I haven’t counted it in several years, but I am pretty sure I’ve put Mickey Mantle on the cover of Sports Collectors Digest more than any other single individual, though I suspect Babe Ruth probably comes in a solid No. 2.
   Obviously, I make no apologies for that, since it is pretty much conventional wisdom that Mantle is the most influential post-war figure in the sports card and memorabilia hobby. I occasionally get criticism about our admitted reverence for all things Mickey, but it’s hard to take it too seriously. Objecting to Mickey Mantle is like dissing Halloween or the Easter Bunny, the latter of which could not get around on a fastball.

   So our 35th anniversary issue, which will be the issue dated Feb. 6, 2009 (a few weeks late, so sue me) will launch “Mickey Mantle: The Complete Collectibles Guide,” an unprecedented multi-part special series written by one of the most well-known and widely respected Mantle experts in the hobby.

   Kelly Eisenhauer (shown lower left), a Mantle fan and collector for more than 40 years, offers insight and literally hundreds of photographs of many of the thousands of pieces of ephemera, consumer goods, trinkets, toys, advertising pieces, magazines, books, postcards, regional and food issues, the Topps inserts and test issues, oddball items, and, as they say, a whole lot more.

   Whether you’re a Mantle fan or not, this is going to be an extraordinary undertaking, one which I am looking forward to in the same fashion I did for the marvelous T206 Series “The Monster” by Scot Reader in 2006 and the acclaimed “Topps Proofs” Series by Keith Olbermann this past year.

  


The breadth and scope of Mantle stuff is simply staggering; about my only regret is that the constraints of a weekly magazine – even with a minimum of 12 installments planned – means that we will only be able to picture a fraction of what the author has available. Even having said that, I am going to run a whole lot of pictures with each installment, though they will have to be smaller than we typically would provide.

   This is going to be a lot of fun, and along the way it’s going to create a wonderful reference source for serious fans and collectors.

---

   Last week or so, I blogged about Richie Ashburn and the wonderful original artwork of the Hall of Famer that turned up in that amazing aggregation of artifacts from former Topps Executive Vice President Sy Berger.

   The Ashburn artwork is one of 117 original paintings from the Topps archives that will be featured in the Robert Edward Auction next spring. Most of the paintings are recognizable to serious collectors as they were used in the classic 1953 Topps Baseball issue.

   What set the Ashburn painting apart from most of the others was the fact that it was never issued as a card. At the time, he was the darling of a Philadelphia Phillies squad that was at the tail end of a rare period of reasonable success, a First-Division team, as we so quaintly called it back then.

   Since Bowman Gum Co. was based in Philly, I assume Richie was in the middle of wrangling between the two companies over exclusive contracts. He wound up on Bowman cards from 1950-55, but missed out on Topps in 1953 and 1955.

   No less of a white knight than former Standard Catalog editor and longtime SCD colleague Bob Lemke has come to the rescue, producing his own version shown here that’s easily the equal of anything engineered by Berger and Woody Gelman 55 years ago. Just like Lemke's ersatz 1955 Topps All-American cards, the “cards” he creates are typically better than the originals.

   Lemke’s attention to detail is extraordinary, as the card back shown here illustrates. Bob even gave it No. 253, one of the half-dozen numbers from that year that carries a “not issued” designation in the Catalog.

   If alien beings came to earth 75 years from now and found this Ashburn card nestled comfortably within a real 1953 Topps set – or even the reprint set – it’s a pretty good bet that nobody could tell the difference.

   But it’s still likely that one of them might chime in with a, “Where’s Stan?”

   Along with trying to become a more prolific blogger over the last several months, I’ve also been in the middle of another project that has consumed just about every available bit of time in the evenings and on weekends since about mid-June.

