It’s going to be fashionable and easy to pounce on Barry Bonds over the coming weeks and months, but I have this feeling that startling number of current and retired players' names released today in the Mitchell Investigation is going to take some of the wind out of our otherwise righteous sails.

   How do we continue to vilify Monsieur Barry now that the report has revealed that he was just one of so many apparently on the juice during that giddy stretch when home run inflation was at its peak? The enormity of the list of names has to give some pause to Barry bashing, that and having so many other seemingly Cooperstown-bound folks lumped in with him.

   It’s certainly not fashionable – nor politically correct – to theorize that back in the 1990s when major leaguers were seeking better stats through chemistry that most of them weren’t the least bit hesitant about what they were doing. I don’t think they gave it much of a second thought, and firmly believe that they only reason they appear to do so these days is because of all the pressure from hypocritical politicians (forgive the redundancy), similarly disingenuous MLB officials and a hyper-agitated mainstream media.
   By the way, that last group deserves as much derision in this tawdry affair as almost any other. It’s understandable why Major League Baseball itself pretended that everything was hunky-dory while their major stars tripled their hat sizes and home run figures, but where were the sportswriters? There were exceptions, of course, but this was hardly the fourth estate’s finest hour.


   Collectors have been rewarded with some real chuckles in recent years with “mistakes” that have been – depending upon your level of cynicism or gullibility – either innocent errors on baseball cards that conjured up recollections of their legendary vintage counterparts or were guerrilla marketing tactics run amok.
  
   Choose either A or B, but don’t get too attached to the idea, because one suspects that the appropriate licensing agencies (MLB and the Players Association) are going to put the kibosh on all of it pretty quickly.
  
   Last year Topps took it to another level, as the cliche goes, by inserting George Bush and Mickey Mantle into the grandstands to admire Derek Jeter’s follow-through on his regular-issue card. As might have been expected, it got hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of attention from mainstream media outlets, leaving one to assume that a certain Carlsbad, Calif.-based competitor was mightily miffed.
  
   Perhaps it’s a coincidence (just as the rotation of the Earth and the arrival of the sun in the east every morning may be coincidence), but in recent weeks, Upper Deck apparently produced “errors” that include an Alex Rodriguez card seemingly misnamed “Ex Rod,” another with a caricature of someone who looks suspiciously like Disney’s Michael Eisner, CEO of Topps’ new parent company, and a third that features an asterisk on a piece of a baseball (details – and images – are featured in this week’s News Brief section on page 8).
  
   Last year I got a kick out of the Topps Jeter card, and appreciated all the national media attention, but I feared at the time that the odd precedent of winking at intentional “errors” from the card companies’ design crews was going to run into problems eventually.
  
   As much fun as it can be, you just have to resist the temptation because escalation will eventually take you into murky waters. It’s not entirely dissimilar to what magazine editors face in resisting the urge to slip in cutesy headlines or subheads with naughty double entendres.
  
   Geez, what does it say about all this when a (formerly) mischievous rascal like myself becomes the voice of reason in this debate?
  
   Don’t answer that. It was rhetorical.


   My favorite quasi-public institution, the Baseball Hall of Fame, has a problem. An organization with talented, dedicated and passionate hierarchy and staff, seemingly from top to bottom, finds itself struggling to come up with a Veterans Committee voting procedure that effectively represents the Hall and its admittedly lofty ideals. We ain’t there yet.
  
   With the new streamlined Veterans voting in place for the first time, two managers (Billy Southworth and Dick Williams) and three executives (Bowie Kuhn, Barney Dreyfuss and Walter O’Malley) were voted in. Marvin Miller, the man who probably had the greatest impact on Major League Baseball this side of Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson, didn’t make it. Wasn’t even close.
  
   That’s an embarrassment not to the Hall of Fame, but to the lunkheads who put personal animus above their responsibility to vote fairly. If I were one of the three who voted for Miller, I would want to make my vote known rather than to allow anyone to think I had botched the equivalent of a slow ground ball back to the pitcher.
  
   I am usually the most cynical person on a wide variety of issues that come up, but in this instance, I clearly am remarkably naive. I am always stunned when I meet resistance to the idea that Marvin Miller is a slam-dunk candidate.
  
   I have never heard so much as one cogent, to say nothing of convincing argument, why he should be excluded. It’s almost always just people who equate the millions of dollars paid to modern players as the result of Miller’s alleged deviousness and (I buy this part) his ability to consistently hornswaggle the rubes from the owner’s side that he faced across the negotiation table.
  
   Ironically, the people who nixed his election indirectly make the case for why their vote is cosmically flawed: they concede Miller’s remarkable impact on MLB, but insist out of a small-minded obstinance that it be used as an argument to keep him out of the Hall rather than to induct him. How sad and pathetic.
  
