I’ll admit up front that the link between the Hall-of-Fame linebacker and the modern curse that is the ubiquitous cell phone is tenuous or maybe even preposterous. I wanted to carp about cell phone use and extoll the virtues of the 1959 Topps Football set in general and that Joe Schmidt card in particular, so I joined a couple of admittedly disparate themes.

   The 1959 Topps set came into the picture in a cover feature that we did in this week’s issue of Sports Collectors Digest (March 13). I’ve never collected football as an adult, though I probably had most of the set as a kid in 1959. Some time in the early 1960s, I traded all of my football for another kid’s 1960 Topps Baseball cards, and since the other kid was quite a bit more fastidious than I am (not too tough a call: Oscar Madison is more fastidious than I am), his 1960 Baseball cards were in far better condition than my own. Good enough that I still have a whole bunch of them a half century later.

   But doing the article was great fun as I looked back at a wonderful set of cards, and now I’m thinking of maybe putting the set together. We also had a lot of fun with the garish pink backgrounds that were used on so many of the 1959s, creating one of the silliest covers we’ve ever had in the 35-plus years of SCD. (shown)

    now my beef. I was having breakfast at a House of Pancakes yesterday and trying to enjoy my Sunday New York Times when a woman about 45 years old and seated a table away began talking on her cell phone.

   She was seated at a booth with her son, perhaps in his early 20s, and she talked at full volume for what was probably 20 minutes but seemed like 40. I’d like to tell you that my first thought was that if Joe Schmidt were here, he wouldn’t tolerate that kind of behavior, but I would be fibbing. Mostly I was just mad as hell.

   For anybody who would suggest that having to listen to her talk on the phone would be no different than listening to her talk to her son, I say, phooey. People raise their voices for the telephone, and even if they didn’t, there’s a different tone and modulation to it that makes it harder – if not impossible – to ignore.

   Ultimately, it’s our fault for tolerating this kind of second-hand audio smoke. Grrrrrr. I once sat in a limo for 25 minutes from an airport on my way to an auction on the East Coast and listened as some dullard preened and cavorted through all his earth-shattering business ventures. I should have smacked that dolt on the forehead with his very own instrument, and I should have politely asked the lady yesterday to return the call at another time in a non-public venue.

   That’s what Joe Schmidt would have done.

   I have been fascinated by the Ken Griffey Jr. situation virtually from the day he arrived in the major leagues, in part because it was such a joy to watch him play through his years in Seattle, and something less than that as he struggled in Cincinnati.

   I was in Cincinnati for the closing of Riverfront Stadium (you can’t make me use the corporate name if I don’t want to) in 2002, and at a press conference during the festivities I got to talk with some beat writers about The Kid. And I was amazed how down they were on him they were, virtually to a man.

   I mention this because with news that he’s headed back to Seattle for a homecoming of sorts, it puts the focus back on a player who was once widely considered the heir apparent to break the all-time home run record. I can remember writing columns in 2000 taking note of that very same idea. And then it all went poof.

   As I look at Griffey’s lifetime log, two things jump out at me. The first is that from 1996-99, he averaged 52 home runs per season. My guess is that the only people with four-year stretches that exceed that are named Bonds, Sosa and McGwire. No wonder we thought he was going to break Henry Aaron’s all-time record.

   And the second thing I noticed was that Griffey’s career had an Aaron-like demarcation from the first to the second half, and now also boasts the oddity of both players returning at the tail ends of their careers to the city where they enjoyed their greatest success.

   Aaron’s first 12 years were in Milwaukee, and I always found it interesting to note that he already had Hall of Fame numbers by the time the ball club headed south to Atlanta.
 
   Griffey, too, had the Hall virtually locked up by the time he arrived in Cincinnati, at which point their trajectories diverged dramatically. Aaron essentially tacked on a second HOF career over his final 11 years; Griffey, on the other hand, struggled mightily in the National League, albeit saddled with a string of injuries. He still has his Hall of Fame plaque, but the story line has changed has changed.

   It was such a great story for those opening chapters – and his clout in our hobby didn’t hurt, either – that you can’t help but be saddened that it didn’t have a better ending.

