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 Monday, June 22, 2009
New Hall of Fame Game sounds better than the old one ...
Posted by T.S.
Did you ever have occasion where a situation was kinda forced on you for any number of reasons and it turns out that the “solution” was so cool that you wonder why you didn’t do things that way in the first place? I raise the hypothetical after reading the official press release from the inaugural Baseball Hall of Fame Classic in Cooperstown last weekend.
This blog will poach in spots from the PR release (italics), the gist of which is that the new arrangement with having Hall of Famers and retired ballplayers square off for the exhibition game at Doubleday Field sounds like it should have been the way we were doing this all along.
With 90-year-old Bob Feller (Hall of Fame Class of 1962) starting the game on the mound for Team Wagner, the 7,069 fans at Doubleday Field were treated to a Hall of Fame matchup right off the bat when Paul Molitor (HOF Class of 2004) came to the plate for Team Collins and singled to center.
Hall of Famer Bob Feller delivers a pitch during Sunday’s
Baseball Hall of Fame Classic in Cooperstown, N.Y. (Milo Stewart
Jr./National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum)
“We made a deal – he said no bunting and I told him I’d keep line drives out of the middle of the field,” Molitor said after his hit.
Bobby Grich followed Molitor – and promptly brought the house down by half-heartedly charging the mound after a Feller offering came a little too close for comfort. From that point on, the laughter coming from the stands was just as prevalent as the cheers – as the players made sure the fans had a good time.
The inaugural Hall of Fame Classic Weekend was presented by Ford Motor Company, and the game featured Hall of Famers Bob Feller, Fergie Jenkins, Paul Molitor, Phil Niekro and Brooks Robinson along with 21 former major leaguers.
The new arrangement follows decades of having actual major league teams travel to Cooperstown for a mid-summer exhibition, but the difficulties of scheduling that annual game led the Hall officials to find an alternative. The last game under the old format, in 2008, was perhaps fittingly rained out.
Feller left the game soon after facing Grich, signing autographs for fans – many of whom were not born when he threw his last major league pitch in 1956. But more than 50 years later, Feller’s legend remains larger than life.
Team Collins scored two runs in the first on RBI singles by Steve Finley and Johnny Grubb, but Team Wagner escaped further damage when Hall of Fame pitcher Fergie Jenkins got Mike Timlin to hit into a double play started by 11-year-old surprise shortstop Zach D’Errico of Schenectady, N.Y. D’Errico came to the game with his father, Rich, and was asked onto the field by Steve Lyons of Team Wagner.
Team Collins added two more runs in the third on a Finley triple and a Kevin Maas home run. But in the bottom of the fifth, Team Wagner cut the deficit to 4-1 on an RBI double by former Reds’ slugger George Foster. The teams were named in honor of the team managers (Hall of Famers Eddie Collins and Honus Wagner) in a 1939 all-star game played in Cooperstown at the first Hall of Fame induction.
Then in the bottom of the sixth, Team Wagner scored four runs on an RBI double by former Red Sox and Expos pitcher Bill Lee, an RBI groundout by military all-star Corey Davisson, an RBI single by Lyons and what proved to be the game-winning double by former Yankees third baseman Mike Pagliarulo.
Lee Smith picked up the win by pitching the sixth inning for Team Wagner, and Rich Surhoff got the save. Lyons had three hits for Team Wagner, while Finley and Grubb had three hits apiece for Team Collins.
“The game was a success,” said Hall of Fame President Jeff Idelson. “We were happy to see everyone having a good time at the ballpark and connecting families as well as celebrating history today on Father’s Day. Not until next year’s Classic will that much talent be having that much fun on the dirt.”
I’ve tried to cajole my Midwestern colleagues here in Wisconsin to take a sortie to Cooperstown, and the new tradition sounds like one more reason to continue hectoring them about it. It’s an idea whose time could have come years ago. Watching a game at Doubleday Field is as close as you’ll ever get to replicating Kevin Costner’s “Field of Dreams” euphoria from 20 years ago, followed closely by sitting in the Hall’s absolutely unique baseball theatre.
I mean no disrespect to the modern players, but the Hall of Fame is just as much (maybe more) about the thousands of guys who came before as it is about them. It sounds to me like the “new” Hall of Fame Game may be even cooler than the old one.
There. Who says I can never embrace new ideas?
Monday, June 22, 2009 3:18:32 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00) 
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Thursday, June 18, 2009
With auction closing looming, this is exciting time ...
Posted by T.S.
I used to have a job where the whole year’s work would distill down to the results of a four-day stretch in the middle of August and a week-long period in February. Fifty weeks of work all directed toward the doings that would take place in 11 days.
That was when I was public relations coordinator for the Empire State Games in New York, and the 11 days, of course, were those involving the four days of the summer games in Syracuse and the week’s worth of the winter festivities in February in Lake Placid. For a guy who had worked primarily at a daily newspaper where you were expected to come up with tangible results literally every work day, gearing my efforts for two brief periods each year was a major change in the workday strategy.
