Eight Clubby Nights: A Stadium Club Hanukkah (Night 3)

Hanukkah is not a holiday for those with little patience. You're in it for the long haul, a week and then a day. This leads to the fun chronology of it always ending on the same day of the week on which it began, in this case Sunday. The actual celebration is quite ritualistic, and it differs from Christmas in that it doesn't have weeks or even months of buildup, suddenly followed by an abrupt end. December 26th always felt like the most anticlimactic day of the entire year. Hanukkah is a nice, slow burn, and by the end of the eighth night, you feel like you've gotten your fill.

By the third night, you've got the rhythm down again. You probably remember the prayers without having to look them up. You've also perfected your dreidel spin. And the more candles you have, the more fun it is to watch them dance in varying ways, even just a centimeter apart.

Something else where your muscle memory comes back quickly is opening packs of cards. I might go months without opening a pack, but partway through a blaster, I have that little tear of the back flap of cellophane just perfect.

2018 Stadium Club #59 Yonder Alonso

First out of Night 3's pack is Yonder Alonso, the Cuban first baseman who has played on three teams in two seasons. He spent all of 2018 with the Cleveland Indians, which means he made it to his first Postseason in October. All those years on the Reds and Padres didn't afford him a taste of October baseball until now.

This card shows the rapid recent evolution of the Cleveland Indians uniform. Red and dark blue are becoming more prominent, and the Indians are gradually moving away from the Chief Wahoo logo, which is barely visible on Alonso's left sleeve. Starting in 2019, the longtime logo will not be used on-field anymore.

2018 Stadium Club #266 Alex Verdugo (RC)

I'll spare you any political opinions about the Indians' logo and move right along to the first of two rookie cards in this pack. Alex Verdugo has mainly been a September call-up for the Los Angeles Dodgers these past two years, and the Dodgers haven't chosen to add him to a Postseason roster yet. He's only 22 years old, and the Dodgers show no signs of slowing down. That will continue to make it difficult on the rest of the NL West, and gives this 22-year old plenty of time to improve his game.

This card has the general look of those 1970s cards everyone loves so much. Other than the massive amount of ink on Verdugo's forearm, the chain link fence and various parked vehicles in the background just scream "retro". That's also one of the better examples of a bat's woodgrain that I can recall.

2018 Stadium Club Never Compromise #NC-MT Mike Trout

This pack's insert arrived exactly in the middle, and it's another new one called Never Compromise. Perennial MVP candidate Mike Trout is the subject this time, who was named the AL Rookie of the Year in 2012. He's reached that age of 27 where most players either finally figure out the big leagues or fade into obscurity. Trout, on the other hand, is a two-time MVP, seven-time All Star, and would be a guaranteed first-ballot Hall of Famer if he retired tomorrow. Instead, he's sure to score a gigantic payday once he hits free agency.

I'm not sure what the point of this set is, other than an excuse to make another card of Mike Trout. The paragraph on the back mostly talks about Trout's clubhouse demeanor, including a quote from former Angel Howie Kendrick.

I am a frequent Redditor, and things get quite different around the /r/baseball subreddit during the offseason. There are plenty of highlights and game recaps during the season, but between November and March, people are grasping at straws a little bit. One offseason post pointed out that Shohei Ohtani was the first Angel not named after a fish to win Rookie of the Year, after Mike Trout and Tim Salmon.

Sometimes April is a long way away.

2018 Stadium Club #280 Harrison Bader (RC)

We're rotating to landscape orientation for the final two cards, starting with our second rookie card of the pack. It's outfielder Harrison Bader of the St. Louis Cardinals, just barely off the ground in a picture-perfect dive, though the ball is still nowhere to be found. It can be a little lonely out there in the outfield, and your ability to dive for fly balls is the only thing standing between an out and an inside-the-park home run. A play like this can spectacularly turn against you very quickly, but professionals like this make the SportsCenter highlight reel more often than not.

Back when I was a young Beckett subscriber, they'd occasionally run a feature where fans would write amusing captions for their cards and send them in. Gloves on heads, dugout shots, Bip Roberts, that sort of stuff. Upper Deck cards were frequent candidates. Anyway, I always wanted to send a card like this in to Beckett, and caption it, "Hurry up and take the picture! I can't hold this pose much longer!"

I may have stolen that from my dad. It was a long time ago.

2018 Stadium Club #300 Hideki Matsui

Closing out the third night is our first MLB retiree of the blaster, Hideki Matsui as a Yankee. The Japanese star spent most of his American career as a Yankee, though he did wrap things up with a few other AL teams in the early 2010s. He was named the 2009 World Series MVP in the Yankees' defeat of the Philadelphia Phillies, and I had the good fortune to see him in late 2009 in Anaheim, the only regular-season MLB game I've attended outside Denver. Matsui went 0-3 that day, with a walk and a run scored.

There is definitely some funny business going on with the background of this card. The umpire, catcher's head, and fans nearer the third base dugout are much blurrier than the fans on the other side, leading me to believe that either Topps applied some weird artificial bokeh effect to the upper right quadrant of the photograph, or else an image processing algorithm got confused. I speak from experience when I assure you that light does not work this way.

I haven't played with new smartphone features like Portrait Mode much, but they can get confused when a background is encircled by a foreground object. Someone with their hands on their hips, for example, or a chair arm. The enclosed area might not be digitally blurred like the rest of the background in the same focal plane. For my money, a fast lens with a wide open aperture is still the best way to get a nice bokeh effect, but I'm a purist.

It's a good photo selection, as is usual with Stadium Club. But the strangeness of how it was manipulated knocks it down a few pegs in my book. However, this is the final card in the set, #300, so that raises it back up a little bit.

Our streak of Washington Nationals has come to an end, but it's never too late to begin a new one.