Ever since Ted Williams turned up missing in the 1959 Topps set (and then again MIA in 1960), I have been fascinated with the historic details surrounding his dealings with Topps, Fleer and later, in retirement, with Upper Deck.
   In 1959, it was just bothersome at first, wondering where Williams’ card was as each series came out and he was nowhere to be found. By the time you got to the last series and realized he wasn’t going to be in the set, it was way too late.
   I am a little vague on it, but I don’t think I bought many packs of the high series. I base that observation not necessarily on memory, but simply on the condition of the high numbers in my 1959 set. Like so many collectors, those final 66 cards aren’t quite as snappy as the first 506, presumably because, even when I upgraded many years later, I didn’t necessarily pay top dollar all the time.
   Anyway, it was a real treat to get a call from Alan Machado of Fall River, Mass., several weeks ago. He explained he had won a number of audio tapes in an eBay auction, and found a tape apparently from 1963 where Ted Williams talked about his exclusive contract with Fleer that kept him out of the Topps issues during his final two years in the game (1959 and 1960).
   The cardboard box that the reel-to-reel audio tape came in is dated 1963, with a notation that it was recorded at Williams’ baseball camp in Lakeville, Mass.
   The tape, seemingly a rehearsal for radio spots, includes Ted reading scripts about baseball nicknames and a kind of lame joke about Lou Gehrig’s four-homer game in 1932. Much of it is also behind-the-scenes chatter (and a Williamsesque dose of profanity) that includes mention of the Jimmy Fund and Ted’s salty but clearly-in-jest grumblings about the machinations of recording numerous scripts.
   “I don’t read too goddamned good, anyway,” he groused at one point. “Christ, if it’s going to be that difficult,” he moaned about the various maneuvers envisioned to get all the scripts done, never actually finishing the thought. It’s all done in a good-natured fashion, and none of the profanity seems like anything other than vintage Ted Williams talking in the rough-edged manner that was part of his trademark persona.
   Most of this banter took place “off mike,” in instances where he would have assumed it would all end up on the cutting room floor. Ted’s musing about Fleer and Topps was likely given as a means of providing background to the others in the room helping with the production. Machado theorized the scripts could have been for radio segments for a show sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. There was no discernible context provided to explain why Ted suddenly launched into a dissertation about the two card companies.
   “I am the greatest benefactor of a new company (Fleer) coming into the bubblegum business than any other athlete,” Williams said.
   “Fleer and Topps are the ones that are arguing back and forth,” he continued. “One chewing gum company (Topps) has cornered all the ballplayers. They contact each individual player, who then signs an exclusive contract for $100, giving the company the right to feature the player.
   “Fleer came to me first. This is the second year I haven’t played. They came to me in 1959 and said, ‘If you’ll sign with us, we’ll give you $500.’ In the meantime, I’d already signed with Topps for $400,” Williams recalled.
   “They said, ‘We’ll give you $1,000 if you’ll sign with us for your last year.’ I told them I had signed with Topps, but I wasn’t an exclusive because it wasn’t very much money to start with,” he added.
   Williams, who would occasionally refer to the company as “Flairs,” was more than a little animated about the topic, despite grousing about being put in the middle of the wrangling between the two companies.
   “Topps didn’t tell me this, but they sure as hell didn’t want anybody else to get me, and I was one of the few ballplayers who hadn’t been signed up with Topps.
   “And Topps said, ‘We’ll give you $1,000 for two years.’
   “I went back to Fleer and told them Topps wanted to sign me up for two years, and they said they would give me $1,000 (per year) for three years.
   “And it kept going back and forth until I finally ended up with Fleer, out of Philadelphia, for five years for $12,500 ... $2,500 a year. And I’m still getting that for three more years.”
   Nothing on the audio tape conflicts with what I had ever learned about Ted’s defection from the Topps camp following the 1958 season. Sy Berger told me years ago that Ted simply came to them and explained about a substantial offer for an exclusive arrangement with Fleer, and Topps simply stepped away to allow Williams to get the windfall in the waning years of his career.
   I know the money sounds like chump change now, but $12,500 was an extraordinary amount at a time when players, even the top players, got a couple of hundred or even less for the rights to use their likeness on a baseball card. Players could also select “lovely prizes” from the Topps catalog, often winding up with a new washer or dryer for their efforts. And we wonder nowadays why people look back at the 1950s and early 1960s with such unabashed nostalgia.
   It was even more noteworthy since Fleer wasn’t producing a set with contemporary players. They made the “Life of Ted Williams” set in 1959, with the hand-colorized photos giving the issue a soft-focus feel that seems positively charming a half-century later but was merely mystifying for youngsters at the time.
   Serious collectors are aware that the 80-card “set” includes one card that is extraordinarily difficult to find, and brutally expensive when you do. Card No. 68, “Ted Signs for ’59,” was withdrawn from production because the other guy in the picture, Boston GM Bucky Harris, was under exclusive contract with Topps. It’s also worth noting that, because of its scarcity, the No. 68 card has been counterfeited and is thus deserving of a certain amount of wariness from collectors.
   Ted would appear in two more Fleer issues, old-timers sets as the hobby referred to them in the earliest days, in 1961 and 1962. By the time Fleer got around to trying a set with current players in 1963, Ted was long since retired, though, as he noted, still drawing a good chunk of cash from the Philadelphia-based card company.
   Ironically, Ted would wind up in the middle of yet another tug of war over exclusivity with the card companies, almost three decades later. In 1994, Topps reprinted its classic 1954 set, but ran afoul of Upper Deck, which at the time had an exclusive deal with Williams.
   Topps reprinted the set in 1994 without the two Williams cards (Nos. 1 and 250, the first and last cards in the set), creating immediate howls within the hobby. Admittedly, I was the one doing the most howling, driven even to the point of poetry.
   Though I assume the impetus for the two rival card companies to huddle up and offer a unique resolution of the problem was something other than my ripoff of Franklin Adams’ “Tinker to Evers to Chance,” the result was an unprecedented collaboration between the card companies.
   Upper Deck produced the two missing Williams cards, then added a “Card That Never Was,” a Mickey Mantle card that was designed in the style of 1954 Topps (Mantle did not have Topps cards in 1954-55).
   All three were inserted in a rather austere, verging on unremarkable, “old timers” set that Upper Deck produced that year called “All-Time Heroes.” As I noted at the time, the three inserts were destined to be expensive on the secondary market, and now 14 years later, probably would run you $200 or more for all three, with the Mantle card easily the most expensive of the group.
    Still, I kind of like the irony of Upper Deck producing cards needed for the completion of a Topps set. Seems like we’d be looking at a serious interval before that kind of thing happens again.

