I’ve playfully chided our friends at the Topps Co. over the years about being so preoccupied with the creation of each year’s mountain of new sports cards that they have little time left to pay attention to all the historic cardboard ancestors from the 1950s and 1960s.

   It was never a genuine criticism anyway, because it quite correctly was their job to pursue the sales of new cards, as opposed to immersing themselves in the glory of the old ones. That was our job, or at least part of it.

   But when when the company created the unique Topps Vault seven years ago, even that tongue-in-cheek charge lost its currency. If you’ve never visited the “Vault,” (www.thetoppsvalut.com) you’re really missing something. It offers the kind of archival material that was featured in the famous 1989 Guernsey’s Topps Auction (more details in my column in the May 30 issue of SCD as part of the first installment of the Topps Proof series written by Keith Olbermann).

   One suspects that if Topps officials had known in 1989 that something called the Internet was around the corner, they might not have held the historic auction at all, preferring instead to sell their archival items on their own website, which is what they do now with the Topps Vault.

   In conjunction with the Olbermann Topps Proof series, Topps has donated three items from the “Vault” that will be included as some of the top prizes awarded randomly later this summer to readers who take part in the Survey (see our home page). The top prize is probably a 1993 Topps baseball card contract signed by Nolan Ryan, a three-year extension at a cool $75 per. The other two are the original black-and-white production photo used to create Pete Retzlaff's 1957 Topps rookie card, and a circa 1970 baseball card point-of-purchase poster touting Topps Baseball Bubble Gum Cards as “A Great Gift Idea for Kids,” with the company logo surrounded by a Christmas wreath. Despite the sort of icky pea-green and purple colors, it’s a wonderful piece of memorabilia, including the odd drawing of a baseball card, with no logo on the cap and the name on the bottom turned into hieroglyphics so that no additional royalty payments would be needed for its commercial use. And still you can tell it’s Bill Mazeroski.

   The items come with three COA’s from the Topps Vault, though it’s hard to see how such redundant authentication would be necessary. If you haven’t sent in your survey form, I urge you to do so. It’s easy and fun, and gives you a crack at these prizes and several others, most notably a Topps Proof plaque created by the incomparable Ernie Montella.

   And whomever wins the point-of-purchase poster should give me a call after he/she receives the prize. I’ve already come up with a cool idea about how to display it with about a dozen 1970 or 1971 Topps cards. The survey appears in this week’s issue of Sports Collectors Digest (June 20) with the second installment in the Olbermann Topps Proof series.


   This last item I included primarily because I just loved the image so much, along with my affection for all things billiards related. My colleague, Chris Nerat, turned this up, presumably an auction item from eBay, but I was fascinated by the charm of the photograph, most notably the inclusion of the hot babe dutifully watching the guy as he executes a masse shot. It reminded of the comically posed “action” shots painstakingly constructed by the Topps photographers in the 1950s and 1960s. If anybody else stood so close to a billiards table while somebody was in the middle of a shot, difficult or otherwise, he would have gotten his thumbs broken, but this winsome young lady – looking far more wholesome than any woman I’ve ever seen in a pool hall – presumably would get a pass on such an ostensibly inappropriate departure from normal billiards etiquette.

   The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran a story on Sunday quoting Henry Aaron as saying, “I still consider myself the home run king.” The occasion was a commencement exercise at Concordia University in Mequon, Wis., where Aaron had lived when he was a member of the Braves in the 1950s and 1960s before the team’s furtive scamper off to Atlanta after the 1965 season.

   Ever gracious, Henry was quoted saying all the obligatory nice things about the beleaguered Barry Bonds, and he was just as diplomatic in commenting on the $45 million the Brewers just doled out to Ryan Braun, calling the youngster “a tremendous ballplayer” while cheerfully noting that his first salary in the big leagues had been $5,000 a year.

   It’s heartwarming that Aaron seems to get the royal treatment these days, but it’s worth remembering that it wasn’t always so. Going back to his time in Milwaukee, Aaron seemed underappreciated by both National League fans in general and even to a lesser extent Wisconsin fans in particular. It was pretty common in the early 1960s to see magazine and newspaper articles noting that Milwaukee seemed a bit more enchanted with Eddie Mathews and Warren Spahn than they were with Aaron, a puzzling circumstance that could be attributed to explanations ranging from the benign to the more ominous.

   As a teenager back then, I took the precipitous decline in attendance at Milwaukee County Stadium as a personal affront to Aaron. Obviously, the passing of 40-plus years has helped me understand the drop-off was a wee bit more complicated than that, but the result was the same: the Braves scurried off to Atlanta and I was left to sort out the thorny question of team allegiance.

   The Journal Sentinel columnist, Michael Hunt, pointed out that Aaron could remember giving only one other commencement address, but that was apparently a good one: Harvard University. And he apparently has only one other honorary doctorate, from Emory in Atlanta. Once again, I was way behind the curve. I would have thought there had been dozens of addresses and a similar number of the ersatz diplomas.

