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 Thursday, November 19, 2009
1984 Tigers get the royal treatment they deserve ...
Posted by T.S.
I was tickled the other day to see a digital image (shown here) of a poster featuring the 1984 Detroit Tigers and used as a promotional giveaway for a two-part reunion show produced by Mark Dehem, owner of The Athlete Connection in suburban Detroit.
The original artwork for the poster was created by one of my favorite artists, Paul Madden, of www.Maddenart.com. The artwork measures 24-by-36 inches, featuring 35 players, five coaches and manager Sparky Anderson. A very egalitarian total, apropos of perhaps the greatest post free agency blue-collar team, and an undertaking just as perfectly suited to Madden’s unique talents.
While his incredible sports art is best known by our readership, Madden’s reach extends way beyond the various sports arenas. He has created pieces for Disney, other major film studios and any number of television series, usually crafting these intricate but exquisitely designed and constructed masterpieces that often portray literally dozens and dozens of individuals.
Madden has done poster commissions like this one for years, and boasts a client list that includes dozens of major banks and corporations. This time, to honor the great 1984 Tigers squad, Legendary Auctions sponsored the printing of the posters, which was held to an edition of – you guessed it – 1,984 pieces.
The first half batch of posters were given away to the first 992 paid attendees at the July Midwest Sports Collectors Show; the posters will be similarly distributed at Denhem’s Nov. 27-29 Thanksgiving Weekend show (www.Midwestsportscollectors.com) at The Rock Financial Showplace in Novi, Mich., also in suburban Detroit.
Madden’s artwork is so meticulously created it leaves onlookers breathless; he works in a combination of colored pencil and markers, producing visuals at once stunningly realistic and just as compelling with faultless use of vivid colors.
Veteran dealers and show goers no doubt have seen Madden over the years at shows in the Midwest and even on both coasts, most notably perhaps at the annual Sun-Times shows and the no defunct SportsFest shows that Krause Publications promoted for nearly a decade.
And unlike the stereotype of the artist as hapless businessman, he can be pretty crafty in that regard as well. Several years ago at Sun-Times, he was set up a good seven or eight rows away from our Sports Collectors Digest booth, and facing away from us.
Undaunted, he took his massive Henry Aaron original artwork and displayed it at the back of his booth, pointed directly at me. I stared at it for the better part of three days – and even visited it up close several times when he wasn’t looking – and by Sunday afternoon pulled the trigger.
Thursday, November 19, 2009 3:16:36 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00) 
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Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Musings on 1959 and 2012 ...
Posted by T.S.
Two things are on my mind, and one of them is not really related to sports, but I offer it anyway because there’s not better way to confirm my conclusion than to solicit responses from the readership.
I’ll go in chronological order: 1959. I recently finished writing an catalog description for our upcoming auction, and one of the lots was a really neat run of 1959 Topps fifth series cards. Herewith a portion of the write-up:
Do you own a NR-MT to MT 1959 Topps Baseball partial set, but for some reason you ended up without any cards from No. 375 to No. 440? Then your troubles are over, my friend. Here’s an absolutely spectacular run of 66 cards from that series, all virtually unimprovable. And the snowy white backs are virtually as nice, and so clean with the blazing bright red and green colors that I caught myself whistling “The Little Drummer Boy” as I typed this up.
My question is: How does somebody end up with a segment of a series in this kind of condition? I am sure there’s a rational explanation – and, of course, I could ask the consignor – but it’s more fun to just pose the question to the readership.
I once had a blazing run of the First Series from 1964 Topps Baseball, with a Mantle I’d kill to have back in my slimy little mitts, but that was a whole series that I purchased as a series from Larry Fritsch back in the late 1960s.
This grouping of 1959s is so nice I’m wrasslin’ with myself about the possibility of bidding, even though you would technically have to be insane to considering upgrading my already NR-MT fifth series cards.
Part II of this blog concerns "2012," the movie. I saw it last weekend, and while I won’t try your patience with a movie review (I liked it, though), I was most intrigued by a bit of reel customizing that was obviously done to the prints for theatrical release in Wisconsin.
At three distinct points in the film, roughly in the beginning, middle and at the end, a line of dialog was included that clearly called for a state or city to be mentioned, and the structure of all three lines was such that virtually any state could have been mentioned.
When “Wisconsin” was the answer to the first installment, I already suspected that probably every state was getting its own custom print in theatres, and by the middle and final ones there could be little doubt.
It seemed like a fairly innocuous invention, not unlike when newspapers create distinct editions for different circulation areas, but I’d never noticed it in the movies before.
