Alaa Abdelnaby 1994 Upper Deck

About two weeks ago, my daughter found just this card in the mailbox. It seems to me that this may be from a new BCB--a BASKETBALL Card Bandit--but at the same time it has the hallmarks of the original BCB. The original BCB, Casey McGee, admitted to me that he would slip a card in my mailbox while out for a walk. The newer BCB, who has never been formally unrevealed, would mail the cards from post offices from around the world. 

Is this a new BCB? I cannot say. Could it be the second, non-McGee BCB, is back with a new M.O. of leaving a card for me along from a new sport? Again, I'm not sure. Is this a copy cat of a copy cat? That would be very interesting, true believer. 

The only thing I know is that this Alaa Abdelnaby card is pretty awesome. Look at Alaa throwing one down against his old team, the Milwaukee Bucks in front of Future Hall of Famer (and member of the 1996-97 Chicago Bulls*) the Chief, Robert Parish. 

* I bet that you forgot that Parish was on that team didn't you? They didn't really talk about him during the ten-part Last Dance documentary did they? Nope the didn't. And they also didn't talk about NBA free spirit Bison Dele who was also on that team too. Jesus, Bison Dele and Dennis Rodman, that must've been some locker room. if memory serves me correctly, Dele and a few friends were murdered by pirates in the Pacific Ocean after he retired from the NBA and tried sailing around the world. His story is so damn interesting. 

Once upon a time, the Boston Celtics were bad. I mean, really bad. The Celtics of 1993-94 finished with 32 wins and poor Robert Parish was literally the last link to the glory days of the 1980s. I wonder if he would walk into practice and expect to see Larry Bird or Kevin McHale or Dennis Johnson, but is saddened to see Chris Corchiani and Sherman Douglas and Todd Lichti. It must have been so depressing. Alaa Abdelnaby was also a member of that team and he averaged a hair under five points per game that year. 

He was a center out of Duke* who was born in Egypt, which is cool. According to his basketball-reference page Abdelnaby was nicknamed the Pharaoh (seems really obvious), the Black Hole (I would assume because that's what his offensive game was likened to) and the Alphabet (which is sort of funny). 

Abdelnabby played for the Blazers, the aforementioned Bucks before becoming a Celtic and then finishing his career with the Kings and the Sixers after he was let go by Boston. 

* Unlike most self-serious Duke players, Abdelnaby told the press that the only way he'd ever get five A's at Duke is if he signed his name. That's a pretty funny burn on yourself. That quip puts Abdelnaby as my third favorite Blue Devil after Jayson Tatum and Grant Hill. All other Dukies are tied for last. 

I don't have a lot more to say about Abdelnaby as I don't remember him too much. I remember his type and I remember the Celtics front office falling in love with guys like him. Like most players acquired after the first Big Three moseyed into the sunset, there was some hope that the new guy would be a replacement for the old guy. But Alaa was never even in the same zip code as Parish. He was an Egyptian Eric Montrose (who also played for the Celts the following year and did his college time down the road from Duke at the University of North Carolina) in that he just stood in the paint and tried to take up space. 

They even have similar stats:

Abdelnaby: 256 games, 5.7 PPG, 0.00% three pointers (kind of unfair) and 70% FTA

Montross: 465 games, 4.5 PPG, 0.00% three points (also unfair) and 47.8% FTA (gross)

The only thing is that the Celts took Montross in the first round of the draft that year and he proceeded to give them the exact same production as the guy who they let walk to the Kings. 

Remember when I said that the Celtics were bad once upon a time? This is one of the reasons for that. 

Pat Mahomes 1992 Upper Deck and Tony Pena 1990 Fleer

On December 12, 2017 I received these cards from the Baseball Card Bandit (BCB):

On Facebook, I wrote: last week the Baseball Card Bandit brought a bit of summer to the Northeast as he warmed my mailbox with these two cards. 

Both feature men who would eventually play with the Red Sox. 

Pat Mahomes was supposed to be a good prospect when he came up with the Twins. He never reached his potential and settled into a long career as a situational righty in a bunch of bullpens. 

2019 Notes: Today you might know Pat Mahomes as the father of Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes. Pat's son has had a bit more success in his chosen field than his dad, he was named the 2018 NFL MVP and led the Chiefs to the AFC title game. Did they win? They played the Patriots, so of course they did not. But Mahomes was a breath of fresh air in a very stale football league, slinging the ball all over the place and running up a lot of impressive passing stats. 

I didn't have a lot to say about the elder Mahomes because he didn't leave much of a mark in Boston, but I just looked at his baseball-reference page and man, he was not good. For a guy that played 11 seasons in the big leagues, Mahomes got hit hard and often. His career ERA is 5.47, his WHIP is 1.59 and he walked a bunch of people and didn't strike out anyone. 

The cool thing is that even though he wasn't a great ballplayer, it's obvious that his son thought that he was something special. After one of his big games last season the younger Mahomes stepped to the podium for his post game press conference in his dad's Mets jersey. That's all a father really needs.

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Tony Pena was a marquee free agent signing and was supposed to bring stability to the Sox catching position. Defensively, he did well. Offensively? Well, Tony Pena was offensive. The thing about Pena was that his defensive was so respected, I don’t recall too many people being angry that he couldn’t hit. 

2019: Red Sox fans were sold on two things about Tony Pena: his defense (he had a cannon arm -- when he was younger and instead of the normal catcher's squat, Pena sat with his right leg behind him and with his front leg extended) and that he wasn't Rich Gedman or Marc Sullivan or Rick Cerone. The latter was great news to anyone who watched these guys try to catch for three seasons. 

