The Infield Dirt with T.S. O'Connell

   (This is the third of three parts profiling noted photographer David Spindel, this time looking at his unique relationship with the legendary Joe DiMaggio.)

   Spindel also has a few artifacts left from another of his cronies, Joe DiMaggio, though not the item he wanted. “I wanted to get Joe to sign a boxing glove, but he wouldn’t do it,” Spindel recalled. Undaunted, the man The Yankee Clipper once described as “my personal photographer” in an introduction to another pretty fair country ballplayer, Ted Williams, arranged in 1989 to have DiMaggio visit his studio at a time when he was creating a huge still-life of his memorabilia.

   When Joe showed up at the studio, he had a couple of surprises in store for his photographer. He brought along a sterling silver humidor and a signed baseball that he thought should be included in the photo. That was simple enough, since the humidor was pretty cool and the ball was signed by a couple of decent prospects named Reagan and Gorbachev. But there was more.

   “Where do I sit,” DiMaggio then said to the startled Spindel. Apparently, Joe figured the still-life would be nicely enhanced with the man himself included. “And his agent wanted $50,000 to include him in the photo!” Spindel recalled in amazement. The agent may have been disappointed about that outcome, but not about the iconic image that resulted after the talented Spindel did a double exposure and inserted DiMaggio into the image.
   A few days later when Spindel took the prints to Atlantic City to show DiMaggio (he was there signing autographs), he ended up chillin’ with the Hall of Famer for much of the weekend, including ringside seats at a boxing match in an entourage that also included Ted Williams and Floyd Patterson.

   Spindel likes to recount his thoughts at the time as he pondered what people were saying about the distinguished quartet. “The people were probably saying, ‘Who are those three guys with Spindel?’ ” he said with a laugh.

Friday, June 12, 2009 5:45:44 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Thursday, June 11, 2009

If Regis says you are a genius, who can argue? ...
Posted by T.S.

   This is the second of three parts profiling acclaimed photographer David Spindel

For the man who came up with an extraordinary interactive body of work called Rebuses (visual riddles), it shouldn’t have been hard to imagine that David Spindel would find a way to keep the creative juices flowing. As the images shown here make clear, he’s taken quickly to the antiques and ephemera of the Old West, which he arranges with the same subtle brilliance that he applied to his baseball pieces. Plus, just as he did with baseball, the portraiture opportunities for some of the great television cowboys of yesteryear have provided ample evidence that he’s lost nothing off his metaphorical fastball.

   “I’m having a great time,” Spindel continued. “It’s totally different, and the people really appreciate what I do.” As he did in New York, there are almost endless demands for charities looking to utilize his talents for fund raising, plus there have still been lots of television and radio appearances (Good Morning, Arizona!), maybe not as much as you might find in the Big Apple environs, but more than enough to help fill up the schedule.

   And the siren call from his New York celebrity still reaches out from time to time. Only recently he was back in New York at Yoko Ono’s invitation for the opening of an annex to the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Spindel, who began his career as a commercial still-life photographer in 1964, was selected by John Lennon to photograph what was to be his last recording session, and the images document the last days before Lennon’s death.

   The list of collectors of Spindel’s work reads like a Hollywood Walk of Fame souvenir program: Charlton Heston, Bob Hope, Johnny Carson, George Burns, Kate Hepburn, Billy Crystal, Donald Trump, Jerry Lewis, and Yoko Ono. One fan, television personality Regis Philbin, offered this morsel that the photographer employs on his website: “David Spindel is a little eccentric; however, you have to put up with him because he is a genius.”

   The baseball stuff (frequently featured in Sports Collectors Digest) so familiar to collectors often contain hundreds of pieces, all so artfully and perfectly arranged that it seems to the uninitiated to be a simple affair to simply fling down the various artifacts and take the picture. Try it sometime with a dozen pieces and see how simple it is, then multiply the degree of difficulty many times over.

   And just having the material to be used in these still-life images is a major challenge. For Spindel, it represented nearly 30 years worth of collecting, though his motivations for chasing all that stuff were far different than your typical collector’s.

   “I had more than 10,000 baseball items,” he recounted, noting that much of it was used for a photography assignment connected with various MLB anniversaries. When Spindel moved west, he got rid of most of the collection, selling to some of the dealers that he had bought from through the years and selling much of it on eBay.