As might be expected, people were tickled to have their own state mentioned, even in this context of possible unimaginable calamity.
Boy, am I going to look like a weeinie if it turns out that “Wisconsin” was the right answer to all three questions in every last one of the thousands of theatres nationwide.
I don’t think so.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009 5:12:23 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Adams lets fly coolest bird since Fidrych ...
Posted by T.S.
It’s long been a rule of mine that old geezers (you pick the starting age, generally somewhere well past my 59 years and extending to Phyllis Diller range) ought to be able to get away with just about anything they do or say, provided, of course, that no actual laws are broken and no one is materially harmed in the process.
With that tortured preamble, I hereby vigorously defend one Bud Adams, he of ambidextrous bird-flipping talents as he found himself in a frenzy after his Tennessee Titans routed their archrival Buffalo Bills on Sunday.
Oh, I understand the necessity of a fine from the NFL, which naturally has to be aghast at such unruly behavior during a game where 100 rugged athletes do their best to annihilate each other over the course of 60 minutes of brutal collisions. Can’t have the kiddies asking mom and dad what those hand signals from the owner’s booth were all about: I concede that’s awkward.
So the NFL had to sack him, but $250,000 seems a little outrageous for a pro football pioneer who got a little carried away in the heat of the battle. I presume that the NFL, which raises millions of dollars every year for a number of charities, would earmark that handsome stack of bonus revenue for some such worthy cause, but that still doesn’t make it right.
One supposes that deterrence is the biggest rationale the NFL would trot out to explain the enormity of the fine, that and the previously mentioned part about parents having awkward moments trying to explain the nuances of such gestures to youngsters.
But a certain amount of that kind of delicate dance is to be expected in raising children. I remember making a gesture (not the bird) to my sister at the dinner table nearly 50 years ago, and getting a little “love tap” from my father for my troubles. This felt like a grave injustice, since I was mimicking an elaborate, two-handed gesture from soccer fans that I had seen in Sports Illustrated.
Naturally, my defense was that I hadn’t known precisely what the gesture meant, but that was hardly solid ground, since I should have been able to discern from the context of the photo (thousands of really angry soccer fans) that the sentiment conveyed was something other than, “Jolly good play, old sport.”
But I’m not defending Bud Adams because of a grievous miscarriage of justice a half-century ago in Johnstown, N.Y., nor am I suggesting that anybody should be cut a little slack just because they have deep pockets. Nope, I merely want to believe that if you get all the way to age 86 and haven’t got any felonies, high crimes or misdemeanors on your record in all that time, you’ve probably earned yourself a pass if you get a little carried away at a raucous football game or in the passing lane of Interstate 95 just south of the Philadelphia Airport.
And even though I’m not technically an old geezer yet, I’m not apologizing to the guy in the yellow Volvo.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009 10:26:14 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Monday, November 16, 2009
Divvying up Madoff auction proceeds ...
Posted by T.S.
I’ll be more than willing to fess up to the charge that I’ve found a good deal of morbid fascination with all things Madoff over the last year, so it should come as no surprise that the results of the first auctions to liquidate some of his ill-gotten stuff would catch my eye as well.
The initial idea was to track the sports end of it, but it turns out that the sports memorabilia end of it just wasn’t that big of a deal, unless you count $14,500 for a shiny blue Mets jacket with his name on the back.
That Mets connection is kind of grating, since he was friends with Fred Wilpon, the Mets owner, who, in turn, was a childhood friend of Sandy Koufax. Initially I’d read reports that the Mets finances were imperiled by the Madoff madness, but in recent weeks I’ve read stories that suggest the Mets did OK and got out from under early enough to even turn a profit. That last part isn’t quite as cheery as it might sound, since there’s a very real possibility that prosecutors could try to pursue such windfalls as part of the effort to reimburse victims.
The other thing that made me giggle a bit was the apparent disdain that some of the auction and antique experts felt about the level of sophistication in his collecting habits. It wasn’t exactly as though he had black-velvet Elvis paintings or Dogs Playing Poker, but aside from an impressive pile of hideously expensive watches and other pricey jewelry, there seemed to be some implicit disappointment that his collecting bent hadn’t been a bit more spectacular.
A New York Times columnist even invoked the nearly hackneyed phrase about “the banality of evil.” Maybe. At the very least he probably merits being included in a club that has Adolf Eichmann as its charter member.
Monday, November 16, 2009 8:10:53 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Thursday, November 12, 2009
Library of Congress book is a grand slam ...
