Ronnie Joyner, the wonderful artist who supplies pen-and-ink drawings of legendary ballplayers every week for us in the pages of SCD, turned in a drawing of George Altman (shown here – it ran in the Feb. 20 issue of SCD), a National League slugger in the late 1950s and early 1960s that I remember from when I was a kid.

   Now, George Altman was a pretty fair country ballplayer in those days, and one of the stars of the Cubs when he was an All-Star in 1961 and 1962, back when the Cubs were merely inept and not quite as beloved as they are now.

   Anyway, I was at some kind of a family function and I am going to say it was at the time of the first All-Star Game in 1961 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, since that was where Altman socked a home run. The men and the older boys, of which I was one, were gathered around the TV for the game. In truth, I am not sure it was that game; for purposes of this recollection, it hardly matters whether it was 1961 or 1962 or even which game it was (that was when MLB was stretching credulity with two per season).

   Altman stepped up to the plate, and one of the older men in the large group huddled around the black-and-white TV said matter of factly something to the effect of: “That’s the blackest nigger I’ve ever seen.”

   I was kind of startled, since my parents had pretty effectively instilled in me a sense of just how reprehensible such a remark was, but it was a moment of prepubescent cognitive dissonance, since there was no discernible reaction from any of the adults that he had said something wrong.

   Who the man was isn’t important; he wasn’t a family member, and he's long since gone, but he was a highly respected and admired member of that group and in his community. It would be many, many years before I understood the significance of what I had heard, which was essentially that the evils of racism extend far beyond the obvious instances of numbskulls wearing bedsheets and prattling about vicious nonsense.

   Indeed, I suspect many blacks might tell us that one of the things that makes racism so insidious is that it held so many otherwise fine human beings within its tawdry embrace.

   As the election of 2008 illustrated, that embrace is growing weaker every day, but it’s a pretty good bet that it’s still there. The encouraging news is that such a remark would be so much rarer today than it was 50 years ago.

   It’s just too bad that that’s the way I remember George Altman. Or maybe not.

P.S. – In case anyone is inclined to scold me, I used the actual offensive term quite intentionally, rather than the widely utilized euphemism “N-word,” which I regard as a pretty silly alternative. While I understand the revulsion that the actual word arouses, I won’t typically join in the widespread usage of the toothless “N-word.” That man back in 1961 didn’t say “N-word,” he said something far more disturbing and hurtful than that and I am not disposed to infantilize the historical record.

   I got a phone call the other day from a man who said he had worked with Ted Williams more than 50 years ago when Ted has his own fishing tackle company, still several years before he sold it to Sears-Roebuck in 1962.

   This call came at the same time as the national news reporting of the death of Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike, whose essay in the New Yorker in October of 1960 chronicled Ted’s poetic ending to his career with a home run in his final at bat.

   The man with the fishing film from 1958, reportedly two 16mm films, including a portion of one section narrated by Red Barber, was interested in finding out if anybody was interested in buying them, and I wasn’t sure what to recommend. The films had been used at personal appearances by The Thumper, and the man thought that the two reels were one-of-a-kind pieces.

   Best thing I could think to do was to put it in my blog and see if it attracted attention from some direction. Done.

   The passing of Updike made me think of that New Yorker essay, which probably marks me as a philistine when it comes to literature, but so be it. I remain a big Ted Williams fan and still am deeply saddened that the goofy way his remains were handled (ie. frozen) after his death in 2002 has done a great disservice to his exalted memory.

   But then there’s the Updike piece to ease the pain a bit:

   “Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs — hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted ‘We want Ted’ for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.”

The wonderful baseball-almanace website has the whole essay posted:
Click here:

   There are a host of reasons why I like blogging about Ted, but one of the best is that it gives me the opportunity to show some of Keith Conforti’s amazing Ted cards “That Never Were.” Teddy was an MIA from several classic Topps sets, but his fans have filled those holes nicely over the years, often with ersatz pasteboards that wound up being better than a lot of originals.

   I check the advertisements of our vintage guys in Sports Collectors Digest pretty religiously, often looking for upgrades of a couple of 1950s Topps sets that I work on, but just as often simply to keep track of which issues are being offered and in what fashion.

   When I am looking for things for my own collection – and this applies just as much to visits to the shows every year – I am still amazed how certain cards keep showing up as MIAs in ads and in dealers’ showcases. Keep in mind, this is one of the intriguing parts of the hobby, as opposed to being nothing more than a point of frustration, though it feels more like the latter when you’re poking around cyberspace or in a dealer’s showcases looking for something.