   But, of course, just like everybody else he kept some of his favorite things. Like a number of signed baseballs from some of his subjects, a list that includes Dr. Ruth (Westheimer, not Babe), Donald Trump and Muhammad Ali.

   This entry concludes on the morrow with recollections of Spindel's unique relationship with Joseph Paul DiMaggio,

Thursday, June 11, 2009 2:49:53 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Spindel goes west, but he is still shooting ...
Posted by T.S.

   David Spindel is a transplanted New Yorker who’s getting so used to Arizona that he can practically pass for a native. That is until he opens his mouth. Then it’s clear he’s a New Yawker.

   And if there were any doubt, one only needs to look back at many of the incredible collages of cards and memorabilia from the likes of Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and a battalion of other baseball greats. Spindel’s iconic work is found in private collections and museums across the country, a testimony to a brilliant, creative mind that has literally invented its own genre in the world of photography, sports and beyond.

   Serious hobbyists and baseball fans will instantly recognize his remarkable work, a staggering array of tributes to the greats of the games by way of artfully arranging and photographing their memorabilia. It’s hard to imagine any single-player collector who doesn’t own a print from Spindel. Hell, they would be useful as checklists of a sort as well, since many of the original layouts can include hundreds of pieces related to that specific player of team (think Yankees, Bums, Cubs and more).

   If you go to his gallery on his website: www.spindelvisions.com, you could end up staying for a good deal longer than you might have planned. Even if you confine yourself simply to his baseball lineup (now a fraction of his overall inventory), you’re talking about 150 or more prints of some of the most stunning still-life photography imaginable.

   Not surprisingly, this is the kind of stuff of magazine and book covers, of which he can claim hundreds. His absolutely unique portraiture of everybody from John Lennon, George Burns and a host of Hollywood and entertainment celebrities to Yogi, Mickey, Babe, Joe, Henry, Tom Seaver and dozens more has left Spindel rubbing elbows with the giants of American culture over the last 50-plus years, and he’s got the photos to prove it. Spindel is 67 and still going strong, vowing never to retire despite living in the arid Arizona badlands in Anthem, not far from Scottsdale. He concedes that New York was getting to be too much for him

   “I’ll never retire,” said Spindel in a phone interview recently. “When I first moved out here from New York I was so depressed. What will I do, photograph cactus?”

Spindel will answer that question and talk about his unique relationship with Joe DiMaggio in tomorrow's blog.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009 2:50:00 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Tuesday, June 09, 2009

The 19th Hartland turns up after 46 years ...
Posted by T.S.

   The Hartland folks are touting this as a chance to go back in time, and given the description of the Casey Stengel Hartland Statue prototype, it’s hard to take issue with their assessment.

   Hartland of Ohio President Fay Halliwell recently announced that the company would be producing a Hartland Statue of Casey Stengel, which is newsworthy enough, but gets a second bump by virtue of the fact that the “new” statue will be made from a near half-century old prototype.

   The metal prototype of Casey was already done in 1963 when Hartland Plastics was sold to Revlon, and company owner Charlie Revlon showed up at the production facility in Hartland, Wis., and shut everything down. “When Revlon came in and told them to destroy all the molds, Frank Fulop saved the Stengel prototype,” said Craig Blakenship, Hartland’s official historian and a recent addition to the Hartland Ohio group that will produce the 19th statue.

   Fulop, who died in 2002, is a legendary figure in the hobby, having been the principal name attached to the collectible that has been a hobby mainstay virtually from the earliest days. The full-color Stengel prototype has been in the possession of Fulop’s son, who lives in Colorado.

   Blankenship, a Hartland fan for decades, purchased the www.Hartlands.com website from Kevin Cloutier. “I love Hartlands and I bought the website as a way to communicate with collectors,” he said.

   Conceived at the time when Stengel was managing the Mets, the statue prototype portrays him in a Mets uniform. Halliwell said the negotiations about use of logos are still underway; the statue already has licensing from CMG Worldwide, which markets the rights to some of the biggest names in the baseball galaxy, including Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson, Honus Wagner and Ty Cobb, to name a handful.

   It’s that licensing that contributes to a suggested retail price that Halliwell figures will be around $100 for a figure that will be manufactured in the United States (a Washington state artist who works under the company name L’il Monsters) and limited to perhaps 200 pieces. Hartland officials also noted that the Stengel statues, expected to be available later this year, will be manufactured to the same weight as the originals and will replicate the off-white color in the originals as well.

