For guys essentially paid to watch stuff as closely as possible and then report on what they’ve just seen, sportswriters can be a remarkably myopic group on occasion. Examples are fairly easy to come by, but rarely as stunning as the recent blather offered by the Ham Sandwich Brigade as Tiger Woods continued along an almost unprecedented winning streak that stretched all the way to last fall.

   As Tiger was running his winning streak to seven events worldwide, the sportswriters would occasionally allow themselves to muse about the possibility of Tiger turning in an undefeated season. Awww, geez, guys!

   I understand the underlying circumstances that make otherwise competent and rational people write silly things, but to even fantasize about something like that reflects pretty poorly on the writer, because it suggests he’s woefully unfamiliar with the elemental components of the game itself.
   (Tiger Woods artwork at right by Michael Joseph.)

   Even when Tiger Woods has been at his best (which we may well be witnessing at this moment), it’s still just goofy to suggest that anyone could win every tournament that they played in over the course of a whole season. I would contend that there has never been another player who dominated his sport as profoundly as Tiger has, but there are simply too many variables in the sport for a perfect season to be something that’s rationally considered.

   A twig, a bad bounce, the wind, a divot, the click of a camera at the wrong time, indigestion, you name it: even a player as dominant as Tiger has to face so many of these that talk of perfection is nutty. It may be flattering, but I’d be more inclined to think it does a disservice to the player, because it takes what would have already been probably unrealistic expectations and moves them up several notches to absurd and beyond.

   And at the same time that the golf scribes were falling all over themselves in cannonizing Woods, he was then roundly excoriated because he cussed out a photographer who clicked in the middle of his downswing. I know, I know, the fact that Tiger hauls in $100 million or so a year makes the public apply a higher standard, but if you think about it, it’s pretty unfair. We applaud Woods on the one hand because of his almost cosmic focus and intensity, then rush to spank him when those very same traits occasionally spill over when things don’t go his way.

   I certainly understand a parent’s discomfort if Tiger says naughty words that could rattle the youth of America, but just as certainly I understand the sacrosanct and symbiotic relationship between profanity and the game of golf.

   Of course, I myself have never actually had to resort to cussing on the course. And I never lie, either.

   I came across a couple of news items recently that caught my attention in part because of the relevance to our hobby but also because of the link they had to each other.

   One report told how the Major League Baseball Players Association was at least taking the preliminary steps to examine whether MLB owners were somehow acting in-concert in their dealings with free agents this spring.

   Around the same time came news reports that union head Don Fehr was wondering about the status of one Barry Bonds, free agent extraordinaire, who has seemingly been left out in the cold, at least for the moment.

   All of this neatly coincides with the SCP Auction of the baseball that just might turn out to be the final home run of Bonds’ tumultuous career. That, of course, would also make the spheroid in question the one that marks the all-time home run mark.

   That auction closes on April 12, and SCP officials have speculated that the ball could sell for as much as $1 million. That would be a nifty hobby development, but it amazes me that the high rollers in this kind of situation would roll the dice on paying big bucks for a baseball that would seem to have some potential of becoming a rather pedestrian artifact (relatively speaking) should Bonds somehow return to the ballpark.

   I don’t pretend to have any inside knowledge on the matter, but I still have an unshakable belief that Barry is going to wind up playing somewhere this summer. I know he’s a major thorn in Bud’s rib cage, but it’s one of those odd areas where I still cling to a good deal of naivete, all evidence to the contrary.

   There’s very little precedent for a situation where a ballplayer had so much left in the tank but wasn’t allowed the opportunity to use it. Obviously, the old coot can’t run much anymore and has morphed from being a Gold Glover in the outfield to a defensive liability that probably can’t be tolerated by a National League ballclub.

   But with that goofy designated hitter thingy in the American League, he’s doesn’t really have to be able to run all that much or bend over for those pesky ground balls that leak past the infield. He just has to swat the occasional home run, and I suspect that he’s still capable of doing just that.

   I want to believe that our overriding sense of fairness wouldn’t permit MLB to blackball Barry when he hasn’t really been found guilty of doing anything that maybe a couple hundred of his contemporaries didn’t also do, admittedly to wildly varying degrees of success.

