It’s been pretty gloomy around these parts, what with that icky NFC Championship Game on Sunday coming in the middle of a cold snap that makes me long for some global warming, or at least local warming.
  
   Once the disappointment of the Packers’ defeat started to ebb a little bit, I started thinking about finding someone or something to blame for the whole debacle, and fairly quickly came up with Sports Illustrated magazine.
  
   The infamous “Sports Illustrated Jinx” struck again, and this time it was a double whammy, since the Big Guy, Brett Favre, wound up gracing their cover twice in the range of about two months. The first one was for the “Sportsman of the Year” designation; the second was that neat image of his pitching in the snow against Seattle.
  
   I’m not bitter, but if appearing on the cover is enough to send somebody to the showers, what happens when it’s twice in such a short span?
  
   And just for the record, I fully understand that attaching a significance to something like that is yet another example of “selective perception” that human beings employ as a means of trying to make sense of a confusing and often forbidding universe. Essentially, we remember those things that support our underlying hypothesis – in this case a Sports Illustrated “jinx” – and simply ignore all of the other instances when they don’t.


   In the course of surfing around the TV dial during NFC Championship huddles, timeouts and commercial breaks, etc., I ran across something that at first blush appeared to be billiards on ESPN, but upon closer examination turned out to be a grotesque abomination of my favorite “sport.”
  
   “Speed Pool” involves players running around the table trying to sink balls as fast as they can, a putrid contrivance that has nothing whatsoever to do with what is still a grand and elegant game when played in some fashion remotely in accordance with normal rules. Comparable mutations in other beloved sports might be something like “Tackle Golf,” or adding a Karaoke round in the final two minutes of each quarter of an NFL game. Thinking those last two whimsical suggestions are any more ridiculous than “Speed Pool” amounts to little more than a distinction without a difference.
  
   I can’t blame Sports Illustrated for this one, or even ESPN, for that matter. The cable TV behemoth has to feed a voracious monster that requires ever-greater mountains of programming, but there are still villains to be fingered in this sad affair.
  
   Atop that list is the world of professional pool, which has never been able to figure out how to market a sport/game that is played by millions of Americans every year. We’re not talking about curling here, though we might as well be given the various professional associations’ tepid abilities in marketing their product. Despite a couple of significant bumps every time Paul Newman makes a movie showcasing “Fast Eddie” Felson, pool has languished for all of my lifetime, never able to even create an effective professional circuit, to say nothing of its inability to solve the riddle of bringing the game to television viewers.
  
   And for those who like irony – and who doesn’t? – it gives me a chuckle that the women’s professional tour has done a far better job at these things. I suspect that if you asked people in a poll to name their favorite professional pool player, the winning name might be “Minnesota Fats,” or slightly more encouraging, maybe Willie Mosconi. There are a number of wonderful players on the men’s circuit these days, but they play at a level of obscurity that is nothing short of embarrassing.
  
   And there has been nothing that has taken place over the last 40 years that would provide any reason to hope that this forlorn situation will improve in my lifetime.

   The Hall of Fame has some fascinating controversies on the horizon directly related to the steroid questions that have hounded MLB now and figure to for years to come, despite what will certainly be strenuous efforts to get it all put behind them.
  
   Mark McGwire’s rather pronounced punishment of two years of paltry vote totals is going to have to be re-examined in coming years as it becomes more and more evident that the use of “performance enhancing” substances – legal or not at the time of use – was probably so widespread for the better part of a decade that the public’s initial outrage is going to have to be tempered a bit.
  
   Think about it. Let’s say in five years we’ve learned that the use of steroids or HGH or virtually anything else they could get their hands on was essentially endemic in Major League Baseball until public relations pressures (and the lunkheads in Congress) forced all concerned to suddenly look – and act – concerned.
  
   If, as it seems likely, the number of players involved was so enormous that singling out any individuals for condemnation (i.e. Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire) would be preposterously unfair, then the current climate of outrage will have to be rethought.
  
   Of the three players mentioned in the previous paragraph, I am convinced that Bonds and Clemens will both ultimately be admitted to the Hall of Fame. Bonds is so thoroughly despised by so many in the fourth estate that his election could very well take several years, but eventually he’ll have to be voted in. Though it frosts my grommet to say it, he was the best player of his generation.
  
