My column in Sports Collectors Digest is called “Out of Left Field,” which turned out to be a suitable appellation for a weekly literary effort that tries to look at things from a different perspective, but I have to concede that this blogging business has helped me poke around into odd corners that I might not have pursued in print.

   Thus I can pursue various pet peeves, like baseball announcers – posturing as savants proffering “inside baseball” gems to the great unwashed – who point out that after a player makes a great fielding play he frequently winds up leading off the next inning. Grrrrr. I want to throw something at the TV when they say idiotic things like that.

   It’s called “selective perception,” meaning the doofus announcer remembers those occasions where the player led off after a great play in the field, and ignores all the instances where it doesn’t happen. In truth, the chances of leading off after making a great play in the field are roughly 1 in 9.
Taking note of this in something as benign as Major League Baseball begs the question: this process of seeing only those things that reinforce our biases plays havoc with all sorts of important areas of daily life, from social issues to politics. It’s at least helpful to be vigilant, and what better place to practice than with numbskull TV analysts.

   And speaking of same, have you ever heard even one of them take note of this particularly galling trait? A player badly misplays a fly ball or a hit rolling under his glove, and when he turns around to chase it to the wall, does so with the same degree of urgency that I employ in emptying the litter box.

   I have some sympathy for the embarrassment involved: I botched a fly ball as a sophomore in high school and was brutally vilified by angry villagers with pitchforks and torches (and yanked by the manager), but, hey, I’ve gotten over it.

   And I know that the embarrassment is different for professionals, but I still hate it when they casually lope after the ball after their misplay, as if to say, “No big deal, there’s nothing to see here.” Meanwhile the base runner is going full tilt, and I am once again looking for something to throw at the TV.

   Here’s another thing I don’t ever recall one of those analysts mentioning: headfirst slides into first base. Obviously, I am talking about running out infield hits and the like, not diving back on a pickoff throw. No one will ever convince me that the maneuver gets the runner to the base more quickly than simply continuing to sprint; the normal, self-protective reflex to slow down during the dive assures that outcome. It winds up being nothing more than idiotic showboating. And again, I’m not talking about a Pete Rose dive into third on a triple, which can be useful in avoiding tags. In bang-bang plays on infield grounders, avoiding the tag is not typically an issue.



   And peripherally related, I got a chuckle out of a newspaper article that I read a couple of days ago that characterized Barry Bonds as a no-good bum that almost everybody hated and Henry Aaron as a wonderful guy that everybody liked.

   I chuckled because my guy Henry is getting a bit of the Maris-like revisionist history process that took place nearly 10 years ago when McGwire and Sosa were in the process of sailing past the old single-season home run mark of 61, held by Roger Maris, of course.

   Maris got wonderful treatment back then, and it could be noted that McGwire played a role in that, taking every possible occasion to offer respectful nods to the Yankee slugger who had died a dozen years before that and making an effort to include surviving Maris family members in the spotlight when the occasion presented itself. All the nice talk somewhat obscured the reality that Maris got really harsh treatment from the press and many fans at the time he broke Ruth’s record in 1961. Then the prevailing sentiment was that Mantle was a more worthy subject to break Ruth’s record; ironically, the arrival of Maris at Yankee Stadium in 1960 had helped generate some of that affection for The Mick as once-thorny press coverage of the great star turned softer and some of the spotlight – and attendant pressure – shifted to Roger.

   I see that same thing happening now with Aaron. Writers and TV pundits are making him out to be this warm and fuzzy old teddy bear, when, in fact, for much of the period after his retirement in 1976, he was regarded as a kind of a prickly personality, a notion perhaps heightened by his principled and unyielding stances concerning race relations and important civil rights issues.

   Remember, this was the 1970s, and the country was still sorting out a lot of “stuff” that seems like old news nowadays. I anguished that Henry wasn’t more beloved than he was at the time, but I won’t go so far as to rewrite the history books now.