   I have enormous sympathy for the HOF officials, many of whom I know are supportive of Miller’s candidacy, starting with HOF Vice President Joe Morgan, perhaps Miller’s most well-placed, influential and ardent supporter. But they are stuck for the moment, and Miller, 90, seems to have finally lost a round so late in the bout (ugh, a boxing metaphor) that he may never live to see a faulty decision overturned.
  
   I am not even particularly bothered by the yucky absurdity of Miller foils Bowie Kuhn and Walter O’Malley getting the nod on a ballot that so thoroughly disses Miller. I worry far less about who gets elected than I do about the disgraceful exclusion of an elderly icon who deserves to see his plaque in Cooperstown in his lifetime.
  
   Our own ace columnist, Marty Appel, was Kuhn’s friend and biographer, and he makes a great case for the HOF election of the former commissioner. The Miller snub is even unfair for Kuhn, because it takes what ought to be a celebratory moment and turns it into yet another controversy between the two men.
  
   For the diehard Brooklyn fans who still cringe at the mention of O’Malley’s name, these voting results are little more than one more Dodger fan (Miller) getting hosed one last time; O’Malley gets yet another last laugh.
  
   Maybe, but Miller’s successor as executive director of the Players Association, Donald Fehr, gets the last word:
  
   “It was very disappointing to learn this morning that, once again, Marvin Miller was not elected to the Hall of Fame. Over the entire scope of the last half of the 20th century, no other individual had as much influence on the game of baseball as did Marvin Miller.
  
   “Because he was the players’ voice, and represented them vigorously, (he) was the owners’ adversary. This time around, a majority of those voting were owner representatives, and results of the vote demonstrate the effect that had ... In the last vote, Marvin received 63 percent of the votes, this time he got 25 percent. By contrast, Bowie Kuhn received 17 percent of the votes last time, but got 83 percent this time.   
  
   “The failure to elect Marvin Miller is an unfortunate and regrettable decision. Without question, the Hall of Fame is poorer for it.”  

   SCD readers will no doubt recognize the name Stephen Wong as the author of the iconic Smithsonian Baseball, arguably the finest book ever produced about the sports memorabilia hobby. That marvelous book – including the stunning photography of Susan Einstein, whose images graced the first book as well – has now been adapted for youngsters (ages 6-11, $16.99) in Baseball Treasures.
  
   That’s about as nifty a double play as anything ever engineered by Tinker, Evers and Chance.
  
   “If there were an MVP award for baseball memorabilia collecting, Stephen Wong would be a lock to win.” That’s about as good as it gets for a blub – even more impressive when the blurber is Sports Illustrated.
  
   To quote the press release: “Baseball Treasures brings a dazzling array of the game’s most cherished memorabilia from the world’s best collections, plus indispensable advice from the experts on building a baseball collection. Detailed histories of bats, balls, cards, gloves, jerseys, and trophies combined with over 100 photo illustrations will inspire young fans of America’s game to start their own collection.”
  
   Here’s a sampling of what’s in the book:
• Original copy of the first written rules of modern baseball
• A scorecard from the inaugural World Series in 1903
• A bat used by Babe Ruth to hit home runs in the 1926 and 1927 season
• A baseball autographed by each member of the 1927 New York Yankees
• The actual ball caught by Yogi Berra for the last out in Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series
• Game-worn jerseys of Lou Gehrig (1927); Ty Cobb (1928); Babe Ruth (1932 World Series); Dizzy Dean (1934) and Jackie Robinson (1948)
  
   Wong, a lifelong collector of rare and historically significant artifacts, spent two and a half years researching this book, in addition to the years he spent working on Smithsonian Baseball. His research took him to the homes of many of the most famous collectors in the hobby, providing a dramatic glimpse at remarkable accumulations that have lived in hobby lore and legend for decades.
  
   A graduate of Stanford Law School, Wong is currently an executive director at Goldman Sachs. He was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and now lives in Hong Kong.



   George “Shotgun” Shuba is one of a handful of surviving members of the seminal 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers team that brought a World Series crown to the borough barely in time for Walter O’Malley to spirit the ball club out to the West Coast two years later.

   Shuba has published his autobiography, My Memories as a Brooklyn Dodger, with an “as told to” writing credit for Greg Gulas. The cover of the book features a collage of Shuba with his HOF teammates Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese and Roy Campanella, plus the famous photo of Shuba shaking Robinson’s hand after Robinson had clubbed his first home run as a professional on April 18, 1946, at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, N.J. Shuba and Robinson were teammates on the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers’ affiliate, playing the top minor-league club of the Dodgers’ hated rivals, the New York Giants.
  
