What The? Huh?!

 

I was wondering if 2025 would be the first year in a while where I would go a long time without buying any sports cards. Then a few days into February I made my first sports card pick-up of 2025 which was that Troy Tulowitzki 2012 Sega Card Gen rare foil there.

There's a card shop called Trickster right across the hall from Mint Ikebukuro. Trickster doesn't deal with sports cards, they deal with cards used for card games but more importantly they also have a nice selection of cards used for arcade games. Which includes Sega Card Gen somehow like over a decade after the game went offline.

I wasn't expecting to find any of these rares in the wild, let alone Tulo's which was the last one I needed to finish the rare foil portion of the Colorado Rockies team set from 2012.

It's kind of nuts to think about how enough time has passed that now we know Todd Helton made it into the Hall of Fame while Carlos Gonzalez and Tulo just fell off the ballot immediately this year.

But as I mentioned before on this blog, when I think of the Rockies I think of the CarGo-Tulo era and it's finally nice to get them from the set I hold near and dear to me from my first serious days in the hobby.

Also picked up some Kancolle cards used for their arcade game which is still on-going. I don't play the games but these two are cute and the artwork is phenomenal (and I am a degenerate).

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.

1,500th TTM Return

 Pulling the plug on the TTM/IP collection did not necessarily mean that I won't still continue partaking in these hobbies in some form in 2024 and beyond. Old habits die hard. It just means my focus will be narrowed down, er, even more narrower than before.

Received On: 2/20/2024

Like this return from Vinny Castilla, which was the first (and to date last) request I sent out in 2024.

Castilla is one of those names people who grew up with baseball in the 1990's and 2000's remember. He was a staple of those early Colorado Rockies teams, or at least it feels like it in hindsight. Castilla enjoyed a 16 year long career as a major leaguer and he was a two time All Star and one of Mexico's best and brightest stars to date.

I picked up this Bazooka blast bat relic around the same time as when I picked up the Todd Helton Bazooka bat relic. I immediately then sent this off as a TTM request using PastPros after paying his fee.

A month or so later it returned and it helped me reach the 1,500 TTMs mark.

At least per my back-of-the-napkin-math count. When I took stock of the stuff I got that was dismantled and sent off, I was at 1,499.

I suppose that those are rookie numbers compared to people who can afford to send requests to every minor leaguer ever every summer but I'm still surprised I reached 1,000 in hindsight.

Going forward I might get some more here and there as a few forgotten requests from years ago trickle in, or I dabble more with non-sports. But we'll see what happens with the sports stuff I guess. The whole reason I dumped a bunch of base cards onto Nick was so I wouldn't be tempted to send requests anymore.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.

2024 TTM Count: 1

Sources:
*https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/c/castivi02.shtml

It Just Fell Into My Lap

 Instead of a want list I have switched to a bucket list. They're cards that I'd like to own at some point in my life. I'm not quite sure if I'd want to keep them for a long time afterwards but they're cool enough cards that yes I would like to have them.

One card I didn't put on there but I never thought I'd ever have the chance to get just fell into my lap.

HELL YES.

That's a Japan-fractor autograph of Kyle Freeland from 2014 Bowman Sterling. It's limited to 5 copies and is a card I never thought I'd see, let alone own.

When I made my initial 14 cards of Freeland post, I made a note that the one parallel I wanted was the Japan-fractor. At the time the only thing available was the non-autographed parallel. A year later I got the autograph! For $10 cheaper too because the hobby is weird like that.

Unfortunately this card being as affordable as it was is more of a indicator on how far Freeland's fallen. In 2018 when he looked like he was finally going to be the first pitcher in history to figure out how to pitch in Coors Field this would've at least gone for triple digits. Unfortunately that time has long since passed and Freeland's gone from future Cy Young contender to ace-by-default on a Colorado Rockies team that is more of a "bonus" perk of the Coors Field experience more than an actual Major League Baseball team at this point. Although good on them for continuing to invest in their own players (congrats to Ezequiel Tovar on his extension). 

Fun to have both now

Still, when he's on he does show flashes of vintage Freeland, the guy who demonstrated that one of the best ways to pitch in Coors is just pounding the zone with elevated fastballs and getting swings and misses. As evident by how the Rockies' pitching staff is full of arms that can't throw strikes and melts down every other day because of it.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.