   It’s going to be fashionable and easy to pounce on Barry Bonds over the coming weeks and months, but I have this feeling that startling number of current and retired players' names released today in the Mitchell Investigation is going to take some of the wind out of our otherwise righteous sails.

   How do we continue to vilify Monsieur Barry now that the report has revealed that he was just one of so many apparently on the juice during that giddy stretch when home run inflation was at its peak? The enormity of the list of names has to give some pause to Barry bashing, that and having so many other seemingly Cooperstown-bound folks lumped in with him.

   It’s certainly not fashionable – nor politically correct – to theorize that back in the 1990s when major leaguers were seeking better stats through chemistry that most of them weren’t the least bit hesitant about what they were doing. I don’t think they gave it much of a second thought, and firmly believe that they only reason they appear to do so these days is because of all the pressure from hypocritical politicians (forgive the redundancy), similarly disingenuous MLB officials and a hyper-agitated mainstream media.
   By the way, that last group deserves as much derision in this tawdry affair as almost any other. It’s understandable why Major League Baseball itself pretended that everything was hunky-dory while their major stars tripled their hat sizes and home run figures, but where were the sportswriters? There were exceptions, of course, but this was hardly the fourth estate’s finest hour.


   Collectors have been rewarded with some real chuckles in recent years with “mistakes” that have been – depending upon your level of cynicism or gullibility – either innocent errors on baseball cards that conjured up recollections of their legendary vintage counterparts or were guerrilla marketing tactics run amok.
  
   Choose either A or B, but don’t get too attached to the idea, because one suspects that the appropriate licensing agencies (MLB and the Players Association) are going to put the kibosh on all of it pretty quickly.
  
   Last year Topps took it to another level, as the cliche goes, by inserting George Bush and Mickey Mantle into the grandstands to admire Derek Jeter’s follow-through on his regular-issue card. As might have been expected, it got hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of attention from mainstream media outlets, leaving one to assume that a certain Carlsbad, Calif.-based competitor was mightily miffed.
  
   Perhaps it’s a coincidence (just as the rotation of the Earth and the arrival of the sun in the east every morning may be coincidence), but in recent weeks, Upper Deck apparently produced “errors” that include an Alex Rodriguez card seemingly misnamed “Ex Rod,” another with a caricature of someone who looks suspiciously like Disney’s Michael Eisner, CEO of Topps’ new parent company, and a third that features an asterisk on a piece of a baseball (details – and images – are featured in this week’s News Brief section on page 8).
  
