Two of my favorite things in the hobby are now linked in a fashion that seems utterly perfect. Hunt Auctions’ considerable reach into the sports memorabilia marketplace expanded once again this week with the announcement that the Exton, Pa.-based auction company had purchased the famed Philly Show and will move the venerable hobby institution to Valley Forge from its current location in Reading, Pa.
  
   Hunt Auctions, on the heels of its recent linkage with Upper Deck, now conducts annual auctions with Louisville Slugger and at the Major League All-Star Fanfest, in addition to its own annual sales. Company President David Hunt said the show, currently underway this weekend at the Greater Reading Expo Center, will move to the Valley Forge Convention Center in suburban Philadelphia, bringing it closer to the city and to its roots tracing back to the mid-1970s.
  
   “We are really excited about this,” Hunt said in a phone interview prior to making an official announcement planned for at the show on Friday evening. “We’ve been a part of this show with Bob Schmeirer for many years, and he did a great job,” Hunt continued. “We saw a need for a show, and this makes sense for the industry.”
  
   Hunt said their goal was to keep those elements that had made the show – in its 100th edition with the show this weekend – so rich in its tradition and legacy, and in turn, modernize a bit by, among other things, bolstering the autograph component. He stressed that nothing was off the table in terms of future plans, but that changes would be mindful of the show’s noteworthy elements, which include providing free autographs and a reverence for all things vintage. The show will be held twice a year, in March and September.
  
   The Philadelphia Sports Card & Memorabilia Show, initially linked to the Eastern Pennsylvania Sports Collectors Club, traces its roots back to September of 1975 and an inaugural show at Spring Garden College outside of Philadelphia. The show hit its stride first in Willow Grove, Pa. (1978) and later in Fort Washington, Pa. (1993). With two shows annually in 1978, it expanded ultimately to four shows annually by 1990, and had also included several editions on the Jersey Shore in the 1980s. I used to set up at both the Philly Shows in Willow Grove and the Seashore ones, and it was right up there among the most fun I've ever had in the hobby. Technically, it may have been work, but I just can't call it that with a straight face.
  
   The show had flourished at the Fort Washington site but was forced to move in 2006 with the closing of that facility. Schmeirer had been actively searching for several years for a more permanent location than Reading, which was regarded as a transitional location not ideally located close enough to the Metro Philly area. Schmeirer had plans under way to bring the show to a different facility in Valley Forge prior to the announcement of the sale to Hunt Auctions.
  
   For three decades, the Philly Show has been regarded as perhaps the premier vintage card show in the country, bowing only to the National Convention in that regard. It was also felt that the primary reason the National never was staged in the Philadelphia area was the strength of the Philly shows.
  
   This is cool stuff, having an auction house with this kind of a reputation now running a show of the same ilk.
 

 
   At the time of the O.J. Simpson acquittal in his awful 1995 trial, I quickly pocketed the $100 I had won in a bet and then took to wondering what the rest of O.J.’s time on the planet was going to be like.

   I didn’t win the $100 because I though he was innocent, but rather because I didn’t think that the jury would convict him, which, obviously, are two very different conclusions.
  
   What would it be like, I mused, to have been an international celebrity, a Heisman Trophy winner, an NFL Hall of Famer and even an admittedly schmaltzy actor, and rather suddenly be this world-class pariah? The only thing I could conclude was that his life was going to be so bizarre as to be unfathomable.
  
   Well, just as I was with the verdict, I was correct on this one, too. No need to recap all of the tawdriness of the last 13 years; suffice it to say that it’s gotten so pathetic that few but the most ardent of O.J. watchers have even bothered with it.
  
   Most notably, mainstream media seem to have largely taken a pass on Simpson courtroom drama Part III, now under way in Las Vegas. Either I am subscribing to the wrong newspapers and magazines or O.J. Simpson’s day-to-day soap opera is deemed unwatchable.
  
   That said, if Simpson gets acquitted yet again, I’ll pony up that $100 that I won 13 years ago and give it to the Disabled American Veterans Charitable Service Trust. Yeah, that’s the same outfit I mentioned a week or so ago as a possible recipient of my largess if the that goofy T206 Honus Wagner card could somehow be authenticated.
  