Thonks

 There's a lot that's been written and discussed about social media and the current state of the internet. How it's all just one gigantic blob of content consumption. Whether we want to or not, the only six websites that still exist are just there to bombard us with content. Some of it is tailored to us, a lot of it is tailored against us, and it's really easy to get burnt out quickly.

That current content consumption landscape is also pretty much the backbone for sports fandom and sports content on the internet. Makes sense, in sports cool shit can happen at any given moment spontaneously. There's no greater rush than seeing a bunch of people (anonymous and unknown to you or not) be caught up in the moment. It makes people who spend their days feeling nothing (read: everyone born after 1993) feel something.

As such there's this constant need for things to be going on all the time. Every five picoseconds that go by without any activity means "ded sporp f". This past winter wasn't a dud because the Scott Boras clients signed at the 11th hour, it was a dud because there were no "PASSAN BOMBS" with league shattering moves every other day. Folks were down bad enough to track a flight from California to Toronto.

But baseball in the regular season is where there's so much baseball happening every night. To the point where we don't even need it all if we're being honest. The 2024 MLB regular season hasn't even been in full effect for a month but already we've cycled through like 5 different headlines. The part I'm not proud of is that I kind of have/had thoughts about each.

- The see through pants and uniforms

I saw someone remark that every manufacturer in the world is in a different stage of not having to give a shit about what they make and that's about the best way I can describe it.

- The Ippei Mizuhara Gambling Scandal

I always thought Ippei was an asshole because he got paid money to hang out with Shohei Ohtani and speak the same two languages that I speak everyday for free.

- The Oakland A's situation

If you think about this for longer than 5 seconds the most cynical side of you completely takes over. Not remotely fun to think about anything related to this.

- The pitching injury epidemic

Gee, who would've ever thought that the league where everyone just copies what the Tampa Bay Rays are doing would end up going through arms before realizing they don't have an army of nameless, faceless pitchers ready to go in triple-A.

- Whatever Jeff Passan/Ken Rosenthal/Evan Drellich writes about next week

I am outraged and indifferent at the same time.

These topics and my thoughts on them are not what I want to talk about though, because these come and go.

No, the thing that made me want to write this post is how I bothered to have opinions on all of these. And how I'll continue to form thoughts and reactions.

Why?

Well this is an unfortunate side effect of having a brain and thoughts. Also this ties back to that spiel at the top about constant content consumption. On the most basic level all of this is content that I consumed. Then during the digestion process I formed thoughts on it but these poisoned me and my body forcefully shat out anyway in a muddied not fully formed state. Because like all of us in 2024, my brain is broken and this is how I "exchange" ideas with others.

But then I took another step back and wondered, are these genuinely my thoughts?

I did think these sure, but how much influence did other people and their reactions have in my thoughts being molded before coming into being?

Often times my first introduction to a topic is someone else's reaction to it. Maybe it's a quote tweet, maybe it's one of those roundtable discussions done on podcasts and discussion panels, whatever. How much do the reactions color my perception before I even know what the main thing is even about?

Probably a lot, especially if I deem that the topic isn't that important and just steal someone else's opinion so I don't have to waste time forming my own.

Or alternatively, if I hear one opinion, there's a high likelihood I want to adopt the other opinion just to be contrarian. Especially for a lowstakes nothing burger topic like sports.

Thinking all of this does not make me feel particularly great. It just makes me feel like a dolt.

It also opens up more questions. Am I alone? Do other people think like this at a subconscious level? What constitutes as someone's genuine thought?

Blah. No more.

I think the best solution is to just take breaks from social media altogether but doing so would hinder my ability to find titties on the internet. Twitter is just swamped with totally real women who are definitely not bots with nudes in their bios these days.

In conclusion, less thinking with my brain. More thinking with my dick.

Goodnight. Take care.

That Duo, Forever

 When I think of the early 2010's, I think of both Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez.

While we know how their careers ended, at the time they were one of the best duos in the sport. Perennial All Stars who had people wondering when they were going to be traded out of Colorado. As is the rite of passage for all Rockies greats not named Todd Helton (and possibly Charlie Blackmon).

That also means that they were unescapable in the card world for those two years.

