The Hall of Fame announced a couple of weeks ago that Jackie Robinson would be getting a new plaque at the baseball shrine in Cooperstown. It had been scheduled for unveiling on May 3, but a scheduling conflict for Jackie's widow, Rachel Robinson, prompted HOF officials to move it to later this summer.
  
   So how come the legendary HOFer needed a new plaque a full 46 years after getting his original? I feel like a dolt for not having known this, but the current plaque includes no mention whatsoever of Robinson's singular role in shattering the color line in 1947.

   As remarkable as that sounds, I think I understand how that could have come about in 1962, and in any event it's not something I'd want to bother newly anointed HOF President Jeff Idelson about in these first weeks after he assumed the new role.

   I can see how the tumultuous times in the early 1960s might have prompted HOF officials to use wording that amounted to "just the facts," and nothing more. What surprises me more than the original wording is the fact that it remained unchallenged for as long as it did.


   The slowdown that shows have endured over the last decade-plus has allowed – ironically – more time for those things that helped make the shows so special in the first place: interaction with other dealers and reminiscing about the good old days.

   At Kansas City, that meant things like Heritage’s Mark Jordan recalling the early 1970s in Los Angeles, appearing on Entertainment Tonight and promoting the hobby on local television at a time when it was in its infancy, to say the least. The nostalgia angle got another boost after Levi Bleam of 707 Sportscards collared me with his cell phone to talk with Tony Galovich, a name serious collectors and dealers will remember from the 1980s and 1990s when he was a fixture at shows around the country and a hard-hitting columnist with Tuff Stuff magazine.

   I talked with Tony long enough to pass on that I had recently visited with (electronically) a couple of other names he would remember: Don Lepore and Frank Barning. Both need no introduction to hobby old-timers: the former was a prolific dealer for much of the hobby’s heyday; the latter a similarly well-known face at early shows and the publisher for many years of one of the pioneering hobby publications, Baseball Hobby News.

   Such is the joy of what we do: celebrating the past with the very structure of our hobby and, at the same time, recalling the many names that once played significant roles that might have receded into the background over the years. I have found that any number of folks might not turn up at the National or in the pages of SCD as time goes on, but hardly anybody actually shakes off the hobby itself.

   George Starmer, another of the hobby’s major nice guys, emphasized that by regaling me with a story about selling a cool Tiger Woods Upper Deck Authenticated piece. “I hated to part with it,” said Starmer, illustrating the age-old hobby dilemma that dealers have to contend with: being a dealer and a collector at the same time. According to Starmer, the temptation to hang on to as the transaction was finalized was enormous. He resisted; I found the item, a Tiger shirt with original artwork on the front, proudly on display a couple of tables away at McAvoy Sportscards.

   But the neatest story of the weekend came from Mike Baker of Global Authentication, perched adjacent to the SCD table, who got the star treatment for much of the weekend as a number of dealers and collectors alike stopped by to tell him they had seen him on Judge Judy.

   Baker had appeared as an expert witness on the show a few days earlier, the result of a taping in Burbank, Calif., in January. A collector was trying to get his money back from the purchase of a clumsily counterfeited 1941 Play Ball Joe DiMaggio. The card came with the requisite yarn about having been handed down from generation to generation, but Baker’s detailed explanation to the Judge about the “card’s” obvious deficiencies (including RP initials on the back tagging it as a reprint), helped produce a quick decision from the judge confirming Baker’s expert opinion.

   “The guy who owned the card was convinced that it was real,” said Baker, alluding to the power of the narrative within our hobby to convince the uninitiated that something is real, despite all evidence to the contrary. Baker modestly conceded that the episode represented his “15 minutes,” something that’s likely to be extended as the syndicated program gets rerun over the years.

   I apologize to the readers for the long gap between blogs. I have been on the road for two weekends and shoving an SCD out the door in the intervening week tied up my time. What follows is my report from the Chicago PCCE show 10 days ago; in a couple of days I’ll blog again with commentary from Rich Altman’s Kansas City Show.

   By almost any measurement, it was a wonderful hobby showcase: The Premier Collectible Conference & Exhibition held April 17-20 at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, Ill., did a bang-up job of presenting the vintage card and memorabilia industry in a positive, professional light, but unfortunately, not many collectors turned out for the consumer end of the four-day event.

   Jointly promoted by Mastro Auctions President Doug Allen and Ryan Friedman, the inaugural effort hosted more than 40 dealers for the combination of keynote speakers and panel discussions that featured some of the biggest names in the vintage end of the hobby.

   While the turnout had to be a major disappointment for both promoters and many of the companies represented at the show, both Allen and Friedman insisted the show would go on, so to speak, with plans already in place to return to the same site at around the same time next year.
“Overall, I would give it a B+,” Allen said early Sunday afternoon near the show’s closing. “A number of dealers said the traffic wasn’t great, but they loved the atmosphere and the fact that the people who did come in were serious and spent money.”

