The photo on the card is obviously a Spring Training shot, and I’m guessing the building in the background is a hotel (my hunch says Hilton).  At first I thought the guys doing something on the ground were from the grounds crew, but it looks like they’re wearing Cardinal uniforms so I have no idea what they’re doing.

I featured Bake McBride’s rookie card in the Hostess Card Of The Week post from two weeks ago, only in that post I was focusing in part on one of his card mates, Rich Bladt, who had been traded along with Elliott Maddox, who was the subject of that week’s card:

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My prediction for the Super Bowl (Not that I’ll be watching…):
Niners 24, Ravens 21.
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At this point I’m going to revive a “feature” that may not be thrilling to many (or any) of you, but when my great uncle Beauregard was on his deathbed, I promised him that I would carry on with this….

Yes, it’s time for Weigh-in #45, this time we’re tracking my progress since 12/2/12.  I find that it making my progress a matter of public record helps to motivate (or shame) me, even if nobody reads them.  This time around, I feel good about what’s going on.

Net change in the collection: -1,311 (since 12/2: 557 added, 1585 purged)

Net change to the # of cards in the house: -8,904 (since 12/2: 530 in, 66 out)

Total # of cards which have left the house: 13,688

Number of cards tracked in my Access database: 20,418 (up from 4,740… I’m very happy with the organization that accompanies this surge)

A Legend among Legends…

Most baseball fans remember attending their first major league baseball game.  For many of us, it happened during our childhoods so it was a special event to spend time with a parent, grand-parent or older sibling.  In my case, I attended my first game with my step-father.  My own father had died a few years earlier and he did not have the health in his final years to take me to any games.

I was excited when my step-father informed me that we could be traveling to St Louis by bus to see the Cardinals play.  My step-father had been a life-long Cardinals fan so he was probably as thrilled about the trip as I was.  My step-father had been very active with the local Elks club chapter, as a member and officer of the organization.  The bus trip to St Louis, a five hour drive, had been sponsored by the Elks club.  I am not sure why that’s relevant to this post, but it’s probably just a tribute to my step-father for the passion and support he gave the Elks over the years.

The date of the game was May 29, 1974, and it featured the Los Angeles Dodgers against the St Louis Cardinals.  It was a nice spring Missouri day at the old Busch Stadium, with the Arch looming in the background.  When I look back, I am in complete awe of the players who took the field that day.  At that point of my childhood, I considered myself a bigger football than baseball fan.  Like many of my friends, my favorite baseball team were the Oakland A’s.  I would not become a Yankees fan until the end of the year when A’s starting pitcher and Hall of Famer Jim “Catfish” Hunter would leave Oakland as a free agent to sign with the Yankees.

Thinking about the game, several players stood out to me that day as a kid attending my first professional game.  I was mesmerized by the Dodgers starting pitcher (and future Yankee) Tommy John and his pitching motion.  Surprisingly, I remember John more that day than the starter for the Cardinals, the legendary Bob Gibson.

For the Cardinals, centerfielder Bake McBride made the biggest impression…well, at least until the latter innings.  I thought the name “Bake” was rather cool, and he seemed to move effortlessly with great speed in the field.  He did not do anything with his bat that day, but I enjoyed the grace he displayed in the field.  Late in the game, the Cardinals brought in closer Al “The Mad Hungarian” Hrabosky even though they were trailing.  The intensity that Hrabosky brought to the game when he entered to pitch still gives me chills.  He brought the crowd alive, and although the Cardinals would lose the game, 5-2, Hrabosky made me a believer and he became my first favorite closer. I would have subsequent trips to St Louis and I always loved watching Hrabosky pitch while he was in his prime.  I think I’ve always had a favorite closer through the years as a result.  Rich “Goose” Gossage and Mariano Rivera are two other all-time favorites.

The memory of these players vastly overlooks the legends on the field that day (as I now recognize).  The Dodgers were managed by the great Walter Alston, while the Cardinals were led by long-time manager Red Schoendienst.  Some of the Dodger names that would have prominent roles in the ’77 and ’78 World Series agains the Yankees were there…Steve Garvey, Bill Russell, Ron Cey and Steve Yeager.  The Cardinals had Joe Torre at first and Ted Simmons behind the plate.  It is amazing how differently the game looks to me today as I recall it as opposed to my perception in May 1974.  I was blessed with the opportunity to see so many legends that day.

As memorable as the game was for me, it was, believe it or not, a trip to the restroom that has endured the test of time as one of my all-time favorite baseball moments.  It was the fourth inning and I made my way to the restroom.  Over the speakers, I heard that I missed the opportunity to see my first home run as Ron Cey connected off Gibson.  After using the restroom, I was walking down the corridor back toward my seat.  I saw a line of people waiting to see a guy who was signing baseballs and books.  There were actually two guys signing autographs.  I went to the shorter line, and it was famed St Louis Post-Dispatch sports writer Bob Broeg.  Nothing against Broeg, but I was more intrigued by the other gentleman as he was garnering the most attention.  After getting Broeg’s autograph, I got in the other line and worked up my way up to shake hands with none other than the legendary Stan “The Man” Musial.  I had been familiar with who Musial was through my step-father as he always spoke very fondly of the Cardinals great.  I was in awe but admittedly I did not appreciate the moment at the time in the way I do today.  Mr. Musial was very kind to me and it is an encounter that I will never forget.  I can still remember going back to my seat and telling my step-father, “I just met Stan ‘The Man’ Musial!”.