Like if you bought a hobby box, there was a more than 30% chance your hit was going to be a gray jersey card of either Tulo or CarGo. You were also going to pull both of their base cards and at least three different inserts of one of them.

I'm not going to look at EVERYTHING they got, but I did cherry pick some cards I like just because.

Like this Black Diamond Wrapper Redemption card thingy from 2011. Lifetime Topps covered the set and has scans of the full base set for all who're curious but the gist is that you had to mail in 10 HTA jumbo pack wrappers or 36 hobby pack wrappers for a five card pack of these cards that featured the 1952 design but with some sparkly diamond theme.

This Carlos Gonzalez is from the Gold Rush Wrapper Redemption program from 2012. The scan doesn't do this card's shininess justice. I wasn't expecting there to be sparkly gold flake effects on this when looked at in-hand.
I'm not sure when Topps stopped with the wrapper redemptions or if they only do them scantly now, but if they ever bring them back I will be sure to have no idea they're going on until I happen to see a card from it pop up on eBay.

I hope Topps cut back on the captions on these Triple Threads cards because people are paying way too much money now on cards for them to be sullied by unfunny Instagram captions.

Although noting Tulo is signed until 2020 is one of the better messages since he was one of the first superstars to sign a long-term extension before hitting free agency, a trend that shortly after took off and continues to this day. Also worth pointing out that Tulo's last season as a MLBer was in 2019 with the New York Yankees.

These silk parallels just kind of came and went. The frames made them a little bulkier than I would've liked but I thought they were neat. I guess Topps figured adding more color borders was better than a card that feels nice to touch.

I remember these die-cut parallels of the Bowman's Best inserts from 2012 being hard to find at the time. Fast forward to 2024 and the artificial scarcity (like how this one is numbered to 99) has allowed them to stay hard to find but when they pop up, they go for pretty reasonable prices.

These Cut to the Chase die-cuts from 2013 are nice and I feel they got overlooked in a rush of good die-cut offerings in the early 2010's. The fact these come in shiny chrome is *chef's kiss*.

My philosophy towards baseball autographs has largely shifted to "do they have Topps 60 autographs from 2011?". Mainly because just having the names from that time period on the designs I liked the most from the time period matters a lot more to me than just getting the cheapest option available. Tulo himself signed a ton for Upper Deck and Topps so there are a lot of cheap autographs of his on the market, but I don't really want those. I wanted this specifically.

Lucked into this CarGo 2013 Sega Card Gen rare for really cheap. The Japanese Yen to American USD exchange rate continues to be more of a discount rate and beneficial for me.

You know, in a lot of ways the Rockies franchise has been defined by duos, or at least it felt like it in retrospect after each core dissolved. Todd Helton-Larry Walker, Todd Helton-Matt Holiday, Nolan Arenado-Trevor Story were some of the other ones that defined entire eras of Rockies baseball. The current non-identity crisis the Rockies have is tied to how the franchise is still waiting for its next duo.

I'm sure another pairing will emerge and give a new generation of Rockies fans fond memories of the team finishing above .500 and making a Wild Card round appearance or two. I'm just not sure how far away in the future that is.

Still, at least I can point to Tulo and CarGo as my go-to duo.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care :).

First Trade(?) of 2024

 At this point I don't "trade". I don't like going through lists and seeing if anything on it tickles my fancy, nor do I have lists of my own for people to look through. Such things take time and effort, neither of which I am willing to put in for this hobby.

But the nice thing is that every now and then it's good to have friends who you can ask for small things.

Base Front

Case in point, I actually reached out to The Lost Collector and got the base card of Kyle Freeland from 2024 Topps. It's spiffy and really nice thanks to a combination of the 2024 Topps design and Freeland rocking the City Connects jersey. A jersey I'm on record previously saying I think is so bad it's great.

Technically TLC's son pulled the Freeland, TLC mentioned he traded his son a Jazz Chisholm card for it but I later sent a Francisco Cervelli autograph just to be make sure. I still stay up at night worried that it wasn't good enough.

Base Back

In a lot of ways this was as ideal a transaction as I could hope for. Saved me so much time and money compared to going on eBay and seeing if anyone is selling base cards anymore at $1 with free shipping. Plus it was with an old friend who I've traded with since, well, basically the beginning.

But as nice as it was to get the Freeland base, in 2024 it's no longer just about the base. There's another reason I wanted that.