Tuesday, June 09, 2009 2:17:57 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Monday, June 08, 2009

Sammy says good-bye and Johnson logs No. 300. Coincidence?
Posted by T.S.

   Most of the commentary surrounding Randy Johnson’s 300th victory last week centered on the very real possibility that he might be the last guy for awhile to top that magic number, but I like another angle.

   I’m more fascinated by the link – conceivably unrelated – between Johnson’s late-career dominance and the steroid era that seemingly has distorted home run statistics for the better part of a decade. I mention that because at just about the same time that Randy was nailing down No. 300, Sammy Sosa was announcing that he was officially retired from Major League Baseball.

   I figure that’s kinda like a reverse of the Brett Favre Retirement Plan, i.e. announcing that you’re no longer playing several years after you’ve stopped playing. Anyway, Sammy made it official and took note to point out his ascension to Cooperstown should follow in the the conventional fashion. Loosely translated: Freedom’s on the march, or if I say something often enough, perhaps all concerned will start to believe it.

   It could just be coincidence, but Johnson’s leap from being merely a dominant, scary pitcher to the ranks of the all-time greats neatly matched the home run sodden years of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Even if it is, he was good enough over that span to guarantee Cooperstown, and the inclusion of the magic No. 300 was simply icing on the cake. He was headed for a plaque even if he had ended up with just 299 wins.

   But for Sammy it’s going to be even more interesting when the vote comes around. As he is fully warranted in pointing out, he’s never been officially linked to PEDs, but the caveat of “official” has taken an awful beating with the revelations of the past five years.

   Ultimately, Sosa will end up being a great test of the conventional wisdom that simply being linked in any fashion to the steroids mess – or merely having smacked a big pile of home runs during the 1994-2003 span – can be enough to derail a trip to Cooperstown. Actually, it’s more than conventional wisdom: Mark McGwire, whose only real sin was allowing himself to be hornswoggled into self-incrimination by a McCarthy-like Congressional subcommittee, has managed less than 25 percent of the BBWAA votes in his first three years on the ballot.

   Now there’s some irony: being linked to McGwire and that once-glorious summer could be the roadblock to immortality rather than the supercharged vehicle that it once appeared to be.

Monday, June 08, 2009 3:36:34 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Friday, June 05, 2009

What would Red have said about hoopla? ...
Posted by T.S.

RED AUERBACH.jpg

   I was watching what I thought was a Broadway play the other day when suddenly an NBA basketball game broke out, leaving me dazed and bewildered, or at least more dazed and bewildered than I typically am while watching television.

   I refer, of course, to the boisterous theatrics that precede the various NBA Playoff games these days. Oh, I understand that this is hardly a new phenomenon; the NBA has been doing this kind of thing for a long time, but that very passage of time is just the ticket in turning something mildly unctuous into grating, self-indulgent parody.

   That’s because the club officials charged with orchestrating such things (arguably the perfect verb in this instance) end up feeling great pressure to make the splash bigger and better every year. Mix that in with the natural tendency to want to outdo your competitors in the pregame hoopla frenzy and you have the ingredients for some decidedly unbasketball-like musings. It's that unbasketball-like quality that got me wondering what Hall of Fame coach Red Auerbach (shown in a Gave Perillo painting) might have thought about all the fuss prior to tip-off.

   If you think I’m overstating it or once again playing the role of the grumpy old man, consider the goofy spectacle that the Super Bowl has become, an event that manages to succeed in spite of its by now colossal foolishness and excess.

   And as I noted above, I fully understand that this particular brand of goofiness is not new: I can remember being in a luxury skybox at the United Center during Michael Jordan’s heyday in Chicago and being struck by the disco-mania lighting and pro wrestling style pronouncements from the MC as “Your Chicago Bulls” charged onto the court. Fortunately for me, I was too distracted by the free weenies and cold-cuts on the buffet table to pay much attention to the sideshow hundreds of feet below.

   I just worry that this kind of thing is going to spread to baseball one day. All that smoke might kill the grass.

Friday, June 05, 2009 7:38:16 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Mom ponies up $3,000 for throwing out the cards ...
Posted by T.S.