I was very saddened to hear the news of Musial’s passing this weekend.  I have always been grateful for the few minutes I had with him and he’ll always hold a special place for me as one of my all-time favorite players.  He will be missed and as many have written, he was “The Man”…

–Scott

Set Type: Primary
Card dimensions: 2½” x 3½”
Parallels: Blank Backs, serial numbered “1/1” on back of card; Gold Foil; Black, Cyan, Magenta & Yellow Printing Plates — each serial numbered “1/1.” Topps distributed the Blank Backs parallels exclusively on eBay via The Topps Vault. These parallels are only for card numbers 1-200, and do not include the high-number, retired played SPs numbered 201-240. Although Beckett’s online guide states that all the cards in the set also have Gold Foil parallels and Printing Plates, I haven’t seen any on the open market for the SPs at the end of the set.

Inserts: 1956 Relics, 1958 Combos, 1967 Stickers, 1968 3-D, 1969 Deckle Edge, 1977 Cloth Stickers, 1982 In Action, Fan Favorites Autographs, Framed 1983 Mini Autographs, Reprints
Additional Information: Topps replicated four different designs for use in the bast portion of the set: 1954 Topps for card numbers 1-50; 1971 Topps for card numbers 51-100; 1980 Topps for card numbers 101-150; and 1984 Topps for card numbers 151-200. Card numbers 201-240 are SPs replicating other Topps designs and featuring retired players. In the checklist below, the year of the Topps set being replicated is listed in parenthesis after the retired player’s name. Each of the retired player SP cards also appeared in the Fan Favorites Autographs insert set.
14,000 Phillies Commentary: Last year, I really hated the primary Lineage set, but loved the inserts. In fact, I wrote a two-part rant in which I stated, “What Lineage should have looked like was the Fan Favorites sets from 2003-2005. Randomly start putting today’s players on card designs from the past 60 years.”
I doubt anyone from Topps actually read this blog, but I’m glad to see that’s almost exactly what they did. 2012 Topps Archives is what 2011 Topps Lineage should have been. I have some minor quibbles regarding the card stock and Gold Foil parallels — not to mention unnecessarily making SPs out of the retired players in the high-numbers — but outside of that, I loved nearly everything about the set and its inserts. In fact, I have acquired every card except for the Framed 1983 Mini Autograph Schmidt card, which I will likely never actually own due to its scarcity.

There was on thing about the set that left me scratching my head, however. Why did they put McBride in the 1975 design as a Phillie? Don’t get me wrong — his card might very well be my favorite of the SPs. However, he didn’t join the team until after the 1977 season started. Because of this, there is no 1977 Topps card picturing McBride as a Phillie. This would have been an awesome opportunity to create a card that never was. Actually, there are a number of similar Phillies cards I would have loved to seen: a 1975 Topps Tug McGraw; 1983 Topps Darren Daulton; 1980 Topps Bob Walk; 1994 Topps Fernando Valenzuela; or even a 1964 Topps card showing Jim Bunning in an actual Phillies uniform.  Cards that never were (but should have been) are a perfect fit for a set such as this — it’s a shame that Topps hasn’t quite figured out that one yet.

You Can’t Lose ‘Em All by Frank Fitzpatrick — With the Phillies now established as a National League power and perennial pennant contender, it’s easy to forget that Philadelphia was once considered as cursed or snake-bitten a baseball city as Boston or Chicago of more modern times. That drought ended when the 1980 Phillies – backed by a volatile collection of top-tier stars (Steve Carlton, Pete Rose, Mike Schmidt) and lesser-known contributors (Greg Luzinski, Bake McBride, Dick Ruthven) alike – beat Kansas City to win their first World Series.

I find that hilarious enough to share with you. That person likely wound up here.

Here are my five favorite Google search terms (aside from “baked mcbride baseball player”) used to find this blog this week power rankings …

1. “red sox bacon”
2. “babe ruth funny”
3. “indianapolis factory next to lucas oil stadium”
4. “jacksonville sports bars philadelphia teams 2011″
5. “sidious with maul ,vador and dooku”

1982 Topps - Bake McBride

I think if your first name is Bake, even if it’s a nickname, you have to have unbelievable hair like this.

Two further reasons this name should be famous – both of these factoids were taken from Wikipedia, so they have to be true.  Wikipedia is like the Bible of the 21^st century:

1. Bake’s nephew Joe McBride is a jazz keyboardist and singer.
2. His grandson Ryan “The Bear” McBride played banjo and buckets in the band “Hilltop.”

Seriously.  You can’t make this shit up.  Well, someone might have, but I’m posting it as fact.

Has Cardboard Gods jumped the shark? I am constantly wondering about this. I actually first considered the possibility many months ago, just a couple weeks into the whole project, when I posted what seemed to me to be a passionless, desultory profile of Otto Velez. Since then I’ve revisited thoughts of an unredeemable demise on an almost weekly basis, most recently in the form of a sinking feeling that I had let the great Boog Powell down.