   Last year I got a kick out of the Topps Jeter card, and appreciated all the national media attention, but I feared at the time that the odd precedent of winking at intentional “errors” from the card companies’ design crews was going to run into problems eventually.
  
   As much fun as it can be, you just have to resist the temptation because escalation will eventually take you into murky waters. It’s not entirely dissimilar to what magazine editors face in resisting the urge to slip in cutesy headlines or subheads with naughty double entendres.
  
   Geez, what does it say about all this when a (formerly) mischievous rascal like myself becomes the voice of reason in this debate?
  
   Don’t answer that. It was rhetorical.


   My favorite quasi-public institution, the Baseball Hall of Fame, has a problem. An organization with talented, dedicated and passionate hierarchy and staff, seemingly from top to bottom, finds itself struggling to come up with a Veterans Committee voting procedure that effectively represents the Hall and its admittedly lofty ideals. We ain’t there yet.
  
   With the new streamlined Veterans voting in place for the first time, two managers (Billy Southworth and Dick Williams) and three executives (Bowie Kuhn, Barney Dreyfuss and Walter O’Malley) were voted in. Marvin Miller, the man who probably had the greatest impact on Major League Baseball this side of Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson, didn’t make it. Wasn’t even close.
  
   That’s an embarrassment not to the Hall of Fame, but to the lunkheads who put personal animus above their responsibility to vote fairly. If I were one of the three who voted for Miller, I would want to make my vote known rather than to allow anyone to think I had botched the equivalent of a slow ground ball back to the pitcher.
  
   I am usually the most cynical person on a wide variety of issues that come up, but in this instance, I clearly am remarkably naive. I am always stunned when I meet resistance to the idea that Marvin Miller is a slam-dunk candidate.
  
   I have never heard so much as one cogent, to say nothing of convincing argument, why he should be excluded. It’s almost always just people who equate the millions of dollars paid to modern players as the result of Miller’s alleged deviousness and (I buy this part) his ability to consistently hornswaggle the rubes from the owner’s side that he faced across the negotiation table.
  
   Ironically, the people who nixed his election indirectly make the case for why their vote is cosmically flawed: they concede Miller’s remarkable impact on MLB, but insist out of a small-minded obstinance that it be used as an argument to keep him out of the Hall rather than to induct him. How sad and pathetic.
  
   I have enormous sympathy for the HOF officials, many of whom I know are supportive of Miller’s candidacy, starting with HOF Vice President Joe Morgan, perhaps Miller’s most well-placed, influential and ardent supporter. But they are stuck for the moment, and Miller, 90, seems to have finally lost a round so late in the bout (ugh, a boxing metaphor) that he may never live to see a faulty decision overturned.
  
   I am not even particularly bothered by the yucky absurdity of Miller foils Bowie Kuhn and Walter O’Malley getting the nod on a ballot that so thoroughly disses Miller. I worry far less about who gets elected than I do about the disgraceful exclusion of an elderly icon who deserves to see his plaque in Cooperstown in his lifetime.
  
   Our own ace columnist, Marty Appel, was Kuhn’s friend and biographer, and he makes a great case for the HOF election of the former commissioner. The Miller snub is even unfair for Kuhn, because it takes what ought to be a celebratory moment and turns it into yet another controversy between the two men.
  
   For the diehard Brooklyn fans who still cringe at the mention of O’Malley’s name, these voting results are little more than one more Dodger fan (Miller) getting hosed one last time; O’Malley gets yet another last laugh.
  
   Maybe, but Miller’s successor as executive director of the Players Association, Donald Fehr, gets the last word:
  
   “It was very disappointing to learn this morning that, once again, Marvin Miller was not elected to the Hall of Fame. Over the entire scope of the last half of the 20th century, no other individual had as much influence on the game of baseball as did Marvin Miller.
  
   “Because he was the players’ voice, and represented them vigorously, (he) was the owners’ adversary. This time around, a majority of those voting were owner representatives, and results of the vote demonstrate the effect that had ... In the last vote, Marvin received 63 percent of the votes, this time he got 25 percent. By contrast, Bowie Kuhn received 17 percent of the votes last time, but got 83 percent this time.   
  
   “The failure to elect Marvin Miller is an unfortunate and regrettable decision. Without question, the Hall of Fame is poorer for it.”