   My colleague, managing editor Tom Bartsch, wrote a column in the June 19 issue of SCD recounting a story about a baby boomer whose mother threw out his baseball cards. I can hear you already, saying that such a revelation is hardly news, and you would be right. But that isn’t the end of the story.

   Turns out, when the man got into his 40s and his son started collecting, he noticed something as the house filled up with baseball cards. His son was buying a lot of the same cards that he had once owned. When Grandma realized how much her grandson enjoyed the collecting and how much her son was involved in the hobby as well, she started feeling guilty about having thrown out the cards years ago.

   And so she asked her son what the original collection might have been worth, with Editor Bartsch speculating that there may have even been a bit of accounting for inflation. And mom volunteered to pony up $3,000 ostensibly to clear her conscience for having done what mothers did all across America.

   I was relieved that there was no hint of a way to identify anyone involved in this, leaving me free to point out the obvious: this is sooo wrong on sooo many levels. Even conceding the possibility that the collector fiercely resisted and that mom insisted, the notion of a mother paying for this particular “transgression” is nothing short of appalling.

   Though I wouldn’t typically bother to invoke this argument, you could suggest that without moms everywhere tossing the cards out, the very hobby resurgence that you saw in the late 1970s and early 1980s might never have happened. Moms were merely performing their vital role in the grand cosmic scheme of things and to have done otherwise might have upset the space/time continuum and created one of those black holes in the universe.

   But mostly it’s just silly because the responsibility for holding on to valued material of any description should reside with the person who values the material. You don’t even have to be a mature adult to understand the concept, since I was able at age 18 to politely tell my mother, “I am leaving to join the U.S. Navy (technically, she already knew that part) and I would like you to leave the baseball cards untouched in my absence.”

   I could have added, but didn’t, that while I understand that these are supposedly childish things, I would nonetheless like to hang onto them into adulthood, either for the reason of passing them along to offspring who might be interested in the hobby or merely for purposes of potential monetary appreciation.

   And lo and behold, there they were, four years later, unmolested and intact. I’ve been tempted to get a T-shirt made that says, “I asked my mother not to throw away my baseball cards, and by golly, she didn’t!”

Wednesday, June 03, 2009 4:41:44 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Monday, June 01, 2009

Hooray! A whole exhibition devoted to ersatz cards!
Posted by T.S.

   I was blogging last week about The Baseball Reliquary, a really cool organization of diehard baseball fans that is, by its own mantra, "dedicated to fostering an appreciation of American art and culture through the context of baseball history." In that initial blog I noted that Steve Dalkowski, Jim Eisenreich and Roger Maris were slated to be inducted into the Baseball Reliquary Shrine of the Eternals this July. I blogged about Maris and noted I'd follow up with Eisenreich, which appears below.

   But first, an additional note about the Reliquary sponsoring an exhibition entitled "Cardboard Fetish," an exploration of baseball trading cards, at the Pasadena Central Library, Pasadena, California, in July 2009 in conjunction with the 11th annual Induction Day ceremony of the Shrine of the Eternals. (a likely candidate for such an exhibition, the 1952 Topps Satchel Paige card by Keith Conforti, is shown above)

   That exhibition is going to include trading cards created by a number of artists in Southern California and around the country, and as readers know, I am a huge fan of ersatz baseball cards created by collectors, many of which are far superior to what the card companies produced years ago or even in modern times. The Reliquary is devoting one entire case to the work of Paul Kuhrman, noted for his defaced and altered baseball cards www.paulkuhrman.com.

Here is a link to their website with the page with details regarding the solicitation of artists' entries. Artists still have a couple of weeks before the deadline for submissions:

www.baseballreliquary.org/FetishEntries.htm

And now on to my follow-up to Thursday's blog: The Jim Eisenreich deal is still pretty vivid in my memory, which is saying a lot given the various gaps that seem to develop in that area at my age.

   I had been newly married in 1983 and was in the process of introducing my then-wife to many of the joys of Major League Baseball, but the sad travails of Eisenreich were kind of a stark reminder even in that seemingly trivial undertaking that our diversions are hardly exempt from the same real-life grimness that seems to touch everything else.

   We watched in horror (figuratively speaking, much of it was in newspaper reports) about the often brutal reaction of fans to Eisenreich’s odd twitching behaviors as he tried to make it with the Minnesota Twins. His Tourette’s syndrome was undiagnosed at the time, so what appeared to be a young player simply struggling mightily with an extreme case of nerves brought unimaginable torment from fans as he fought to launch an MLB career under the most arduous circumstances ever devised.

