For guys essentially paid to watch stuff as closely as possible and then report on what they’ve just seen, sportswriters can be a remarkably myopic group on occasion. Examples are fairly easy to come by, but rarely as stunning as the recent blather offered by the Ham Sandwich Brigade as Tiger Woods continued along an almost unprecedented winning streak that stretched all the way to last fall.

   As Tiger was running his winning streak to seven events worldwide, the sportswriters would occasionally allow themselves to muse about the possibility of Tiger turning in an undefeated season. Awww, geez, guys!

   I understand the underlying circumstances that make otherwise competent and rational people write silly things, but to even fantasize about something like that reflects pretty poorly on the writer, because it suggests he’s woefully unfamiliar with the elemental components of the game itself.
   (Tiger Woods artwork at right by Michael Joseph.)

   Even when Tiger Woods has been at his best (which we may well be witnessing at this moment), it’s still just goofy to suggest that anyone could win every tournament that they played in over the course of a whole season. I would contend that there has never been another player who dominated his sport as profoundly as Tiger has, but there are simply too many variables in the sport for a perfect season to be something that’s rationally considered.

   A twig, a bad bounce, the wind, a divot, the click of a camera at the wrong time, indigestion, you name it: even a player as dominant as Tiger has to face so many of these that talk of perfection is nutty. It may be flattering, but I’d be more inclined to think it does a disservice to the player, because it takes what would have already been probably unrealistic expectations and moves them up several notches to absurd and beyond.

   And at the same time that the golf scribes were falling all over themselves in cannonizing Woods, he was then roundly excoriated because he cussed out a photographer who clicked in the middle of his downswing. I know, I know, the fact that Tiger hauls in $100 million or so a year makes the public apply a higher standard, but if you think about it, it’s pretty unfair. We applaud Woods on the one hand because of his almost cosmic focus and intensity, then rush to spank him when those very same traits occasionally spill over when things don’t go his way.

   I certainly understand a parent’s discomfort if Tiger says naughty words that could rattle the youth of America, but just as certainly I understand the sacrosanct and symbiotic relationship between profanity and the game of golf.

   Of course, I myself have never actually had to resort to cussing on the course. And I never lie, either.

   I came across a couple of news items recently that caught my attention in part because of the relevance to our hobby but also because of the link they had to each other.

   One report told how the Major League Baseball Players Association was at least taking the preliminary steps to examine whether MLB owners were somehow acting in-concert in their dealings with free agents this spring.

   Around the same time came news reports that union head Don Fehr was wondering about the status of one Barry Bonds, free agent extraordinaire, who has seemingly been left out in the cold, at least for the moment.

   All of this neatly coincides with the SCP Auction of the baseball that just might turn out to be the final home run of Bonds’ tumultuous career. That, of course, would also make the spheroid in question the one that marks the all-time home run mark.

   That auction closes on April 12, and SCP officials have speculated that the ball could sell for as much as $1 million. That would be a nifty hobby development, but it amazes me that the high rollers in this kind of situation would roll the dice on paying big bucks for a baseball that would seem to have some potential of becoming a rather pedestrian artifact (relatively speaking) should Bonds somehow return to the ballpark.

   I don’t pretend to have any inside knowledge on the matter, but I still have an unshakable belief that Barry is going to wind up playing somewhere this summer. I know he’s a major thorn in Bud’s rib cage, but it’s one of those odd areas where I still cling to a good deal of naivete, all evidence to the contrary.

   There’s very little precedent for a situation where a ballplayer had so much left in the tank but wasn’t allowed the opportunity to use it. Obviously, the old coot can’t run much anymore and has morphed from being a Gold Glover in the outfield to a defensive liability that probably can’t be tolerated by a National League ballclub.

   But with that goofy designated hitter thingy in the American League, he’s doesn’t really have to be able to run all that much or bend over for those pesky ground balls that leak past the infield. He just has to swat the occasional home run, and I suspect that he’s still capable of doing just that.

