The changes that started to happen in Major League Baseball when the red light came on atop that first television camera have only expanded and accelerated in the ensuing half century, but one of the most profound is the all-or-nothing philosophy surrounding the postseason.
  
   The importance of the World Series was always enormous – and thus the failure to get there a significant disappointment – but it wasn’t until the Fall Classic moved into prime time in the early 1970s that the true distortion really took flight. Now, failure to get there is a cross to bear for individuals and teams, despite the fact that mere numbers make it so much tougher in 2009 than it was in 1959.
  
   Just looking at it as a question of raw numbers, without accounting for things like big market vs. small market, etc., a team today has about a 7 percent chance of getting into the World Series; that bald number would have been about 13 percent in 1959. So in the same span that we have grossly overemphasized the importance of the prize itself, we have made it twice as difficult to achieve it.
   
   I personally blame Brooks Robinson for all of this. His remarkable 1970 World Series upped the ante for ballplayers in terms of what the ultimate stage could mean to a career. I had never seen one player so completely dominate a Series in the fashion he did that glorious autumn; another Hall of Famer, Roberto Clemente, would have the same kind of extraordinary impact just one year later, this time as the game’s marquee event made its first-ever sorties into television prime time.
   
   Thus we have these annual rituals where we have to tolerate incessantly regurgitated blather about Cubs Curses, A-Rod’s October misses and related meanderings about this or that player who – gasp! – has never been to the postseason.
  
   One wonders if Ernie Banks would have been forgiven his career-long absence of October pay stubs enough to have still made his way to Cooperstown.

   A fellow posed the question the other day on one of those Network 54 forum threads asking what percentage of their net worth was tied up in baseball cards or memorabilia, and as you might have imagined, just offering the question prompted a lot of interesting stuff.
  
   It was not so much that the responses were terribly illuminating, since a majority probably declined to provide such a potentially significant personal financial revelation, but that raising the question about investment vs. collecting can be fascinating.
  
   I still contend that part of the emphasis can be traced back to the 1970s, which, with current economic strangulation aside, was arguably the lamest decade I can remember in terms of the national economy.
  
   When our hobby took off back then in the mid-1970s, there was still enough of a residual sense that baseball cards were something pursued by arrested adolescents, and the principal way that we countered that thinly veiled charge of immaturity was to say, “Hey, look at how much money these things are worth!”
  
   The implication was that collectors were savvy investors rather adults still clinging to a childish pastime. I have little but instinctive or anecdotal evidence to back this up, but I would contend we have perpetrated a grand charade for about 35 years that was designed to protect that initial subterfuge.
   
   Clearly there have been thousands of genuine investors who have entered the hobby over that span, but my perhaps naive view is that the first wave was really just guys who liked baseball  cards adopting what seemed like a tolerable excuse for doing so past the age of puberty.
  
   But the real reason I wanted to run this particular blog was so I could use the cool picture of Thurston Howell III that was nestled comfortably in one of those Network 54 threads.

   In the early 1990s when the new-card end of our hobby was a much larger part of the whole pie than it is today, the card companies would issue so many card sets so quickly that it was hard for me to get too worked up about any individual ones. But around the turn of the century, old geezers like me caught a break when Topps launched the Heritage Series.
  
   For nine years we’ve at least had the fun of seeing one card set every year that looked just like the ones we collected when just about everything was being left to Beaver.
  
   The 2009 edition of Heritage, based on the oddly shaped but nostalgically attractive 1960 Topps set, is reportedly out and about in the world, but it hasn’t made its way to the cornfields of Iola, Wis., just yet. Which, when you think of it, is almost quaint. Here I am, a whisper away from being eligible for Social Security, and it’s spring and I am wondering about the arrival of baseball cards.
  
   One of the reasons that product is so much fun is the company’s commitment to matching every idiosyncratic foible from the original issue, and it’s a lot of fun either trying to spot the connections or when you stumble across them without trying.
  