   My greatest hope in conceding that the all-time home run status was going to have to be relinquished was that Aaron would get some much-deserved time in the spotlight once again, and I sort of like it that he’s being portrayed so positively now after a couple of decades of being either largely ignored or even occasionally scolded for espousing views that didn’t always sit well with the mainstream press.

   But let’s at least do everybody a favor and keep it “real,” as they say. None of that selective perception stuff.


   As I write this, our friend and columnist Marty Appel is in Israel helping out with the launch of the Israel Baseball League. The league opened last night with a game between the Petach Tikva Pioneers and the Modi’in Miracle at the Yarkon Sports Complex in Jerusalem.

   That information comes from the Sunday New York Times (June 24); I already knew Marty was there, since he’s one of our ace columnists and he e-mailed me several days before to tell me he would be out of town.

   It all sounds pretty cool to me: a six-team league plays an eight-week, 45 games schedule (seven-inning games). The players make $2,000 each for the season, and the play-by-play will be in Hebrew, with the inaugural game also being broadcast in English and shown on PBS affiliates in New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and West Palm Beach, Fla.

   A number of former major leaguers are on board as managers (Art Shamsky, Ron Blomberg and Ken Holtzman), plus former Red Sox and Expo GM Dan Duquette will serve as the league’s director of player development. Appel, arguably the most famous PR maven in the sports world, directs the public relations effort.

   About my only beef would be the planned home run derby to break ties, instead of playing extra innings. That doesn’t seem kosher to me.

   In Part Deux of my recent road trip, I flew from Providence, R.I., down to New York City for the June 5 Sotheby’s With SCP live auction at Sotheby’s on York Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Covering live auctions is one of the toughest things I do as a reporter because there’s a huge element of chance determining how much takes place with live bidders and how much is from absentee bids, online and over the phone.

  
   Fortunately for me, Pete Siegel of Gotta Have It in New York City turns up at all the major auctions. Siegel grabbed national media attention at auctions of the Mickey Mantle estate in 2004 and two years ago at Sotheby’s when he was the winning bidder at nearly $1 million for the sale contract that sent Babe Ruth from the Red Sox to the Yankees in 1920. He is arguably one of the most prolific collectors of Yankees memorabilia, much of which will ultimately be on display at his museum, details as yet to be finalized. In the meantime, he continues to acquire Ruthian treasures, for example, that would fit in any museum from Cooperstown to the Big Apple.
  
   “I purchased two of the small Babe Ruth photos from the tour of Japan, and in the afternoon we picked up the baseball that was signed by both Babe Ruth and Brother Matthias,” said an elated Siegel. “We are very happy to have that and it’s probably the only one in existence in terms of the history of Babe Ruth. If it weren’t for Brother Matthias (from the St. Mary’s School for Boys orphanage where Ruth was raised from age 7), Ruth might never have had an interest in baseball.”

   I always sit near the front at live auctions, hoping to be able to follow the live bidding in the room at least, which is something of a trick in itself. I had been to Sotheby’s auctions before, so I had seen Leila Dunbar in action at other sales, working as part of a rotation of auctioneers, but this time she handled the whole day. At just over 350 lots, that may not seem like such a big deal, but in this case it really was.
 
   In all my years of going to auctions, I can’t recall another where virtually every item got a slew of bids. It’s a little nutty to compare it to the Halper sale in 1999, since that was more like 2,500 items over seven days, but even that sale would have some lots that opened with an absentee bid, got a couple of bumps and then, bang.     In this one there was fierce bidding all the way through. There just weren’t any lots that seemed like they were phoned in, if you’ll pardon the expression.

   In a Gehrig-like performance, I never saw her make so much as a stutter, handling literally thousands of bids back and forth from the “book” in front of her at the podium, the phones, the Internet and the room. All of this accomplished while pushing her reading glasses back from time to time as they would relentlessly creep down her nose.

