The Infield Dirt with T.S. O'Connell - Tuesday, June 29, 2010

   There was a report in the Washington Post about our newest Supreme Court Associate Justice, Sonia Sotomayor, taking part in the surrounding festivities of a Congressional Women’s Softball Game in early June.

   The game between female lawmakers and reporters was a fundraiser for a breast cancer charity, and the new Justice signed autographs for fans as she mingled in the congressional-side dugout. According to the Post, she would sign lots of stuff – programs, wristbands and T-shirts were mentioned – but balked at attaching her signature to a softball.

   “Oh, I can’t sign that,” she told them, “because of the baseball case.” She added that she would sign anything else – just not a ball.

   Sotomayor, as a federal district court judge in 1995, is widely credited with “saving baseball” when she ruled in favor of the players in the spring of 1995, ending the disastrous seven-month labor impasse that had so severely stained the game.

   President Obama took note of her role in rescuing the 1995 season, citing it as a landmark achievement as he announced her selection as a nominee to the high court.

   The Post story said that the new Justice didn’t precisely explain why she wouldn’t sign a ball, but the combination of her “because of the baseball case” quote and the historical context was more than enough to posit the surmise that she didn’t want a signed baseball with her signature showing up in an online auction.

   The intrepid Post reporter even got confirmation of that conclusion from a spokeswoman from the Supreme Court. I would have tried to contact the Court for the same kind of confirmation, but they haven’t exactly been taking my calls since I tried to get Clarence Thomas to take the Coke-Pepsi Challenge with me in 1991. I thought the restraining order was a little over the top, but I guess I can take a hint.

   Anyway, the Post story took the next logical step and went to the expert, Brandon Steiner of Steiner Sports Memorabilia, to ask what a Sotomayor-signed ball might fetch. Steiner opined that if there were only a couple, they might bring $599-$600 each; if she only signed one, it might go as high as $3,000.

   To provide some context for the uninitiated, he said a Babe Ruth ball sells for $75,000-$80,000; a Derek Jeter ball could be found on the www.steinersports.com website for all of $514.99.

   Ever the entrepreneur, he pitched his own idea for the new Justice: a limited-edition signing of, say, 500 balls that might sell for $50 to $100 apiece, with the proceeds going to charity.

   “We’d be more than happy to help her expedite that, by the way,” the Post reported Steiner as volunteering.

   I wonder if any of those Congressional knuckleheads now ostensibly playing hardball with Elena Kagan will think to ask her about her sports memorabilia signing habits. At least it would be something for which she could presumably provide a straight answer.

   Meanwhile, the Democrats await their turn in anticipation of tossing Kagan some of those very same softballs that her fellow Justice, Sotomayor, won’t sign.

   Golly, I love it when politics and the sports memorabilia hobby get all mixed up. Anybody want to buy my Pete Rose signed copy of the Dowd Report?

Tuesday, June 29, 2010 4:22:41 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Friday, June 25, 2010

Firing the manager is often excruciating nonsense ...
Posted by T.S.

   With the All-Star Game approaching, we obviously have entered that silliest of seasons when major league teams start unceremoniously whacking the manager as an ostensible means of jump-starting their particular moribund and presumably under-performing ball club.

   I’ve been annoyed by this ridiculous kabuki dance since long before I was old enough to articulate my dismay. There no doubt are times when offing the skipper is something that is required by circumstances, but I’d venture to say that only the tiniest of percentages of the annual firings would fall under that legitimate category.

   I guess what riles me most is all of the group participation that goes on to support this. Agitated readers froth in letters to the editor – or more precisely nowadays in online venues, and the ham sandwich brigade of sportswriters fulminate right along with them, everyone alternately retching and mewling about how the skipper can’t perform even the most rudimentary of tactical maneuvers.

   And so the manager gets fired and a new guy brought in and the cliches and platitudes get rolled out once again the same way your Uncle Ned and Aunt Louise go to the attic every year in early December and rustle up all the Christmas crap for the holiday season. The analogy is sound as far as it goes, but it could be noted that gathering up the ornaments and such is a more useful – even rational – undertaking than firing your baseball team’s manager is.