   What prompts this was a press announcement via e-mail listing the shortprints from the issue, which, ironically, is a bone of contention for some collectors, but I understand is probably unavoidable given the structure that the card companies have developed for marketing new cards.
  
   While I ain’t thrilled with the additional cost that all those shortprinted numbers place on set collectors, the procedure has been successful from Topps’ perspective. The latest list showing the high numbers shows the Coaches cards, which according to Heritage orthodoxy, are supposed to match the 16 Coaches cards included in the original 1960 set.
  
   But the checklist shows the Tampa Bay Rays instead of the Kansas City Athletics, which I guess is merely another case of Topps working in mysterious ways, which is yet another tradition dating back to the beginning in 1951.
  
   It could be argued that the Oakland Athletics would have been the suitable replacement, but I won’t quibble on that one. I am, however, a bit more mystified by the inclusion of the New York Mets further down the checklist, penciled in instead of the San Francisco Giants. The Giants were in San Fran in 1960, and the Mets were still two years away from their National League debut. Huh?
  
   I put in a call to my favorite PR guy, Clay Luraschi of Topps, but the immediate nature of the blogging phenomenon means this goes to cyberpress (I made up that word) and the explanation will follow.
  
   Besides, I am sure I’ll blog some more about Heritage once that 20-mule train makes its way to central Wisconsin to drop off the samples.

   When I was the editor of a weekly newspaper in Wilmington, Del., roughly 20 years ago, there were early rumblings that the state wanted to bring in off-track betting and maybe even casino slots, with the prime candidate being a moribund Delaware Park Racetrack that fell within the circulation area of my newspaper.
  
   Well, all of that came to pass, with the racetracks now cleverly dubbed “racinos,” but according to ESPN.com, there’s more afoot here than that, if you’ll pardon the lame (hobbled?) pun.
  
   The story this week said the First State’s governor, Jack Markell, is going to propose legislation next week that would legalize sports betting in Delaware, making it the first state (no pun) east of the Mississippi to offer that colossal bogeyman for the first time.
  
   I understand how the prospect of this terrifies NFL officials, but you have to think that with state treasuries collectively facing shortfalls running into the tens of billions of dollars, the writing would seem to be on the wall, or more precisely on the betting slip.
  
   The Delaware governor made the cliched-though-cogent observation about the futility of being “half-pregnant,” citing the countless state lotteries and horse racing betting opportunities for citizens, to say nothing of all the “winked at” illegal ones.
  
   I grew up in a time before off-track betting, working as a 16-year-old at a leather factory in Upstate New York, about 35 miles from the legendary Saratoga Racetrack. The factory covered three floors; if you wanted to make a bet on any of the afternoon’s races at Saratoga (or at Aqueduct or Belmont at non-August times), you didn’t even have to bother going up or down the rickety stairs. There was a bookie on every floor.
  
   That’s a confusing message for a teenager; gambling is illegal (no state lotteries to speak of in 1966), and yet certain types of gambling are essentially winked at. Such has been the case with growing severity for the last 40 years as states plunged into the lottery business and Indian casinos sprouted up across much of the country.
  
   The NFL has fought the good fight for all of that span, but you have to wonder if the forces aligned against it in the form of impoverished state governments may now be too big to resist.
  
   Thank heavens our gentle hobby of sports cards collecting has been able to steer clear of the mire. You’d hate to see the little cardboard hosers turned into de facto lottery tickets, wouldn’t you?
  
   Uh, wait a minute ...

   I guess it’s a week for taking note of hobby pioneers stepping out of the spotlight, at least for the moment. The same week that Bob Schmeirer hands over the reins of the famed Philly Show to David Hunt of Hunt Auctions (yesterday’s blog), Bill Mastro has apparently stepped off stage as the famed Mastro Auctions has essentially been dissolved and instantly re-emerged as a new entity, Legendary Auctions.
  
   According to the press release (see our home page), the new company will look remarkably like the old one, at least in terms of three of its principals, except there will be no Mastro in any fashion.
  