   I understand that in hindsight many of those who were toughest on the young outfielder contend that had they known it was an actual affliction that bedeviled Eisenreich they would have reacted differently. I would suggest instead that it was deplorable that he had to endure what he did in addition to the staggering burden from his Tourette’s.

   Though I had the assistance of having my ex-wife psychologist at my side as I watched his anguish, I was appalled that he was subjected to that abuse regardless of whether or not people understood what was ailing him.

   It made his eventual triumph all the more compelling – nine solid major league seasons with the Royals and the Phillies – but it made his torture at the hands of fans no less inexcusable.

Monday, June 01, 2009 3:11:01 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Thursday, May 28, 2009

PEDs push Maris back into the spotlight ...
Posted by T.S.

    In this second installment about the Baseball Reliquary announcement of three 2009 inductees for the Shrine of the Eternals, I wanted to talk about two of the inductees: Jim Eisenreich and Roger Maris. The third, Steve Dalkowski, I don’t know much about, beyond his being the inspiration for the Tim Robbins character Nuke LaLoosh in the movie Bull Durham. Oh, yeah, and the reported 110 mph fastball lore.

   But my connection to Roger Maris is more visceral and substantive, since I rooted for him even back into the 1960s when it was more conventional to link oneself to either Roger or Mickey, with the vast majority leaning to the latter. I opted for both, and the biggest reason for connecting to Maris was the feeling that Maris was a major league underdog.
(Maris artwork by Arthur K. Miller; www.artofthegame.com)

   As the Reliquary press release notes, Maris got posthumously shoved back into the spotlight 11 years ago when Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire electrified the baseball word with their epic pursuit of his 37-year-old single-season home run record. It is now a good deal more than historical footnote that the fall of his bittersweet home run crown may have been tainted by the very same PED’s that have bedeviled dozens of players and the game itself for several years since the first revelations.

   For me, the home run battle 11 years ago was pretty cool precisely because it provided a renewed and re-energized appreciation of Maris, just as the steroid revelations of the last few years have probably left millions of fans feeling like the record may still belong to Roger rather than where it technically resides.

   That can only give great comfort to a considerable legion of Maris fans who still clamor to have their guy enshrined in that other Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Ironically, unless MLB and the good burghers of Cooperstown figure out a way to reconcile the steroid decade and the havoc in has created with the MLB record book, having a shadow Hall of Fame seems like something we’re going to have to get used to – and least for awhile.

   Jim Eisenreich shall be the topic du jour tomorrow.

Thursday, May 28, 2009 3:00:42 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Wednesday, May 27, 2009

What is in a name? Ask the Baseball Reliquary
Posted by T.S.

   The Baseball Reliquary recently announced the three 2009 inductees for the Shrine of the Eternals, and if you’re a little fuzzy on just what all that means, you can be forgiven.

   Steve Dalkowski, Jim Eisenreich and Roger Maris are joining a really cool group that includes the likes of Dick Allen (at left), Moe Berg, Jim Bouton, Dummy Hoy, Dock Ellis, Bill James, Bill Lee, Marvin Miller and a couple of dozen others as members of a truly elite club that Reliquary officials describe as “the national organization’s equivalent to the Baseball Hall of Fame.”

   I kinda admire the organization’s insistence on nomenclature that at once elevates and at the same time probably ensures a certain amount of obscurity. For those scoring at home, “reliquary” means “container of holy relics,” and I gotta admit, earlier Shrine of the Eternals inductees like Jimmy Piersall, Fernando Valenzuela and Buck O’Neil certainly qualify on that count.

   One is tempted to say that the Shrine is designed for people who made a significant contribution to baseball history but may not have cleared all the Cooperstown hurdles, but no, there are several guys in both: Yogi Berra, Roberto Clemente, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Jackie Robinson and Bill Veeck Jr.

   So in reality, it’s just a neat idea for hard-core baseball fans to take note of important figures in the game’s history, who in this instance, will be inducted into the Shrine in a public ceremony on Sunday, July 19 at the Pasadena Central Library in Pasadena, Calif.

   I’ll offer a word or two about the enshrinees in tomorrow’s blog.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009 3:30:57 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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