   Many of the same arguments apply to Clemens, regardless of what takes place in the coming months. If his indignation of recent weeks represents the genuine emotion of an honorable man who has had his reputation sullied, then I would even applaud some kind of vindication, however unlikely. He is left having to prove a negative, to prove that he didn’t do something, a Herculean challenge that seems as impossible as the broader challenge of trying to restore a good name and reputation after they have come under disrepute.
  
   Ultimately, one suspects that such individuals are left needing to content themselves with some Zen-like realization that their self-knowledge of their professed innocence (and the support of family and genuine friends) will have to suffice. I am a little rusty with my Buddhism, but that’s my best advice to Roger and the Bare Man.
  
   For McGwire, I am all at once supportive and pessimistic. I am supportive because his transgression as currently outlined is seemingly even less significant than many others. He suffers essentially from poor timing, having had his initial Hall-of-Fame eligibility kind of neatly coincide with the unfolding of this “scandal.”
  
   Until his admittedly ill-advised appearance in front of that congressional committee three years ago, McGwire had a largely solid reputation, though his inaccessability in our hobby for autograph purposes certainly hurt a bit. But even that always seemed like little more than a bit of personal eccentricity that the public was more than happy to make allowances for, at least until his tortured testimony.
  
   What I wonder about more is what the long-term impact will be on his Hall-of-Fame prospects? Both Bonds and Clemens were first-ballot Hall of Famers even before the dawning of the steroid era, but McGwire was a different case. He socked 300 home runs in his final six seasons, and averaged 61 homers per year from 1996-99.
  
   Plus, it almost seems like people got madder at McGwire than at Bonds, for example, seemingly because they were more disappointed by McGwire’s inclusion in the steroid debacle. I am not as certain that he will eventually be inducted as I am about Bonds and Clemens.
   
   As for others, including some “magic number” guys, it’s going to be even more interesting. Rafael Palmiero, a member in good standing of both prestiguous clubs – 500 homers and 3,000 hits – is likely to be subjected to a McGwire-like penalty for his Clintonian denial of steroid use and later failed drug test. Like McGwire, it’s even possible that he may never get in, or at least not by the baseball writer’s hand, which encompasses two decades (five-year waiting period; 15 years on the ballot).
  
   Ultimately though, I don’t think players from that “tainted” era gave hardly a second thought to using some substance that might make a difference between being put on waivers or an $8-million contract. I don’t think they even thought of it as cheating.
  
   I guess it will take the passage of time to get the final word on how fans feel about it. I would be amazed if it looks as disgraceful 10 years from now as it does today. In the meantime, it’s going to make for a lively and often overheated Hall-of-Fame debate.  

   

   It used to be a tradition back in the 1970s and 1980s, more with the Veterans Committee voting but still, to a lesser degree, with the Hall-of-Fame vote from the baseball writers (BBWAA). Just before the vote totals would be announced, a well-placed article would run on the wire services noting the solid chances of a particular candidate, and, more often than not, the guy would be announced as a new HOFer a few days later.
  
   It wasn’t an exact science, and as MLB itself and the Hall of Fame grew in recent decades, the voting would come under increased scrutiny all year long, rather than just surrounding the announcements.
  
   So it was with some amusement – and a bit of amazement – that I saw stories in yesterday’s Sunday New York Times proclaiming: 1) “Hall voters may look Rice’s way”; and 2) “Raines could slide safely into the Hall on first try.”
  
   I was pleased with the first story, since I believe Jim Rice is among a number of great players from the 1970s and 1980s who belong in Cooperstown, but the second one had me scratching my head.
  
   But Tim Raines? First ballot? Without getting bogged down in the debate about Raines’ numbers, it seems incomprehensible that anybody would think he would be elected on a first ballot. Hell, it’s hardly a sure thing that he will be elected on any ballot, to say nothing of his first time out of the box.
  
   Turns out, the actual bylined article by Dan Rosenheck doesn’t really make the first-ballot argument even indirectly, but does talk about Raines as worthy of enshrinement, all the while crunching his numbers in general and his base running stats in particular. In fairness to the guy who wrote the story, the overheated headline almost surely came from an editor who got a bit carried away. Tim  Raines could slide safely into the Hall on his first try, and Pete Rose might be appointed as ambassador to Luxembourg.
  