Yup, got the "Golden Mirror" image variation shortprint too.

So I'm going to go a little bit on a tangent here but we'll come back to this card.

2023 Variation

Freeland's shortprint in 2023 Topps is one of my favorite Freeland cards in my collection. It's so great that I've proudly placed it on my blog when viewed on browser mode as the replacement for what used to be the signed Luis Torrens superfractor. That's how much I like it.

2024 Variation Front

The 2024 shortprint is not nearly as good to me for some reason. It's a unique pre-game shot of Freeland chilling in the sunlight for sure, but it's just not hitting the same. Maybe it's the way this card looks like more an Xfinity ad, maybe it's the empty stands, maybe the 2023 SP just raised the bar that much higher because that was a good shot taking inside the dugout and not on the railing next to it. Whatever the reason this card is one of those gray areas where I'm glad I have it but it's more just because I wanted to say I have it as opposed to really wanting it.

Edit: TLC pointed out in the comments that this variation is actually likely a picture of Freeland in an airbrushed Denver Nuggets jersey (maybe Nikola Jokic). Pretty interesting factoid, the way there's just this airbrushed void left is kind of a good reflection of how I'm feeling towards seeing this.

Source: Getty Images, taken by Rachel O'Driscoll

A quick Getty Images archive search proved that theory correct. And not going to lie, if this picture had been left intact, this SP would've been so much better.

Which is to say that if there ever comes a time when I pull the plug on the Freeland collection, this card is definitely going out the door.

2024 Variation Back (we don't need to squint and read codes anymore!)

But right now I have both the base and variation from 2024 Topps flagship. As someone who's built rainbows before I feel like this is a lot better (and feasible) as a compromise than trying to assemble a giant lot of cards that all look the same but just come in different colors.

I'm not sure if Topps will continue to do these short print image shenanigans in 2025 and beyond for Freeland's cards, but I may have just set myself up to obligate myself to continue assembling them for as long as they continue. Maybe thinking I have to do this is why I wasn't thrilled with this 2024 SP in the first place.

Both are City Connects shots now that I look closer

Then again I might not do it anyway given how I'm, well, me.

Maybe I'll realize the idea of owning these cards appeals to me more than actually owning them for real and I lose interest as I tend to do with 90% of stuff that enters my possession.

Either way thanks to TLC and his son for the assist :).

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.

A Whole Bunch of Names

  Despite how I've bombarded several mailboxes and yelled all of your ears off about how I'm downsizing, today's post is going to be the polar opposite. The cards I've accumulated in the time in which I'd been dumping hundreds of cards onto other people, or more specifically the cards I picked up in January before I went cold turkey in February.

The theme for most of these is rather simple, these names were the first names I'd seen when I was wide-eyed and first getting into sports and sports cards. A lot were Tulo and CarGo from those early 2010's Rockies teams but those will get their own post. Here is everything else.

Tim Lincecum

Starting off with this really cool Lincecum jersey card. The "A Cut Above" inserts from 2012 were up against stiff competition in what was a good time for die-cuts. These flimsy cards just didn't tickle anyone's fancy compared to the sturdier and shinier offerings around at the time. But when I saw there was a relic version, I was mildly interested.

Especially since the guy on it is Lincecum, who stopped being the Freak we all know and love in 2012. He'd still show flashes of his former self like when he no-hit the San Diego Padres twice later on, but the Padres didn't start being good at baseball until 2021 so take that with a grain of salt.

Takuya Asao

リリーフ投手としてMVP賞をとれのって普通に凄くない？いつかメジャーでも活躍するの見たいよ。

In 2011 Takuya Asao won Central Legue MVP honors as a reliever. He wasn't even a closer, he won the MVP as a set-up man! This is the year after he set the single-season NPB record for holds (47 in 2010).

Anyone who watched the Chunichi Dragons at the time remembers him being absolutely filthy. He would've probably been a dominant reliever in the big leagues too. Unfortunately he got overused and his arm wore down, but his peak was absolutely insane.

Chris Sale

Once upon a time people thought Sale would never be able to find prolonged success as a starting pitcher and that his lanky frame would doom him to just being a reliever. Well several successful seasons with the Chicago White Sox and Red Sox erased that real quick. Sale has a lot of rookie autographs from 2010-11, but I opted for the more wallet friendly option of a sticker autograph applied on a horizontal insert nobody liked from his sophomore season.