   I want to believe that our overriding sense of fairness wouldn’t permit MLB to blackball Barry when he hasn’t really been found guilty of doing anything that maybe a couple hundred of his contemporaries didn’t also do, admittedly to wildly varying degrees of success.

   Bonds is under indictment for perjury and obstruction of justice (indictment may be amended), but he hasn’t been convicted of anything and ought to get the benefit of the doubt until he is.
   Assuming that MLB would – as a group – decide not to employ him despite obvious reasons to do otherwise probably does a disservice to MLB officials and team owners. I won’t presume that those folks would be inclined to collusion; the Union and media watchdogs will doubtless be on the job in coming months checking out just such a possibility.

   I think he wants to play. I think he’s going to play. Stay tuned.


   Barry’s godfather, Willie Mays, finds himself in the news within the narrow world of our hobby. Willie’s 1972 Topps “In Action” card recently sold for $8,100. It’s supposed to be illuminating to point out that it was a PSA 10, but for old-timers like me, it’s still a Neverland kind of moment.

   It’s almost cosmically irrelevant, but the card is one of the lamest ever created of Willie in his 22 years of appearing on Topps cards. Obviously, the $8,100 price tag isn’t predicated on the design purity or the graphic elements of the card, or even the attractiveness of the photograph. But, gee whiz, this is one of the all-time great ugly baseball cards, with Willie seemingly mired in quicksand on a baseball diamond, with some other guy’s leg in the background and yet another in the foreground. And like so many Topps photos from the 1970s, the lonely leg in the foreground is in focus, while Willie, ostensibly sliding into a base, is not.

   Sy Berger, the legendary Topps VP who helped design many of the great sets of the 1950s and 1960s and who “negotiated” with a couple of generations of ballplayers for the rights to be included on baseball cards, used to tell me how Mays almost continually crabbed about some of his cards. Like Mickey Mantle, Henry Aaron and Roberto Clemente, Mays, in fact, wound up on some of the greatest cards ever created, but if that 1972 Topps “In Action” card was one of his complaints, I gotta go with Willie on this one.

   I have not blogged for a couple of weeks, but at least for once I have a fairly good excuse: I’ve been on vacation. Actually took four days off (plus a weekend) for a golf tour in Alabama, doing a swing between Birmingham, Montgomery and Auburn along what is called the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail.

   I would never violate community standards of decency by subjecting readers to details of my golf game, but it was nice to get out of Central Wisconsin for nearly a week in the closing weeks of the ugliest winter  I can remember in my 15 years here at Krause Publications (now F+W Publications).

   I managed to immerse myself in the vacation spirit enough to get behind on my traditionally voracious consumption of daily newspapers, but I did see a copy of The Birmingham News on Saturday, March 8, and quickly noticed two things I really liked: pictures of Henry Aaron and Billy Bob Thornton on the front page, and a second picture of the all-time nonpharmaceutically enhanced home run record holder on the inside of the front page.
 
   Thornton was pictured atop the fold as the star attraction of the 11th Annual George Lindsey Film Festival at the University of North Alabama. I don’t know about you, but I just sort of liked the idea of a film festival named in honor of a guy who played Goober Pyle on “The Andy Griffith Show.”

   Henry’s front-page mention (and tiny photo) was to plug a contest coming in the next day’s paper that would have readers vote for Alabama’s Greatest Sports Legend. The Hammer was there on the next page, this time with wife Billye, attending the opening of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” at the Broadhurst Theatre in New York City.
  
   Now that’s my idea of a good newspaper.


   On the collecting front, I have started to piece together a set of the 2008 Topps Heritage Baseball issue, an undertaking I began primarily because of my fondness for the original 1959 Topps set.

   I’ve had a lot of fun over the years piecing together the Heritage sets, though I haven’t done every year. Topps is getting better at this Heritage deal every year, and that’s really saying something, because they nailed it almost from the beginning in 2001 with an issue that paid homage to 1952 Topps.

