Guernsey’s, one of the legendary names in the auction world, doesn’t routinely do sports memorabilia auctions, but when it does there is never anything routine about them. Such is the case with the next Guernsey’s sports undertaking: a sale of documents related to the construction of Yankee Stadium – The Baker Collection – which will be offered in a live auction on Oct. 18 at yet another iconic site: Madison Square Garden. (William Feldman's "Outside Yankee Stadium" original artwork is shown above, courtesy of Bill Goff Inc.; Goodsportsart.com)

   The Baker Collection features more than 150 architectural plans and emphemera related to Yankees and other players, including things like insurance forms for Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, among others.
“These are early treasures of the most famous baseball park or sports arena in the world,” said Arlan Ettinger, president of Guernsey’s. Bringing a live sale to Madison Square Garden or other similar exotic locations is second nature to Ettinger, who orchestrated the Mickey Mantle Auction at the Garden in 2003, the same year Guernsey’s auctioned the Sports Immortals Joe Platt Collection at The Borgata Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City, N.J. Old-time hobbyists will also remember that the 1989 auction of Topps archival material was a Guernsey’s production, held at Hunter College in New York City.

   “There will be other things in the auction as well, including World Series rings from Yankees players and even autographed balls from Ruth and Gehrig,” Ettinger added, noting he expected the sale to run about 400 lots, with a catalog that may even feature a keepsake poster of the stadium. “It’s an important time in the baseball season, and it should be pretty exciting.”

   The last time Guernsey's was at MSG for an auction was in 2003 when the company sold items from the Mantle family. Aside from having a great time at the auction, I also set the Krause Publications record for expense account frugality at the sale, logging a food bill of just over $11 for that trip to New York City. I arrived at LaGuardia around noon that day, snagged a couple of Nathan's Franks below MSG, hit the auction afternoon session, then Chinese by the Pound during an hour dinner break, then back to the sale. Flew back to Iola next a.m. I may have set the bar a bit too high; that's been a tough act to follow in subsequent business trips.

 

 This is the second and final part of a look at some of the odd stuff from the recent National Convention in Chicago that caught my eye.
  
Some of the things that stop me are just fun and/or silly, but almost always nostalgia based. Dave & Adams, with a massive arrangement the size of a couple of boxcars, was offering a pile of cases from the Steve Myland Collection Find of last year, but one of the things I noticed is hardly as compelling as that.

   Remember those “Bag O Cards”-like thingys from 25 years ago that featured about two dozen packs of, at the time, fairly recent Donruss cards, including their early 1980s golf issue? They were a pretty good bargain in 1983 or so at a whopping $1.29; I suspect they still provide a lot of fun at the  $25 price tag a quarter-century later.

   Dave & Adam’s also was offering a “Show Special” of a slightly discounted Upper Deck Authenticated Aaron Rodgers signed Green Bay Packers jersey. I’m sure they were just being timely; I know those guys from Buffalo understand how wrenching the last several weeks have been for us Packer rooters. I could puke.

   Veteran dealer Skip Hunter had a whole bunch of “bricks,” groups of 50-100 vintage cards that used to be such a staple of shows in the old days when using such items as a start on building a complete set wasn’t quite as daunting (read expensive) as it might be today.

   Steve Hart initially had a couple of things I would have liked to see, but he sold them during the course of the show: full boxes of 1961 and 1962 Topps Cellos.

   Still there in his showcase (and presumably at the end of the show) was a 1959 Topps Cello with Wes Covington on top. I couldn’t pull the trigger this time, but I’m eyeing it as perhaps something for my 60th birthday in two years. SCD readers may recall that eight years ago on my 50th birthday, I opened a 1960 Topps Cello. Now I am thinking of doing it again, though as each year passes it becomes ever more of an investing blunder to actually open unopened material. We’ll see.

   As always, the artists knock me out, with my hectic swings around the 700 or so tables spotting the legendary Robert Stephen Simon hawking his Yankee Stadium (and many other) prints, or Robert Hurst, a damn fine artist (no letters, please: that’s his tag line), indeed, painting one of his originals at his booth. I also got to talk to Al Sorenson, who will be featured in a later issue of SCD, and another hobby figure of renown, Monte Sheldon, creator of remarkable hand-painted baseballs that are stunning collectibles.

   Sheldon was encamped alongside Charles Mandel of Helmar Brewing, which made sense, since Sheldon is part of the stable of Helmar artists which produces the most gorgeous baseball cards you’ll ever see (www.helmarbrewing.com).