   And I think I know where much of that came from, too. After he retired in 1976, Henry had a tolerable deal with Magnavox and not too much else as the all-time home run king. Though he largely steered clear of controversy both on and off the field for much of his career, by the time he hung up his spikes he was regarded as an outspoken critic on a number of topics involving the treatment of black ballplayers, and I am convinced that he paid the price in terms of post-career opportunities.

   I’m thinking President Obama will take care of all that early next year. How about Secretary of Defense? Aaron was a Gold Glover, after all.


    Jeff Fritsch sent me three baseball cards the other day, one of which is illustrated here. The cards were created recently as a tribute to his famous dad, Larry Fritsch, who died last December.
I have been buying cards from Larry Fritsch Cards for nearly 40 years, with orders going back to the 1960s, so it was a treat to see how Jeff had come upon such a perfect vehicle to honor his father. The three “In Memoriam” cards can be had by sending a SASE to Larry Fritsch Cards, 735 Old Wausau Rd., P.O. Box 863, Stevens Point, WI 54481, with donations accepted for the American Cancer Society or the Stevens Point Youth Baseball Association.

   If anybody ever deserved his own baseball card(s), it was Larry Fritsch. Nuff said.

   The Hall of Fame announced a couple of weeks ago that Jackie Robinson would be getting a new plaque at the baseball shrine in Cooperstown. It had been scheduled for unveiling on May 3, but a scheduling conflict for Jackie's widow, Rachel Robinson, prompted HOF officials to move it to later this summer.
  
   So how come the legendary HOFer needed a new plaque a full 46 years after getting his original? I feel like a dolt for not having known this, but the current plaque includes no mention whatsoever of Robinson's singular role in shattering the color line in 1947.

   As remarkable as that sounds, I think I understand how that could have come about in 1962, and in any event it's not something I'd want to bother newly anointed HOF President Jeff Idelson about in these first weeks after he assumed the new role.

   I can see how the tumultuous times in the early 1960s might have prompted HOF officials to use wording that amounted to "just the facts," and nothing more. What surprises me more than the original wording is the fact that it remained unchallenged for as long as it did.


   The slowdown that shows have endured over the last decade-plus has allowed – ironically – more time for those things that helped make the shows so special in the first place: interaction with other dealers and reminiscing about the good old days.

   At Kansas City, that meant things like Heritage’s Mark Jordan recalling the early 1970s in Los Angeles, appearing on Entertainment Tonight and promoting the hobby on local television at a time when it was in its infancy, to say the least. The nostalgia angle got another boost after Levi Bleam of 707 Sportscards collared me with his cell phone to talk with Tony Galovich, a name serious collectors and dealers will remember from the 1980s and 1990s when he was a fixture at shows around the country and a hard-hitting columnist with Tuff Stuff magazine.

   I talked with Tony long enough to pass on that I had recently visited with (electronically) a couple of other names he would remember: Don Lepore and Frank Barning. Both need no introduction to hobby old-timers: the former was a prolific dealer for much of the hobby’s heyday; the latter a similarly well-known face at early shows and the publisher for many years of one of the pioneering hobby publications, Baseball Hobby News.

   Such is the joy of what we do: celebrating the past with the very structure of our hobby and, at the same time, recalling the many names that once played significant roles that might have receded into the background over the years. I have found that any number of folks might not turn up at the National or in the pages of SCD as time goes on, but hardly anybody actually shakes off the hobby itself.

   George Starmer, another of the hobby’s major nice guys, emphasized that by regaling me with a story about selling a cool Tiger Woods Upper Deck Authenticated piece. “I hated to part with it,” said Starmer, illustrating the age-old hobby dilemma that dealers have to contend with: being a dealer and a collector at the same time. According to Starmer, the temptation to hang on to as the transaction was finalized was enormous. He resisted; I found the item, a Tiger shirt with original artwork on the front, proudly on display a couple of tables away at McAvoy Sportscards.

   But the neatest story of the weekend came from Mike Baker of Global Authentication, perched adjacent to the SCD table, who got the star treatment for much of the weekend as a number of dealers and collectors alike stopped by to tell him they had seen him on Judge Judy.

   Baker had appeared as an expert witness on the show a few days earlier, the result of a taping in Burbank, Calif., in January. A collector was trying to get his money back from the purchase of a clumsily counterfeited 1941 Play Ball Joe DiMaggio. The card came with the requisite yarn about having been handed down from generation to generation, but Baker’s detailed explanation to the Judge about the “card’s” obvious deficiencies (including RP initials on the back tagging it as a reprint), helped produce a quick decision from the judge confirming Baker’s expert opinion.

   “The guy who owned the card was convinced that it was real,” said Baker, alluding to the power of the narrative within our hobby to convince the uninitiated that something is real, despite all evidence to the contrary. Baker modestly conceded that the episode represented his “15 minutes,” something that’s likely to be extended as the syndicated program gets rerun over the years.