   Hardly anyone ever seems to bother to point out that all the swell things the GM is saying about the new guy are almost word-for-word what he said three years ago about the poor sap about to be kicked in the rump.

   Ultimately, I think the process is demeaning and embarrassing for everyone involved. If indeed the manager has turned out to be something less than originally advertised – it happens – then shouldn’t the guy who hired him get spanked in some fashion as well? That guy is getting paid to make those kinds of decisions.

   The merry-go-round approach to managerial hiring diminishes the genuine accomplishments of some of the truly great managers who somehow avoid the silliness for longer periods than the rest of the mere mortals.

   So the club is 18 games under .500 as the Home Run Derby festivities get underway, the manager gets dumped two days after the All-Star Game and the club suddenly responds by winning 11 of the next 14 games. Whoopee.

   In a game so exquisitely constructed to reward the application of long-term, sustained consistency and often excellence, firing the manager for shabby public relations reasons becomes the MLB equivalent of trying to teach a pig to dance.

   It doesn’t work and it supremely annoys the pig. And me, too.

Friday, June 25, 2010 3:04:24 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Jughead would love this Strasburg mania ...
Posted by T.S.

   Unless my cognitive abilities are even more impaired than I fear, I saw that those two amazing Stephen Strasburg cards were creating more market hysteria than we’ve seen in many a year.

   As I write this, the Strasburg Superfractor (I giggle every time I type that word) Red Autograph card is above $100,000, and the guy who paid $16,000 for the unsigned 1/1 Superfractor has decided to sell his after owning it for about a week or so. I just get the vapors when our hobby reaches such dizzying heights.

   And I can’t help but think back to the lawsuits that the card companies dodged maybe 10 years or so ago when it was alleged that what they were actually selling was more akin to lottery tickets than baseball cards.

   If I remember that bit of legal wrangling correctly, the card companies escaped a nasty mess by asserting that consumers (collectors) were getting precisely what they bargained for: baseball cards, with whatever intrinsic value that suggested, whereas people who buy lottery tickets ended up with zilch if the particular lottery ticket they bought ended up without any winners.

   That sounds like good lawyer talk, as they say, but it seems to me the picture of somebody buying a pack of baseball cards and finding something ostensibly worth $100,000 or more is a bit more compelling. See, I’m not protesting about what intuitively to me seems like insanity, since I understand to a degree about supply and demand and the effects of a kind of group hysteria. But I just can’t shake the similarly intuitive notion that spending that kind of money on something so recently manufactured is just an incredibly risky proposition.

   And I also keep thinking back to one of the last comic books I ever read as a kid, probably about 50 years ago or thereabouts. Jughead comes up with this grand plan to create the sheerest pantyhose known in all of the civilized world, which in this case amounted to nothing more than a black string that ran up the back of the legs. As I recall, he did very well with it, at least initially.

   For whatever reason, whenever I hear of new cards selling for the price of a Buick or even a small condominium in Little Rock, I think about Jughead.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010 4:11:39 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Guy wants the Super Bowl to come to Green Bay ...
Posted by T.S.

   I should have suspected this would happen when the NFL awarded the Super Bowl to The Meadowlands in New Jersey for 2014. Now, somebody has stepped up and urged that the NFL designate the 2016 Super Bowl – the 50th anniversary of our gala sports bacchanalia – for Lambeau Field in Green Bay.

   I am treading on really thin ice by writing anything snarky about such a fantasy, since I have lived and worked in Wisconsin for the past 17 years or so. If nothing else, the waitresses at my favorite Sunday morning breakfast place – each adorned in a different Packer jersey – might “accidentally” dump my cream of wheat onto my lap. However, I am pretty sure they don’t read my blog.

   An outside contributor pitched the idea of the Super Bowl for Lambeau in a op-ed piece on the front of the Opinion Section of this week’s Sunday Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Which means, I think, that it was done with a straight face.

   But the fanciful nature of the suggestion leaves me breathless, if for no other reason than it was made in a newspaper home-ported in a city with a domed stadium that might more conceivably be able to host such an event.