   The refinements over the years have mostly been nuances like matching colors and players with their counterparts in the original issues, something that really worked well with the bright color backgrounds of 1959 Topps.

   I know it’s a generational thing, but I can’t shake the idea that it would be more fun if the sets could be completed by buying packs (and boxes) rather than purchasing missing high numbers and short prints from dealers. The generational part is simply that the process of collecting has changed so much over the years, and the Heritage issues are genuine godsends for dealers in that they are huge draws for set collectors, a group that’s had a rough time of it in our hobby over the last 15-plus years or so.

   Still, you gotta admit I’m trying to adjust to new realities. Putting anywhere from $350-$400 or more into a new set takes some getting used to. For me, it’s jarring enough to make me end a sentence with a preposition.

   I got an e-mail the other day gently criticizing my decision to “have a little fun” with the ongoing steroid and HGH debacle, with the reader quite fairly noting that the devastation that ensues for both the game of baseball and the individuals touched by the scandal doesn’t seem appropriate for even subdued hilarity.

   Fair enough, but part of what I was trying to do with the Roger Clemens piece that dreamed up a Col. Nathan R. Jessup-like testimony was to offer my belief that athletes at that level didn’t really think using steroids or HGH was all that big of a deal, at least until the public uproar developed.

   I don’t think you could have so many players involved if the private attitudes about such use truly mirrored what is now politically correct condemnation of same. The enforced rigidity of political correctness annoys me big time, so I tend to push against it whenever I can, even in instances where my own opinion might substantially differ from what I appear to be defending.

   I don’t know if it’s clear or not, but I have a good deal of sympathy for Clemens, and to a lesser degree, even Barry Bonds. Regardless of the widespread condemnation that attaches itself to the idea of “cheating,” I can’t shake the nagging suspicion that the pair is being ganged up on.

   My favorite newspaper, The New York Times, has pretty clearly got Clemens outfitted for some kind of “Sombrero of Disgrace.” I don’t think anybody can look at the paper’s relentless coverage of the Clemens Saga without concluding that they want his scalp (Oops, even more politically incorrect). Heck, I’ve never been a Clemens fan, in part because I liked Doc Gooden instead, but I’m not sure what he’s done to warrant the avalanche that seems to be headed his way, aside from perhaps quite thoroughly bungling the public relations effort in the weeks after the Mitchell Report was released.

   There are only two possibilities: 1. Clemens is telling the truth, in which case he has been the victim of one of the great travesties of justice in our lifetime, with his reputation left in tatters right alongside his legacy in the game itself; or 2. Clemens is lying, in which case I could still suggest that the punishment already incurred and likely to follow is grossly disproportinate to the offense. Even if you decide that he must be flogged for perjury, it’s worth noting that if we are going to come down that hard on Americans who lie to Congress, it would at least seem less hypocritical if we were even remotely as outraged when the lying goes in the opposite direction.


   And speaking of political correctness, several weeks back, there was a thankfully brief media stir when a video made the Internet rounds showing Pedro Martinez and Juan Marichal at a cockfighting match in the Dominican Republic. The outcry was mercifully muted, in part because while the distaste for the enterprise is fairly uniform in this country, there was apparently some allowance made for the realization that it might hold a different sway in another culture.

   Still, it got me to thinking about my own checkered past, and thus prompted a bit of long-overdue confession. I am pretty sure the statute of limitations has long since expired, but I was present at a cockfighting match nearly 40 years ago in the jungles of the Philippines.