   Veteran dealer Bill McAvoy of McAvoy Sportscards in Omaha, Neb., who was also one of the panelists, was perhaps the prime beneficiary of that situation. “It was a fantastic show. It wasn’t well attended, but the people who came in did spend. We did twice as much here as at the National,” McAvoy said.

   Allen conceded he had some concerns about querying dealers about their sales after light attendance the first couple of days, but he said that by Friday, after hearing comments from dealers that it was phenomenal even though they hadn’t seen the traffic, they knew they were going to do it again.

   “I think we will completely revamp the schedule and we won’t have it open on Sunday,” Allen explained. “I think we’ll have more one-on-one interaction instead of the panels – more roundtables, things like that.

   (Shown at right is a cool photograph showing Babe Ruth and President Harding. It was at Andy Madec's booth at the show.)

   Allen also said that it was part of his plan with the conference to create another venue to do a live auction. “With other auction companies here, I don’t know that it would be fair to have this huge live-auction event, but maybe we’ll do something to try to get the other auction companies to participate. Maybe each one could do 15-20 items and we could do a multi-branded catalog. It might be kind of fun.”

   That would, indeed, be a unique undertaking in a hobby/industry that can often raise eyebrows as giant egos clash and cooperation and accommodation can wind up on the back burner. That’s another point that the Mastro Auctions president would like to see addressed.

   “People see this as a natural transition to having some type of trade association,” Allen continued. “I don’t know where that’s going to go, but I think personally – though I don’t want to carry the banner – I would be very supportive of it.

   Allen took the occasion of our post-conference interview to reveal the plans for Mastro Auctions’ role at the upcoming National Convention this summer. It has been a long-running tradition in the auction end of the hobby that the company takes great pains for prominent promotional events in conjunction with the National each year, and the ante gets upped every time the show returns to Mastro’s neck of the woods in Chicago.

   “We will have a live auction at the ESPN Zone in Chicago on the Friday night of the National,” Allen said, noting that they had rented the upstairs of the ESPN Zone for the occasion.
“It will be similar to what we did last year; I don’t know if we’ll do $4.3 million again, but it will be about 100 lots.”

   He pointed out that some problems had developed with the National Convention Committee over Mastro’s auction last year when they “inadvertently put the branding of the National Auction on our website, and we got called on it and we changed it,” he added.
  
   “So it’s not the official National event; it’s just our event that happens to coincide with the National.”

   Ford Frick. That’s the Baseball Hall of Famer on the cover of the April 18 issue of Sports Collectors Digest. He appears in the upper right-hand corner of the cover, directly underneath the Sports Collecting Radio logo. Nearly a dozen readers had the correct answer, but Louis Chiappone of East Moriches, N.Y., was the fastest on the draw, phoning in only seconds after 8 a.m. Central time on April 9. I shipped the signed Bob Gibson postcard out to him that afternoon, in between taking phone calls that would last well into the following week.

   As noted, a number of people had the right answer, but among the most popular wrong answers were Babe Ruth and Ted Williams. Some of the others most frequently mentioned: Hank Greenberg, Warren Giles, Sam Rice and Joe Cronin. Ironically, Cronin is actually in that photograph, but to keep it to a single Hall of Famer, I cropped him out of the right-hand side.


   Loyal SCD readers will know something big is up simply from the choice of topics: Keith Olbermann has turned in an extraordinary examination of Topps proof cards from four decades, and the exclusive five-part series launches in the May 30 issue of SCD.
 
   In a 13,000-word thesis that figures to instantly become the reference source on this fascinating and mysterious hobby segment, the MSNBC anchor and longtime SCD contributor and columnist will make available spectacular images of many of the Topps proofs from his own fabled collection.

   I haven’t been this amped up about a multi-part feature in our pages since the similarly imposing T206 White Border Series that we ran in 2006. This is neat stuff that we are going to extend well into the summer because each section is so elaborately detailed that we wanted to be able to provide sufficient space for every one.

   We even own one of those legendary Topps proof cards: the 1977 Topps “Rarest Reggie,” or, as we like to call it around these parts, the “Wherewist Wedgie.” That famous card, depicting Reggie Jackson as an Oriole on his 1977 Topps card, gets a section all to itself as perhaps the most significant proof of that decade, slated for the Aug. 8 SCD, one week before the National Convention issue.

   With each of the five parts, we’ll run a special SCD Collector Survey that will ask our readers to provide their views about the hobby, their collections and the players that they like to collect, and everybody who enters will be eligible for prizes that will be offered as part of the whole promotion.
Fasten your seat belt, it’s going to be a bumpy ride, and you’re going to get the chance to see a bunch of Topps “cards” unlike any that you might have ever laid eyes upon.

   Stay tuned.

   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.