   Bonds is under indictment for perjury and obstruction of justice (indictment may be amended), but he hasn’t been convicted of anything and ought to get the benefit of the doubt until he is.
   Assuming that MLB would – as a group – decide not to employ him despite obvious reasons to do otherwise probably does a disservice to MLB officials and team owners. I won’t presume that those folks would be inclined to collusion; the Union and media watchdogs will doubtless be on the job in coming months checking out just such a possibility.

   I think he wants to play. I think he’s going to play. Stay tuned.


   Barry’s godfather, Willie Mays, finds himself in the news within the narrow world of our hobby. Willie’s 1972 Topps “In Action” card recently sold for $8,100. It’s supposed to be illuminating to point out that it was a PSA 10, but for old-timers like me, it’s still a Neverland kind of moment.

   It’s almost cosmically irrelevant, but the card is one of the lamest ever created of Willie in his 22 years of appearing on Topps cards. Obviously, the $8,100 price tag isn’t predicated on the design purity or the graphic elements of the card, or even the attractiveness of the photograph. But, gee whiz, this is one of the all-time great ugly baseball cards, with Willie seemingly mired in quicksand on a baseball diamond, with some other guy’s leg in the background and yet another in the foreground. And like so many Topps photos from the 1970s, the lonely leg in the foreground is in focus, while Willie, ostensibly sliding into a base, is not.

   Sy Berger, the legendary Topps VP who helped design many of the great sets of the 1950s and 1960s and who “negotiated” with a couple of generations of ballplayers for the rights to be included on baseball cards, used to tell me how Mays almost continually crabbed about some of his cards. Like Mickey Mantle, Henry Aaron and Roberto Clemente, Mays, in fact, wound up on some of the greatest cards ever created, but if that 1972 Topps “In Action” card was one of his complaints, I gotta go with Willie on this one.

   I have not blogged for a couple of weeks, but at least for once I have a fairly good excuse: I’ve been on vacation. Actually took four days off (plus a weekend) for a golf tour in Alabama, doing a swing between Birmingham, Montgomery and Auburn along what is called the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail.

   I would never violate community standards of decency by subjecting readers to details of my golf game, but it was nice to get out of Central Wisconsin for nearly a week in the closing weeks of the ugliest winter  I can remember in my 15 years here at Krause Publications (now F+W Publications).

   I managed to immerse myself in the vacation spirit enough to get behind on my traditionally voracious consumption of daily newspapers, but I did see a copy of The Birmingham News on Saturday, March 8, and quickly noticed two things I really liked: pictures of Henry Aaron and Billy Bob Thornton on the front page, and a second picture of the all-time nonpharmaceutically enhanced home run record holder on the inside of the front page.
 
   Thornton was pictured atop the fold as the star attraction of the 11th Annual George Lindsey Film Festival at the University of North Alabama. I don’t know about you, but I just sort of liked the idea of a film festival named in honor of a guy who played Goober Pyle on “The Andy Griffith Show.”

   Henry’s front-page mention (and tiny photo) was to plug a contest coming in the next day’s paper that would have readers vote for Alabama’s Greatest Sports Legend. The Hammer was there on the next page, this time with wife Billye, attending the opening of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” at the Broadhurst Theatre in New York City.
  
   Now that’s my idea of a good newspaper.


   On the collecting front, I have started to piece together a set of the 2008 Topps Heritage Baseball issue, an undertaking I began primarily because of my fondness for the original 1959 Topps set.

   I’ve had a lot of fun over the years piecing together the Heritage sets, though I haven’t done every year. Topps is getting better at this Heritage deal every year, and that’s really saying something, because they nailed it almost from the beginning in 2001 with an issue that paid homage to 1952 Topps.

   The refinements over the years have mostly been nuances like matching colors and players with their counterparts in the original issues, something that really worked well with the bright color backgrounds of 1959 Topps.

   I know it’s a generational thing, but I can’t shake the idea that it would be more fun if the sets could be completed by buying packs (and boxes) rather than purchasing missing high numbers and short prints from dealers. The generational part is simply that the process of collecting has changed so much over the years, and the Heritage issues are genuine godsends for dealers in that they are huge draws for set collectors, a group that’s had a rough time of it in our hobby over the last 15-plus years or so.

   Still, you gotta admit I’m trying to adjust to new realities. Putting anywhere from $350-$400 or more into a new set takes some getting used to. For me, it’s jarring enough to make me end a sentence with a preposition.