   Shuba’s son, Mike, has done much over the last several years in promoting his dad’s link to baseball history, including marketing that historic image, “A Handshake for the Century,” on the official George Shuba website, www.georgeshuba.com.
  
   The book, which includes detailed accounts of that  moment and many others, is offered on his website, along with Shuba’s recollections of many of his teammates from those Dodgers teams and observations about everybody from Chuck Connors and Charlie “The Brow” DiGiovanni (the Bums’ famous batboy) to Charlie Dressen and Casey Stengel.
  
   The book also features a foreword by Roger Kahn, author of the seminal The Boys of Summer, arguably the most revered sportswriter of his generation.
  
   In my column in SCD, I made a sarcastic reference to cyberspace in the headline, a petulant gesture that stems from an oddly errant sentence in Shuba’s Wikipedia entry. It states: “(Shuba) won the National League’s Rookie-of-the-Year Award in 1948 and the league’s MVP in 1949.
  
   For those of you scoring at home, that’s the cyber equivalent of muffing a ground ball and then firing the throw to first wildly into the mezzanine. Shuba, obviously, did not win either award; the entry would seemingly be for the man he is linked to in baseball history: Robinson. Except that Robinson was the Rookie of the Year in 1947 instead of 1948. He was the National League’s MVP in 1949.
  
   And just to be clear, the error doesn’t go to Shuba, but rather to whomever bungled that entry.

   I know there are thousands of you out there, because you have subscribed to our magazine for many, many years. I am talking about the valued core of our SCD readership, and I suspect they frequently harbor views not terribly dissimilar to my own.

   Having made that observation, I wonder how many of you are bothered by the current MLB Playoff situation that can abruptly end a team’s spectacular season in a mere three games, obviously, assuming a sweep in the first round, or Divisional Series. I guess we should be thankful it’s not called the Valvoline Divisional Series.

   For readers anywhere close to my age, we still remember when teams labored through 162-game schedules to find themselves with at least half of the ultimate prize: a trip to the World Series.
Now, I am not whining about the switch to the playoff format, since I understand that adding so many teams to the mix and the unquenchable thirst for television revenue made the expansion of the post-season inevitable. But somewhere around 20 years ago, maybe when my Mets were battling the Astros to get into the World Series, it occured to me that one of the effects of the change was to occasionally make the playoff rounds more exciting than the Series.

   And that situation makes the five-game opening round of the playoffs problematic, because a team can simply lose a couple of games and suddenly be finished before they even get started. It just seems like the seven-game affair would lessen the odds of that a bit, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the powers-that-be moved to that eventually. Their motivation would likely be the additional stadium and TV revenue, but the impact would be an overall positive anyway.
I have to think that someday MLB is going to decide that having a five-game first round is an idea whose time has passed.

   Upsets can be exciting, but I am sure MLB executives wince a little bit when the Nielsen Ratings come in from small-market tangles like Colorado vs. Arizona in the NLCS, especially with Chicago and Philadelphia sent to the showers.

Mourning my Mets and phretting over Phillies
   It was bad enough that the Mets had to pull off one of the greatest collapses in baseball history, but to have the recipient of all this largesse be the Philadelphia Phillies just made it all the worse. It is no consolation whatsoever that the Phillies got pummelled by a Colorado avalanche in the playoffs. That development and the precarious perch the Yankees are holding onto at the moment (down two games to one) merely emphasize my earlier point about the need to make the first round of the playoffs a best-out-of-seven games affair.

   I am not sure where my dislike of the Phillies developed, since I used to like them in the mid-1960s when they had Richie Allen. In the 1980s, I used to live about an hour or so outside of Philadelphia, and I guess I started to get aggravated with them when they started thumping my Metsies in the mid-to-late 1970s.

   But I should probably be more grateful to the Phillies 1983 club that made it to the World Series, because they almost, emphasis on almost, got me into a USA Today feature story that October.
  
   I was running my O’Connell & Son Ink fledgling little company in those days, doing the artwork at night and sending out my orders in the morning. That left the afternoons for one of my great passions, playing pool, and it was in a Newark, Del., poolroom that the World Series saga unfolded.
  
   A writer from USA Today, the then 1-year-old newspaper, turned up at Don’s Billiards after having taken out a compass and a ruler and determined that Newark, Del., was the exact halfway point between the AL Champion Baltimore Orioles and their NL counterpart Phillies.
  
   The story essentially involved quotes from the various reprobates (I include myself in that description) about where their loyalties landed for the upcoming 1983 World Series. The writer was operating under the presumption that being exactly the same distance between the two cities would somehow cause a good deal of angst for the denizens of the poolroom.
  