   At the very least, I hope his homecoming arrangements work out better than Henry’s did. At Griffey’s peak, there was nobody else in the game that was as fun to watch at the plate, with a big sweeping swing and a follow through of mythical proportions. My guess is that’s what the people in Seattle are remembering.

 
 
   Even though I am not directly involved in the new auction business Krause launched recently, it’s still pretty exciting news that we are going to actually be in doing auctions rather than simply covering them.

   I am confident that the crew of Collect.com will be able to make the new venture effectively complement our publications, both print and online. We’ve spent the better part of the last decade or so adapting to changes brought about by the dawn of the Internet Age, and so I’ve gotten better about accepting change, especially since the alternative would seem to be getting left behind.

   Actually, I’m kind of envious of those who are going to be in the middle of looking at cool material consigned from around the country. Steve Bloedow, a KP staffer for 15 years, will serve as the auction director, and what makes it even better is the addition of my old pal, Bob Lemke, who has been named consignment director for the new project.

   Lemke, the former publisher of Sports Collectors Digest and for many years was the editor of our Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards, was instrumental in bringing SCD into the Krause family of publications in 1981. It’s hard to imagine another individual more widely respected in the hobby and more uniquely qualified to bring such vast expertise to this new division.

   One thing I know: any auction house, whether brand-new or one of the longtime veterans, would be well served to remember all of the elements that brought together our hobby and auctions in the first place. That would involve providing equally impressive service to all segments of the hobby in an arena that represents the hobby in the best possible light.

   Come to think of it, that’s what we’ve been trying to do for nearly 30 years with the various magazines and books (and now online stuff, too).

  
   I am guilty of using the word “pioneer” in connection with various hobby individuals at a frequency no doubt far beyond any other hobby writer. And I make no apologies about it.

   Anointing pioneer status is weighty stuff, but I would insist that I use the term advisedly, and further that designating someone in that fashion is important as a means of drawing a distinction between a mere bystander or onlooker and someone who had an impact in shaping events.

   So with that introduction I bring you a piece that involves two guys who easily warrant that appellation. Ron Lewis (photo at right), one of the most prolific sports artists in the hobby’s heyday of the 1980s, and Bill Hongach of Capital Cards in New York, teamed up for a number of artistic ventures back then, most notably perhaps on the famed 500 Home Run Club artwork from the Atlantic City show in 1989.

   Hongach, one of the co-promoters of that historic undertaking in Atlantic City 20 years ago, was a former Yankee batboy and a major player in the earliest days of the hobby, promoting shows and creating dozens of themed art projects with Lewis, including limited-edition prints of 300-game winners, 3,000 strikeouts and several others, along with producing collector-issue sets, including Negro leaguers and individual player issues.

   The Hongach-Lewis double play combination has been pretty quiet for the better part of a decade, with the artist having moved to Idaho and Hongach focusing on his well-known hobby business, Capital Cards, in Brooklyn.

   “Now we are coming back with a nice collectible, Classic Baseballs,” Hongach said in a phone interview. Each of the individually painted baseballs will feature a portrait done by Lewis of the ballplayer in question, along with an inscription from the player, his signature and the signature and edition number added by Lewis.

   Leading off is Tommy Brown, the youngest major leaguer to hit a home run, who accomplished that feat on Aug. 20, 1945, and will so attest on the Classic Baseball, which also comes with a certificate of authenticity signed by Brown.

   All of the baseballs will be limited editions to 100, and the second entry planned is from Calvin Coolidge Julius Cesar Tuskahoma McLish, proud owner of the greatest full name in baseball history. And don’t ask me what it means that I was able to type that name from memory without even looking at the notes from his interview. And this from a guy who can’t remember his own cell phone number.

   The Classic Baseballs retail for $199.99, and collectors who purchase the inaugural Brown ball can reserve the right to purchase the same numbered edition on future issues.

   The idea for the baseballs came from Hongach, who has compiled volumes of information on major leaguers of every description dating to his years as a Yankees batboy in the 1970s. “We think with Ron’s following in the hobby, this will be sold pretty quickly, so we urged collectors to secure a number for future releases.”