   And speaking of noses, I sneezed during the the middle of the second session and panicked for a moment, thinking I might have inadvertently bid on a Dave Cowens jersey, but Leila never missed a beat, and merely blessed me instead of assessing me with a $2,700 tab.
   Now that’s efficiency.

   The other reason I like to sit in front at auctions is to keep track of who shows up for the live bidding. SCP President David Kohler assured me there were celebrities bidding in the sale, but most of those were on the phone. Many of the top dealers in the country were in the audience, but the only other celebrity (that I knew of) was Jane Forbes Clark, the chairman of the board of the Baseball Hall of Fame, who quietly took a seat in the front row on the right side early in the morning ssession.
  
   Immediately after the sale of the Walter Johnson bat that was one of the highlights of the sale, five lots of Hall of Fame-related correspondence came up in Lots 107-111. The letters, which feature fascinating insight into the process the Hall used to encourage the players to donate items, included missives from the likes of Clark Griffith, Honus Wagner, Cy Young (3), Nap Lajoie, Tris Speaker, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, and Ford Frick.
  
   The five lots included more than a dozen letters from some of the greatest stars in the game who responded to museum planner Alexander Cleland’s inquiries about getting donations of memorabilia for the brand-new Hall of Fame. The letters are all dated in the 1930s and feature three from Ty Cobb, including one where he pointed out statistical errors concerning his career numbers. That lot inspired furious bidding that reached $27,000, with Clark prevailing as she did with all five lots, totaling $56,000.
  
   As serious fans are well aware, the Hall of Fame does not purchase memorabilia items for the museum but rather relies on donations from ballplayers and the collecting elite, both of which have come through to varying degrees of success over the years.
  
   “My grandfather founded the Hall of Fame, and these papers are important to my grandfather, and to the Hall of Fame in terms of being some of the original documents that began the Hall of Fame as we know it today.
   “The Hall is not bidding; I was bidding on them myself, personally, and of course I’ll put them on loan to the Hall,” said Clark.
   “As you know, the Hall of Fame does not buy artifacts,” she added.
  
   She also responded to a question about the origins of material that would have traditionally been saved by the museum. “We’re not entirely sure, but we think that when Mr. Cleland left, he took boxes of documents with him. And those have been, we think, with his family.
   “And we are very happy to get them.”

   Last leg of road trip, to our SportsFest Show in Schaumburg, Ill., to follow shortly.

   If readers are wondering if I have fallen off the edge of the universe they can be forgiven; I have been on the road for much of the past two weeks and for me that means I haven’t been able to keep up my blog. I fully realize that there are millions of people clever and computer literate enough to travel across multiple time zones, keep their blogs up to date, change the litter box and complete the wash and ironing, but I am not one of those people. I don’t even get Christmas cards from those people.

   Anyway, I was on a wonderful but exhausting road trip that sent me to the Mohegan Sun Casino in Uncasville, Conn., for Dick Gordon’s June 1-3 reunion of the 1967 Boston Red Sox, then on to New York City for the Sotheby’s with SCP auction that turned out to be the doozy you would expect. Then it was back to the wilds of Wisconsin for a couple of days and down to Chicago Friday night (June 8) for our annual SportsFest show, this time relocated to the Renaissance Schaumburg Hotel about 10 miles west of the former location in Rosemont, Ill.

   First things first: the casino, touted as the largest in the world, is easily one of the most spectacular I’ve ever seen. It’s actually two casinos at opposite ends, with all the shops, restaurants and theatres you’d ever want sandwiched in between 6,000 slot machines and all the usual other games of chance, and some not so usual.

   As might have been expected, Yaz was the star of the show, but he also turned out to be intent on putting the focus of the weekend on the team as a whole, rather then himself as the guy who had an absolutely unbelievable 10 days and the end of an equally unbelievable month, capping a year that was quite fairly dubbed “The Impossible Dream.”