   I am talking here about common numbers that you go through piles for several websites or dealers’ tables and end up with the same holes appearing with alarming regularity. In my case, I’m thinking of a number of first series commons from 1959 Topps that have managed to elude my grasp for many, many years.

   Part of the dilemma comes from the makeup of Topps uncut sheets; for example, in 1959 the first series would have had 132 cards printed, with 22 of those double printed. That double printing helps explain why some guys – they often seem like schlumps – show up with such infuriating regularity, but doesn’t necessarily explain why others seem so difficult, except in relative terms to the double prints.

   I was thinking particularly of the 1967 Topps Brooks Robinson, which admittedly is a high number in a tough high series, but I vaguely remember hobby stories that detailed how that card – at least in highest grades – was brutally tough even with the aforementioned taken into consideration.

   If anybody out there remembers the details of this, I’d be most appreciative to be reminded about it. I’d also like to hear some of the readers’ stories of nagging cards – commons or stars – that seem to be way tougher to find then conventional wisdom might suggest.

   Now there’s a headline designed to lure in the reader. My old friend Bob Lemke has been gone from SCD for several years now, but fortunately for me he’s still here in town in Iola and we get to talk on the phone frequently about hobby events of all descriptions, among other things.

   Bob routinely keeps me up to date on some of his incredible card creations, specifically his massive array of ersatz cards he’s made in the design style of the 1955 Topps All American Football issue. (shown here)

   He was telling me about a custom order he’d done for a man who wanted a card of a former Notre Dame player and World War II hero who had been among the 75,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war who had been part of the infamous “Bataan Death March” in the Philippines in 1942.

   The player, Mario “Motts” Tonelli, had helped engineer a thrilling Irish win over USC in 1937 with a 70-yard run from scrimmage late in the fourth quarter, but the USA Today article “To Hell and Back,” talks about his war service more than his exploits on the gridiron.

   I was fascinated by Lemke’s brief recounting of the tale – and later the full USA Today story – in part because I had actually traveled along much of the route of the Bataan Death March in 1969 when I was stationed in the Philippines in the Navy and remembering the overwhelming feeling that this was hallowed ground, a place with a somber history despite its incredible lush geography.
 
   I would urge you to go to the link included here (Tonelli is also on YouTube, as well), but I’ll hit the one highlight here. During the brutal 60-mile trip through the jungle that would result in the deaths of perhaps nearly 20,000 men (figures are disputed), a Japanese guard noticed the Notre Dame ring on Tonelli’s finger. When the guard demanded the ring, Tonelli initially refused, and the enraged guard reached for his sword.

   Another prisoner told Tonelli to give it to him, that it wasn’t worth dying for. Tonelli reluctantly did surrender the ring. Within a few minutes, a Japanese officer  appeared and asked Tonelli if one of his guards had taken something from him. When Tonelli said the guard had taken his school ring, the officer handed it back to him, telling him to hide it somewhere or he might not get it back the next time.

Click here for the USA Today story:

   I’ll quote the article verbatim here: The act left Tonelli speechless. “I was educated in America,” the officer explained. “At the University of Southern California. I know a little about the famous Notre Dame football team. In fact, I watched you beat USC in 1937. I know how much this ring means to you, so I wanted to get it back to you.”

   The surreal encounter ended, and the gridiron and battlefield rivals headed their separate ways.
“I always thought that someday he’d try to look me up,” Tonelli says. “I guess he probably didn’t make it through the war.”

   Lemke gets to make a lot of important cards, but few have this kind of regal quality.

   I was meandering around cyberspace and poking my nose into the Network54 http://www.network54.com/Forum/153652 discussion section (probably not the correct nomenclature), which then sent me further afield at to a Financial Times website where someone named Tony Barber was blogging about the inauguration of President Obama being such a momentous event for so many millions of Americans.

   I would normally be way too chicken to venture to a website called Financial Times, especially in this day and age, but with the recommendation from a hobby venue I took a shot. What prompted me to comment on it was his No. 1 moment: Playing with a full set of American Civil War bubble gum cards.

   His list encompassed Top 10 American Moments of his life, and he included popular culture and politics, presumably because it’s his list and he gets to decide the ground rules.

   Barack Obama didn’t make it to his list anywhere, but I was intrigued that a set of Civil War cards could jump ahead of Robert Kennedy’s assassination, Nixon’s resignation and 9/11.

   For most people my age, I suspect the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 either tops the list or is right up there, so this Financial Times guy is obviously quite a bit younger than I am.