   In truth, the people in that area seemed to lean more to the Phillies than the Orioles, but the USA Today writer seemed more intrigued by the fact that I was an expatriated Mets fan.
  
   I was pretty pumped about being quoted in the new “National Newspaper,” but ultimately Mike Boddicker’s mom bumped us off the first page of the Life Section. And they didn’t even bump it to pages further back in the newspaper – the story was simply killed. Seems they weren’t as intrigued with our World Series prognostications as we might have hoped.  

   I am not sure exactly what triggered it, but perhaps it was nothing more than the fact that somebody mentioned Indianapolis the other day and it got me to thinking about a card deal that I blew big time more than 15 years ago.
  
   I should stipulate first and foremost that I was a lousy card dealer in those years in the 1980s and early 1990s when I set up at shows. I loved going to shows, I loved old cards and I always enjoyed meeting collectors and dealers and talking about the hobby. But when it came to actually doing dealer stuff, I stunk.
   My flaws were many and profound. I only wanted to sell stuff I liked, and I frequently overpaid for it and wound up with little or no profit to show for my efforts. I liked setting up, but the packing up part didn’t really thrill me. I even priced my material based on how much I liked it, rather than on the market. I was a soft touch, in other words.
  
   Anyway, I was set up at the fairgrounds in Indianapolis in 1992, I think, perched near the entrance. I was living in northern Indiana at the time, so this was practically a home game.
A little old black lady walked in with a couple of grandchildren in tow. I mention her race only to be descriptive; it bears no particular relevance to the story, except perhaps that the fairgrounds are located in a section of the city with a large minority population.
For whatever reason, she came up to my table first, which may have been part of my undoing. She really did have a shoebox full of cards, in this instance mostly 1960 Topps Baseball, one of my favorites.

   I was floored by the condition, which was Near-Mint or better. I think there were about 300-350 cards, with a mixture of stars that made it clear that the group hadn’t been cherry picked by anyone. It was the cleanest grouping I had ever been offered, and so, naturally, I hosed it up from the start.

   She told me she wanted nearly 100 percent of the value listed in the price guides, which she had already consulted to great extent. Not wanting to be the one to explain that paying that much was hardly an option, I offered her nearly full book prices for a couple dozen of the star cards, which was still probably silly, but it didn’t matter anyway. She said she would look around and get back to me. I made a mental note that I would have offered her about $2,000 for the whole box, but I didn’t say it to her because I didn’t want to face her disappointment, since I figured (a guess) that she was looking for $3,500 or more. As I said, I wasn’t very good at what I was doing.

   So she starts walking her treasures around the room, and I watched as she did this, hoping against hope that she might return to my table with more reasonable expectations.

   Maybe 40 minutes later, she did get back to my area, just not to my table. She wound up at the table next to mine, and by now had been schooled enough by a half-dozen or more other dealers that she was looking to accept $1,100 for the whole shoebox.

   I watched horrified as she ultimately took $1,050 from my neighbor. If you are wondering why I didn’t speak up and explain that I would have been willing to pay nearly double that amount, then you aren’t familiar with card-show protocol. I was an inept card dealer, but I understood what bad form that would have been. I have spent a good deal of time in poolrooms, so I have this innate fear of getting my thumbs broken.

   So I suffered in silence, and virtually for the rest of the weekend, since I had to watch the guy tinker with those cards until Sunday's closing.

   And lest you conclude that the money offered was somehow unfair, I would refer you again to the paragraph where I noted that I wasn’t a very good card dealer. Like virtually all businesses, one of the fundamentals of dealing is to buy as low as possible, if for no other reason than to offset those deals where circumstances prompt you to overpay.

   One of the ironies of the situation was that the show world was a lot friendlier beast 15 years ago than it is today. The arrival of the Internet has changed so many equations in our hobby – just as it has for virtually every facet of modern life that it touches – that trying to make money at shows is much tougher today than it was then.

   Oh well, I probably would have just taken most of them and upgraded my 1960 Topps set.

   It must have been somewhere around 1974 when I first realized there was a great big group of people out there collecting baseball cards and that I wasn’t alone. I was fresh out of the Navy, in college and working full time at a swanky restaurant in Upstate New York, and the stories had already started to creep into the mainstream media about how baseball card collectors were coming out of the closet (or maybe the attic) and that hanging on to your treasures wasn’t as sissified as previously believed.
   I used to keep all my cards in alphabetical order, grouping my vintage Topps sets or near-sets from 1958 forward right in there with the TCMA stuff, the Laughlin World Series cards and the 1960s Fleer Hall of Fame issues. A very egalitarian system that kept me shuffling through virtually every one of the cards every couple of years.

