ToppsGelt

As another year's Hanukkah winds to a close, it's about that time for your occasional education on Jewish culture here at Infield Fly Rule. It's certainly nothing as in-depth as my full eight-night Stadium Club extravaganza from 2018, but there's still cause for celebration. We all know the mail hasn't been especially speedy this year, but I did get a Hanukkah card delivered from my mom, and inside was yet another Eight Men Out need.

1994 Topps Gold #395 Bill Brennan

As longtime readers may know, I've gradually been collecting the Topps Gold checklist replacement cards from 1992-1994 Topps. I have a full set of the six 1993 cards, completed last year. I don't think I have any of the 1992s, but with the above Bill Brennan card, I'm well on my way to having the '94 set as well. For those not in the know, Topps figured that getting a one-per-pack Gold parallel of a plain old checklist would be disappointing, so they picked a few extra players that didn't make it into the regular base set and gave them gold-only cards.

In a rather inattentive error, I actually had this card on the list twice, so Mom must have figured I really wanted it. It ended up being Bill Brennan's last Major League card. He had numerous minor league issues, and a few major-brand MLB cards following his 1988 debut, including an appearance in the famed 1989 Upper Deck set, but his career never took off. He appeared in four games for the '88 Dodgers, so he probably has a World Series ring somewhere. His career didn't progress beyond the Minors until a final, brief stint with the Cubs in 1993, as pictured here in a Studio-esque posed shot.

On the back, Topps has this listed as Brennan's Rookie Card. Donruss, Score, and Upper Deck all gave him cards in 1989, but Topps didn't get around to it until after his career ended. That makes it one of the rare examples of a Rookie Card and a Sunset Card all in one.

And since this is a Gold card, I thought I'd make a little Hanukkah pun and call it ToppsGelt. Gelt is a Yiddish word meaning "money", and in the context of Hanukkah, it refers to the little golden foil-wrapped chocolate coins that are given as small gifts. They're a favorite item to gamble with while playing Dreidel. I didn't buy any this year, but getting a relatively rare overproduction-era card is a great substitute.

Thanks for reading and Happy Holidays!

Take that, Lucy!

It's almost Valentine's Day, and here I am ready to write about Christmas.

When I was growing up, we had lots of family traditions around Christmas (and still do), but most of the annually aired 1960s TV specials were something I missed out on. Frosty the Snowman (narrated by Jimmy Durante) was the primary exception, along with a few 1930s-era Disney cartoons.

The stop-motion Rudolph special I only saw once or twice, and I was in my early teens. I hadn't even seen Elf until a couple months ago. Same goes for the Grinch animated film (though the Jim Carrey remake was pretty amusing), plus perhaps the most classic of all, A Charlie Brown Christmas.

It's true, I had never seen that Peanuts classic until maybe six weeks ago. And it's probably one of those things you have to do by a certain age to fully appreciate, sort of like reading The Catcher in the Rye. Thirty-one is a bit late.

Still, at least now I know what it's all about. But there was one scene that really stuck out during my first-ever viewing.

It's the scene where Schroeder is playing Beethoven's Fur Elise with Lucy sitting nearby. Lucy gripes that "Beethoven wasn't so great." Schroeder fires back with "Whaddya mean Beethoven wasn't so great?!" Lucy ponders that one for a moment, eventually responding with "Have you ever seen his picture on a bubble gum card? How can you say someone is great who's never had his picture on bubble gum cards?"

Hmm.

Well that got the gears spinning.

Surely with all the multi-sport retro sets like Upper Deck's A Piece of History or Allen & Ginter, that statement is no longer true. A little digging led me to add a card to the Eight Men Out list, which my girlfriend recently filled for an early Valentine's Day present.

So which card was it that set the record straight?

2009 Topps Allen and Ginter #83 Ludwig van Beethoven

2009 A&G took care of that, finally allowing a baseball card blogger to refute a claim made in an American Christmas classic almost fifty years prior.

Card or no, Beethoven was a musical genius, especially in light of the hearing loss that struck him in his late twenties. He was so influential that the 74-minute length of a Compact Disc was allegedly designed to fit his 9th Symphony. And like several legendary composers, his 9th Symphony was his last. It's a bit of a superstition in classical music, sort of a 19th-century predecessor to the Madden Curse.

Like many of his contemporaries, he set up shop in Vienna, and on our trip last summer, we got to dine at a winery in the Heiligenstadt district of Vienna, a spot that Ludwig himself lived in the early 19th century. Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Strauss, and others are immortalized with statues all over Vienna.

And, as of 2009, he's also on a baseball card.

We can't know whether Topps created this card early in the existence of Allen & Ginter specifically to address Lucy's concern, but after almost 50 years, Topps made Beethoven great again.