It'll be a few days before I can gather up photos of all the Dodger cards, so stay tuned. In the meantime, I came across a couple of triple relic Dodger cards worth an early mention.
As has been custom, Topps tries to find creative phrases and anecdotes to use for their triple relic cards. In the past they used phrases like "Mannywood" for Manny Ramirez, "The Bison" for Matt Kemp and "Lefty Legend" for Sandy Koufax. This year they appear to be using a decidedly musical theme to their Dodger triple relic cards. Check out what I mean below.
Above is one of the Hyun-Jin Ryu Triple relic cards (there are three different phrases available). They spelled the phrase "Smile Again," and if you remember your Ryu K-Pop lore then you'll know what that means.
As a part of a Christmas charity project in 2013, Hyun-Jin Ryu and Cube Entertainment teamed up to create a song called "Smile Again." Ryu got on the microphone with K-Pop stars Trouble Maker and G.NA. Watch a video of the song below.
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One might think that the phase above, "Puig Destroyer," refers to his ability to murder the ball when he makes contact. Fans of grindcore know better, though.
Puig Destroyer is a band that was inspired by the pure awesomeness of Puig's early start with Dodgers. Puig hit like a monster on a mission back then. He showed speed and finesse, as he raced around the bases like a gelding and threw out runners with the precision of a sharpshooter. All the while he did it with a smile. Puig was just incredible, so when a couple of grindcore veterans got together they knew what they had to do. They formed Puig Destroyer, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Shortly after they began recording I had the opportunity to interview one of the founders, Riley Breckenridg, on this blog. You can check it out here. This is what he had to say about its creation:
It's silly, really. The name "Puig Destroyer" came up, in passing, during a discussion of Puig on an episode of the weekly Productive Outs podcast that I do with my good friend Ian Miller. There's an awesome grindcore band called Pig Destroyer that we're both fans of, and I said something along the lines of "There should be a grindcore band called Puig Destroyer". Nine days after that utterance, we are that band. I sent Ian the drum track for "One Man, Five Tools" the next day, he wrote a bass line for it immediately, I enlisted my good friend (and Giants fan) Mike Minnick from Curl Up and Die to do vocals, and Ian pulled Jon Howell (his bandmate in Kowloon Walled City) to play guitar. We'll have an EP done fairly soon.So far they have release three EP's. Feel free to visit their website here. Listen to their very first album below. The very first song is called "One Man, Five Tools."
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