   In a hobby/industry that lives and dies by the power and pervasiveness of the “rumor,” the odd, abrupt end of Mastro Auctions is an awkward final chapter to one of the great success stories we have ever seen. Given that just about the only information available falls under that sordid category of the unsubstantiated verified by the ignoble or uninformed, I’ll pass and stick to what I know firsthand.
  
   Our hobby has had a long and fascinating embrace of the auction as a means of moving material, but the elemental components would change over time. In the earliest days it was designed more to move quantity; as the hobby grew and evolved, it ultimately became the vehicle for getting the top prices for the very best material.
  
   Bill Mastro had as much to do with that evolution as anybody, initially with his consultant work with giants like Sotheby’s and ultimately with his link with another hobby pioneer, Don Steinbach, and later the creation of the Mastro auction behemoth.
  
   Over the last dozen years, it grew to dominate the sports memorabilia business and even spread to numerous other areas like comics, coins, art, Americana and even publishing. In the middle of all of that was Mastro, as tenacious a hobby figure as we’ve ever encountered, often brashly redefining the process of acquiring material for his auctions. He was, by his own admission, a barracuda when it came to deal making.
  
   From my perspective, he was a joy to deal with in the hobby press: accessible, candid, colorful and uncensored.
  
   I apologize for blogging something that sounds like an obituary. It ain’t. Regardless of how long Mastro’s hobby hiatus runs, I am going to miss him. 

  
   In a couple of days, Hunt Auctions is going to raise the curtain on the newest incarnation of the famed Philadelphia Sportscard & Memorabilia Show and like most collectors and dealers who have been part of this 34-year-old institution, we’re hoping for continued grand success.
  
   I thought the occasion called for a proper nod to the show’s legendary host over that incredible span, Bob Schmeirer (at left). The 2009 version takes place at the Valley Forge Convention Center in King of Prussia, Pa., which is a new site for his show, but my old friend Levi Bleam reminded me the other day that Tony Carrafiell of Delco Sports Cards had promoted shows in King of Prussia in the 1980s.
  
   I was already hooked on the hobby by the time I went to my first EPSCC Philly Show at Willow Grove in the early 1980s, but if I weren’t, that show would have taken care of that chore handsomely.
  
   I suspect younger collectors offer a collective yawn when they hear such things, but for collectors who remember that show at that cheezy hotel in Willow Grove, the excitement of the hobby was never more visceral or profound, not even at National Conventions, save perhaps for the nutty one at Anaheim in 1991.
  
   I understand now that it was a special time in terms of the exploding growth being experienced by the hobby, a convergence of factors that can never be replicated or artificially reproduced. Fair enough.
  
   But for someone who hates cocktail parties and other instances where I have to nuzzle up to my fellow man way past acceptable boundaries for me, I gotta admit there was nothing better than showing up at that hotel, wrestling for a parking spot in the odd bowl-shaped lawn in front of the convention hall and then diving into one of the great scrums that were the hallmark of that show for so many years.
  
   Every time I went I had a list of a half-dozen dealers whom I had dealt with for years that I wanted to see, but I never went to directly to their tables, since that wasn’t how it worked in those days. As you entered the show floor, you ran smack dab into this huge mass of collectors, and so the whole group moved like a herd of Wildebeest, and once you got to a dealer you wanted to see, you then had to elbow your way toward his table and get in line to wait your turn.
  
   It was all so exhilarating that I promptly signed myself up for Schmeirer’s famous waiting list, and so waited impatiently until 1984 or 1985 for my first chance to be on the other side of the table. Hard as it may be to believe, there was actually a lot less space behind the tables than in front, as I think there were 150 or so tables crammed into a relatively tiny convention hall. Most graphically, I remember having to crawl under the table on my hands and knees to get out to use the rest room or snag a grotesque, flaccid hot dog and frigid french fries. And I loved it all.
  
   As Schmeirer steps away from something that he helped orchestrate for virtually half of his lifetime, I am sure that he can take enormous pride in knowing he was part of something so special.
  
   Heckuva job, Bob.

