have better luck than I did and talk him down to a fair price, meaning JR will be a steal. I made solid offers based on market value, but whatever. 

So there is it. The link. The card for trade. The first edition of Headhunters around here.

Any takers?

Have a good one everybody and goodnight Pumpsie Green, wherever you are!

Thor as a 5'10" White Guy: Lemmer

This is the other card I pulled when going down memory lane the other night:

This is Mark Lemke circa 1990. In case anyone forgot, the Braves at this point are something of an abomination. They haven't been relevant since 1982 when they lost to the Cardinals in the NLCS. Sure, in they finished second in the old NL West in '83 and '84, but starting in '85 they'd go on an EPIC losing jag in which they'd lose 90+ games in 5 of the next 6 seasons. The exception was '86 when they lost 89. They were bad. This cat here was bad. They were ALL bad, in fact. So bad in '87 they traded they lone effective pitcher to the Tigers for some minor leaguer. Things sucked.

Then this happened. And this guy, this guy who even in the season had an OPS of .617 went NUTS to the tune of 1.170. 

This, I'd like to think, is one if the things that makes baseball great. It's not just the one guy who comes through in a big way and his team wins. There's also the career-OPS .641 2B who blows up over a period of days, a guy who had 63 hits all season who has 10 in a few days, and 4 of those were XBH. He had one of the greatest WS ever. And yet his team still lost. Now that I'm older, I think we're all there at some point. 

Any who, when I was a kid this wasn't quite an auto of Christ himself, but it was pretty darn close. 

Have a good one everybody and goodnight Pumpsie Green, wherever you are!

Old School Auto: Francisco Cabrera

My grandmother passed away about 2 years ago. She'd been living with my folks for several years, and they're just now getting around to going through her stuff. Understandable, I guess. On Sunday my dad told me he and my mom had found two autos I got in the late-80s at a Braves game: Vida Blue and Atlee Hammaker. Apparently they were in an envelop my grandmother had kept for years.

Anyway, that got me kind of sentimental. After my granddad passed away in the mid-1990s my grandmother always came over for dinner. In the summer and into the fall, she stayed for the Braves. In honor of gramma, I pulled out this card:

I got this card "the year before," but that doesn't make it any less awesome. If I remember correctly, I obtained the card and the auto at a Braves Caravan back when the Braves had a rabid regional following. Like my Glavine and Smoltz autos, when I got this Francisco Cabrera was nobody. 

But he'd very quickly become a somebody, one of the greatest somebodies in Braves history.

This video is here. I many ways, it's kind of a "shot heard round the world." Cabrera's BB reference page is even sponsored by a Pirates fan who says, "He ruined my childhood and destroyed a franchise. The only thing I can do now is make sure a Braves fan can never sponsor this page again." Dark stuff they talk over at Where have you gone Andy Van Slyke.

Anyway, get your EJ's out, trade bait coming out soon!

Have a good one everybody and goodnight Pumpsie Green, wherever you are!

The EJ Collection Goes to 11: The 2005 Bowman Chrome Superfractor

Seriously.

I sold a few things on the 'bay recently and decided it was time to step out of my normal purchasing range. WAY out.

I'd been following the card for a while and the BIN on it was more than I wanted to pay. I was looking to get one of several cards and even though this buyer didn't have an OBO on it, I thought I'd drop him a  line. I offered, he countered, we agreed on a price. 

Give it a few days and here it is:

I'd never seen, much less held a superfractor in person before, and let me say that they are sweet. REALLY sweet. 

I've stated before that I'm a HUGE EJ fan. This was only increased this past 4th of July, but that story will have to wait. Suffice it to say that he's a cool, down-to-earth guy and one of my favorite players of all-time. Hence the superfractor purchase.

A 1/1, but look at that story. How many undrafted free agents make it so far as to have their own card, much less all the way to the show? He's a hell of a guy and a hell of a ballplayer. This is also a hell of a card.

So, keep an eye out in the next few days for some headhunting trade offers I'll be putting out. I'm obviously going after the 2005 Bowman EJ rainbow, as well as this year's 2011 Topps Update EJs. If you have any put them aside, it'll be worth your while!

Have a good one everybody and goodnight Pumpsie Green, wherever you are!

Have a good 

Enough of the CC Hating: Or John Henry is Killing the Red Sox

So here we go.

Red Sox owner John Henry goes on a radio show and says that he was "against signing CC." Now, there's no denying CC had a down year, but why is the Red Sox owner going on the record and throwing players under the bus? Usually Henry and the Sox brass waits until a guy is gone or on his way out, so what on earth is he trying to accomplish here? This is the type of stuff that drove the Yankis into the ground in the 80s and kept them there until the mid-90s.

Now, I know a good bit of CC hate has been unleashed by a lot of Rays fans, but remember this: CC is a consummate pro. When Pat "The Bat" was stinking it up and pouting around for the Rays, CC was the clubhouse enforcer. According to at least one source, CC was so shocked by the lackadaisical clubhouse culture in Beantown he kind of kept to himself for most of the season. That said, he manned-up and gave an "impassioned speech" to his teammates as the Sox season went from bad to worse.

Let's be clear: in a clubhouse where Beckett, Lester, and Lackey supposedly drank and played video games between starts, CC is the guy Henry has publicly decided to name as a disappointment.

If that's the case JH, then by all means please, PLEASE send him back to the Rays.

Have a good one everybody and goodnight Pumpsie Green, wherever you are!