Dellin Betances

This is probably the first Betances card I've added to my collection in a LONG time. Now I have both New York Yankees rookie autos from 2012 Topps Chrome in shiny blue (the other rookie is Austin Romine). 2012 is unfortunately when Betances' chances of being a starter died, things got so bad he got demoted to double-A. But there he was moved to the bullpen and from 2013 onwards he enjoyed a very successful career as a dominant four time All Star reliever.

Yoshinori Tateyama

It's easy to forget but Tateyama did actually come stateside and played in MLB in 2011 and 2012. Tateyama hailed from Osaka, Japan and actually went to the same high school that another Japanese MLBer Koji Uehara went to. They were both in the same grade and both teammates on the high school baseball team.

Tateyama joined the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters in the second round of the 1998 Draft. While initially he was tried out as a starter, he eventually converted into a reliever and in the 2000's he was a mainstay in the Fighters bullpen.

Tateyama joined the Rangers in October of 2010, it was right when the Rangers were about to become back-to-back AL Champs, but more importantly it was right when they were heavily scouting Tateyama's Fighters teammate Yu Darvish (spoilers: they got him too). Interestingly enough in 2011 the Rangers also traded for his old high school teammate Uehara from the Baltimore Orioles. So in 2012 he had teammates at different times in his life in Japan on the same MLB team. That's kind of nuts.

Tateyama bounced around 2013 and 2014 going from the Rangers to the Yankees to the Hanshin Tigers before calling it a career after the 2014 season. Since then he's gone back to being involved with the Fighters, at first by being a part of the TV crew covering the team but from 2023 onwards he's been the pitching coach for the Fighters. Makes sense since he was also the pitching coach for the Samurai Japan team that won Gold in the 2020 Olympics.

Tateyama gets the honor of the longest blurb out of anyone I will talk about in this post because his career is just truly fascinating.

Johnny Cueto

In 2012 the Cincinnati Reds only used six starting pitchers for the entire season. Johnny Cueto, Bronson Arroyo, Mat Latos, Homer Bailey and Todd Redmond. Redmond only made one start in what was his MLB debut while the other five made 30+ starts each. That was rare even then and absolutely unheard of now given how nobody knows how to keep pitchers healthy. That version of Cueto will always be the version I choose to remember him by.

Hanley Ramirez

It's kind of crazy how the 2010's had such a big array of fantastic shortstops that they've all gotten lost in the shuffle for various reasons (mostly injuries). Hanley was also on a really great HoF caliber path but by the time he was traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers his best years were somewhat in the rearview mirror. Then he went to the Boston Red Sox and the decline got uglier.

Victor Oladipo

Oladipo was once one of the biggest up-and-coming names when I was getting into basketball. He was really coming into his own as the guy who led the Indiana Pacers to a competitive first round playoff series against LeBron James and his Cleveland Cavaliers that went a full seven games. They lost but the prevailing notion was that they would pick up where the Paul George-era Pacers left off and they might even get as high as the second seed in the Eastern Conference.

Fast forward to 2024 and unfortunately Oladipo is turning into one of those players you toss around in "imagine if they never got injured" hypotheticals. Injuries thwarted any momentum he or the Pacers had during the late 2010's and in the 2020's Dipo suffered more injuries as he also kept bouncing around as a journeyman.

Even so, I did want a certified autograph of his showing him as a Pacer, there's strangely not a whole lot of them out there on the market. You can find plenty of him as a Magic/Thunder/Heat but it's like everyone already scooped up the cards of him with the team he had the most success with.

Clay Buchholz

The first time I heard about Buchholz was in an article where someone in the comments called him Clay Buttholes. That comment has not left my brain for even a second since. Also this 2013 Topps Replacement Autograph is neat solely because I like the novelty of cards created to be replacements for redemptions.

Ryan Braun and Carlos Gonzalez

Braun is definitely someone who people haven't thought about since 2014. 2011 was when he was at the peak of his powers and NL MVP over Rihanna's then-boyfriend Matt Kemp. Over time it'd become known that Braun used performance enhancers to reach that peak and was cast into the abyss.