(Shown is original artwork of Walter Johnson by acclaimed artist Darryl Vlasak, one of three striking pieces he has consigned to the sale.)
I mention this because we find ourselves this morning in a similar kind of situation with the closing of our first auction sometime this evening, or even better, sometime early tomorrow morning. I know that the pressures of business put considerable demands in terms of revenue generation and all that good stuff, but I find myself more taken with the inner workings of the auction business, which I have always found fascinating.
I have always had enormous respect for the people who do auctions for a living – much as I do for card and memorabilia dealers – because I have a real feeling for how much is actually involved in doing all of those things successfully. Our sortie into the auction arena has only increased those feelings.
In the same vein, the move into auctions also reminded me of something else from another point in my journalism career, maybe 20 years ago. I had been the editor of a weekly newspaper in Delaware for several years and was, for lack of a better expression, getting pretty burned out on the job. And out of the blue, we started developing our own black-and-white photography for the newspaper, and the process of adding that new skill and chance for creative new tinkering promptly revitalized me for a couple of more years.
And no, I am not suggesting I am burned out as editor of Sports Collectors Digest, but merely noting that finding new avenues to learn and grown is important even in a job where the creative opportunities ought to be virtually unlimited.
I had a lot of fun helping to write up the auction descriptions and I hope to have a bit of fun this evening manning the telephones. There’s some really cool stuff in this auction, and I’d like nothing better than to be running back and forth from the vault to the telephone to describe the centering or corners on this or that baseball card.
I always really enjoyed the electricity that surrounded some of the early auctions I covered for SCD, and I’m hoping we’ll re-create some of that energy tonite.
Because of the demands on getting SCD out the door on Friday morning, I probably won’t be able to do any blogging about the auction until the weekend or Monday morning. In the meantime, check it out by clicking on the auction button on the home page.
And call me tonite if you have questions. As they say, operators will be standing by.
Thursday, June 18, 2009 3:04:52 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Sammy is guilty, but we have no right to know it ...
Posted by T.S.
 I have to confess I took a couple of days off for something as frivolous as golf, thus I have been remiss in keeping up my blog postings. I know there are countless individuals capable of handling something as pedestrian as that from virtually anywhere, but I ain’t one of them.
Upon my return to the office, I see newspaper and online accounts of Sammy Sosa’s name being added to the ranks of those on that infamous 2003 list that indicates players who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs.
This comes about a week after Sammy’s unsolicited announcement that he was now officially retired and would calmly await his inevitable election to the Hall of Fame. Ahem.
The timing may be coincidental, but if it is it’s one helluva coincidence. I don’t know about you, but I would like to know who this guy is who gets to sit back and decide: a) ballplayer A has said something annoying; so b) He gets to tie a can to his ass on the basis of Item A. That’s a lot of power for any individual, anonymous or not.
The resulting uproar is as expected: outraged sanctimony, garnished with righteous indignation. Yipee!
Me, I’m more interested in the aspect of all of this that is ongoing rather than that which is historical trivia. The List. I capitalize list, because I suspect that this particular list is going to become a proper noun fairly soon.
Here’s the part I find so interesting: we wouldn’t know any of this if the players association hadn’t agreed to the 2003 testing, which hinged on the results being kept confidential. I can’t shake the suspicion that if this were actually some kind of legal proceeding, rather than an impromptu public stockade, all of the evidence would be summarily tossed out because of the way it was obtained.
The reality is that the only reason the “evidence” even exists is because the players, through their association, agreed to the testing on the basis of that confidentiality. That ought to count for something, but it doesn’t really seem to in the court of public opinion, which seems to lap up every new revelation with an ardor and enthusiasm not unlike that which captivated the baseball world and the nation in 1998. It’s grand theatre, which is not quite the same thing as being right.
And I’m not quibbling here. It was wrong for players to be using those substances in 2003, but my mother used to stress to me that two wrongs do not make a right. They shouldn’t have been using that stuff and it’s wrong that they did. It’s also wrong that we are going to torpedo them – apparently one at a time – on the basis of evidence that should never have seen the light of day.
As a duly installed member of the public, I confess I have absolutely no moral or legal right to be privy to that information. Doesn’t matter who the other 102 names are, it is all data that is “fruit of the poisonous tree,” and should thusly be excluded.
I will blog another time about the implications of the other 102 names dribbling out in the coming months/years. Or maybe the pressures will prompt some large disclosure en masse, or maybe somebody will get tired of having that particular sword hanging over his head and “confess.”
No matter how it comes about, it ain’t right.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009 4:47:14 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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Friday, June 12, 2009
The Great DiMaggio throws him a curveball
Posted by T.S.
(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.
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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