   With the vote announcement slated for tomorrow afternoon, I’d love to see Jim Rice get the nod, but I’d really like to see Andre Dawson in there alongside him. Bear in mind, when I talk about voting possibilities, I restrict myself to things I consider at least a possibility, rather than lament about things I’d like to see. While I’d like to see, among others, Dave Parker, Don Mattingly and Dale Murphy voted in, their vote totals thus far have been so miniscule that such conjecture is little more than fantasy.
  
   I always wanted to see Harold Baines get to the 3,000-hit mark just to put to the test the voters’ fascination with magic numbers. Baines is on the ballot for the first time, but I don’t think most voters think of him as a Hall of Famer.
  
   Conventional wisdom would suggest that Goose Gossage, the highest unelected vote getter last year (71 percent), will make it this time, but it’s also possible that he might have hit his peak just shy of election. Gossage did some major grumbling about his recent near-miss vote totals, even getting a major feature in Time magazine last year. One suspects that the ham sandwich brigade (BBWAA) doesn’t care for that kind of kibitzing, but it isn’t clear that they can make that kind of indignation a major factor in the final ballot.
  
   Anyway, my guess of what will happen is (opposed to what I would hope would happen): Gossage and Rice.
  
   I include Gossage just to show how fair minded I can be, my annoyance with relief pitchers notwithstanding. If relievers are going to be considered based largely on lifetime save totals, where is there even a tiny semblance of fairness to the dozens of other relievers who just happened to labor for teams where there was no chance for even a remotely close number of save chances?
  
   What good is an individual statistic when only a handful of pitchers in each league have the opportunity to lead the league every year? It’s a rhetorical question.