   The book department here at F + W Media asked me to author a book, Legendary Yankee Stadium: Memories and Memorabilia From the House That Ruth Built. This was not my first book – I authored the Alan Rosen biography True Mint in 1994 – but it was the first done through the traditional collaboration with our book department. Much different than the virtually solo affair of 14 years ago (solo except for dozens of hours of interviews with Rosen).

   And while the soon-to-be-demolished Stadium has been the subject of a number of books, ours will hopefully still attract a good deal of attention because we’ve gone at it from a slightly different direction.

   Legendary Yankee Stadium is going to showcase many of the remarkable artists and photographers that our Sports Collectors Digest readers have come to know over the years, plus we’ll obviously also have a dramatic emphasis on including images of memorabilia from many of the great auction houses that have graced those same SCD pages.

(Mantle artwork by Ron Stark; www.ronstarkstudios.com)

   For my part, I spent the summer researching online and poring over two decades worth of SCD’s in assembling profiles of some of the Yankee legends that any Bronx Bomber fan would come to expect. Rather than recount the results of World Series contests or All-Star Games, we’ve approached it instead as an opportunity to look at the heroic names from Yankee history, with an a bit of an anthropological bent by unearthing (figuratively speaking) some of the artifacts that were so much a part of their careers.

   With a focus on Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, Berra, Ford, Reggie, Thurman, Mattingly, Jeter and A-Rod, plus hundreds of photos of the Stadium (old and new) and our own unique perspective (and photos) of Barry Halper and his acclaimed collection, we’re hoping to provide a look at all of this that defies easy categorization.

   Much of my end of the undertaking is completed, though we had hoped that a bit more information about Stadium demolition plans might have been available at this point. The book is already in the design phase and is slated for release next spring.

   A week or so ago I blogged about what a horrible card dealer I was for the several years that I tried it way back before I started full time here at SCD, so it’s only fair that I reverse course and talk about my best day as a dealer.

   I think it was 1992, and I was doing a Chicago show in the western suburbs, but I am pretty sure it wasn’t George Johnson’s Sun-Times show. I think it was on Ogden Avenue, which just came to me – I don't know how.

   Anyway, it was what you would call a typical Saturday morning when a man about my age came to my table and was looking at my early 1970s Topps stuff. It took me a while to recognize him, but the fact that his clothes were so snappy was something of a hint. It usually is with big-league ballplayers. You notice they ain’t shopping off-the-rack at WalMart.

   It was Dave LaRoche, the pitcher from the 1970s who carved a spot in baseball history with his own version of Rip Sewell’s famous Eephus pitch, which he called “La Lob.” He was tickled that I recognized him, and we struck up a conversation for several minutes.



   He asked to take a look at complete sets of 1971 and 1972 Topps that I was offering, noting that his first two Topps cards appeared in those years and he had always wanted the full sets. The sets I had were near-mint or better, though I suppose that with today's hyper vigilance from grading the 1971 might fall short of that these days.

   But in 1992 it would have been acceptable to “grade” both in that fashion, certainly the 1972 set, which I had put together card-by-card many years earlier (with the last series purchased en masse from Larry Fritsch). But LaRoche didn’t have a lot of time to look at the cards; he was the White Sox pitching coach at the time, and there was a game that afternoon at Comiskey.

   He asked if he could come to my hotel room that night to get a closer look at the sets. Gee, tough call. Sitting on a hotel room bed with takeout food while watching reruns of “Walker Texas Ranger,” or kibitzing with one of the game’s top relief pitchers from the 1970s ... and maybe making some money. The internal debate lasted 3/8’s of a second.

   About 9 p.m., he showed up with his bullpen coach, Johnny Stephenson, in tow. That made it evern better; Stephenson was a backup catcher for my Metsies in the mid-1960s, so I had a great time talking with him about Casey and the rest of that amazing crew. While we had a couple of beers, LaRoche sat at a table and carefully went through the two binders, page by page.

   As the title of the blog suggests, he ultimately decided to buy both sets, and under the continuing premise that I am a better journalist than baseball card dealer, I’ll defy another convention and say that he paid me – as I recall – about $3,400 for the pair of them.