   Since there’s no chance of that happening, I think I was feeling guilty that I had offered a “fake” donation to a very worthy charitable organization.
  
   At least with O.J., they’ve got a prayer at getting the dough.

  
   When I was a teenager growing up in Central New York, I lived maybe 65 miles or so from Cooperstown. We got to the Hall of Fame a couple of times when I was a kid, but I really developed my love for the town a couple of decades later as an adult.

   During the years that I lived in Delaware and Pennsylvania in the 1980s, we used to travel to Cooperstown probably twice a year. Once I told my ex-wife about the story of Shoeless Joe Jackson and the possibly apocryphal story about the little kid saying, “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” she started to cry and was hooked on baseball for good, or at least the literary side and the stories about great players from the past.

   I sure would have liked to have been at Cooperstown this past weekend as the Hall hosted its third annual Baseball Film Festival. I am a baseball fan first and foremost, but I'll betcha my affection for movies isn't far behind. The theme was a 20th anniversary salute to the classic film “Bull Durham,” and stars Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon were on hand for the festivities, along with Robert Wuhl, who played coach Larry Hockett, and writer/director Ron Shelton. That star-studded lineup was part of a panel discussion at the Hall of Fame that was moderated by NBC film critic Jeffrey Lyons, another well-known baseball fan of epic proportions. (in the photo above, courtesy of the Baseball Hall of Fame, from left to right: Wuhl, Robbins, Sarandon and Shelton.)
  
   In the HOF’s news release on their website, they talk about an idea that Robbins came up with for a sequel, picturing his character, “Nuke” LaLoosh in 2008 signing autographs at a card show after blowing out his arm during an up-and-down year in the big leagues.
  
   “I could see Crash (Kevin Costner) and Annie (Sarandon) finding Nuke and helping his comeback to the big leagues as a knuckleballer,” said Robbins.
  
   Robbins also told of going through training to make the baseball segments look believable. “We all had to audition as baseball players and prove ourselves,” Robbins said. “I had played baseball growing up and played third but never pitched, but I did have a pretty good arm.”
   
   I always tell people around these parts that a visit to Cooperstown would be a great idea even if there were no such thing as the Baseball Hall of Fame. I just can’t seem to convince these cheeseheads that Upstate New York (which to New Yorkers means anything above the City) is just as nice as Wisconsin. It’s like Wisconsin with mountains.
  
   I used to visit Larry Fritsch, too, at those odd times when you could catch him out there working to set up his baseball card museum as he wrestled (figuratively speaking) with the good burghers of Cooperstown. And now they’ve got film festivals about baseball, too.
  
   I rarely plug websites, but if you start our at www.baseballhalloffame.org, you can go on for a very long time.
  
   Put me in, coach.

   Well. After a summer’s-worth of entries pouring in via e-mail, online and in just good old-fashioned mail, we’ve finally closed out the sweepstakes held in conjunction with the Topps Proof Series of articles, and pulled the names out of a hat to award the prizes.
  
   For those of you scoring at home, I concede I am a couple of weeks late in picking out the names. No good excuse, except the crush of other matters that kept us from getting to the project. Finally, on the morning of Sept. 16, we huddled up and did the deed.
  
   We had, I believe, more than 700 entries, which is a spectacular number in that we asked our readers to include comments on a wide array of hobby topics as part of the sweepstakes. Our subscribers, as devoted a group of readers as you’ll ever find, outdid themselves in providing thoughtful observations on everything from their own collections to telling stories about their best or worst autograph experiences and their greatest finds in the hobby.
  
   So without further ado, here are the prize winners, listed in descending order and ending with the grand-prize winner of the Topps Proof “Rarest Reggie” plaque created by Ernie Montella of the Philadelphia Athletics Historical Society. The (2) Topps factory sets and (2) boxes of 2008 Topps Heritage were provided courtesy of the Topps Co.; the 1957 Pete Retzlaff photo used to create his Topps card, 1970 Topps Baseball point-of-purchase advertising display piece and the 1993 Nolan Ryan-signed card contract were provided courtesy of the Topps Vault.