   I got an e-mail the other day gently criticizing my decision to “have a little fun” with the ongoing steroid and HGH debacle, with the reader quite fairly noting that the devastation that ensues for both the game of baseball and the individuals touched by the scandal doesn’t seem appropriate for even subdued hilarity.

   Fair enough, but part of what I was trying to do with the Roger Clemens piece that dreamed up a Col. Nathan R. Jessup-like testimony was to offer my belief that athletes at that level didn’t really think using steroids or HGH was all that big of a deal, at least until the public uproar developed.

   I don’t think you could have so many players involved if the private attitudes about such use truly mirrored what is now politically correct condemnation of same. The enforced rigidity of political correctness annoys me big time, so I tend to push against it whenever I can, even in instances where my own opinion might substantially differ from what I appear to be defending.

   I don’t know if it’s clear or not, but I have a good deal of sympathy for Clemens, and to a lesser degree, even Barry Bonds. Regardless of the widespread condemnation that attaches itself to the idea of “cheating,” I can’t shake the nagging suspicion that the pair is being ganged up on.

   My favorite newspaper, The New York Times, has pretty clearly got Clemens outfitted for some kind of “Sombrero of Disgrace.” I don’t think anybody can look at the paper’s relentless coverage of the Clemens Saga without concluding that they want his scalp (Oops, even more politically incorrect). Heck, I’ve never been a Clemens fan, in part because I liked Doc Gooden instead, but I’m not sure what he’s done to warrant the avalanche that seems to be headed his way, aside from perhaps quite thoroughly bungling the public relations effort in the weeks after the Mitchell Report was released.

   There are only two possibilities: 1. Clemens is telling the truth, in which case he has been the victim of one of the great travesties of justice in our lifetime, with his reputation left in tatters right alongside his legacy in the game itself; or 2. Clemens is lying, in which case I could still suggest that the punishment already incurred and likely to follow is grossly disproportinate to the offense. Even if you decide that he must be flogged for perjury, it’s worth noting that if we are going to come down that hard on Americans who lie to Congress, it would at least seem less hypocritical if we were even remotely as outraged when the lying goes in the opposite direction.


   And speaking of political correctness, several weeks back, there was a thankfully brief media stir when a video made the Internet rounds showing Pedro Martinez and Juan Marichal at a cockfighting match in the Dominican Republic. The outcry was mercifully muted, in part because while the distaste for the enterprise is fairly uniform in this country, there was apparently some allowance made for the realization that it might hold a different sway in another culture.

   Still, it got me to thinking about my own checkered past, and thus prompted a bit of long-overdue confession. I am pretty sure the statute of limitations has long since expired, but I was present at a cockfighting match nearly 40 years ago in the jungles of the Philippines.

   It was Thanksgiving Day 1969, and at 19 years old I was prone to go along with whatever adventures were proposed, within limits. I had been in the Philippines all of six months or so, with another year to go. There had been a rather pronounced resurgence of violence against American sailors from the Communist Huks, a group that had originally resisted the occupation of the Japanese in World War II and had grew into a genuine insurrection from 1946-54. The Huks had re-formed as the Communist Party of the Philippines in 1968, and posed enough of a threat to unwary sailors on liberty in Olangapo City outside the Subic Bay Naval Base that the Navy had designated virtually anywhere outside the city as “out of bounds.”

   Thus our foray into the jungle that Thanksgiving held the potential of getting us into a good deal of trouble regardless of our role in the local sporting events. The final spot in the jungle was a good 20-30 miles beyond the narrow strip of seedy bars and hotels that served as perhaps the ultimate liberty destination for sailors of the 7th Fleet and GI’s on R and R from in-country duty in Viet Nam.

   It wasn’t anything fancy like the chaotic arenas in the videos, but merely a cleared area of the jungle. As I recall, there were maybe a couple of dozen spectators, no more than that, but I concede that copious quantities of San Miguel beer may have clouded the memory. It only lasted a few minutes, and was such a tumultuous affair with all of the screaming and shouting from the local enthusiasts that I can’t even recall whether I had bet on the winner or not.

   I do recall that we ate the loser, cooked right there in the jungle over an open fire. Tasted like chicken ... really tough chicken.