Posted by T.S.
For a hobby that sailed along handsomely without much of a literary archive for a long time, ours has turned around in spectacular fashion in recent years with an extensive array of important reference works that now constitute a significant library all by itself. At such a moment, who better than to weigh in with yet another major-league keeper than the Library of Congress?
Maybe the trend got its official start in 1999 with the still other-worldly Halper Collection Catalog, but even that marvelous piece of work owes its own heritage to any number of massive auction catalogs in the 1990s that so impressively displayed in full color all the classic cards and memorabilia that would typically move on the auction circuit. Just by their nature and their utilitarian role in the hobby/industry, such catalogs usually found the writing constrained by the demands of commerce.
Obviously, the Halper tome took it a step further with a more literate feel to the text, along with an attendant nod to baseball history that would have been impossible to keep out of its pages in any case. Then, just in the last five years, there have been wonderful books that clamor for spots on the most elegant coffee tables as well as demanding library shelf space, most notably the Stephen Wong epic Smithsonian Baseball in 2005.
Well, it's time to nudge that volume over a few inches on your coffee table to make room for Baseball Americana: Treasures from the Library of Congress, authored by a Murderer’s Row of baseball historians, to say nothing of a nifty foreword by noted baseball fan George Will.
The erudite Mr. Will sets the table for Harry Katz, Phil Michel, Wilson McBee, Susan Reyburn and our own Frank Ceresi, a longtime SCD columnist and a former consultant at Sotheby’s. That lineup conspired to produce a remarkable 240-page classic that lays claims to more than 350 illustrations – many never before published – including first-generation vintage photographs to die for, newspaper clippings, magazine covers, sheet music, advertising display pieces, chromolithographic baseball cards, WPA photographs and a whole bunch of cool stuff that you’ve never seen before. Even if you had a front row seat at Sotheby’s in the fall of 1999, this thing is going to be a treat and a surprise.
Turns out that, by its own assertion, the Library of Congress boasts the largest collection of baseball material in the world, but because the vast majority of it is securely salted away, getting a look at most of it isn’t quite as simple as in a more traditional museum setting.
As Ceresi explained to me in a phone interview, it’s not that the stuff isn’t accessible for the general public, but more prominently that well-honed research skills come in handy in poring through the archives and finding it.
“We rolled up our sleeves and went to rare books, prints and photographs and newspapers and began pulling out some wonderful things,” Ceresi said in describing the beginning of a process that took several years.
With the incredible website (www.loc.gov), the Library of Congress has already done much to expand its reach beyond the Beltway, and the elegant Harper Collins book represents another important step in that direction. “The LoC publishing offices want to get the stuff out there for the people to see and enjoy. The online presentation is the most visited on the Worldwide Web, but it’s a mere smattering of what we saw,” Ceresi added.
The amazing book will be the cover subject in this week’s issue of SCD (Dec. 4), but I’ll close here by adding one more note. Have you ever seen an uncut sheet of 1887 N172 Old Judges? It’s on page 59, and while we traditionally refer to the N172’s as being from 1887-90, saying 1887 works OK here, since the Library of Congress copyright stamp is included on the bottom of the page. How cool is that?
Don’t bother to answer: it was rhetorical.
Thursday, November 12, 2009 3:29:23 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Tales of regional rivalries or, Who mailed my cheese? ...
Posted by T.S.
I got a press clipping the other day mailed from a reader in Metro New York and it was a photo copy of a New York Post article from Jan. 19, 2008, talking about how New York had upended the favored Wisconsin in the 2007 U.S. Championship Cheese Contest.
The article was timed for the day before the NFC Championship Game between the Packers and the Giants and was obviously part of the carpet-bombing coverage strategy that overcomes editors of all stripes at such moments.
Scrawled across the top was a notation about “Something to share with your Wisconsin friends,” which I took to be a fun poke at our legendary cheezenfreude. Doesn’t work for me personally, since I have nearly as much emotional attachment to Chateaugay, N.Y., as I do to Madison, Wis., the home of the cheese that had been expected to take the top prize. That tiny little Upstate New York village is just on the fringe of the circulation area that included my Saranac Lake, N.Y., bureau 30 years ago, near Lake Placid, the site of the 1980 Winter Olympics.
I also found it fascinating that the tattered photo copy was reaching me nearly two years after its publication. I am not sure what prompted the mailing at this particular moment, since our Green & Gold don’t play the Giants this year in the regular season.