10   Bob Feller single-signed baseball
     James Baurle, Rome, N.Y.
9   2007 Topps Baseball Factory set
     Eric Carlson, Smethport, Pa.
8   2002 Topps Baseball Factory set
      Ed Ash, Hudon, N.Y.
7   2008 Topps Heritage unopened box
      Mark Stirneman, Benton, Ill.
6   2008 Topps Heritage unopened box
     Eric Hillman, Exeter, N.H.
5   Billy Martin 1979 Mitchell & Ness jersey
      Darrell Comstock, Monroe, N.C.
4   1957 Topps Pete Retzlaff photograph
      David Barnes, Schenectady, N.Y.
3   1970 Topps POP advertising display piece
      Kermit Tanzey, Bartlesville, Okla.
2   1993 Topps Nolan Ryan signed card contract
      Timothy Pulcifer, Pasadena, Calif.
1   “Rarest Reggie” Topps Proof Series plaque
      Chuck Heyman, Weston, Fla.

   Congratulations to the winners and our thanks to everybody who took part. I didn't dawdle on this one: the stuff was mailed out Wednesday (Sept. 17).

  
   Imagine that the guy who led the league in home runs accomplished that in 502 at bats, easily surpassing his competition who only had 350 opportunities at the plate, or the guy who led the league in wins with 32 starts, and the runner-up had but 24.
  
   Sounds unfair, doesn’t it. But every year we gush over the latest guy to lead the league in saves, blithely ignoring the fact that usually he’s one of only a handful of relievers with a realistic opportunity to lead the league in saves.
  
   Our latest phenom is Francisco Rodriguez. He recently passed Bobby Thigpen’s single-season record of 57 saves, and I suppose he could wind up with 60 should the Angels find the appropriate spot to use him in a pennant race that was over before Labor Day. Oooh, I am all a tingle. I think I got me the vapors.
  
   So how many other guys had a realistic shot at leading the American League in saves this year? The next guy behind him has 38, playing for the Kansas City A’s, er, Royals, for pete’s sake. That team has only got 67 total wins, as opposed to the Angels’ 92. Think he had a chance to challenge Rodriguez to anything other than a duel this season?
  
   Don’t confuse this continual harping about saves with a misunderstanding over the value of having some flame thrower waddle out to the mound for the ninth inning. I get it.
  
   What I also get is that statistic doesn’t work well in aggregating a player’s season or career contribution, since it is so dependent on the efforts of 24 other individuals. That's probably the biggest reason that the various groups who vote on Hall of Fame selection have trouble deciding much of anything about relief pitchers. And our hobby is equally ambivalent. I can buy the card pictured on this page for about 40 cents. That wouldn't even cover the postage costs to mail it.

   Batting champions have come from crappy teams, home run champions have come from crappy teams, even starting pitchers have occasionally led the league in wins from crappy teams (see Steve Carlton circa 1972). But to lead the league in saves your team has to – broadly speaking – be leading going into the ninth inning.
  
   Try earning a save if your team goes on an 11-game losing streak.

   I got a chuckle out of some quotes that appeared in an SCD story recently, where 1982 AL Batting Champ and base stealer extraordinaire Willie Wilson was telling our correspondent Ross Forman about his ambivalence about signing autographs.
  
   In the story, Wilson provided details about several unpleasant incidents when overzealous fans jostled his family or otherwise made the process of signing autographs something hardly to be embraced.
  
   Wilson, who was a fine ballplayer and a genuine game changer with his blazing speed, made good points and his feelings about signing are perfectly understandable, but it was a couple of paragraphs later on that caught my eye.
  
   Though not much of a collector, Wilson did tell a story about a pictorial he owned featuring the top base stealers, noting that he had picked up about 25 signatures for the piece.
 
   As might be expected, he wanted an autograph from the all-time leader, but when he approached Rickey Henderson, The Great One declined to provide his signature.
  