    I never did put them together as sets until around the end of the decade when I went to my first good-sized card show in Albany, N.Y. I also took the plunge for an insurance policy from Cornell & Finkelmeier, which I mention only to offer some insight about how the hobby changes over time.

    Though I am pretty good at hanging onto baseball cards and the like, that capability doesn’t extend to paperwork, so I don’t have a copy of those early insurance forms, but I do remember that I said I had mostly complete sets from 1958 forward (with some years in the turbulent 1960s completely unrepresented, essentially my hormone-riddled teenage years from 1966-69), which still actually constituted a bit of rounding up. Since I still largely kept everything in alphabetical order, I merely assumed I had complete sets from 1962-65.

   Which is not to suggest that I was the originator of the currently in vogue mantra of this millennium, which is roughly, “It’s not a lie if you really believe it.” Nope, I was more than a little surprised when I figured out a couple of years later that I was missing quite a few cards from 1962 and 1963.

   Anyway, of more interest was the condition that I thought the cards were in: near-mint. Now, that one truly is one of those instances were it wasn’t a lie because I really did believe it. I hadn’t seen that many complete vintage sets at that point, and so I figured I had been as careful with my cards as anybody else on the planet. Yeah, right.

   Turns out, I wasn’t even in the upper echelon. Cards and sets that I listed for insurance purposes as Near-Mint would ultimately end up as VG-EX, though there were also several hundred that were/are EX-MT or even Near-Mint.

   As I started going to a lot of shows on the East Coast, especially the Philly shows, I fairly quickly figured out that I had been seriously overgrading my cards.

   That wouldn’t have been a big deal, especially since I never filed even one teenie-weenie insurance claim, except that it prompted a new development. I would come home from one of those shows and, upon looking at my sets, would now feel that a little bit of “upgrading” would be in order. Now there’s a concept: doing a little bit of upgrading.

    I started out with my favorite set: 1959 Topps. There were lots of cards in the VG-EX range, and a goodly number of others that might have better corners than that but ended up off-center enough to be jarring. It was the early 1980s, so it wasn’t as bad as it might have been had I undertaken the duties 10-15 years later. Sparkling commons could still be had for a reasonable price, and so I upgraded ... and upgraded ... and upgraded.

   I ought to be embarrassed to point out that some of commons I kept nudging into better condition with two, three or even four upgrades. That’s just silly, and the mark of somebody not quite tidy enough to be as discriminating as I ought to have been.

   And serious collectors know the rest of the story. Once you started planting genuinely Near-Mint commons in those plastic sheets, the stars sprinkled in start to look a little shabby, and so you wind up looking for better condition specimens of those as well.

   My 1960 Topps set was always in better shape than my 1959 because I had pulled off a major trade around 1963 or so, unloading every last one of my football cards for the 1960 Topps cards of one of my friends. He was a good deal more discriminating than I, plus he hadn’t hardly ever looked at his cards and thus many truly were Near-Mint. Still, there were enough cards below that grade to send me into upgrading a couple hundred cards from that set, too.

   Now I’ve been perking those two issues up for the better part of a quarter-century, and yet they still wouldn’t manage to compete with many of the sets on the various card registries. Not only are none of the cards thus entombed, but I’ve actually bought slabbed cards and freed them from the confines of their plastic holders so that I could slip them into plastic sheets where they belong with the rest of their friends.

   About the only holdout from 1959 would be the No. 20 Mickey Mantle card. I just couldn’t bring myself to reach for the kind of dough needed to upgrade that particular card.

   And besides, I feel enough guilt about dumping so many of the originals for better-groomed and protected versions. At least Mickey is one of the few remaining veterans from the trenches, metaphorically speaking.  

   With our National Convention returning to Cleveland next week, it occurred to me that the five-day extravaganza offers a unique opportunity for our hobby to honor someone who has played an important, though often misunderstood, role in the world of autographs.
  
   The man who is subjected to a famous hobby aphorism about “the only thing worth more than a Bob Feller signed 8-by-10 photo is an unsigned version” has actually been a significant hobby pioneer, helping to make autograph appearances by current and former stars a mainstay in a hobby dominated by cardboard at the time.
  
   With Feller being one of the autograph headliners at the National, it would be neat if the show promoters, acting on behalf of the entire hobby, could find a way to honor him in the city where it all began more than 70 years ago. Feller is approaching 89 years old, so even though the National returns to Cleveland in a couple of years, now would seem like the ideal moment for a well-deserved tribute.

   I can remember Feller simply showing up at the Philly Show on the music pier in Ocean City, N.J., in the 1980s, charging three or four dollars for an autograph and just generally serving as an elder statesman and ambassador to the game as he regaled awestruck fans with stories from his career.