   Serious collectors will also recognize Hongach’s work as the principal photographer on the 1975-76 Sports Stars Publishing Co. issue that made a splash in the hobby in 1975 and ultimately drew the ire of a certain Brooklyn-based manufacturer, Topps, which sued for $20 million and ultimately quashed the production.

   The Classic Baseballs can be ordered through Capital Cards, P.O. Box 102, Brooklyn, NY 11228; (718) 921-6400.

   Collectors wishing to contact Ron Lewis for commissions unrelated to the Classic Baseballs offering can e-mail him at: theshadetrade@cableone.net.

   Over the last 15 years or so the various card companies have created modern versions of cards nicely replicating just about every successful vintage card design ever employed over the last century.

   This has generally been a good thing, since a hobby that revolves around the idea of nostalgia surely has much to celebrate in the classic card designs of yesteryear. The enthusiasm for creating retro-style cards has even surged to the point of companies reviving some designs that probably didn’t deserve to live in the first place, much less to have themselves reincarnated 30, 40 or 50 years later.

   For that one, I won’t pick on anybody in particular, but you know who you are. Still, the winners have probably outnumbered the losers, and our hobby has thus seen modern entries that have celebrated most of the turn-of-the-century tobacco issues, the Goudeys, Play Balls, and early Topps and Bowmans, to name the most obvious ones.

   A case can be made that the well is running dry, an argument that probably has some legs when you consider some of the candidates offered up in the last decade or so. But one incredibly attractive vintage issue has avoided the craze, presumably for fairly obvious reasons: 1952-55 Red Man Tobacco.

   It says here that the four-year run of Red Man issues is easily the most vibrant and evocative card design that hasn’t yet been tapped for a modern set, but the link to the stigmatized tobacco has likely prevented such an undertaking.

   The Red Man Tobacco brand is still being sold these days, presumably making pilfering of their card design problematic, though the set was reprinted many years ago without official sanction or licensing as far as I know.

   Given all the recent issues worked around original art, it’s not hard to see that a set in that style could be a winner, if only there were a way to avoid the, uh, linkage with a product not exactly in public favor these days. Even if a company wanted to wing it and create a set “close” to the design from the original series, it would run the risk of being at least informally connected to killer tobacco and thus not viable.

   Too bad. Those were spectacular cards, an observation based almost entirely on the power of the unusual design and the colorful artwork.

   In a hobby with nostalgia front and center virtually at every juncture, it sounds weird to think that looking at a catalog can amount to something of a throwback experience, but there it is.

   I know the first temptation is to think I am talking about auction catalogs, the massive glossy monsters that rival the Des Moines phonebook for heft and durability. Nope, I am talking about old-time card dealer catalogs, which like old-time card dealers themselves, are become something of a rarity as each day passes.

   I’ll talk, er, blog, about the joys of looking at auction catalogs another time, but for the moment I am talking about thumbing through catalogs that might best be represented by those produced by Larry Fritsch Cards or Kit Young Cards. I am aware that by singling those two out I risk offending others, which, of course is not my goal. But those two are probably the largest and longest-running examples of the genre, and surely are deserving as being held up as reflective of the broader concept itself.

   Talk about nostalgia! This goes back to the earliest days of the hobby in the 1960s, for example, when I would read the catalogs from Richard Gelman’s Card Collectors Co. in New York, or Fritsch’s from Stevens Point, Wis.

   For me, it was the first opportunity to understand that the hobby was broader than I might have expected. Like so many old-timers, I kick myself for not taking advantage of the prices that prevailed at the time; for me it was rarely much more than laziness or, perhaps less harshly, an acknowledgement that I didn’t keep my cards in sets in those days (I opted for a large, alphabetical mass) and so didn’t even know which cards I needed to fill holes.

   I can remember ordering the first series of 1964 Topps all as one series from Larry Fritsch, something I undertook because the onset of puberty had precluded my buying any cards that year and I figured this was a nice way to get a sample for my collection without embarrassing myself at the local drugstore. I don’t remember what I paid, and it probably seemed like a lot at the time, but obviously it wasn’t.