   Unlike Wilson, who would pass on signing things for arguably defensible philosophical reasons, for Rickey it was not quite so complicated. He said he wanted to get paid for signing it.
  
   I always like Wilson, but I would disagree with another statement he made earlier in the same piece (Oct. 3 SCD). He was, he insisted, being paid to play baseball, not to sign autographs.
  
   Major League Baseball is, first and foremost, in the entertainment business, and the principal entertainers are paid lofty salaries based on contributions to that entire picture. Certainly any individual player – especially the highest-level performers – can opt out of helping in the various PR duties that typically are part of the game, but doing so either means that those duties get passed on to another teammate who doesn’t have quite as much clout, or they don’t get done at all.
  
   It’s my old-fashioned side, but I don’t much care for either approach.

  
   I remember when free agency first rolled around more than 30 years ago, and my first reaction was that if these guys are now being paid this kind of money, how badly were the guys from earlier generations getting hosed all those years?
  
   That was an understandable conclusion, but significantly flawed, because the likely biggest reason that the dough started to flow so much after 1975 was that there was so much more dough to flow.
  
   In short, the pie got a lot bigger. Our hobby would be a tidy microcosm of what happened in MLB. albeit perhaps an alarming one. The wild expansion of baseball card revenue in the early 1980s helped produce a bloated collector base, which in turn prompted a grotesque overproduction of cards, ultimately yielding a much smaller hobby/industry that was more clearly in line with reality.
  
   It sure seems like that’s the path that Major League Baseball is on these days as the scale of the sport becomes ever-more grandiose and, dare we say, bloated.
  
   And this was the second thing that I feared when I started to see huge contracts be shoved at ballplayers: that the “sport” would allow its structure to become such an expensive undertaking that eventually the very attributes that fostered the game’s popularity would be severely eroded, if not eliminated outright.
  
   Already the voracious appetite for revenue has placed MLB on a course that virtually guarantees that someday a charming little Mrs. Butterworth patch will someday be sewn first on the sleeve and then ultimately dotted around the front and the back of the uniform itself.
  
   Now that’s something to be very afraid of, when Alex Rodriguez’s jersey starts to make him look like a flair-besotted waitress at a TGI Fridays.
  
   (Associate editor Tom Bartsch contributed to this piece by coming up with the word “flair” for me, which does not show up in conventional dictionaries with a noun usage in that fashion. He also helped me with the TGI Fridays thingy.)

   

   I was writing a lead to a news story a couple of weeks ago about some cool Don Larsen items that will be in the Guernsey’s Yankee Stadium Auction at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 18, and part of it was going to be a reference about attendance.
  
   The idea was that official attendance was a reported 64,519, but over the years an estimated 12.3 million fans have insisted they were present. I liked that observation, because it could quite easily be transplanted to a number of other historic events, most notably the 1951 “Shot Heard ’Round the World” playoff game at the Polo Grounds, or maybe even Bill Mazeroski’s 1960 World Series-winning homer at Forbes Field.
  
   Lo and behold, I got an e-mail from my first editor at the Plattsburgh Press-Republican in Plattsburgh, N.Y., talking about a related topic, and he mentioned to me that he had been at Larsen’s perfect game as an 11-year-old.
  
   Now, by including the estimable Bob Grady in this blog, I am not suggesting that he’s one of the 12,235,481 fans who are fibbing about being present at Yankee Stadium on Oct. 8, 1956. He’s one of the most scrupulously honest individuals I know, and besides, he’s got the taped-stained ticket stub (not his shown here) to prove it.



   One of the nicest guys in the hobby, Dave Czuba, is fighting kidney cancer, and so I wanted to use this space (and in my regular column in Sports Collectors Digest) to let collectors and fellow dealers know.
  
   For the handful who might not know, Dave is Alan “Mr. Mint” Rosen’s right-hand man, his official driver and assistant at those shows and buying trips around the country, plus he’s a prolific collector and dealer in his own right.
  
   Rosen called me the other day to pass on the information that Dave has had one operation and faces another, but he’s faring well and facing the situation with the same winning attitude that has made him a favorite in the hobby for nearly three decades.
  