   Ever since Ted Williams turned up missing in the 1959 Topps set (and then again MIA in 1960), I have been fascinated with the historic details surrounding his dealings with Topps, Fleer and later, in retirement, with Upper Deck.
   In 1959, it was just bothersome at first, wondering where Williams’ card was as each series came out and he was nowhere to be found. By the time you got to the last series and realized he wasn’t going to be in the set, it was way too late.
   I am a little vague on it, but I don’t think I bought many packs of the high series. I base that observation not necessarily on memory, but simply on the condition of the high numbers in my 1959 set. Like so many collectors, those final 66 cards aren’t quite as snappy as the first 506, presumably because, even when I upgraded many years later, I didn’t necessarily pay top dollar all the time.
   Anyway, it was a real treat to get a call from Alan Machado of Fall River, Mass., several weeks ago. He explained he had won a number of audio tapes in an eBay auction, and found a tape apparently from 1963 where Ted Williams talked about his exclusive contract with Fleer that kept him out of the Topps issues during his final two years in the game (1959 and 1960).
   The cardboard box that the reel-to-reel audio tape came in is dated 1963, with a notation that it was recorded at Williams’ baseball camp in Lakeville, Mass.
   The tape, seemingly a rehearsal for radio spots, includes Ted reading scripts about baseball nicknames and a kind of lame joke about Lou Gehrig’s four-homer game in 1932. Much of it is also behind-the-scenes chatter (and a Williamsesque dose of profanity) that includes mention of the Jimmy Fund and Ted’s salty but clearly-in-jest grumblings about the machinations of recording numerous scripts.
   “I don’t read too goddamned good, anyway,” he groused at one point. “Christ, if it’s going to be that difficult,” he moaned about the various maneuvers envisioned to get all the scripts done, never actually finishing the thought. It’s all done in a good-natured fashion, and none of the profanity seems like anything other than vintage Ted Williams talking in the rough-edged manner that was part of his trademark persona.
   Most of this banter took place “off mike,” in instances where he would have assumed it would all end up on the cutting room floor. Ted’s musing about Fleer and Topps was likely given as a means of providing background to the others in the room helping with the production. Machado theorized the scripts could have been for radio segments for a show sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. There was no discernible context provided to explain why Ted suddenly launched into a dissertation about the two card companies.
   “I am the greatest benefactor of a new company (Fleer) coming into the bubblegum business than any other athlete,” Williams said.
   “Fleer and Topps are the ones that are arguing back and forth,” he continued. “One chewing gum company (Topps) has cornered all the ballplayers. They contact each individual player, who then signs an exclusive contract for $100, giving the company the right to feature the player.
   “Fleer came to me first. This is the second year I haven’t played. They came to me in 1959 and said, ‘If you’ll sign with us, we’ll give you $500.’ In the meantime, I’d already signed with Topps for $400,” Williams recalled.
   “They said, ‘We’ll give you $1,000 if you’ll sign with us for your last year.’ I told them I had signed with Topps, but I wasn’t an exclusive because it wasn’t very much money to start with,” he added.
   Williams, who would occasionally refer to the company as “Flairs,” was more than a little animated about the topic, despite grousing about being put in the middle of the wrangling between the two companies.
   “Topps didn’t tell me this, but they sure as hell didn’t want anybody else to get me, and I was one of the few ballplayers who hadn’t been signed up with Topps.
   “And Topps said, ‘We’ll give you $1,000 for two years.’
   “I went back to Fleer and told them Topps wanted to sign me up for two years, and they said they would give me $1,000 (per year) for three years.
   “And it kept going back and forth until I finally ended up with Fleer, out of Philadelphia, for five years for $12,500 ... $2,500 a year. And I’m still getting that for three more years.”
   Nothing on the audio tape conflicts with what I had ever learned about Ted’s defection from the Topps camp following the 1958 season. Sy Berger told me years ago that Ted simply came to them and explained about a substantial offer for an exclusive arrangement with Fleer, and Topps simply stepped away to allow Williams to get the windfall in the waning years of his career.
   I know the money sounds like chump change now, but $12,500 was an extraordinary amount at a time when players, even the top players, got a couple of hundred or even less for the rights to use their likeness on a baseball card. Players could also select “lovely prizes” from the Topps catalog, often winding up with a new washer or dryer for their efforts. And we wonder nowadays why people look back at the 1950s and early 1960s with such unabashed nostalgia.
   It was even more noteworthy since Fleer wasn’t producing a set with contemporary players. They made the “Life of Ted Williams” set in 1959, with the hand-colorized photos giving the issue a soft-focus feel that seems positively charming a half-century later but was merely mystifying for youngsters at the time.
   Serious collectors are aware that the 80-card “set” includes one card that is extraordinarily difficult to find, and brutally expensive when you do. Card No. 68, “Ted Signs for ’59,” was withdrawn from production because the other guy in the picture, Boston GM Bucky Harris, was under exclusive contract with Topps. It’s also worth noting that, because of its scarcity, the No. 68 card has been counterfeited and is thus deserving of a certain amount of wariness from collectors.
   Ted would appear in two more Fleer issues, old-timers sets as the hobby referred to them in the earliest days, in 1961 and 1962. By the time Fleer got around to trying a set with current players in 1963, Ted was long since retired, though, as he noted, still drawing a good chunk of cash from the Philadelphia-based card company.
   Ironically, Ted would wind up in the middle of yet another tug of war over exclusivity with the card companies, almost three decades later. In 1994, Topps reprinted its classic 1954 set, but ran afoul of Upper Deck, which at the time had an exclusive deal with Williams.
   Topps reprinted the set in 1994 without the two Williams cards (Nos. 1 and 250, the first and last cards in the set), creating immediate howls within the hobby. Admittedly, I was the one doing the most howling, driven even to the point of poetry.
   Though I assume the impetus for the two rival card companies to huddle up and offer a unique resolution of the problem was something other than my ripoff of Franklin Adams’ “Tinker to Evers to Chance,” the result was an unprecedented collaboration between the card companies.
   Upper Deck produced the two missing Williams cards, then added a “Card That Never Was,” a Mickey Mantle card that was designed in the style of 1954 Topps (Mantle did not have Topps cards in 1954-55).
   All three were inserted in a rather austere, verging on unremarkable, “old timers” set that Upper Deck produced that year called “All-Time Heroes.” As I noted at the time, the three inserts were destined to be expensive on the secondary market, and now 14 years later, probably would run you $200 or more for all three, with the Mantle card easily the most expensive of the group.
    Still, I kind of like the irony of Upper Deck producing cards needed for the completion of a Topps set. Seems like we’d be looking at a serious interval before that kind of thing happens again.

   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.