I saw a news item recently that said the Detroit Tigers were taking a bit of heat because of the scheduling of their home opener on April 10, more precisely noting that some Catholics were upset that the 1:05 p.m. start time came during the noon to 3 p.m. period when traditional Christian belief holds that Jesus was hung on the cross.
  
   It got me to wondering how this particular conflict hadn’t come up before, but of course it might have and simply escaped my attention. What didn’t get past me was the 1965 decision by Sandy Koufax to forego pitching in the World Series opener against the Minnesota Twins because it fell on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year for the Jewish people.
  
   I was just a 15-year-old kid, frantically following the approaching World Series in the New York Daily News, and I was just awestruck that somebody (actually my favorite pitcher) could take a pass on what I regarded as a secular assignment with near-religious overtones.
  
   Mostly it just impressed me with the seriousness of the Jewish faith; the decision only enhanced my view of Koufax, aided neatly by the later developments that saw the Dodgers win in seven games. By my way of thinking, it was no harm, no foul.
  
   (Sandy Koufax artwork by Arthur K. Miller; www.artofthegame.com)
  
   I also found it fascinating to learn years later as I became something of an amateur baseball historian that there was never really any major decision involved for Sandy. He had long since made it clear to the Dodgers’ brass that he would not play on Yom Kippur, so when the prohibition coincided with one of the holiest days in the baseball world, it was what we would later call a “no brainer.”
  
   That same thirst for reading about baseball history would lead me to Hank Greenberg’s decision to skip a game during the 1934 pennant race for the same reason. Scholars have debated the relative importance of the two; for me, it’s enough to note that I lived through the Koufax decision and yet fully understood the heightened significance of Greenberg’s choice because of the confluence of monumental historical events involving Jews in the 1930s and 1940s.
     

“Turn out the lights, the party’s over.”

   With that Curt Schilling announced his retirement, sending off stage a figure who brought a lot to the game of baseball – including an outspoken persona – at a time when such unvarnished maverickiness was sorely needed.
  
   See, even in his exit from the spotlight he inspired me to invent a new word that is – like the man himself – equal parts nonsense and exquisitely annoying. That’s pretty much how I thought of him over the years and so I applaud his good theatrical instincts for always insisting on being true to himself.
  
   He also, I presume inadvertently, performed yet another public service in his choice of rhetorical device for his announcement, noting that, “To say I’ve been blessed would be like calling Refrigerator Perry ‘a bit overweight.’ ”
  
   The Fridge is, in fact, not a bit overweight at all these days as he struggles with Guillan-Barre syndrome, but I think it's fortuitous that Schilling called attention to the beloved Bruin. He was hospitalized last year for five months and turned up at the recent Sun-Times Show in Chicago with the aid of a wheelchair in order to take part in the reunion of the Bears’ 1985 Super Bowl Champions.
  
   Back to Curtsie. A week or so ago I raised the discussion point about evaluating players’ careers for Hall-of-Fame consideration and juggling the dual importance of statistics and postseason excellence. Schilling will present yet another strong element in that debate, with career numbers that might have made him iffy or simply a tough call, but mixed in with that sterling 11-2 October log he seems like a much stronger candidate.
  
   Me, even though I was never a huge fan, I’d be inclined to give him the Cooperstown nod based on the fact that he was one of the dominant pitchers of the period in which he performed.
  
   Plus, he was never boring, and I always like that, even if I don't agree with everything.

   As I have explained numerous times, I am working frantically to get
accustomed to this blogging business, and that includes understanding and
orchestrating the comments section at the end of each blog.
  
   Creating discussion is an important element in the interactive component
of modern media, but in the case of commentary on my blog, it needs to be at
least remotely related to the blog content.
  
   As the editor of Sports Collectors Digest, I have no role in determining
matters related to advertising, and thus am pretty careful about not
creating blogs that blur the line between editorial and advertising.
  
   I also understand that for the individuals who want to control the
direction of commentary on the site that is a point of frustration, but it's
the ground rules that we are faced with. Confronted with numerous posts
about matters over which I have no control, there's nothing that I can
provide in the way of discussion.
  
   I am subsequently charged with being a censor because some posts have
been deleted. Again, there's not much I can say about it, other than to note
that there's nothing in my history or background to suggest an affinity for
censorship or curtailing the free flow of ideas. With this understood, we
will continue to delete comments that simply are designed to harangue me
into discussing areas that fall outside the editorial end of SCD.
  