This sinking feeling is not new. I’ve always sort of felt like I’m living within an aftermath. I’m like Ted McGinley, star of the Love Boat just before it sank and of Happy Days at its glummest, always arriving too late for all the excitement, always incapable of creating a new thrilling epoch on my own. All the cool shit had already happened by the time I was old enough to take part, it seemed. I was too late to huff carbona with Richard Hell and Dee Dee Ramone, too late to drop acid with Ken Kesey and Ram Dass, too late to smoke “tea” and guzzle cheap port with Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. By the time I was the age these guys were in their frontier-exploring heydays it was the early 1990s, and though I guess there were probably new exciting movements going on somewhere, I had no idea where they were, and even if I had known I’d probably have thought the people involved were pretentious assholes.

So instead of blazing new pathways of creativity within an invigorating collective of the best young minds of my generation I got a job on the night shift at the UPS warehouse on 42^nd street by the Hudson River and got sort of drunk after work every day in the morning while reading a newspaper I’d pulled out of the garbage and eating three-for-a-dollar macaroni and cheese with chopped-up generic hot dogs. I’d fall unconscious for a while and wake up at dusk feeling like I’d been regurgitated, and then I’d watch the 5:30 episode of Charles in Charge. After a few months of showing up at work at 3 A.M. to take boxes off a conveyer belt and put them in a truck, I abruptly quit, phoning in one evening to tell a preposterous lie about the sudden death of my grandfather (who had actually died a few years earlier) necessitating my immediate departure from the city to help run “the family farm.” I went to Vermont and lounged around my stepfather’s condo in Montpelier and wrote a young adult novel about basketball, taking copious breaks to run imaginary tournaments involving the putting of a golf ball at various targets around the condo. At the end of the summer I had a complete manuscript, and returned to New York planning to sell it and begin a fabulous career of swinging from one joyous literary conquest to the next like Tarzan swinging on vines.

I never did sell the thing. While I was sort of trying to sell it I got an “in the meantime” job at the liquor store where my brother had worked while going to NYU (that particular “in the meantime” job of mine ultimately lasting the better part of a decade). My shift there started at 6 P.M. on most days, and though it was only a five-minute walk from the small apartment I shared with my brother, the start time meant that I always missed the last few moments of Charles in Charge. Each episode always followed the same basic three-part pattern, the first and last parts being relatively brief: Part one: Charles is in charge; Part two: Charles is no longer in charge; Part three: Charles is in charge again. I always had to leave the apartment with the situation in chaos.

I don’t know what any of this has to do with Bake McBride, except that I started the day today with some observations about him that were so lackluster and uninspired that I quickly fell to thoughts that I had really blown it for good, that I was through as a writer, that if I couldn’t get a good lather going for Bake McFucking McBride I might as well hang it up and let the shark Fonzie jumped tear me and my metaphorical leather jacket of imagined coolness to shreds. I mean, this is Bake McBride we’re talking about! If I was a beatnick I’d have already chanted a rolling, incantatory three-page Bake McBride ode at the Six Gallery with Sal Paradise yelling “wail!” in the background; if I was a hippie I’d have already run naked across the Pentagon lawn out my mind on mescaline, convinced I was Bake McBride ecstatically legging out a world-peace-bestowing triple; and if I was a New York Punk I’d have already ruined my eardrums forever with the sheer velocity and volume of a two-minute aural assault entitled “Bake McBride” that would have helped free music from the skeletal clutches of corporate rock. But I’m none of those things, and I’m not even an odd solitary miner of the gruesome and beautiful unconscious like Kafka, spinning out a tale of waking one morning metamorphosed into Bake McBride’s disembodied afro. No, all I could manage was that Bake McBride hung up his spikes one hit shy of a lifetime average of .300.

His batting average rounded up to .300 as late as the 10^th-to-last game of his career, when as a member of the Cleveland Indians he went 2 for 4 on September 10, 1983, against the Red Sox. He managed only 2 hits in his next 17 at bats, however, dooming to failure a subsequent 5 for 10 flurry in his last major league at-bats.

I don’t know why Bake McBride stopped playing then. He was 34 years old, but he had hit .291 for the year and just one year earlier in limited action had hit .365. The speed that had been one of his strikingly distinguishing features in his prime—along with his large afro (seen here below a Cardinals flat-topped “old-tyme” cap in an admirable but still only penultimate stage of magnificence) and his incomparable name—may have been on the wane, but he still stole 8 bases in 10 attempts in ’83 and, even more tellingly, made his final major league appearance as a pinch runner in his team’s second to last game of the year. He could still hit, and he could still run. So why stop?

I don’t know why. I’ve quit a lot of things in my life, so I guess I can imagine how he might have just got sick of doing what he was doing, especially considering it must have gotten harder and harder as the years went on. 

As for me, even though I’ve quit a lot of things, I never have quit writing, not yet. So I guess even if my lifetime average keeps falling farther and farther below .300 I’m going to keep going up there and hacking.