   If I read the piece correctly, the principal reasons would be two-fold: it would be a cool (literally) way to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1967 NFL Championship Game, more commonly lovingly referred to as “The Ice Bowl.” And the other principal argument why the NFL should award the game to the Frozen Tundra would be because they had established the precedent of sending the 2014 game to New Jersey.

   Since the jury is still out on whether that was a particularly adroit stratagem or maybe a world-class goof, I don’t know if basing your argument in that fashion is the best plan.

   The writer notes that more than half of the NFL Playoff games since 2002 have been played in temperatures of 50 degrees or colder. This I would regard as a fairly clever pitch, not unlike suggesting that Phyllis Diller and Sophia Loren might be similarly desirable choices for a blind date, since both are women.

   The guy, God love him, also tries to dismiss the anticipated concern about Green Bay having an adequate number of hotel rooms by noting that if Milwaukee were included in the discussion, there would be rooms aplenty.

   He apparently didn’t think that one all the way through to what might be its logical conclusion: if the Super Bowl were somehow awarded to Green Bay, you might have tens of thousands of fans traveling two hours to watch a game in 10 degree weather with a handsomely domed stadium blinking incessantly in the rear-view mirror where their hotel rooms were located.

   As a transplanted New Yorker living reasonably peaceably with the indigenous people of Wisconsin, I know I am opening myself up to some heat for suggesting this op-ed piece is quaint but ultimately silly, but I just don’t think it’s ever going to happen.

   But, of course, I was a little surprised by the Meadowlands decision, too.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010 1:53:44 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Monday, June 21, 2010

Oil-soaked congressman opines on the BCS ...
Posted by T.S.

   A Texas congressman the Associated Press described as “one of the most powerful advocates of a college football playoff system,” offered his view that the Big 12’s “brush with death might eventually help doom the BCS.”

   I’ll run the AP passages verbatim, in part because I wouldn’t want anything that the Hon. Joe Barton said misunderstood or taken out of context:

   “It’s not going to happen right away,” said Texas Rep. Joe Barton. “But the promise of renewed television riches that persuaded the Big 12’s major football members to reject overtures from the Pac-10 has shone the spotlight on the huge financial jackpot awaiting a playoff.
   “The reason the Big 12 stayed together is the commissioner was able to put together a deal that enabled Texas and Texas A&M to go from about $8 million-$12 million a year to around $20 million a year” apiece, the Republican said. “I don’t really have a dog in the hunt as to how the conferences ought to be aligned. But I do think this moves us toward a playoff because we now know where the money is.”

   He could have added – though it may have sounded a bit unseemly – that his vast and onerous responsibilities as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives may not permit him adequate time to devote his attention to truly significant stuff like the arrangements for a college football playoff system.

   Of course, there is that pesky oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that seems to be much in the news, and Rep. Barton offered up his street cred as a sage observer of that environmental disaster by apologizing to BP, which naturally makes him someone I want to listen closely to as he describes how we should deal with the thorny BCS Playoff question.

   The Associated Press took note of same by pointing out that Barton has introduced a bill that would make it illegal to market something as a national football championship unless every eligible team was given a fair opportunity to win it.

   One can presume that in the absence of such vital legislation – it’s not like our federal legislators have any other pressing problems in need of their attention – Barton could be counted upon to issue an apology to the duly maligned university that might be unfairly left out of the collegial postseason antics.

   Hey, this apology thing just might catch on. Maybe we can muster up something for Bernie Madoff, the gang at Wall Street or even Milli Vanilli. We have been awful tough on all of them, what with revoking – in order – his freedom, their illusory status as contributing members of society and their Grammy.

   I’ll leave the apology to Madoff to Sandy Koufax, but first thing tomorrow, I’m going to apologize to my neighbor, who ran over my cat last week.

   I owe him that much at least.

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Monday, June 21, 2010 2:22:00 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Sunday, June 20, 2010

Golf announcers leave much to be desired ...
Posted by T.S.

   I want to state for the record that my criticism of the various golf announcers covering the U.S. Open does not extend to Sean McDonough, whom I worked with 30 years ago when he was still an undergrad at Syracuse University and was helping out with the Empire State Games.