While fans in Boston never saw the sit-down style of catching that Pena made popular it Pittsburgh and St. Louis, he still knew how to call a game and was a favorite of many Boston hurlers. 

2019: See above for that sit-down style. 

After Boston he had a stop in Cleveland where, ironically, his bat is what sunk the Sox. Pena teed off on a Zane Smith extra inning flat “fastball” for a Game One winning homer. The surprise of who beat them submarined the Sox and they meekly bowed out of the 1995 playoffs. 

2019: That 1995 Cleveland Indians team was a wagon*, there was no way in hell that the Sox were going to beat them. But to lose to a home run by Tony Pena? Ugh. That was a killer. I remember that game like it was yesterday, I was sitting in my favorite corner on the couch in my on-campus apartment at Merrimack watching the game by myself in the living room. As soon as Pena hit that shot, it seemed like the entire apartment groaned at the same time -- it was that loud and that unexpected. The 1995 ALDS was the only time that the Red Sox or Patriots made the playoffs while I was in school**. It seems like a really long time ago -- because it was. 

That’s life in the big city, kids.

* That 1995 Indians team had: Jim Thome, Manny Ramirez, Albert Belle (who got jobbed out of the 1995 MVP), Kenny Lofton, Eddie Murray, Omar Vizquel, Sandy Alomar, Dave Winfield, Carlos Baerga, Brian Giles, Jeromy Burnitz in their lineup. That's three Hall of Famers, three dudes who could be in the HoF and a bunch of All-Stars. They were unbelievable to watch at bat. Their pitching was okay with Orel Hershiser and Dennis Martinez, but they just didn't have that number one pitcher. 

** The Celts and Bruins made the playoffs a few times during the early 90s, but they were usually beaten in the first round. I remember the Hornets-Celts first round matchup in 1993 when Alonzo Mourning hit a game -- and series -- winner with no time left. That was a tough one. 

Confessions of a Sports Bigamist

I was watching the Celtics play the Miami Heat on Sunday and my wife Aly asked, “Since when do you care about the Celtics?” And I didn’t have a real answer for her, I said something along the lines that I like this particular team as a whole, the personalities of the players and how well they’re playing. But I didn’t really have a strong answer. This question came about a month or so after she made the observation that “I care about football more than I think that I do.”

And it hit me, she’s right. I do care about the Celtics* (and the Bruins for that matter) and I do care more about football (especially the Patriots) than I even admitted to myself. I was a bit shocked about this realization more than I should have been, which is odd because since high school part of my identity has been one of a sports geek. I was a fair athlete (ok, maybe bad is the word), but I could talk sports with the best of them. But during the last ten years or so, that perception had changed; I considered myself a baseball fan first and foremost and the others fell into line. In fact, my mantra was: You can only have one favorite team. And for me, that favorite team was undoubtedly the Boston Red Sox.

* When I was in high school I hated the Celtics. Just hated them. I hated their style of play, I hated their boring-ass players, I thought that Larry Bird was overrated (I know, I know; the indiscretions of youth) and I hated that they were everything that the Chicago Bulls weren’t. I loved the Bulls and Michael Jordan, they were the new NBA of high flying, basketball dunking awesomeness. In a “kill your idols” sort of way, I reveled in every Celtics loss and cursed every Celtics victory. To me, Red Auerbach was an old fool that needed to go far away from the NBA.

But something happened in the almost 20 years that I graduated from good old Amesbury High School. The Celtics stunk, I mean really bottomed out and it wasn’t fun to kick a dead dog. I began to feel a bit bad about hating them so much and began to cheer a bit for the underdog. As they got a bit better and better, it became more fun to watch a Celtics game. The 2008 NBA Postseason is among the most fun I’ve had as a sports fan and last year’s was a lot of fun (until the last game).

The point that I was making is that I still believe that you can only have one favorite team, but I’ve widened my scope to believe that you can have a handful of other teams that you care about just as much. And for me those teams are the other three Boston teams.

I should have seen this coming; a few years ago, when the Pats lost to the Giants in the Super Bowl, I tried to blow it off as “not really a big deal” because New England had won three other Super Bowls and they’d get there again. I told Aly that while it sucked the Pats lost, I would be more upset if the Red Sox did something similar. But that was a brave face and the Super Bowl XLII loss gnawed at my gut the entire off-season and when Tom Brady went down with a season-ending injury just one quarter into the next season, it really hit me as to what the Patriots lost that day in Arizona.

From there it seemed like things changed. When the Patriots lost to the Jets (THE FUCKING JETS!) in January, I was as angry as I’ve been about a professional team in some time. When the Celtics lost to the Lakers in the Finals, I was really bummed out. When the Bruins choked away a three-games-to-zero lead against the Flyers, I was apocalyptic*.

* Again, this wouldn’t have been possible even five years ago because I hated the Bruins and wanted them to lose in the most excruciating, painful ways imagined. And the reason was because of their “thrifty” (read: cheap-ass) owner Jeremy Jacobs. He always seemed to be happy that the Bruins would make a couple of dollars for him and would never dump the money back into the team. One summer he opened the purse strings and signed Zedeno Charra and Mark Savard and I began to come back to the Bruins. That’s really all I wanted, just some show that he cared about the team. I know, I’m a sap.

And you know what? I feel pretty good about the outlet of emotion that I can express about the home town teams. Am I obsessed with the other teams? No, not as much as the Red Sox; but it’s good to have options and care about teams when the Sox aren’t in season.