   If you like coincidences, Heritage was offering the actual baseball that Gabby Street caught in 1908 after it was dropped from the Washington Monument, and only a few tables away, Sheldon had created original art for the Helmar series showing Street himself, with the Washington Monument ever so barely visible in the background. Baseball card collectors are quite often baseball historians, and the two pursuits never have a better arena than the National Convention.

   Wayne Hitchens had something you don’t see every day: the 1961 Chemstrand Iron-ons. The Dagsboro, Del., dealer came across 159 of them, and had a number of them (at left) graded and on display at his table.

   And I ran into another old friend, Paul Madden, and got to see some of his newest handiwork on the Sportkings Series B, which was featured at the Sport Kings booth. These are just as remarkable cards as the Helmars, and so evocative of the original Sport Kings series that you’ll just shake your head (www.sportkingsgum.com).

   Steve Wolf is yet another sort of artisan, in this instance the creator of absolutely exquisite replicas of great ballparks. He was displaying a huge replica of Comiskey Park, complete with working stadium lights and a $17,500 price tag that you would likely describe as a bargain if you got to see this stuff (www.majorleaguemodels.com).

   I noticed the price tag on Friday – the table was only a hoot and a holler away from the SCD booth – but by the next day the price tag was gone. The model had been purchased by Gary Cypress, whose museum in downtown Los Angeles houses what is easily one of the finest collections in the world of sports cards and memorabilia. He has purchased a number of the Wolf creations, and the Comiskey model is slated to make the move to Los Angeles with several others that have done the same thing, not even counting the real-life Dodgers and Giants.

   Cypress’ museum was the featured Mastro event at the 2006 National, part of the auction house’s annual “treat” for dealers and hobby high rollers every year. Mastro chartered several buses at the 2006 Anaheim National to ferry the guests downtown to the museum; it did the same thing this year to bring everybody to the ESPN Zone for the live auction.

   The trip from the Rosemont facility to downtown – I would guess 20-plus miles or so, took about an hour and 15 minutes going to it Friday evening. Not griping, just noting Chicago traffic.
For the return, I boarded a bus when the driver said there was one seat left, and by the time I got to the back and found no vacancies, he was pulling away. No problem: I sat on the floor for the return, feeling like a dwarf in an NBA huddle.

   I couldn’t see much of anybody – and couldn’t really converse with anyone, but I listened intently as an unidentified old-time dealer reminisced about attending shows in the 1970s and introducing youngsters Bill Mastro and Rob Lifson to the peculiar gastronomical delights of White Castle Sliders.

   I could have gleefully listened for the whole stretch of another hour and 15-minute bus ride – even sitting on the hard bus floor – but the return trip to Rosemont only took about 20 minutes.

   The autograph lineup at the National Convention has been the headliner over the last 15 years or so, but, for me, the dealers remain the star of the show. I can’t shake the notion that siphoning hundreds of thousands of dollars off to one corner of the facility is one of those seemingly necessary but less-than-ideal situations.

   And even in the case of the dealers, some of the pizzazz from finding killer stuff is reduced a bit by the fact that much of the material displayed by the major auction houses is not so much of a surprise, since a lot of it appears in online and print catalogs for their upcoming auctions.

   Still, it was fun watching Josh Evans and Mike Heffner of Lelands.com sifting through hundreds more of those spectacular images from the San Francisco Examiner find of a couple of years ago. Evans figures that was around 800,000 or more photos, and perhaps as much as 25 percent or more is still left to be disposed of.

   At the Heritage booth, Jonathan Scheier showed me a Babe Ruth cap from the famed Bustin’ Babes and Larrupin’ Lous barnstorming tour (shown at right). I’ve gotta admit, I’ve never seen the cap offered, though I have frequently seen the Ruth/Gehrig photo that neatly photo matches the cap.

   John Kanuit’s elegant display at his Vintage Sports Collector booth caught my eye as usual, but ultimately it was a lot of little things, including all of the original artwork, that would interrupt my rounds through the 700 or so dealers.

   Right next to the ultra-modern and high-tech eTopps booth, the Topps Vault had samplings of some of the cool stuff that somehow eluded that incredible 1989 Guernsey’s auction of Topps archival material. The neatest ones were the black-and-white photos used for the 1959 Topps “Symbol of Courage” Roy Campanella card and the 1962 Topps Babe Ruth’s Farewell Speech. I wonder where the actual flexichromes from those two cards are?

   Along with admiring all the cool stuff in the Topps Vault, it was nice to talk to Topps’ Mike Jasperson, who so graciously provided some items from the Vault that will be awarded later this month in the random drawing held in conjunction with the Keith Olbermann Topps Proof five-part series.

   I am trying to get the hang of blogging, which in part means shorter bursts, so I'll have more on the National in a couple of days.  – T.S.