  If you’ve never been to the Network54 Vintage Card Forum website, you’ve missed out on sitting down in a dugout filled with genuine hobby enthusiasts.
  
   The site, boasting perhaps 30 threads largely confined to discussions of baseball cards and memorabilia older than 50 years, routinely engenders lively discussion about a wide range of topics within those parameters.
  
   One of the neatest threads I’ve seen lately was launched (is that the right word?) by a well-known hobby veteran, Ted Zanidakis, encouraging the group to talk about some of their personal meetings with baseball players.
  
   Zanidakis talked about meeting Ted Williams 25 years ago in Cooperstown and subsequently talking with the Hall of Famer for 25 minutes. The topics touched on included hitting (mandatory), the Yankees (optional) and even Ted’s 1959 Fleer set that followed a nifty bidding war for Ted’s exclusive rights between Topps and Fleer that year (elective).

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   According to Zanidakis, with only one modest prompt from a question about his 1954 Bowman card, Williams went into a long soliloquy about Sy Berger and how Fleer and Topps got into a largely unprecedented bidding war for Ted’s exclusive rights for 1959.
  
   As serious hobbyists know, Fleer won that particular wrangle, as Zanidakis explained came after Fleer pushed the bidding all the way up to $5,000, and which point Topps hollered “Uncle.”
  
   Zanidakis’ account of Ted’s story fits nicely with a rare radio interview we reported about last year where Ted had also discussed the 1959 deal.

   Tobacco card expert Keith Olbermann e-mailed me the other day with some thoughts about the column I did recently about a 100-year-old article in the Charlotte Observer talking about youngsters in 1909 clamoring for “pictures” that came in the various American Tobacco Co. cigarette packs sold at local drugstores.
  
   Alluding to the two most prominent theories that would seek to explain why the T206 Honus Wagner card is so rare (a – he didn’t approve of smoking; or b – he wanted to be paid for the use of his image with a commercial product), the MSNBC news anchor toyed with a third option. “What if both theories about the T206 Wagner are wrong? Not just the ‘didn’t want to encourage kids to smoke’ one, but my theory that Wagner hit them up for money for his likeness?” Olbermann asked.

   With that he cited fragments from the news story: “Greatest desire to procure Cobb and Wagner ... no reference to Wagners ... kids in North Carolina desperate for the Dutchman from Pittsburgh ... buying pack after pack."

   "To hell with Admiral Schlei," he muttered at the end, assuming you can mutter in an e-mail.

   Still, he’s not ready to abandon his original theory just yet. “Although, as I think I pointed out in an article on T207  that I did 20 years ago, if you look at the progression of the American Tobacco sets, there is a definite “star drain” – T206 has Plank and Wagner, evidently withdrawn. The T205 issue has neither player (pretty much busting the Plank ‘broken plate’ theory) and is missing a few lesser stars.
  
   “T207 has no Plank, Wagner, Cobb, Mathewson, etc., and is filled with obscure rookies who wouldn’t get their own card in any set today. That certainly fits the idea that there might have a growing money issue."

   So what’s your verdict, either about Wagner specifically or some of the other tobacco card rarities in general? And your choices don’t have to be limited to anti-tobacco bias, royalty compensation or deliberate chase card. We are willing to listen to other suggestions as well, just don’t blame it on the guy on the grassy knoll. He’s got enough on his conscience already.

 
   I ran across this TCMA card of Eddie Gaedel the other day and it reminded of an old friend from another time who was just about the same size as the famous St. Louis Browns pinch hitter.
   
   About 35 years ago I was living in a good old-fashioned boarding house in Plattsburgh, N.Y., where six or seven boarders essentially took over the upstairs section of a private home, sharing the restroom but not getting any dining privileges.
   
   Just down the hallway from me was a guy named Johnny Allen, a dwarf from England who had emigrated from the United Kingdom and somehow settled in northern New York to ply his trade as a tailor. We had been pals virtually from his first day in Plattsburgh when I was an undergrad at the state university.
  