   That made it about $4,200 for the weekend, which was easily the record for this lousy card dealer. I drove home Sunday night to Indiana and asked my then-wife to guess how much I had made, thinking it would be a nice surprise, since the take was usually $1,000 or even far less.

   “$5,000,” she exclaimed. She was a psychologist, not an accountant, so the surprise was gone, but at least I still had the dough.

   I watched the first game of the 2008 World Series last night and wondered how the event might seem to an impressionable 10-year-old getting acquainted with the game for the first time.

   I blather in this fashion because it struck me just how much technology has changed since I watched my first World Series nearly 50 years ago. It’s probably hard for younger people to imagine it, but television didn’t rule the roost in those days and the World Series games were afternoon affairs, meaning they conflicted with, ugh, school attendance.
 
   So the first World Series I remember much about was the 1959 Dodgers/White Sox clash, and my familiarity stemmed from an odd combination of the World Series cards included in 1960 Topps (shown) and an 8-mm film that I remember seeing at a Little League banquet that summer.

   I don’t remember what was on the menu, but I do remember big Ted Kluszewski stabbing a fierce line drive at first base. Even though he was nearing the end of the line at that point – and his greatest years had been with the Reds – I became a Big Klu fan for good. For most of the other memories of that Series, I couldn’t tell you if it came from that highlight film (which we saw several times), or from studying the Topps World Series cards. I do recall being confused why there weren’t World Series cards in my already-treasured 1959 set. I would have liked to have a look at the 1958 World Series in that fashion, even though my Milwaukee Braves got thumped by the Yankees.

   The first World Series game I ever remember seeing on television was in October of 1960, by which time my father had taken a job in New York City and we we’re living in Yonkers. I raced home from school on Oct. 13 just in time to see the last couple of innings of one of the great games of all time, capped off by Bill Mazeroski’s historic home run. I was already a full-fledged National League fan by then, so I couldn’t have been more thrilled – unless it had been the Braves.

   That’s a pretty good way to ensure that a 10-year-old would develop a lifelong addiction to the game of baseball.

   As I try to get accustomed to the personal nature of blogging vs. the more structured format of a conventional print magazine, I noticed the calendar date of Oct. 22 and thought about the impact that notable dates can have.

   Psychologists have long noted the ability of anniversaries to elicit powerful emotions in people, even in instances when they are not consciously aware that an anniversary date has been reached. I can’t cop to the subconscious part; I will always remember Oct. 22, 1968.
 
   Forty years ago I boarded a plane in Albany, N.Y., en route to boot camp at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center north of Chicago. I was all of 18 years old, and I was nervous, and not just because in those days air travel was new enough that it was pretty commonplace for people to be leery of flying. The sense of the unknown that faced us was exceeded only by the even more compelling realization that this was a situation without a Plan B. If it turned out you couldn't hack it, the conventional wisdom was at the time that you lifetime employment opportunities would be essentially extinguished. The phrase wasn't in vogue at the time, but failure was not an option.

   The anxiety only grew as we got off the plane (I can’t remember if it was Midway or O’Hare) and boarded a bus for Waukegan. By the time we got to a barracks, it was about 3 a.m., and somebody in uniform started screaming at me and calling me things that would have warranted a punch in the snout only a day earlier. Welcome to boot camp.

   I’m kind of a nervous Nellie by nature anyway, so the first three or four weeks were really tough. This was no way to put an exclamation point on a summer spent working, drinking beer and singing “Hey, Jude,” while I waited for Oct. 22 to arrive.

   Early on, we were being administered penicilin shots en masse in a gymnasium, with spooked sailors ordered to step up to an "X" marked on the floor in adhesive tape, drop your trousers and await a less-than-elegant injection in the butt. There were three "X's" marked in front of us in an effort to move things along quickly, but one sorry sailor got flustered and presented his backside at all three locations, one right after another. He keeled over after shot No. 3, and presumably got screamed at even as they carried him away to sick bay.

