I will give him the fact that he does help out the community by getting some ex-ballplayers to come to his golf tournament and baseball clinics. If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have been able to meet Johnny Bench and find out how apathetic a guy can be while teaching 12-year-olds.

(sorry)

Here are the boxes from those piles of Schmidt:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/MON/MON198010030.shtml
http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/MON/MON198010040.shtml

Though “We NEED to talk” always stung more bitterly than “we HAVE to…”

The barroom beauty of the Brewers was a nice subtext.
However, why would the mid-80s Expos ever be condidered a “fallen bombshell?”
- I’d think of her more like a homely yet exotic (read: interesting and maybe attractive after a few drinks) type of chick who woulda-shoulda-coulda (in ’81) if only she hadn’t dressed a certain way, or gotten a nose piercing, or a particulary unflattering haircut…

Also why would the Expos/Lass be talking about Mike Schmidt?

The baseball game got suspended because of a power outage so my brother and I retired after one inning to the Wild Rover for some calimari and a couple of drinks. He left, but I wound up hanging out with one of the kids that worked there; a fresh off the boat Irish kid named Peter. I bent his ear asking the dating status of all the different waitresses and wound up closing the place. At one point I recalled relieving myself in a gold toilet. I left a copy of the 1918 Red Sox book there with my George Whiteman bio. I brought that in to show my brother.

The Rover is on the way to work, so I stopped by this morning to pick the book up. I commented on the opulence of the restroom and the gold toilet. The manager said “Aha! So you’re the ####### that pissed in that guy’s tuba.”

1. Reading cardboardgods is always worthwhile because you just might see an essay in which “numbness” is used as a noun.

2. Jim Wohlford was an active player when I first started following baseball. I don’t have any recollections of him as a player but immediately, upon seeing his name, remembered his 1986 Topps card. It was one of those cards that seemed to turn up in every pack – there are at least five of them deep within my mother’s basement.

That year, the first that I really collected cards, I lived and died by the stats on the backs. I sorted them into piles based on whether or not they hit 20 or more homers, won more than 10 games, etc…

Late that year, as those piles grew, it seemed like I kept getting Wohlford, or Buddy Biancalana, or Reid Nichols instead of Boggs, Mattingly, or even Keith Moreland.

Wohlford hit a woeful .192 in 1985. Here’s that awful card…

http://www.billscollectiblestuff.com/servlet/the-3036/1986-Topps-344-Jim/Detail

Who’s he watching? Raines? Dawson? Razor Shines? His expression and posture both seem resigned.

3. I went to the game the other day, on a whim…woke up, grabbed the bus, $10 ticket. And there I was, sitting in the sunshine, shrieking at a rookie catcher for throwing a ball into center field on a two-strike, two-out count which allowed the lead runner to score from third. It’s gonna get warm soon.