   Some of the comments related to the dissolution of the Mastro Auctions
behemoth do prompt this observation: the available information about what is
currently underway in the hobby is minimal to non-existent at the moment.
Even the initial reporting in the New York Daily News last summer was
virtually without discernible attribution, and nothing reported since then
has changed that situation.
  
   What moves through the hobby is recycled, second-hand speculation that
travels at the speed of light and takes on a sheen of legitimacy that wasn't
present at its birth. If I am going to be a party to disseminating something
that has such extraordinary impact, I would want to be convinced of its
unassailable nature.
   We ain't there yet.

   I spent the weekend at the Chicago Sun Times Show at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, Ill., and it’s hard not to notice that our hobby that’s so resistant to change finds a degree of it unavoidable at modern card shows.
  
   Just as its famous counterpart in Valley Forge, Pa., the iconic Philly Show has done for decades, the Sun-Times Show holds a unique position for Midwest collectors as a twice-annual reminder of how the hobby started and the powerful hold that shows have.
  
   Still, even a horse like the Sun-Times has had to make concessions to the current economic climate, this time with a show about 16 percent smaller in terms of the number of dealers.
  
   Show promoter Brian Schwartz insisted the attendance numbers were probably close to those of the November 2008 show, and noted a strong turnout from fans for reunion of the beloved 1985 Super Bowl Champions Bears on Sunday afternoon.
  
   Chronicling sales is even trickier, since such considerations can vary widely depending upon whom you ask. A number of dealers told me that collectors seemed a little slow to pull the trigger on deals, a perhaps understandable observation given the tenor of the times. For my part, it seemed to me there was a bit more sightseeing than I might have expected, with many collectors seemingly give short shrift to many dealers as they walked by.
  
   Still, there was a lot going on, from a serious buzz Sunday from all those lovable Bears to a Heisman Trophy that walked in the door Saturday afternoon, in a manner of speaking. Plus, all weekend long, the gang from Hartland and Mike Shuba (shown in photo at right), the son of George “Shotgun” Shuba, were hawking a unique “Kwik Mit” that is designed to give fans at the ballpark a big assist when it comes to catching foul balls and home runs.
  
   More on all of that later this week.

   I saw a news item in the New York Times the other day that said Mark McGwire had been working with four current major league players helping them on their hitting, which he clearly knows a little something about.
  
   According to the news report, McGwire agreed to the interview with the understanding that “it would focus on his work as a hitting tutor and not on other issues.”
  
   I was glad to see the story, in part because I was never comfortable with the public pasting that Big Mac took as a result of that ill-fated appearance in front of the chuckleheads in Congress. He took a lot of heat for declining to discuss the past, including seeing his initial Hall-of-Fame vote opportunities plummet, for essentially doing what every last one of us would have done had we been put in the same untenable circumstance.
  
   I don’t much like government compelling people to testify about stuff that they know ultimately puts them in serious jeopardy for their livelihood or even their freedom, or in this instance for well-deserved recognition (HOF) for a lifetime’s achievements.
  
   All the clamor about performance-enhancing drugs drowns out the reality that McGwire was as exemplary a major league ballplayer as we’ve had over the last 20 years, his treatment of the family of Roger Maris during the historic home run chase in 1998 being way up there on my list of stuff that helped remind me that some of the modern guys can be just as cool as my favorte old-timers.
  
   I’ve known a number of people in our hobby who have had considerable contact with McGwire and they pretty universally defend him as being one of the genuine good guys. He took a lot of heat even before that 2005 Congressional hearing because of the price of his autograph or even his willingness to sign in the traditional show setting, but I’m not sure that’s been fairly presented either.
  
   I also really liked a quote in the New York Times article from another modern ballplayer I’ve heard good things about, Matt Holiday. He was one of four ballplayers from the A’s and Cardinals that McGwire tried to help; the first one, Chris Duncan of the Cardinals, credited McGwire’s role in helping him to a .302 batting average last year.
  
   Holliday reportedly brushed off suggestions that working with Big Mac might affect his reputation. “I wouldn’t ever not want to have somebody in my life that could be a good friend or somebody I could really enjoy or learn from based on what other people might think about it,” he said, according to the Times.
  
   I won’t quibble about grammar in a sentiment that I so readily agree with, certainly not from a ballplayer who reminds me of McGwire in terms of the way he conducts himself as a teammate and as a citizen of the world.
  
   It says here that McGwire’s Hall-of-Fame prospects are going to turn around someday and eventually he’ll wind up where he belongs.
  
   Gee, I hope that’s not just wishful thinking.

   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 ...