   By early December, they had us doing truly insane stuff, like hanging up freshly washed sheets on a line in the courtyard when it was 20 degrees outside. Did I mention we had to do this in our underwear? The sheets would freeze solid almost instantly, and would clack against one another in the wind.

   Like virtually everbody else, I was a smoker back then, and we got about 45 minutes a day to huddle in one disgusting room at the barracks and puff away like mad, filling the tiny room with a haze that would produce apoplexy today but didn’t cause anyone to even bat an eye in 1968. Maybe just rub the eyes a bit as the smoke would cause some difficulties.
 
   And the only thing that kept us going was the realization that it would end someday and that, presumably, the remaining four years of Navy life wouldn’t be anything nearly so ghastly. It did, and it wasn’t, thank heavens.

   But 40 years later the importance of the date has yielded little in the way of its initial primacy. Few other anniversaries that have come along in four decades have managed to trump that one by much of a margin. Aug. 22, 1972, comes to mind, and I suspect I don’t have to explain what it is, other than to note that I got out a tad early to go to college.

   After all this time, I can’t remember if I actually was that eager to go to college or simply wanted to get out a tad early. Moot point now.

   I have long been a big fan of live auctions, and I applaud the big players in the hobby who keep the concept alive despite the daunting expenses and the overriding lure to simply rely on the Internet for auction sales.

   For one thing, they (live auctions) provide the vital link to the hobby’s past, and though they embrace technology to the extent that live sales still include a significant Internet component, it’s still refreshing that stuff in 2008 gets sold in virtually the same fashion that it did three decades earlier in crowded hotel rooms and dingy hotel conference centers.

   The sales also provide spectacular showcases for the material itself, displaying it in the aggregate that sometimes gets lost in the massive catalogs.

   Hunt Auctions (www.Huntauctions.com), long a proponent of the genre with an old-fashioned live auction near company headquarters in Exton, Pa., has been stepping up its live-auction profile with annual events at the Major League Baseball All-Star FanFest and at the Louisville Slugger Museum in Louisville, Ky.

   The latter has been going on for five years now, with the 2008 version slated for Nov. 15 at the museum. Try to picture a better place for a live auction than the headquarters of the bat company that boasts a link to baseball history unlike any other.

   I’ve been to the auction a couple of times, and it’s nothing short of sensational. Surrounded by the artifacts of the famed bat maker, the showcases of the live-auction items neatly encircle the main showroom, where seating for a couple of hundred bidders is provided. We’ll have a preview of the Hunt Auction in this week’s edition of Sports Collectors Digest (Nov. 14), but I gotta tell you it would be worth a trip to downtown Louisville even if all they were selling was cases of 1989 Donruss (they aren’t).

   A report today in the Associated Press noted that the baseball players’ union has found evidence that major league teams “acted in concert” in failing to sign Barry Bonds this past summer.
In an unrelated announcement of similar qualitative scope, scientists have announced that the rotation of the earth and the seeming disappearance and later reappearance of the sun every 24 hours are indisputably linked.

   Ya think? This was apparently one of those deals where everybody knew what was going on and yet blissfully pretended that they didn’t – kind of like the decade or so that steroids were the abuse drug of choice and yet MLB owners and the Commissioner were clueless. Hard to imagine that a demographic (obscenely wealthy team owners) that wasn’t clever enough to get away with colluding against hundreds of free agents from 1985-87 couldn’t even get it together enough to pull off the same tacky maneuver on a smaller scale two decades later. A really smaller scale: one guy.

   It will be interesting to see once the grievance is filed (the union and MLB agreed to delay the actual filing of the grievance – the AP says any filing would likely come after Bonds’ trail, which starts March 2 of next year) if the charges implicate only American League teams. One assumes the National League teams could offer a pretty sound argument that Bonds might have been too much of a defensive liability, but you would have thought he might have been a good DH for somebody.