The next day, the Sunday New York Times ran a full-page feature chronicling all 27 of the Yankees World Series titles, and then on the facing page ran a small story about Chicago’s legendary inability to nail down a World Series crown in more than 100 years. That, I presume, had to sting a little, from the juxtaposition and timing, if nothing else.
And then they had to push it a little by implying that the Cubs could conceivably lift the infamous curse by inviting Steve Bartman throw out a first pitch or maybe coach first base. Ouch!
From what I recall of that debacle – and our own National Convention’s quasi-serious invitation to Bartman to show up at the Chicago National two years ago – that winds up being a kind of cruel taunting of both the Cubbies and Mr. Bartman.
Call me old fashioned, but I think we New Yorkers could have graciously celebrated yet another World Series triumph without feeling compelled to remind the beleaguered fans in Chicago that this is a particular bit of joy that the baseball gods have apparently conspired to deny them.
Geez, and me a Mets fan, feeling sorry for frustrated Cubbie lovers. Whoda thunk it?
Wednesday, November 11, 2009 4:31:02 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Ignorance may not be bliss, but it aint useless ...
Posted by T.S.
I got a chuckle out of a couple of things from the national sports arena over the last several weeks, events seemingly unrelated but in my view at least peripherally connected by one fairly significant element: the all-seeing, relentless video camera.
In the MLB postseason, the umpires were confronted with what seemed like an inordinate number of botched calls, evincing the usual cavalcade of breast thumping about how video review needs to come to the rescue here or cameras need to be installed behind home plate to handle the balls-and-strikes duties that now seem to be beyond the capabilities of mere mortals. Phooey.
This is one area where Commandant Selig and I agree completely. He’s against the kind of intrusion into the game of baseball that all the instantaneous camera review has brought to the NFL. And I’m pretty sure that he dismisses out of hand the idiotic notion of having cameras and computers call balls and strikes, as well he should.
I don’t think baseball needs hardly any tinkering in that area: the bulk of the uproar stems from the enhanced scrutiny that television gives from every possible angle and in mind-numbing slow motion. There seemed to be a lot of balls and strikes missed during the postseason, but I suspect most of that comes from having those graphics installed by the television networks that seemingly show up the umps as borderline clueless.
I don’t think they are; missed calls have been part of the human element of the game since the beginning, and while aggravating at the moment of occurrence, are probably more palatable than the fundamental alteration of our beloved game that would come from turning the umping duties over to technology.
And for those of you keeping score at home, I am convinced that the final pitch of Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series was a ball. So sue me.
The other event that prompted this blog was the soccer player from New Mexico who yanked another gal to the turf by her pony tail. I suspect this will be further examined in a separate entry, but I am convinced that the heightened scrutiny of multiple cameras and the ability to then install the images in cyberspace is a huge part of our outrage. The camera's knack for removing things from context and thus distorting our understanding obviously predates Rodney King from nearly 20 years ago, but the oppressive nature of the all-seeing magic eye is getting more onerous every day.
OK, and I concede it made me giggle. I'd suspect myself of being a male chauvinist pig if it weren't so retro.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009 3:10:37 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Thursday, November 05, 2009
Coping with a distorted view of Yankees dominance ...
Posted by T.S.
The first five World Series I can remember seeing even snippets of on television featured the New York Yankees squaring off against five different National League teams, none of which were my beloved Milwaukee Braves.
From 1960-64, the Yankees battled against Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, San Francisco, Los Angeles and St. Louis, and by the time the Cardinals upended the Yankees in Game Seven behind Bob Gibson, I was more than a little ready to see my National League guys tangle with anybody other than the Yankees in the Fall Classic.
And though I hardly consider myself the center of the universe, I got my wish. For the next three decades, the Yankees would win a total of four more pennants; admittedly, they would engineer a phenomenal streak of four World Series titles in a five-year span starting in 1996, but taken in the aggregate, it’s hardly been oppressive.
So why does it feel like I’ve spent a lifetime under Bronx Bomber dominance? I just realized it’s because I’ve read so much and spent so much time through our hobby linking with the Yankees’ ridiculous streak of 14 pennants in 16 years (1949-64) that I tend to distort what the impact has actually been.
A couple of other things I realized: I almost certainly shortchanged the modern Yankees in the Legendary Yankee Stadium book that our company released earlier this year. It wasn’t intentional, but more the result of us having a wealth of cards, memorabilia and stories from the earlier dynasty at our disposal. I did intentionally try to mitigate that a bit by including chapters on Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez, but I am probably still quite vulnerable to the underlying criticism.