   But for the rest of those guys I have little more than bronx cheers.

   As I write this, Dustin Johnson is on the verge of winning the 2010 U.S. Open and their handling of his ascension into the spotlight has been barely short of laughable.

   I wasn’t even sure of his nationality until I went to the U.S. Open website. I watched most of the afternoon on Saturday, an extraordinary but occasional level of commitment to golf spectating that is predicated by things like Tiger or Phil being in the running, broadcast times, etc.

   Unless I dozed off, it didn’t seem like the announcers told us much of anything of substance about him, other than constantly repeating the pithy assessment of Johnson’s caddy that attested to his unflappable nature. That repetition was annoying all by itself; besides, I never have to worry about who is or isn’t getting flapped out on the course, because we have Johnny Miller available to somberly notify us when anybody has actually choked.

   I didn’t necessarily want an ABC Sports, Jim McKay style homily, but a few actual tidbits might have been nice, like his nationality, college, family stuff, etc. The only thing they did tell us was that he had won the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro Am earlier in the year.

   Oh, they did gush about how far he could crush the ball, but even that they bollixed up by offering little more than locker room hero worship blather. Besides, we could tell he was long by watching the balls zip down the fairway.

   Indeed, in those instances they would really hit their stride as they cooed about savage drives that seemed to roll forever on hard fairways. They might have even provided us with some actual distances about how long those drives were; you know, measuring them in yards. I understand that concept has actually been dabbled with for quite some time in professional circles.

   For much of the broadcast as Johnson’s remarkable day continued, the most they would offer would be the slyly equivocal suggestion that he just might be the next major star on the PGA Tour. I would have been more impressed if they had offered that a week before the Open rather than three days into it.

   If it turns out that Johnson really does have the right stuff to go along with his being “stupid long,” which I believe was a sterling compliment offered by Tiger, then the feeble handling by the announcers on Saturday is even more egregious.

   The other possibility is that his game is really well suited for Pebble Beach, where he has snagged a full 66 percent of his three tour wins. I’ve got a feeling he’s the real deal, what with being stupid long and all that alleged ice water in his veins and all, but we’ll know more tomorrow.

   Which is why I am posting this on Sunday morning when I should be in church.

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Sunday, June 20, 2010 5:16:15 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Friday, June 18, 2010

Mixing up my Rogers may not be a senior moment ...
Posted by T.S.

   The senior moments seem to be coming at a fast and furious pace these days, but as the rest of this entry will illustrate, I was having senior moments even before I was old enough to vote.

   This latest mea culpa comes from an earlier blog and my column in Sports Collectors Digest from June 25 when I was taking note of the 2010 inductees to the Baseball Reliquary’s Shrine of the Eternals.

   Listing the three newest enshrinees – Pete Rose, Casey Stengel and Roger Angell – I cheerfully pointed out that Angell had written the classic book The Boys of Summer. Duh.

   To say I know better is an understatement. The author of that remarkable book is Roger Kahn (pictured here), whom I have interviewed for SCD. And I read the book within a couple of years of its release in 1972.

   I have loyal reader Richard Zamoff of Washington, D.C., to thank for pointing that out, and I am sure a number of others spotted the goof as well. I haven’t got any good excuse for doing something so dumb, in large part because I don’t much care for excuses.

   I may be able to take some comfort in knowing that I am not alone in having the occasional spaced-out moment, nor is there convincing evidence that this is related to advancing age any more than it might be to my general state of confusion.

   I read a short piece on the ESPN website from one of their megastar authors – I think it was Rick Reilly – who told this story about an anonymous author who had been doing a book tour of two cities per day, and doing it without such niceties as a tour escort.

   As Reilly told it, the guy would get to a city, rent an economy-class car for the day and start hitting the bookstores to sign copies, etc. He flew into Indianapolis, rented the car and started driving away from the airport when he realized he LIVED in Indianapolis and had his very own automobile residing in the long-term parking lot. I liked that story; I could do that.

   And now to my evidence that my gaffes are probably unrelated to aging. Five or six years ago I was in Stevens Point, Wis. (yes, home of Larry Fritsch Cards), and spotted the place where I had occasionally taken my dry cleaning.