   Obviously, a simple finding from the union doesn’t mean that the owners can’t win a grievance hearing, but this is "the gang that can’t collude straight." And this particular blog isn’t sour grapes, though I concede I did naively suggest many months ago that Bonds would play somewhere in 2007.

   So shoot me for thinking that simply attending to a team’s self-interest would be enough to get someone to give him a shot. I guess I somehow underestimated the overwhelming revulsion that MLB owners must feel about their minions using performance-enhancing drugs. Silly me, I mistook 15 years of gleefully collecting millions of dollars from whirring turnstiles while the integrity of the record book was thoroughly shattered for evidence of some complicity in the fraud on their part.

 
   So a grandmother walks into a card show at the Fairgrounds in Indianapolis, Ind., with a shoebox (really) under one arm and a couple of grandchildren in tow.

   I have no idea why she came to my table first, but she did. She told me she wanted to sell the cards and had consulted the price guides about values. She had the nicest 1960 and 1961 Topps cards you could hope for, virtually all near-mint or better, at least as I remember it. And she told me she wanted to get about 75 percent of the price-guide value.

   That kind of floored me, since just the first examination suggested to me that “high book” might be over $4,000, meaning she was hoping for $3,000 or so. I had thought I could offer $1,800, but I didn’t do so because I didn’t want to offend her. This was my first mistake.

   Instead, I picked out about a dozen or so 1960s and offered a couple of hundred dollars, but she wisely didn’t want to sell pieces. I then let her get away so she could make her pitch around the show floor. This was my second mistake.

   I watched helplessly as she ambled around the room, picking out dealers here and there and making her pitch. I sorta hoped that she would get a better idea about what dealers could offer for material and maybe return to my table after making the tour. Mistake No. 3.

   She made her tour in about an hour and a half, ultimately returning not to my table but to the dealer next to me. And I watched in horror as she tried to snag $1,100 for the whole pile.
Seems she had been schooled a bit, and had gotten offers ranging from $500 up to about $1,200, she said. Now she was wrangling to get $1,100, and eventually settled on $1,050. I wanted to politely interrupt before the exchange of dough for cards and point out that I was willing to pay several hundred more than that, but that would have been indecorous to say the least. I might have been drummed out of the fraternity or had my thumbs broken.

   I had to suffer through a good deal of indigestion that Saturday, and again Sunday morning when the adjacent dealer walked in and said he’d booked out the cards at $4,500-plus.

   So there you have it. The nicest cards I ever had a shot at (at most of the big East Coast shows I did, Mr. Mint or any of the other hobby icons would gobble up the best stuff before I could ever get a crack at it) had gotten away. The worst part wasn’t even the potential profits lost, since I would have likely taken the very best specimens of the 1960s and upgraded my own set.

   See, I told you I was a lousy card dealer!

   I have confessed on numerous occasions to having been a lousy card dealer during the handful of years that I traveled much of the East Coast and Midwest in the years before I started working full time for SCD. I suspect a lot of readers may think I am being disingenuous or modest, but no, I really wasn’t very good at it, despite enjoying a good deal of the whole process.
 
   I liked the travel, the people I met (which helped immeasurably over the years in my SCD career), and the idea of working on your hobby. I also developed an enormous respect for the people who do it 24-7, as they say, especially in light of the fact that I wasn’t able to pull it off myself.

   When I started doing shows in 1981, I marveled at how much there was to learn! I had thought of myself as a serious collector, but compared to these guys at the Polish Community Center in Albany, N.Y., I was a novice. So a couple of years later when I moved down to the Delaware/Pennsylvania area outside of Philadelphia, I wanted to have a different shtick if I was going to venture out and compete against guys I knew where vastly better at what they were doing than I was.