   With Dave on the DL for the moment as he recuperates, Rosen noted that another well-known hobby name, Kevin Bronson of Bronson Galleries, will be pinch-hitting for him occasionally.
  
   Dave has a legion of friends wishing him well, and I am tickled to count myself among that group.

   Card dealer Joe Ruocco sent me a copy of the wonderful photo collage of the 1956 Yankees shown on this page, and it got me to thinking back and remembering a similar collage from my very first full-time journalism job 30 years ago.

   Ruocco, owner of Rock’s Dugout in Wichita, billed as Kansas’ first card shop (est. 1977), has the 4-by-8-foot beauty displayed in his shop. It had once hung at the entrance to Yankee Stadium, but after the 1973 renovation, it ended up at a bowling alley in New Jersey owned by Hall of Famers Yogi Berra and Phil Rizzuto.

   Ruocco bought the stunning piece in 1978, a year after he opened his store. As you can imagine, it’s been a bit attraction at his shop, and he’s listened to a long litany of entreaties to sell it. It’s the kind of thing that probably would have to sell at auction to determine its actual value, but it’s instructive to note that Ruocco has turned down a hefty $20,000 offer.

   But it wasn’t the monetary thing that struck me when I saw the photo. The collage reminded me so much of a similar one (same size, as best I can remember, and same wooden frame) that was displayed behind the bar at “Little Joe’s” bar in Saranac Lake, N.Y.

   Joe Gladd was one of those lovable, eccentric characters who would wind up on everybody’s list of hometown favorites. I was a young bureau reporter working for the Plattsburgh Press-Republican. He had the uncanny ability – in part because of his revered status in the tiny Adirondack community – to convince anyone of just about anything. He even sold me on the whopping tale that Kodak had signed a deal to have all of the film developing in the hemisphere done there in Saranac Lake, with the little Adirondack Airport serving as the receiving point for those millions of rolls. I know it sounds dumb to have bought it, but you had to know Joe Gladd.

   Boy, would I ever love to know what happened to the photo collage that graced the back of his bar.

 
   A wire service news article last week that told about a postal employee convicted of glomming a 1915 Cracker Jack Christy Mathewson and then was clumsy enough to get caught gave me pause.

   The guy told the judge at his sentencing that he was addicted to collecting; the judge told him he was sentenced to six months in the county jail, with the jail time suspended provided he stay out of trouble for two years. I half expected to see that he was barred from opening Topps or Upper Deck wax packs, or maybe be put under a court order prohibiting him from being closer than 500 feet to a candy store, but no.

   Our SCD correspondent, Arnold Bailey, wrote a nice piece about this bit of criminality (Sept. 19 issue), even getting quotes from academia about “the emotional sources of the never-ending longing for yet another collectible.”

 
 Oh, pulleez. Not again. When clinical psychologists go about writing books, even those about something as ostensibly innocuous as collecting, they go searching for pathology. It’s sexier, and also has a leg up in elbowing for space in the medical journals.

   I used to try to get some psychologist friends from years ago to speculate for me about the reasons why people collect things, but virtually all begged off. Now I have to wonder if maybe they just didn’t want to hurt my feelings.

   I don’t doubt there are people who collect for odd reasons, including some of the deep-seated psychological stuff, but I would also be willing to bet the reasons for much of the hobby are relatively benign, and maybe even laudable.

   But, of course, I really can only speak for myself. I like cards for a variety of reasons. I don’t think I had a particularly traumatic childhood, but I did hang onto the cards with a certain fervor. Here’s more of the confession part: my original intention was to have them intact to pass along to a son or daughter as a means of also providing said hypothetical offspring with a link both to my youth and the game of baseball.

   By the time it became clear that any descendants would remain in the hypothetical category, I had already contented myself that hanging on to the cards was OK in and of itself.

   As most of the readers of this blog may know – and I would bet some of the academics do not – putting together a complete set of cards can be a fun undertaking, whether it’s a $25 investment in still-cheap 1987 Topps or the painstaking process of piecing together one of the great vintage Topps or Bowman sets of the hobby’s golden era in the 1950s and 1960s.