   Twenty-five years and a couple of zillion signatures later, Feller’s contribution to our hobby gets largely lost amid the trite jokes about how much he has signed. Yeah, there’s a cogent criticism we ought to level at one of the greatest pitchers of all time: you signed too many autographs, shook too many hands, posed for too many pictures with fans and did it all at prices that ought to make modern ballplayers embarrassed.

   Apparently well on the way to becoming something of a grouchy old man myself, I’m not really bothered by some of the politically incorrect Feller commentary over the years. Besides, you don’t have to agree with everything he’s ever uttered in order to take note of his contributions to the game of baseball in general and our quirky hobby in particular.




   A Chicago area card dealer is organizing a “Barry Bondsfire” that’s designed as a protest against Barry Bonds’ alleged steroid use. Keith McDonough, owner of Bleachers Sports in Winnetka, Ill., has organized a protest that is slated to follow on the heels of the moment when/if Henry Aaron’s all-time home run mark falls to Bonds.

   McDonough, who has operated his store on Chicago’s North Shore for 15 years, has apparently started something when he announced he was going in incinerate his Bonds cards, a provocative announcement that he repeated on ESPN2’s “Cold Pizza” morning talk show last week. “We want to protest it,” McDonough told SCD’s editorial director Brian Earnest in a phone interview. “We’ve got lots and lots of cards. Now we have kids coming in and dropping their Bonds cards in the fire pit, and that’s a kick.”

   In an interesting twist, McDonough said he’s been beseiged by e-mails revealing a startling dichotomy: many collectors have sent in cards and memorabilia to be included in the “Bondsfire,” but an even greater number of Bonds fan have sent a flood of angry e-mails defending the controversial slugger.

   For his part, McDonough is quick to point out the firey symbolism is not personal but merely directed at the alleged steroid use. And he added that he doesn’t sell Sammy Sosa or Rafael Palmiero cards in his store, either.

   For me, the interesting part part was that the gesture recalled another bonfire from 26 years ago. The beef back then was against Major League Baseball and the players as stunned fans looked for ways to vent their rage against the most significant labor stoppage in MLB up to that point. A New England dealer, David Carter, reportedly orchestrated the public incineration of 64,000 baseball cards, nearly half of that number coming from Carter himself and reportedly including a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle, valued at $1,300.

   At the time the demonstration seemed a bit quixotic, but no more than the current bit of pyromania. If you’re going to quibble, both events seem a little self-defeating, since Bonds presumably doesn’t care if we burn his cards and MLB and its employees also didn’t blink when Carter took a match to The Mick in 1981, but they still seem(ed) liked effective symbolism.


An expensive Clemens autograph

   I saw a news item in USA Today last week that reported a Japanese reporter had his membership in the Baseball Writers Association of America revoked because he asked Roger Clemens for an autograph.
  
   I fully understand the principle at work here: journalists need to be doing journalism or thereabouts when they are covering teams and it opens up an ethical can of worms if they start asking for autographs while on the job. Fair enough.
  
   But in this instance the penalty seemed a bit harsh, especially since the writer, who works for a tabloid newspaper based in Tokyo, apparently didn’t realize he had broken the rules. The story didn’t make it clear just exactly what the implications were from losing his BBWAA credentials, but it’s reasonable to assume it means he can’t cover the Yankees or any other major league ballclub.

   According to the article, Hiroki Homma went up to Clemens with a stack of pictures that had been taken by the newspaper’s photographer; Homma, apparently thinking that the pitcher might like to have them to commemorate his 350th win, offered the stack to the pitcher, and asked Clemens to sign one of the photos for him. A security staffer apparently witnessed it and reported the violation.

   Bummer. Seems harsh, but I understand at that level they would want to make an example if somebody stepped, or even stumbled, over the line.

   My column in Sports Collectors Digest is called “Out of Left Field,” which turned out to be a suitable appellation for a weekly literary effort that tries to look at things from a different perspective, but I have to concede that this blogging business has helped me poke around into odd corners that I might not have pursued in print.

   Thus I can pursue various pet peeves, like baseball announcers – posturing as savants proffering “inside baseball” gems to the great unwashed – who point out that after a player makes a great fielding play he frequently winds up leading off the next inning. Grrrrr. I want to throw something at the TV when they say idiotic things like that.

   It’s called “selective perception,” meaning the doofus announcer remembers those occasions where the player led off after a great play in the field, and ignores all the instances where it doesn’t happen. In truth, the chances of leading off after making a great play in the field are roughly 1 in 9.
Taking note of this in something as benign as Major League Baseball begs the question: this process of seeing only those things that reinforce our biases plays havoc with all sorts of important areas of daily life, from social issues to politics. It’s at least helpful to be vigilant, and what better place to practice than with numbskull TV analysts.