And the final observation: despite the fact that enough small-market teams have managed to wiggle their way into the postseason to make crabbing about team payrolls seem kind of reactionary, I can’t shake the idea that having teams with $200-million payrolls playing teams with half or even less than that total is not a good idea.
Even if the vagaries of sport conspire to blunt the effect of those disparate salaries, it still ain’t right. I wouldn’t want to get on a airplane where the crew was paid 50 percent of what their colleagues were getting on a competing airline parked 500 feet away.
Probably just jitters over a Sunday afternoon flight in my future.
Thursday, November 05, 2009 4:56:57 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Wednesday, November 04, 2009
An homage to the King of the Wild Frontier ...
Posted by T.S.
I don’t typically interact with a lot of teenagers – usually limiting my exchanges to providing odd payment amounts at fast food restaurants in a kind of sadistic desire to watch their heads explode as they try to do math calculations in their heads – but I did run into one the other day and the subject of Davy Crockett came up.
I can’t remember why Crockett’s name came up, but I do recall that I was absolutely stunned the teen in question had no recollection at all who he was. Mentioning the Alamo didn’t help: there was no recollection of that, either, and when I tried to describe it he looked at me as though I was trying to pull a fast one on him.
This is not some screed about the quality of public education, but merely an acknowledgment of the usefulness of companies like Topps and Upper Deck mixing historical figures into some of the card offerings the way they have in recent years. Apparently, it’s much needed.
And it’s also a fairly transparent way of recounting the details of the apex of my amateur musical career – the modifier is wasted, since there has been no professional version – which took place nearly 55 years ago.
The youngster with the coonskin cap and the bow and arrow, as legend would have it in the O’Connell Family archives, allegedly sang the Ballad of Davy Crockett at a Madison, Wis., nightclub called “Smokey’s,” not far from the University of Wisconsin campus.
While the number of verses changes in the annual retelling, my 85-year-old mother has always insisted that the number was in double digits, and always intended to suggest that all possible verses were duly memorized and included in the rendition.
In researching for this blog entry, I was stunned to find out that there are actually 21 verses, which casts a bit of doubt over my mother’s power of recollection. For a guy who can’t remember what he had for lunch yesterday, that seems like an awful lot of memorization, though the abuses that I was to submit my limited number of brain cells to certainly hadn’t been a factor at age 5.
But mostly I just can’t believe that patrons in a restaurant/night club could sit there and listen to that much for that long. Alcohol can dull the senses, for sure, but that seems a bit extreme.
Wednesday, November 04, 2009 3:53:09 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Tuesday, November 03, 2009
A World Series with everything and then some ...
Posted by T.S.
I know it’s the first week of November, but there’s a part of me that doesn’t really want this World Series to end. Even with two teams involved that traditionally would pose rooting dilemmas for me because of my lifelong affiliation with the New York Mets, I gotta admit this one has been a doozy.
Obviously, that’s not particularly insightful, since I imagine that it’s a fairly widely held view. And I imagine that the television ratings have been strong as well.
But what I like best about it is that seems like so many classic story lines: kick-ass pitching, a red-hot hitter (think five home runs), a smidgen of controversy with a string of umpiring snafus, the usual flubs from the assembled throng because of the smothering media coverage, a heads-up play on the base paths from Johnny Damon that somehow has not taken place in the previous 100-plus World Series, and even a good old-fashioned slugger mired in a World Series calibre batting slump.
I don’t know if the parish priests had the good folks in the Diocese of Philadelphia praying for Ryan Howard’s resurrection as they did 57 years ago in Brooklyn for Gil Hodges, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me.
As I write this on the travel day back to Yankee Stadium, I can’t help but assume that Mr. Chase Utley is not likely to see very many decent pitches for the remainder of this World Series, but then I am kind of surprised that he’s been pitched to as much as he has anyway. I think I’d move Howard down the batting order a tad and put Jason Werth behind him for a bit more protection. I don’t typically offer advice to MLB managers, but I’ll make an exception for the Phillies.
I also got a chuckle out of the news that the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a three-quarter-page advertisement for Macy’s featuring the Phillies logo, the Commissioner’s Trophy and the phrase “Back To Back World Series Champions.”
The Yankees held a commanding but presumably not insurmountable 3-1 lead on the day the ad was printed in the paper.
This is not precisely the same thing as a magazine creating a cover image of Tom Brady and a 19-0 blurb a couple of years ago, but there are similarities.
Tuesday, November 03, 2009 3:42:35 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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