26 of the top fantasy first basemen for 2015
FANDOM/CULTURE
In Part 3 of the Time Capsule: Cards From the ‘80s & ‘90s series we were introduced to Randy McCament’s 1990 Upper Deck baseball card and marveled how wonderful it was when the card manufacturer didn’t seem to care whether their subject knew his picture was being taken.
I will not be attending the 1990 Spring Training Camp of the team of my choice.
“My first major league baseball game was in April of 1987, in St. Louis, Missouri. I was eight years old. My favorite team calls St. Louis home and on that Saturday night we, the Cardinals, were playing the New York Mets. This was serious business. True, our rival was, and is, the Chicago Cubs, but that wasn’t really the case in 1987. The Cubs were “lovable losers,” they were cute. The Mets were not cute. They were brash, they were reckless, and they had a slugger named ‘Howard Johnson’ which I thought was weird. And more importantly, they were winners.
“The best cards are often when the manufacturer didn’t seem to care whether the player knew his picture was being taken or not. This seemed to afflict the more average players than your all-stars. Honestly, I could make an entire 700-card series of these. “
“It’s been nearly two months since the Royals lost the World Series by ninety feet. Baseball went into hibernation when Fox signed off that night, not to be heard from again until April, right? Of course not, although we do get a welcome respite from Joe ‘Hack’ Buck and Harold ‘Hack’ Reynolds. Baseball is a 365-day-a-year sport (366 in leap years). There are plenty of ways to get your baseball fix in the winter.”
“Going through old cards you’ll find some just have a knack of jumping out at you for various reasons. ’91 Score had a series of cards called ‘Master Blasters’ which were designated for the sluggers of the day and ‘K-Men’ which, well you get the idea. They were hideous.”
“When it comes to prospects, rookies, and future stars – those special player cards that appear in every so often in a pack of baseball cards – it’s important to remember that there are, at least, two separate but important groups: those who build major league careers and those who fall short.”
“The Saturday after Thanksgiving I was asked to retrieve the Christmas decorations from storage. To do this I had to maneuver several boxes out of the way, one of which I knew contained my old baseball cards. I also knew if I opened that box, I would fall into a bottomless chasm of Diamond Kings, commons, and ‘Jesse Barfield? I had forgotten about Jesse Barfield!’ moments. Naturally, I dove in.”
“This brings us to this week’s featured autograph, a 1961 Topps Cal McLish. The card is badly centered, and for some reason McLish is squinting mightily. A Facebook user on my autographs page speculated that perhaps he just saw Marilyn Monroe. Not too likely, but it’s a theory.”
The top 15 fantasy backstops for 2015.
“Joe Buck: Here’s the 0-1. That’s in the air to left center. That ball iiiiis…down. And it gets passed to the wall! Gordon is gonna dig for third. A mistake in the outfield…and Gordon is being waved home! There’s gonna be a play at the plate…the relay from Crawford…Posey takes it on a hop. Gordon topples over Posey aaaand…”
“Reporter Scoop Chevelle gives his review of the winter meetings: Weather – ‘The weather is warm enough that you could walk around in just your underwear. In theory.'”
“It illustrates the dynamics of what happens when a band of outsiders infiltrate a world dominated by the status quo of business and offer a collective ‘eff you’ to the establishment.”
“The trip was advertised as 6 games in 6 days; Los Angeles -> San Diego -> Anaheim -> Stockton -> Oakland -> San Francisco. At the time it was just a cool idea that none of us took too seriously, but it was something I thought about until 3 months later when all of the stars aligned and I pulled the trigger on my birthday.”