   It was Thanksgiving Day 1969, and at 19 years old I was prone to go along with whatever adventures were proposed, within limits. I had been in the Philippines all of six months or so, with another year to go. There had been a rather pronounced resurgence of violence against American sailors from the Communist Huks, a group that had originally resisted the occupation of the Japanese in World War II and had grew into a genuine insurrection from 1946-54. The Huks had re-formed as the Communist Party of the Philippines in 1968, and posed enough of a threat to unwary sailors on liberty in Olangapo City outside the Subic Bay Naval Base that the Navy had designated virtually anywhere outside the city as “out of bounds.”

   Thus our foray into the jungle that Thanksgiving held the potential of getting us into a good deal of trouble regardless of our role in the local sporting events. The final spot in the jungle was a good 20-30 miles beyond the narrow strip of seedy bars and hotels that served as perhaps the ultimate liberty destination for sailors of the 7th Fleet and GI’s on R and R from in-country duty in Viet Nam.

   It wasn’t anything fancy like the chaotic arenas in the videos, but merely a cleared area of the jungle. As I recall, there were maybe a couple of dozen spectators, no more than that, but I concede that copious quantities of San Miguel beer may have clouded the memory. It only lasted a few minutes, and was such a tumultuous affair with all of the screaming and shouting from the local enthusiasts that I can’t even recall whether I had bet on the winner or not.

   I do recall that we ate the loser, cooked right there in the jungle over an open fire. Tasted like chicken ... really tough chicken.

   One of the things that gives so much power to the memories of Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio is that, unlike in the case of Ruth, Cobb, et. al, there are still hundreds of thousands of fans who remember seeing Mickey, Ted and Joe actually play the game. And those memories can be powerful, if often embellished to the point of being apocryphal. With that introduction:
  
   I saw Mickey Mantle hit his final major league triple in a mid-summer game in 1968 against the Tigers, a doubleheader, in fact, at Yankee Stadium in heat so sweltering we couldn’t drink beer fast enough. We tried, though.
  
   It was way over 100 degrees, and we had taken a bus from Upstate New York (Johnstown, west of Albany), a four-hour bit of Animal House type business years before the movie came out. The bus was chartered by the local Eagles club, there was no restroom and there were huge, shiny metal garbage cans filled with beer for the trip downstate Sunday morning. The facilities, as such, consisted of a single five-gallon gas can like the Army used (gerry can) that rested in the middle of the aisle. It was not for the faint of heart or for the squeamish.
  
   The Tigers were in the middle of a pennant race and, ultimately, perhaps the most glorious year in the team’s history. The Yankees were in the tank yet again, awkwardly trying to adjust to the end of their incredible 1949-64 dynasty, which didn’t bother me at all, because I hated the Yankees. I was a Mets fan. Still am. But I loved The Mick.
  
   We also figured this might be the last chance to see The Mick, which was reason enough to visit the otherwise reviled Yankee Stadium. It was in the first game, I don’t remember the inning or the pitcher, but I think he was batting left-handed when he rocketed one back over the mound and into dead center. As I’ve told the story for the last 40 years, the ball was struck with such ferocity that it never got more than 10-12 feet off the ground, yet made it all the way to the monuments in centerfield on the fly, back when they were actually on the field of play. And that’s what got Mick the triple. It was one of the hardest-hit balls I ever saw in my life, and certainly the hardest-hit ball that didn’t leave the park.
  
   As we screamed and dumped Ballantine beer on one another, Mantle hobbled around the bases. He seemed to barely make it to second, but as the ball clattered like a pinball between the plaques of Ruth, Gehrig and Miller Huggins, he didn’t have much choice but to limp on to third base. He made it standing up; it was the only triple that the hobbled Mantle would hit that season.
  
   I would join the Navy in a couple of months and be in the Philippines before Richard Nixon could set foot in the White House. The trip to see Mickey’s last triple was also the last chance before joining the military to do a bit of bonding with my father. We didn’t call it bonding in 1968.
  
   As to the reference to apocryphal above, I guess I would find it disconcerting if all the facts didn’t line up the way I remember them, but as the circumstances have been described, I’d have at least one really good excuse if they didn’t.

   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.”