   What prompted all this was getting one of those catalogs in the mail today, and I can’t tell you how much I enjoy looking through it, though I probably don’t order as much as either Jeff Fritsch or Kit Young might prefer. I don’t buy too many modern cards, but I still like seeing the offerings, and the array of vintage material, from the pricey to the campy, is nothing short of amazing.

   So release that mouse back into the wild, shut off your computer and grab one of those catalogs and sit back in your easy chair and go back in time to when the only cable involved with your television was the one that connected it to the wall.

   I rarely resort to a blog that sounds so unabashedly like an advertisement, but if you check them out in the fashion I describe, you’ll probably indulge me a bit.

   An MLB.com article last Friday recounted the tributes paid to Henry Aaron on the occasion of his 75th birthday. The guest list at the birthday party included the likes of former President Bill Clinton, who told of a last-ditch campaign stop in Georgia in 1992 where the Hall of Famer joined him on the stump.

   According to the article, Clinton was urged to take a final swing through Georgia in the hopes of the admittedly long-shot possibility of carrying the traditionally Republican state.

   (Photo courtesy of National Baseball Hall of Fame and Library/Cooperstown, N.Y.)

Clinton was reportedly persuaded when aides told him Henry would join him at the last-minute campaign stop in Atlanta. As Clinton recalled it, he responded, “Well, if I go and get to meet him, I don’t care if I carry Georgia or not.”

   I’ll quote the article verbatim here:
   When Clinton arrived in Atlanta, he spoke to a crowd of approximately 25,000, half of whom he’s convinced showed up simply to see Aaron.
   Three days later, when Clinton carried the state of Georgia by 13,000 votes and won the presidential election, Aaron immediately thought that this represented half the total of people who had come out to hear that final campaign address in Atlanta.
   “He has never let me forget that,” Clinton said. “He told me, ‘James Carville and all these other people say they won the election for you. I’m the only one who has carried a state for you, and don’t ever forget that.’ ”

   I always get tickled when Aaron seems to get accorded the respect he deserves, not because he’s the all-time home run king (sans any figurative asterisk), but because of the way he conducted himself as an American icon for 75 years.

   In recent years the reverence has built nicely, but I’ve been disappointed a number of times, though I’ll concede some of that may be because I set the bar pretty high. Some of that.

   But nearly nine years ago when I was the All-Star Game at Turner Field in Atlanta, I remember writing an SCD column afterward that talked about the reception, or lack of same, that Henry received from the Atlanta crowd that day.

   Herewith I quote myself: “At about 8:35 p.m., before the All-Star Game started, Adonis Guilfoyle, the chairman of the Parks and Recreation Department for Greater Downtown Atlanta, was speaking in front of 75 weary Rotary Club members. At the same moment, Henry Aaron was introduced as he tossed out the first pitch of the 2000 All-Star Game. Guess who got the bigger ovation?”

   Hey, it’s only been nine years; clearly, I’ve gotten over it.

   As you can imagine, blogging every day requires that I wade into cyberspace with some regularity to take the pulse of what my fellow bloggers are stewing about. It was on just such a sortie that I came across a story on ESPN.com where a guy came up with a novel strategy for Alex Rodriguez in confronting his public relations nightmare about steroid use.

   According to our blogger, the idea is that A-Rod needs to reshape the public perception of his transgression with an eye toward convincing 500-plus baseball writers, say, 15 or 16 years from now, to include him on their Hall-of-Fame ballots. He was essentially proposing that A-Rod voluntarily remove 33 home runs from his lifetime total, a figure he came up with by looking at A-Rod’s home run production in three-year segments before and after the tainted 2001-03 steroids slice.

   Well. I gotta admit it’s an intriguing idea, by which I employ intriguing as a euphemism for some uncharted hybrid word meaning moronic-idiotic-goofy. I guess the plan would be that if A-Rod approached Barry Bonds’ all-time home run mark, breaking the record would actually take place 33 home runs later (if at all) than what the unsuspecting fan might think. Gee, not too many holes in that idea, are there?