   And speaking of same, have you ever heard even one of them take note of this particularly galling trait? A player badly misplays a fly ball or a hit rolling under his glove, and when he turns around to chase it to the wall, does so with the same degree of urgency that I employ in emptying the litter box.

   I have some sympathy for the embarrassment involved: I botched a fly ball as a sophomore in high school and was brutally vilified by angry villagers with pitchforks and torches (and yanked by the manager), but, hey, I’ve gotten over it.

   And I know that the embarrassment is different for professionals, but I still hate it when they casually lope after the ball after their misplay, as if to say, “No big deal, there’s nothing to see here.” Meanwhile the base runner is going full tilt, and I am once again looking for something to throw at the TV.

   Here’s another thing I don’t ever recall one of those analysts mentioning: headfirst slides into first base. Obviously, I am talking about running out infield hits and the like, not diving back on a pickoff throw. No one will ever convince me that the maneuver gets the runner to the base more quickly than simply continuing to sprint; the normal, self-protective reflex to slow down during the dive assures that outcome. It winds up being nothing more than idiotic showboating. And again, I’m not talking about a Pete Rose dive into third on a triple, which can be useful in avoiding tags. In bang-bang plays on infield grounders, avoiding the tag is not typically an issue.



   And peripherally related, I got a chuckle out of a newspaper article that I read a couple of days ago that characterized Barry Bonds as a no-good bum that almost everybody hated and Henry Aaron as a wonderful guy that everybody liked.

   I chuckled because my guy Henry is getting a bit of the Maris-like revisionist history process that took place nearly 10 years ago when McGwire and Sosa were in the process of sailing past the old single-season home run mark of 61, held by Roger Maris, of course.

   Maris got wonderful treatment back then, and it could be noted that McGwire played a role in that, taking every possible occasion to offer respectful nods to the Yankee slugger who had died a dozen years before that and making an effort to include surviving Maris family members in the spotlight when the occasion presented itself. All the nice talk somewhat obscured the reality that Maris got really harsh treatment from the press and many fans at the time he broke Ruth’s record in 1961. Then the prevailing sentiment was that Mantle was a more worthy subject to break Ruth’s record; ironically, the arrival of Maris at Yankee Stadium in 1960 had helped generate some of that affection for The Mick as once-thorny press coverage of the great star turned softer and some of the spotlight – and attendant pressure – shifted to Roger.

   I see that same thing happening now with Aaron. Writers and TV pundits are making him out to be this warm and fuzzy old teddy bear, when, in fact, for much of the period after his retirement in 1976, he was regarded as a kind of a prickly personality, a notion perhaps heightened by his principled and unyielding stances concerning race relations and important civil rights issues.

   Remember, this was the 1970s, and the country was still sorting out a lot of “stuff” that seems like old news nowadays. I anguished that Henry wasn’t more beloved than he was at the time, but I won’t go so far as to rewrite the history books now.

   My greatest hope in conceding that the all-time home run status was going to have to be relinquished was that Aaron would get some much-deserved time in the spotlight once again, and I sort of like it that he’s being portrayed so positively now after a couple of decades of being either largely ignored or even occasionally scolded for espousing views that didn’t always sit well with the mainstream press.

   But let’s at least do everybody a favor and keep it “real,” as they say. None of that selective perception stuff.


   As I write this, our friend and columnist Marty Appel is in Israel helping out with the launch of the Israel Baseball League. The league opened last night with a game between the Petach Tikva Pioneers and the Modi’in Miracle at the Yarkon Sports Complex in Jerusalem.

   That information comes from the Sunday New York Times (June 24); I already knew Marty was there, since he’s one of our ace columnists and he e-mailed me several days before to tell me he would be out of town.

   It all sounds pretty cool to me: a six-team league plays an eight-week, 45 games schedule (seven-inning games). The players make $2,000 each for the season, and the play-by-play will be in Hebrew, with the inaugural game also being broadcast in English and shown on PBS affiliates in New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and West Palm Beach, Fla.

   A number of former major leaguers are on board as managers (Art Shamsky, Ron Blomberg and Ken Holtzman), plus former Red Sox and Expo GM Dan Duquette will serve as the league’s director of player development. Appel, arguably the most famous PR maven in the sports world, directs the public relations effort.

   About my only beef would be the planned home run derby to break ties, instead of playing extra innings. That doesn’t seem kosher to me.