   I hope I didn’t repeat this to Yaz, who, no doubt has heard the same refrain a couple of zillion times, but I never saw any ballplayer have a stretch even remotely close to what he did at the close of the 1967 season. Coming at what was nearly the apex of a pitching-dominant era, his numbers in that Triple Crown season were stunning, but what he did that September defied simply being distilled and defined by mere numbers.

   This was a time when you followed baseball in the newspaper; this was long before cable TV and ESPN, and there was one “national” game on  network television every Saturday afternoon. Fans listened on radio and read gaudy, hyperbolic accounts in the newspaper, meaning the listener or reader supplied much of the imagination needed to fill out the picture. To me, a 17-year-old kid still mourning the premature retirement of Sandy Koufax at the end of 1966, it seemed like Yaz got a hit almost every time he stepped to the plate in that final stretch. At the very least, he seemed to come through every time the game hung in the balance.

   Now, four decades (and several reunions) later, Yaz sits behind a table and dutifully signs for a dedicated legion of admirers, occasionally taking a drag on a politically incorrect Marboro Red that he would rest at the edge of the tablecloth between signatures. As an ex-smoker, I closely scrutinize actors in the movies as they fake their way through inhaling; it rarely looks real, though I can hardly criticize an actor for wanting to protect a set of lungs. For Yastrzemski, the act of smoking seemed as natural as that magnificent swing of his, and besides, Yaz is New England royalty, and even if smoking was verboten in those conference rooms, who is going to call him on it?

   Gordon, who orchestrated the reunion and the attendant activities along with another well-known East Coast show promoter, Mike Riccio, came up with a marvelous location for his event. I suspect the show area, with about 50 dealers and an area to the side for the player signings, was almost certainly one of the most elegant locations for a card show in a hobby/industry that traces its roots to your Uncle Ned’s garage or maybe a tiny room at a suburban Holiday Inn.

   On the Saturday night of the show, Gordon and Riccio teamed up with the casino to run a unique reception cocktail party and dinner after the close of the show. The casino invited about 200 high rollers to the party and then treated them almost as well as they treated the ballplayers: in one of the upper-level ballrooms, the players posed for pictures and signed stuff for nearly two hours, while all invited nibbled on high-end hors doeuvres like itty-bitty lamb chops and various and sundry things wrapped in bacon and such.

   It was really interesting to watch such a monied lineup wade around in the world of sports memorabilia and autographs, but despite their collective unfamiliarity with it all, they adjusted pretty quickly and efficiently. Though they had all gotten e-mail invitations to the event, they still found themselves improvising when it came to finding things for the famous Soxers to sign.
The casino had arranged for a camerman to take pictures of the high rollers with the various players and then promptly develop the photos so they could get them signed by the players on the spot. The most innovative effort came when the assembled snagged every home plate that was part of the centerpieces on the tables, getting every player .... starting with, who else, Yaz ... to sign the piece.

   In the frenzy (dignified but, uh, energetic), one lady with a raspy voice who sounded as if she might have been cheering too enthusiastically from the bleachers thrust a souvenir program in front of my nose. “Are you a Red Sox player from way back?” she asked a bit frantically, not wanting to waste a lot of time and effort if it turned out I was a mere mortal. For a nanosecond I thought about telling her I was Pumpsie Green, but realized the gag might have missed its mark, so I politely explained that I was a lowly fourth estater. I wasn’t necessarily upset that she had lumped me into a group generally 10-plus years older than I am; I get the same treatment at the local grocery store here in Iola, with the teenagers according me the 10 percent senior citizens discount, even though I am still a couple of years away from the official status.

   The use of the home plates gave me a chuckle because I found out from one of the waitresses (I love grilling the staff) that they were leftovers from a roast of Don Zimmer a couple of weeks earlier at the casino.

   That same night, Rich Little was performing in the theatre at the casino, with Chicago not far behind. I just mention that to show that our hobby doesn’t exactly have a monopoly on the nostalgia thing.
   More on Sotheby's and SportsFest to follow.