   That argument got only stronger when I started going to the Philly Shows at Willow Grove, where suddenly I was bumping up against national figures of prominence like Bill Goodwin, Kit Young, Alan Rosen, Levi Bleam and a host of others. This was the big league, and a show climate that is hard to describe for those who weren’t around at the time. It was a frenzied excitement that I suspect hooked a lot of guys into the hobby for life, even as the adrenaline meter would pretty consistently dip over the years that followed.

   Anyway, it was probably a good thing that I had to sit on the EPSCC waiting list for a table for a couple of years, a list as legendary as the Green Bay Packers’ current backlog for season tickets. I think I got my first table at Willow Grove in 1984 or 1985, and I confined much of my selling to the old Baseball Greats set of cards (shown) that I had produced in 1983. I wouldn’t start selling stuff from my own personal collection for a couple of years, which would bring me to a card show at the Fairgrounds in Indianapolis, Ind., where I let the big one get away.
 
   And for that yummy morsel, we must return to the blogosphere on the morrow ...

   I got a kick out of seeing some of the original artwork that surfaced recently from the Sy Berger Collection and will be auctioned next spring by Robert Edward Auctions. They are almost uniformly stunning, especially in light of the fact that the original paintings are so tiny – virtually identical in size to the issued cards themselves.

   One that really grabbed me was Richie Ashburn, one of a couple of them that turned out to have been unissued, meaning that no card was ever produced from the artwork. I assume it was because of the contract wrangling between Topps and Philadelphia-based Bowman. Ashburn had Topps cards in 1951, 1952, 1954 and 1956; he showed up on Bowman pasteboards in 1950-1955.

   If anybody has any other information about why Richie didn’t get Topps cards in 1953 and 1955, I’d love to have it.

   Ashburn was one of the great storytellers in all of baseball, so I’ll end this with a story he told me more than 20 years ago.

   Ashburn: “A guy recognized me the other day and said, ‘I know you. You’re the guy who used to hit all the foul balls.’

   “I don’t know, but I’d like to be remembered for more than hitting foul balls. When I was playing for the Cubs toward the end of my career, Jim Brewer, the pitcher, was a teammate.

   “Now Jim Brewer hated his wife; I don’t know why. One day, he came up to me and said, ‘Big Patty and I just had a fight.’ And he pointed to the section of the stands where the players’ families normally sat, and he said that’s where Big Patty sits. ‘Take a shot at her,’ he told me, meaning I should try to hit her with a foul ball.

   “I laughed and forgot all about it. Then a while later when got up to the plate, I hit a couple of foul balls in that area, and when I stepped out of the batter’s box, I looked into the dugout. There was Brewer waving a towel and yelling, ‘Two seats over and one row back.’ ”

   I suppose the upcoming presidential election is going to cost the federal, state and local coffers hundreds of millions of dollars, and given how tight we are for cash these days, it would be a godsend if we could find a way to save a few bucks along the way.
  
   So naturally I am here to offer help in any way I can. Mastro Auctions has one of its Classic Collector sales slated to end on Oct. 29-30, and included in it are four lots each related to the two presidential candidates. I’m thinking the timing is probably something other than just coincidence.
  
   Three of the four lots match up perfectly for evaluation: PSA 9 single-signed balls (2 lots), and two original paintings by Darryl Vlasak (shown here) of Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain. SCD readers will no doubt remember Vlasak’s spectacular work, which has graced several of our covers over the years, and many of his original paintings have sold in previous major auctions.
  
   So how cool is that? On the morning following the auction’s Oct. 30 close (Halloween. Boo!), there is going to be a clear-cut winner from three decidedly nonpartisan polls. I guess people could quibble about the potential margin for error in such a markedly unscientific poll, but to that I say, Phooey!
  
   About the only thing we have to worry about is a possible split decision, like one painting topping the other, but some differing numbers with the single-signed balls. Naw. It’s going to be a landslide.
  
   And the winner will be ...