   Anyway, it got me to wondering about a top 5 list of hobby/sports moments, since including assassinations, wars and other calamities would dominate such a compilation way too much.
So with hopes of getting a look at some of the readers’ top 5, here’s my list:

1. Meeting and talking to Henry Aaron for nearly an hour in 1978 at a press conference in Plattsburgh, N.Y.
2. Opening my first pack of 1959 Topps Baseball cards, probably in the spring of 1959
3. First trip to Shea Stadium in 1964
4. Interviewing Barry Halper at his home in New Jersey in 1996
5. (tie) Attending my first Philly Show at Willow Grove in 1982; and my first National Convention in Parsippany, N.J., in 1984

   Gee, listing that stuff is a lot more fun than pondering assassinations, global conflagration and such.

   In a couple of months, we are going to be watching the auction of items from the Sy Berger Collection that include original paintings from 1953 Topps, and included in that grouping will likely be work from the legendary artist Gerry Dvorak.

   It is a point of considerable irony that Dvorak is remembered more in our hobby – he was also an animator for cartoons like Popeye and Casper the Friendly Ghost – for a painting that he didn’t do than he is for the estimated four dozen that he actually did for the classic 1953 Topps set.

   When the Mickey Mantle original artwork from the 1953 set sold for $121,000 in the 1989 Guernsey’s Topps Archives Auction in New York City, it provided the hobby and the mainstream media with a good glimpse of what was to come over the next 20 years.

   In that ensuing two decades, the notion that Dvorak had painted that iconic gem has become widespread, but it just ain’t so. When the auction was held there was no mention at all of who the artists where who painted the half-dozen originals in the auction (Mantle, Mays, Campanella, Feller, Ford and Jackie Robinson), and not a peep since. I can promise you that if the guy who painted the Mantle were still alive, he likely would have stepped forward at the time and got some mileage out of his 15 minutes of fame.

   In doing some of the editing for the Mickey Mantle Collectibles Series currently under way in SCD, the question came up again, so I went back and did some research. In a wonderful article in the August 1984 issue of Baseball Cards Magazine, Dvorak told interviewer Paul Green that he thought he had done about 50, and identified nearly a dozen from the set that he remembered.

   That list included Hall of Famers Eddie Mathews and Red Schoendienst, but he also specifically conceded that he hadn’t done the Mantle (or Mays) cards. He did explain that Topps officials had told him he could have as many cards as he wanted of the various paintings he did, or even of others that he hadn’t done, and he lamented that the Mantle and Mays cards were “the ones selling for big money.”

   And remember, this was a full five years before the Guernsey’s auction, and he was talking about the value of the Topps cards, not the original artwork.

   The most famous painting in the history of the hobby, and there’s nobody to lay claim to it. I've got a feeling this one is going to remain a mystery for a very long time.

   There is so much stuff produced every year in conjunction with Major League Baseball that you can’t help but wonder how much of it is going to survive the decades that would be required for a particular item to be called a collectible.

   Oh, vast piles of stuff are produced for all the various and sundry Major League Baseball promotions and “days” at the ballpark get manufactured and distributed willy-nilly at the stadiums, but does any of it rival the cool Schaefer Beer 3D team picture of the Brooklyn Dodgers shown here?

   It’s not likely that much of the modern stuff doled out at the ballpark is going to appreciate in the fashion that the cool 3D team picture has, if for no other reason than the numbers produced would be so vastly different.

   What winds up being collectible is often something that offers a unique or refreshing snapshot of the culture of the period in question, which I suspect the Schaefer sign managed to do in spectacular fashion.

   Got any nominations of unusual items from, say, 2008 that might wind up similarly revered in 2048?

   I should offer the disclaimer upfront that I really like casinos. Not necessarily from a morality perspective, but simply as entertainment that is wildly popular with the masses and will exist with or without state-sanctioned, tax-gulping support.

   Here in Wisconsin, we have casinos run under the auspices of the Native-American tribes that still reside here, and I like that delicious irony even more than my fondness for casinos themselves.

   But disclaimers aside, I really wonder about the recent announcement that the Milwaukee Brewers have inked a deal with the Potawatomi Bingo Casino that makes the gambling behemoth a “presenting sponsor” for the 2009 season.

   My squeamishness stems not from outraged morality, but rather from the seeming hypocrisy of Major League Baseball suddenly being able to disavow its historic aversion to gambling now that the pressures for additional revenue have become so, uh, intense.