   Johnny used to drive a brand-new Mustang with special doo-dads added to the foot pedals to allow him to reach them. He wasn’t a very good driver, couldn’t hold his liquor too well (I’d carry him home under my arm) and wasn’t much of a pool player (table’s edge was at eye level for him), but he was an amazing tailor at a time when the profession was probably fading away a bit.
  
   After a couple of years in Plattsburgh, he announced he was moving to The Big Apple. We were all instantly terrified for him, as it turns out for no good reason.
  
   We never heard anything from him, other than a note that he was doing costume tailoring for some Broadway shows.
  
   Then, in 1979, I was at the theatre with another of Johnny’s old mates, as he might have described us, and there barely 10 minutes into the 1978 thriller “The Eyes of Laura Mars” with Faye Dunaway and Tommy Lee Jones, was Johnny, up there on the silver screen. He even had a line spoken to the Oscar-winning actress, one clearly cobbled into the screenplay to get him the scale fee from the Screen Actors Guild.

   My friend and I almost fell out of our seats, and made something of a fuss in the theatre exclaiming, “There’s Johnny,” at a time when movie staffers were a bit stricter than they are nowadays.

   We never did hear from Johnny again, though we subsequently saw him in the “Buck Rogers” television series, in the Sylvester Stallone movie “Paradise Alley,” and in the Sex in Cinema section of Playboy magazine. Plus, he showed up as one of Santa’s elfs in a Penthouse magazine advertisement.

   Just for the record, I wasn’t a subscriber to either of those two. On those rare occasions when I ran across either one, I was always impressed by the literary content, which I think has been widely underestimated. Seriously.

   This kind of stuff must read suspiciously like the old Reader's Digest "Most Unforgettable Character" feature, so I won't try to deny it. I'd be interested in some of the readers' choices as the most memorable persons they encountered in the hobby over the years. Especially if you ran into any dwarfs, or Minis, as we might call them in the card-collecting world.

    Tom Hultman, whom SCD readers will remember as one of our editors for many years and who is now a school teacher here in Central Wisconsin, sent me a link to a movie trailer the other day. In keeping with our nostalgia theme around here, the movie in question is almost 20 years old, and the reason he sent along the link to the trailer is to enjoy once again the appearance of yet another SCD notable.
  
   Rick Firfer, our longtime correspondent in the metro Chicago area, is a member of the Screen Actors Guild and has turned up in a number of major motion pictures over the past 20 years.
  
   In the trailer of the hit 1989 film “Home Along,” Firfer is the manager of the grocery store where Macaulay Culkin goes for supplies as he stocks up for the ordeal of being a home “survivor” as an enterprising 8-year-old kid inadvertently left alone by his family over the Christmas holiday.
  
   As Culkin checks out at the cash register, Firfer questions the kid about where his mother and father are and whether he has any sisters or brothers. Told that that he is an only child, Firfer asks the kid where he lives. “I can’t tell you that,” Culkin tells him. “Why not,” Firfer counters. “Because you are a stranger.”
  
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SCD readers wouldn’t concur with that, but it is great fun to see somebody you know show up in a movie. Toward the end of the two-minute trailer, the Firfer charcater sets up the ultra-precocious kid for a line that ultimately became a real-live catch phrase in the early 1990s.
  
   Asked if he’s at the grocery store alone, Culkin responds, “I’m 8 years old. Do you think I’d be here all alone? I don’t think so.”
  
   So Firfer’s got a claim for a role in altering the national lingo, to say nothing of all the different roles in various movies he's been part of. He also gets those residual checks ... and it hardly matters that the film editors clipped his talking part out of the final version for widespread release.
  
   Just like the guys who get a cup of coffee in the major leagues, it leaves the rest of us green with envy to be able to say you’ve had your moment up on the silver screen.
  
   Tomorrow I’ll tell you about another friend who suddently popped up in a number of movies and several television roles. Here’s a hint (though not a particularly helpful one): he’s much, much shorter than Firfer is.