   The hobby gets another boost next spring when Rob Lifson of Robert Edward Auctions offers yet another of the hobby’s famous T206 Honus Wagner cards.
  
   This time it’s the Wagner that was once owned by actor Charlie Sheen, who had put it on display at the All Star Cafe in Times Square in New York City in the 1990s.
  
   In 1998, three Cafe staffers conspired to steal the Wagner from the display case, replace it with a reprint that could easily pass muster from a distance, and then sell the real one.
  
   The plan worked for awhile, but then the trio struck again after a display case broke at the restaurant, providing an opportunity to snatch another of Sheen’s treasures, the highest-grade known of a 1934 Goudey uncut sheet with the 1933 Nap Lajoie on it.
  
   The crew cut up the sheet (groan!), but without a suitable ersatz version to conceal the crime, the deed was revealed, and then the Wagner switch also came to light.
  
   The FBI arrested the thieves and the stolen cards were returned to Sheen. He would sell the card at auction three years later for $78,000, which according to Lifson was a record price at the time for a lower-grade Wagner.

  
   I marvel every year at the vast array of calendars that show up in bookstores every year, and I used to spend a good deal of timing perusing them, but not so much over the past decade or so.
For at least that long, The Hallowed Ground Calendars produced by Bill Goff Inc. (www.goodsportsart.com) have served nicely in that capacity.
  
   And this year’s calendar (2009) hits even closer to home, since my friend, and SCD contributor Andy Jurinko, is the featured artist for the whole calendar, an honor never before bestowed on any single artist.

   Ebbets Field is on the cover (and June), but other headliners include Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium, both of which are slated for demolition as the teams move to brand-new parks in 2009. Also featured: Crosley Field (Cincinnati), Griffith Stadium (Washington D.C.), Sportsman’s Park (St. Louis), Dodger Stadium (Los Angeles), Fenway Park (Boston), Comiskey Park (Chicago), Tiger Stadium (Detroit), Polo Grounds (New York), Veterans Stadium (Philadelphia), and Forbes Field (Pittsburgh).

   Jurinko needs no introduction to SCD readers, who have enjoyed his work in our pages from even before I started here full time in 1993.

   The 2009 edition of Hallowed Ground is available at www.goodsportsart.com for $17 each plus $6 shipping and handling, or by calling 1 (800) 321-4633.  

   I give the Hall of Fame a lot of credit for almost obsessively tinkering with the various voting procedures in an attempt to make the process as fair and credible as possible. Ultimately, it still comes down to subjective decisions about who belongs in the elite ranks of the game’s historical record, but you can’t fault the organization given that lofty charge for trying so hard to refine the selection process.

   In recent weeks, the Hall released the ballots for Veterans Committee voting for 2009, broken down into two separate votes for pre-1943 players and those after World War II. As readers know, I love the Hot Stove League aspect of HOF voting, but I gotta admit that it just isn’t the same when considering guys I have never seen play.

   I could crunch numbers and probably make a tolerable case for a couple of the 10 guys on that ballot, but the zeal just wouldn’t be there. I suspect the numbers are right there (or close) for Carl Mays, Allie Reynolds and Bucky Walters, and even closer for Mickey Vernon, but the fact that I didn’t see them play makes it hard for me to get worked up about it. For Deacon White, who played before the turn of the century, I wouldn’t have a clue how to put his numbers into a useful context.

   If I were part of the 12-member voting committee that will render a decision (announced Dec. 8), I would feel compelled to do the homework and vote accordingly.

   For the post-war guys, it’s a snap because I saw all of them play, many of them in person. The Hall of Famers have the say on this one, which I think makes it tougher to get to that 75 percent threshold because you’re dealing with five times as many ballots.

   Without blinking (Remember, Sarah says no blinking allowed), I would enshrine Dick Allen, Gil Hodges, Tony Oliva, Ron Santo, Luis Tiant, Joe Torre and Maury Wills, and feel a wee bit guilty about passing on Jim Kaat. Torre shouldn't be bothered with, since he was a decent candidate just based on his playing career, and now its locked up with his manager numbers. So he's already in, but we can probably wait until he actually retires.