   With a well-soiled winter coat in the back seat, I turned into the parking lot, grabbed the coat and hustled into the facility. I flung the coat on the counter and asked how much it would cost to dry clean it.

   “We can’t dry clean it,” said the clerk. I was instantly on guard, afraid that she was going to say it was too soiled and beyond redemption. “Why not,” I came back with.

   “Because this is a copy center,” she replied without a hint of condescension. And I looked around and, sure enough, it was a copy center, with huge Xerox machines and the like and boxes of multi-colored paper stacked to the ceilings. It seemed pointless at that point to argue with her.

   In my defense, the building had been a dry cleaners several years previous.

   And one more, from 1971, when I was all of 21 years old and one of 30,000 or so servicemen working at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Getting off work at about midnight, I proceeded to look for my car in the vast Pentagon parking lot for the better part of 40 minutes, at which time I realized that I hadn’t actually driven to work that day.

   So I called the same guy I had car pooled with the previous afternoon, and I can’t remember if he thought it was funny to pick me up at 1 a.m. or not. Probably not.

Friday, June 18, 2010 3:10:30 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Wednesday, June 16, 2010

I dont like soccer and you cant make me ...
Posted by T.S.

   I suppose we go through this tiresome ritual every four years or so, but for some reason the annoyance factor has been heightened this year. It’s World Cup Soccer (I know they want me to say, FIFA World Cup Soccer, so naturally I refrain, just as I won’t say all the corporate garbage names attached to otherwise MLB-worthy stadia): we’re supposed to like it – or at least watch it – I guess because so many other millions around the world are so thoroughly enthralled. Not me.

   As I said, this year seems more onerous than usual, with the seeming nod to political correctness insisting that so many hundreds of millions of glassy-eyed soccer enthusiasts (I also refuse to call it football, much as I will not refer to gasoline as petrol) can’t be wrong.

   The unmistakable implication is that those who cannot embrace this marvelous game – remember, feet only; no hands, please – must be philistines of the first order. Or maybe xenophobes with that peculiarly American taint exacerbated by our quaint affection for baseball, basketball and the actual game of football.

   I don’t like soccer. There, I’ve said it. And not just said it, but put it down in typography of a fashion, so there’s ostensibly a record. I don’t begrudge others their fanaticism about it, and I may even understand it a bit (the fanaticism, that is, not the sport), but I don’t want to watch it. And you can’t make me.

   I really haven’t got a clue why the needling is more strenuous this year; maybe it’s because the World Cup is being contested in South Africa, the land where political correctness, self righteousness and hypocrisy blend into a kind of creamy consistency.

   God knows soccer doesn’t seem to catch on in this country in the traditional professional sense where we like our spectator sports, but I am aware that it has its adherents at the scholastic level. And that’s good, because I concede that it’s a helluva a lot more exercise than almost any sport I can name this side of water polo, which was once my favorite sport until I read the appalling statistics about how many horses drowned every year.

   As to the other widely employed argument that we ought to like soccer because so much of the rest of the world does, I say, phooey. The rest of the world is similarly fanatical about a whole bunch of other things – think crappy food, repressive religions, the metric system, rainbow-colored currencies and driving on the wrong side of the road – and I won’t have anything to do with that stuff, either.

   My final argument is that a sport that prohibits most of the players from using perhaps their most prominent and adroit appendages (no smirks, please, I mean their hands and arms) is just silly.

   I do, however, like the colorful uniforms and applaud the fact that the sport can be played by vast millions who don’t have the financial wherewithal that might be needed for, say, golf or yachting.

   Now there’s a sport I can really get behind, and not just because the cup is more properly named after just us, rather than the whole dang globe.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010 3:08:58 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Tuesday, June 15, 2010

An Initial Public Offering of a baseball card ...
Posted by T.S.

   If old-timers like Warren Spahn and Lew Burdette had some inkling about the baseball card business in the 1950s, it was probably predicated on the idea that this was a diversion for children without a great deal of gravatas beyond that. Remember, in the 1950s, the Topps baseball card was in the process of becoming an American cultural institution and a rite of passage for several generations of young boys, but it wasn’t there yet.