   In Part Deux of my recent road trip, I flew from Providence, R.I., down to New York City for the June 5 Sotheby’s With SCP live auction at Sotheby’s on York Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Covering live auctions is one of the toughest things I do as a reporter because there’s a huge element of chance determining how much takes place with live bidders and how much is from absentee bids, online and over the phone.

  
   Fortunately for me, Pete Siegel of Gotta Have It in New York City turns up at all the major auctions. Siegel grabbed national media attention at auctions of the Mickey Mantle estate in 2004 and two years ago at Sotheby’s when he was the winning bidder at nearly $1 million for the sale contract that sent Babe Ruth from the Red Sox to the Yankees in 1920. He is arguably one of the most prolific collectors of Yankees memorabilia, much of which will ultimately be on display at his museum, details as yet to be finalized. In the meantime, he continues to acquire Ruthian treasures, for example, that would fit in any museum from Cooperstown to the Big Apple.
  
   “I purchased two of the small Babe Ruth photos from the tour of Japan, and in the afternoon we picked up the baseball that was signed by both Babe Ruth and Brother Matthias,” said an elated Siegel. “We are very happy to have that and it’s probably the only one in existence in terms of the history of Babe Ruth. If it weren’t for Brother Matthias (from the St. Mary’s School for Boys orphanage where Ruth was raised from age 7), Ruth might never have had an interest in baseball.”

   I always sit near the front at live auctions, hoping to be able to follow the live bidding in the room at least, which is something of a trick in itself. I had been to Sotheby’s auctions before, so I had seen Leila Dunbar in action at other sales, working as part of a rotation of auctioneers, but this time she handled the whole day. At just over 350 lots, that may not seem like such a big deal, but in this case it really was.
 
   In all my years of going to auctions, I can’t recall another where virtually every item got a slew of bids. It’s a little nutty to compare it to the Halper sale in 1999, since that was more like 2,500 items over seven days, but even that sale would have some lots that opened with an absentee bid, got a couple of bumps and then, bang.     In this one there was fierce bidding all the way through. There just weren’t any lots that seemed like they were phoned in, if you’ll pardon the expression.

   In a Gehrig-like performance, I never saw her make so much as a stutter, handling literally thousands of bids back and forth from the “book” in front of her at the podium, the phones, the Internet and the room. All of this accomplished while pushing her reading glasses back from time to time as they would relentlessly creep down her nose.

   And speaking of noses, I sneezed during the the middle of the second session and panicked for a moment, thinking I might have inadvertently bid on a Dave Cowens jersey, but Leila never missed a beat, and merely blessed me instead of assessing me with a $2,700 tab.
   Now that’s efficiency.

   The other reason I like to sit in front at auctions is to keep track of who shows up for the live bidding. SCP President David Kohler assured me there were celebrities bidding in the sale, but most of those were on the phone. Many of the top dealers in the country were in the audience, but the only other celebrity (that I knew of) was Jane Forbes Clark, the chairman of the board of the Baseball Hall of Fame, who quietly took a seat in the front row on the right side early in the morning ssession.
  
   Immediately after the sale of the Walter Johnson bat that was one of the highlights of the sale, five lots of Hall of Fame-related correspondence came up in Lots 107-111. The letters, which feature fascinating insight into the process the Hall used to encourage the players to donate items, included missives from the likes of Clark Griffith, Honus Wagner, Cy Young (3), Nap Lajoie, Tris Speaker, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, and Ford Frick.
  
   The five lots included more than a dozen letters from some of the greatest stars in the game who responded to museum planner Alexander Cleland’s inquiries about getting donations of memorabilia for the brand-new Hall of Fame. The letters are all dated in the 1930s and feature three from Ty Cobb, including one where he pointed out statistical errors concerning his career numbers. That lot inspired furious bidding that reached $27,000, with Clark prevailing as she did with all five lots, totaling $56,000.
  
   As serious fans are well aware, the Hall of Fame does not purchase memorabilia items for the museum but rather relies on donations from ballplayers and the collecting elite, both of which have come through to varying degrees of success over the years.
  
   “My grandfather founded the Hall of Fame, and these papers are important to my grandfather, and to the Hall of Fame in terms of being some of the original documents that began the Hall of Fame as we know it today.
   “The Hall is not bidding; I was bidding on them myself, personally, and of course I’ll put them on loan to the Hall,” said Clark.
   “As you know, the Hall of Fame does not buy artifacts,” she added.
  
   She also responded to a question about the origins of material that would have traditionally been saved by the museum. “We’re not entirely sure, but we think that when Mr. Cleland left, he took boxes of documents with him. And those have been, we think, with his family.
   “And we are very happy to get them.”

   Last leg of road trip, to our SportsFest Show in Schaumburg, Ill., to follow shortly.