As for the card I want to be clear that I picked this up because I wanted a cool 2011 Topps card of Carlos Gonzalez and this is my first dual relic from the 2011 Topps Diamond Duos insert set. Braun just happened to be on it too.

Daniel Bard

I actually did have another copy of this at one point in a trade I made with Ryan of This Card Is Cool over a decade ago but that one was eventually moved. Now that Bard's made a name for himself again with Colorado, I was more than willing to re-add this card from the Topps 60 subset to my collection.

Mark Buehrle

Buehrle's stint in Miami feels basically forgotten at this point. Though considering what a disaster that team was it's probably for the best.

Robinson Cano

Letting Cano leave was a good financial and baseball decision for the Yankees, but I do want to see the alternate reality where Cano hands the baton off to Aaron Judge.

Jared Weaver

Weaver anchoring the Los Angeles Angels rotation feels like an eternity ago and also like the last time that team cared even the tiniest bit about good pitching.

Cliff Lee

I've talked before about Topps 60 and how it's kind of confusing that the player on these cards aren't even number one on the list of whatever the achievement at the top of the card is. Like here Lee is commemorated for having the fifth best career ERA in the Division Series (min 20 IP) with 1.11 as of the time of 2011 Topps Series 1's production.

Ryan Zimmerman

Zimmerman's contributions to helping the Washington Nationals start to establish themselves as more than just the Zombie Expos has also been forgotten, but it is fun to remember how he was there to help fans through some awful dreck years until Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper finally arrived.

I did get a Trevor Story TTM autograph WAY back when he was still just a top prospect but I finally got to add a certified autograph to my collection. Story has so many autograph cards out there that the market for it kind of nuts. I'm picky and wanted an on-card autograph with logos and this 2017 Gypsy Queen offering (a parallel limited to 150 copies at that) was somehow the cheapest option on COMC.

My first certified Charlie Blackmon autograph. This is from that 2018 Topps Clearly Authentic set where every card came prepackaged in a one-touch magnet holders. I promptly freed this card the moment I got it since the case was a little scuffed and therefore useless (I have extremely high standards for one touch cases and even the tiniest blemish is a big no-no). On top of that this card was moving around in that case and made an annoying clicking sound. I can't handle hearing one of my cards get worse.

Ubaldo Jimenez autographs from 2011/2012 are either high-end stuff that doesn't interest me or cards that show him as a Cleveland player. Blarg, had to compromise with one of these more modern offerings.

I think Ryan McMahon is probably the best position player on the Rockies right now, or at worst second behind Nolan Jones. McMahon's a perennial Gold Glove candidate despite being asked to move around all across the infield to accommodate how the people constructing the Rockies roster have no clue what they're doing. He'd be a really really good utility-man on an actual contender.

Mark Montgomery

The year is 2012. The countdown to Mariano Rivera's retirement has already started, and along with it a search for his heir apparent. If you also read a list of the top prospects in the Yankees organization around that time, one of the fastest risers of note was a reliever named Mark Montgomery. Armed with a fastball and slider, he was striking out hitters at an incredible pace and was aggressively pushed to double-A by his season season as a professional. Then his velocity dipped a bit and all that momentum just stopped. He did manage to stick around as a professional for a good while as he was still active as of 2019, pretty impressive considering it practically feels like he stopped existing after 2014.

Lovely Labrynth of the Silver Castle

I only play Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links at a casual level so I have no clue how to play Labrynth and I don't want to read what these cards do so I probably will never learn how to play the deck. What I do know is that Lovely here has big boobs and is conventionally attractive, good enough for a degenerate like me. Although the secret rare sparkle effect makes the art harder to see.

Justin Verlander

This post started on an insert that only existed in 2012 and it's going to fittingly end on another one too. I had forgotten all about these Mound Dominance inserts. These were so obscure and uninteresting that I had no idea there was even a relic version. Normally I wouldn't think much of a boring grey jersey card (even if it is limited to 50 copies) but knowing it's from a one-and-done bumps it up to mildly interesting for 30 seconds territory.

One day Verlander will get the recognition he deserves as one of the greatest pitchers of all time. But that won't be right now since in early 2024 he's just seen as that old guy who stunk for the New York Mets in 2023. We can also blame him for his brother Ben getting famous too.

Alright that concludes this extremely long scan dump of names from a decade ago. This covered enough ground from back then that if there's ever a follow-up,

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.