   Teammates Spahn and Burdette approached the annual photo shoot with the Topps photographer with enough whimsy for the antics mentioned previously, which may have been a reflection of the overall import of the moment. Players received a welcome but hardly princely sum of $125 annually for appearing on a Topps baseball card, or could opt instead to pick out some swell prizes from the Topps gift catalog.

   Contrast that to today when the now New York City-based Topps rolls out an initial public offering (IPO) of an eTopps card of pitching phenom Stephen Strasburg.

   His first eTopps Major League card was limited to just 1,999 at a price of $8 each. I am hardly an expert in this kind of thing, but presumably that figure will be gobbled up long before the alleged deadline of June 20. I assume the 1,999 cards are already accounted for as I write this.

   Ah, it’s a serious business now. The initial Strasburg rookie card that was made available through Topps’ Million Card Giveaway redemption program the night of his debut was a mainstream media sensation, only days after his Bowman Chrome SuperFractor sold for more than $16,000. The company is also selling autographed Strasburg memorabilia on its website and released a minor league card of Strasburg in its eTopps line, featuring him in a Harrisburg Senators uniform.

   I would typically be shaking my head in amazement at such data, but now I just applaud the fact that the hobby is getting such widespread positive attention.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010 4:13:15 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Monday, June 14, 2010

Mischief with 1959 Topps article was intentional ...
Posted by T.S.

   (Note: I've been out of town since last Wednesday, off to Sacramento, Calif., for a college graduation of a family member, but I should have mentioned those plans in my blog last Tuesday.)

   As readers can probably imagine, I had more fun writing the 1959 Topps Baseball story a couple of weeks back then just about any story I’ve done for Sports Collectors Digest. Since 1959 is my favorite set, I also had fun grabbing more than 150 cards from my collection and arranging in various patterns for the page layouts in the June 18 issue.

   But like so many stories I do, I would have liked to have spent a lot more time in preparation, in this case at least three or four times as much, but alas it just isn’t possible.

   There’s been a good deal of feedback coming in from that article, including some valid criticism that I’ll mention here, along with a bit of mischief that I intentionally undertook. I do that sometimes.

   Reader David Ladd (letter appears in the Feedback section of this issue) noted quite fairly that if I were going to discuss “Flexichromes” so extensively, I should have pictured some of them in the vast array of 1959’s included in the feature. That’s the valid criticism; I did picture several of them, but maybe I should have pointed out which ones they were, forgetting sometime that the “peculiar” and “odd-looking” nature isn’t necessarily readily apparent for everyone.

   For the record, high-series Flexichromes of Jim Coates and Joe Koppe appear on the cover image, and others (not high series) of Dutch Dotterer and Jim Owens appear in inside pages.

   Ladd’s other observation was that bit of intentional mischief I alluded to. He notes that I talked about Ted Williams and Maury Wills being missing from the 1959 set, then correctly points out that I pictured what appeared to be 1959 cards of both of them. Guilty as charged.

   I was just trying to have a little fun with the readers, and several – including Ladd – have spotted the chicanery. Ladd referenced two cards, but there were actually three: a high-number All-Star style Ted Williams on Page 50, a regular-issue Wills card on Page 51 and a regular-issue Williams on Page 52.

   All three cards were created by the now-nearly-legendary-himself Keith Conforti (www.vintagecardtraders.org/virtual/pseudo/pseudo.html), and I was delighted to be able to slide them into the story. And in my defense, I had planned all along to make the identification in a subsequent issue of SCD, but didn’t want to do it in that June 18 issue.

   He also noted quite fairly that I should have pictured the semi-infamous card of merry prankster Lew Burdette where he had traded gloves with his buddy Warren Spahn and posed as a left-hander. That was one that just slipped past me, much as the original paste-up managed to sneak past the Topps proofreaders after Lew snookered the photographer. I had pulled out a Burdette card to be included in one of the seven pages of color photos, but it just got lost in the shuffle.

   Burdette, who like Spahn I have interviewed a couple of times, would presumably have winked at my error.

Monday, June 14, 2010 3:48:23 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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