   That’s a lot of new bronze, but, of course, it’s not going to happen anyway. I still haven’t given up hope on Gil, and while I realize Allen is a long shot, it doesn’t change the fact that he was the most feared hitter in the National League in his prime. Oliva, Santo and Tiant may never make it either, but I suspect people who saw them play would feel otherwise.

   Ironically, one of the guys who had perhaps the greatest impact on the game of baseball may not get there either, but Maury Wills’ contribution is hardly diminished by the fact that its singular quality doesn’t translate effectively into statistics.

   For an outfit that provides a good deal of lip service to the idea of preserving the “integrity of the game,” one wonders how much longer Major League Baseball is going to permit the first round of its “playoffs” to be a three-out-of-five affair.
  
   Forty years ago, teams would play 162 games and be rewarded with a trip to the World Series if they managed to compile the best regular-season record in their league. With each expansion of the playoff system, the payoff for being the best team over a six-month season was diminished. The other effect that it had was occasionally making the first two levels of the playoffs, the Divisional Championship Series and League Championship Series, more exciting than the World Series. Hell, sometimes teams have endured thrilling – and gruelling – playoffs, only to find themselves in a World Series that turned out to be anticlimactic.
  
   But the principal argument for expanding the first round to (potentially) seven games is that the integrity of the game is imperiled by having such a short series determine who moves on to the next round.

   The four-of-seven format is at least a tolerable number with historical roots dating back more than 100 years, and in any event it provides a bit more cushion for a team that might stumble – for whatever reasons – in those early games. See how handsomely the four-of-seven format worked for the Boston Red Sox in 2004.

   And I am not talking about this year’s playoffs or even any particular year. As I blog this, the Cubs and Brewers are down 0-2, but I’m not a fan of either, despite the geographic proximity to Iola, Wis.
  
   I’m still a Mets fan. If only we could have expanded the regular season to 166 games, I think we could have been alright.

   I noted the passing of Robert Gartlan the other day, and it got me to remembering about the wonderful statues that his company produced over the last 25 years or so.
  
   Launched in 1985, the Gartlan statues were an instant hit in the hobby, with a Pete Rose version that I think was about $800 from the start (larger version, signed) and a Joe DiMaggio that was in the same ballpark. Those lofty mid-1980s price tags were enough to keep me from pulling the trigger back then on those two, but I did purchase most of the others that originally retailed for about $200-$300, plus my ex-wife got me several for Christmas and birthday presents.
  
   The company stopped producing the sports pieces in the mid-1990s, but continued to make striking statues of popular entertainment figures. I have never understood why the sports pieces aren’t wildly more expensive than at issue price; one theory is that issuing the miniature version of the statues caused some confusion in the marketplace, but that seems iffy.
  
   I do think that there was some drop-off in the quality of the molds later on, certainly enough to make me pass on Luis Aparicio and several of the Negro Leaguers after having collected all the others except for the aforementioned Rose and DiMaggio.
  
   But it says here that the passage of time is going to be more generous with the main body of statues, arguably some of the nicest ever produced of Musial, Bench, Brett, Carlton, Ford, Schmidt, Spahn, Teddy Ballgame and Yaz.
  
   And I’m not plugging it because I am hoping to cash in. I would have bought all these statues even had there been no signatures involved, plus my Ted Williams statue has a hairline break in the ankle that isn’t visible but is there nonetheless. I only mention that in case other collectors found a similar flaw. As near as I can tell, it came from the factory that way, and my half-hearted attempts to get them to replace it never really panned out.
  
   I was a little aggravated at the time, but now I am too old to worry about such things. These are wonderful statues, period. I never met Bob Gartlan, but it would seem his legacy is imposing.