   So in the spirit of this kind of freewheeling improvisation, I started wondering about Don Larsen’s 1956 perfect game in the World Series, specifically about that called third strike from umpire Babe Pinelli that sent the Dodgers’ Dale Mitchell back to the dugout fuming and propelled Larsen into Yogi’s arm in the well-documented celebration of perfection.

   As baseball historians recall, no less an authority than Mickey Mantle opined that the pitch looked high from his perspective in center field.

   Wouldn’t it be pretty cool if Larsen stepped forward now and – in the giddy spirit of admitting stuff that I suspect is going to be an ever-expanding non-contact sport in coming months – reveal that Strike Three really was outside the zone and voluntarily offer to rescind the perfect game?

   I concede there might be a few minor drawbacks that might make revising the historical record a bit of a problem, but hey, confession is supposed to be good for the soul.

   I’ll give Duke Snider the final word on this one: “I think he (Pinelli) wanted to go out with a no-hitter,” said Snider, “but there were 26 outs before that and he got them all. You can’t take anything away from him.”

   Tell it to A-Rod.

   And now, after that brief interruption for my apology about A-Rod’s steroid use, we return to our regularly scheduled programming, which was essentially a discussion about that 100-year-old news article from the Charlotte Observer entitled “The Small Boy’s Mania.”

   If ever there were a news story that neatly described what the baseball card hobby is all about, this was it. While baseball fans often have difficulty connecting to the turn-of-the-century ballplayer, this account of youngsters hovering around the local drugstore to wade through packs of cigarettes in search of Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner and Christy Mathewson makes it clear the distinction between young collectors in 1909 and 1959 is nominal at best.

   The article describes “flipping” of the pictures, though that particular verb isn’t employed; more intriguing is the paragraph alluding to Cobb and Wagner:

   “More especially are the likenesses of Ty Cobb and Hans Wagner desired, and until a week ago only a few pictures of Cob (sic) had been found, two of these in the possession of the Buford Hotel cigar stand.”

   It went on to detail arrivals of shipments at area drugstores, noting that “13 pictures of Cobb were found in the first installment opened.” The story also noted that one store sold 3,000 cigarettes and that by day’s end, 5-cent packages of smokes were selling for as little as a penny apiece, sans pictures, of course.

   The article made no mention of any Wagners being found, and if you take into account these scenarios of prepubescent boys wrasslin’ with 5-cent cigarette packages, it’s easy to see what Honus had been worried about all along ... assuming you buy the mythology.

 
   Part II of the 1909 T206 White Border card frenzy will have to wait. Weekend news developments related to Alex Rodriguez and steroids have bumped the cute little hosers from my blog for at least a day.

   And no, I am not going to overload the already-past-the-fire-department-limit “Scold A-Rod” bandwagon by climbing on board. Nope, I resort instead to self-flagellation. For a self-described cynic, in fact someone who considers himself way too cynical for his own good, I appear to not be uniformly jaded. There are gaps, it seems.

   We just sent the book Legendary Yankee Stadium: Memories and Memorabilia From the House That Ruth Built off to the printers in anticipation of a May release, and it carries the following tidbit by yours truly in Chapter 12:

   It is fascinating to note that despite the steroid and human growth hormone revelations that occurred after 2004, Rodriguez escaped largely unscathed despite his spectacular production.

   Ouch! For those wondering, once a book heads off to the printer, making changes becomes a pretty big issue, and therefor doesn’t happen unless it’s something truly extraordinary. Being way too naive and having bad timing doesn’t qualify, so those jarring words are about to be immortalized in print.

   In hindsight, I should have reread some of things I wrote earlier in that A-Rod chapter, which had I examined them more closely might have prompted me to avoid the clean bill of health offered by that ill-fated paragraph.

   For example: Rodriguez has managed to do something that no ballplayer has ever done before: his numbers are too good, too other worldly, too imposing – so much so that they’ve propelled him to a spot that is awash with the cruelest of contradictions. He’s so good that nobody seems to truly appreciate how good he is. Is that like Yogi’s apocryphal restaurant that’s so busy that no one goes there anymore?

   And just to show you that I’m still embracing my cycnical side, I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve used this flap over A-Rod and steroids as a shameless opportunity to plug the book.

   And it almost certainly won’t be the last.