(An ersatz 1954 Topps Mickey Mantle card created by Keith Conforti is shown here)

   I know, MLB’s response was that legalized gaming has sewn itself into the national fabric so widely that shunning potential sponsorship money simply didn’t make economic sense. True enough, but the more candid answer might be that economic pressures have prompted the grand old game to embrace partners that they almost certainly would have turned up their nose at only decades ago.

   About 30 years ago, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn banned Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays from the game for simply glad-handing at Atlantic City casinos, a mercifully short-lived pronouncement that seems almost quaint nowadays.

   In the years since Pete Rose came forward and finally admitted that he had bet on baseball after 15 years of denials, he has been scolded from various corners about continuing a long-running affiliation with Las Vegas that included weekly autograph signings and public appearances.

   Maybe MLB officials can insist that the new welcoming mat for “casino gaming” doesn’t alter Pete’s status on that permanently ineligible list, but I’ll bet (whoops!) for a lot of baseball fans, the seeming contradiction may be terribly significant.

   Let’s see, 1989-2009. Hmmmm. Nice round number. If Pete can’t be considered for the Hall of Fame, can he at least sign autographs at the casino in Milwaukee?

   Even if I had gotten it wrong, I would have been here today blogging, but I gotta admit it’s more fun when I don’t have to be humble and literate all at the same time. Predicting what the Veterans Committee will do can be tough, especially with the different voting panels and procedures, but the baseball writers vote (BBWAA) should be easier to anticipate.

   Thus, the Hall will welcome Rickey Henderson and Jim Rice to Cooperstown next summer, and there’s little left to attend to other than to ensure they have a stage large enough to accommodate Mr. Henderson, who now must allow for a tiny space for Mr. Rice as well.

   “Wait till next year,” takes on considerable import for Andre Dawson, who finished third in this year’s voting at 67 percent. There are no surefire Hall of Famers coming to the ballot over the next three years, so he should have a couple of good opportunities.

   The managers/umpires and executives/pioneers get voted on this fall; often the individuals who get the nod from this group est morte, so here’s hoping Andre at least gets in for staging purposes.

   Since Rice getting elected on his last try on the BBWAA ballot wasn’t really a surprise, neither was much of the rest of the voting. Dawson and Bert Blyleven would seem to have the best shots in coming years (67 percent and 63 percent, respectively), but after that it’s iffy.

   Lee Smith and Jack Morris still hover around 45 percent; Tommy John (32 percent) will now cast his lot with the Veterans Committee in 2010 after exhausting his 15 tries on the BBWAA ballot.

   Mark McGwire lost a couple of percentage points, and now unofficially seems like toast when it comes to the writers’ vote. Remarkable, given that all he really did was completely botch his Congressional testimony, rather than actually be charged with doing something untoward.

   Not far behind is Alan Trammell, Dave Parker, Don Mattingly and Dale Murphy, four guys whom we all likely would have thought were Cooperstown-bound had the question been raised in the late 1980s, and now seem lost as far as the BBWAA is concerned.

   For Barry Larkin and Roberto Alomar, coming to the ballot for the first time next year, the paltry vote total for the American League’s top shortstop for the whole decade of the 1980s (Trammell) has got to be troubling.

   Next Monday is an oddity: a day in January that I always look forward to every year. It’s the day when the Hall of Fame announces the winners and losers from the annual balloting for enshrinement.

   In addition, the latest installment of the Hall of Fame newsletter (good stuff) includes word that my favorite player, Henry Aaron (right), will be featured in a new exhibit opening in April. Not that Henry had been ignored by the Hall: lots of his stuff was already there, but now a bunch of it is in his own exhibit.

   I won’t blog on Monday until after the 2 p.m. (EST) announcement from the HOF, an undertaking which will presumably include a proper genuflection to Rickey Henderson, the all-time stolen base king. One supposes that Henderson may well be at the podium by himself next summer, though my hope is that Jim Rice and Andre Dawson will be right alongside.

   As HOF hopefuls can attest, there can be pesky gaps between hope and reality. Though I think both Rice and Dawson deserve election, the process has usually been that when two players who have been on the ballot for quite awhile (Rice 15 years, Dawson 8), it would be almost unprecedented for both to get in the same year. The BBWAA guys just don’t have the attention span for something that complicated.

   For Dawson, there should be hope for the next couple of years after that, though, because there isn’t a first-ballot Hall of Famer being added to the ballot until 2013. That fascinating year will have at least three of them: Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa. I can hear all the hew-hawing from here.

   I love guessing at these things. I am working hard as I approach my golden years to be more optimistic than I might have been as a younger man. The rampant pessimism helped me avoid a lot of unpleasant surprises over the years, but I still can’t recommend it as a strategic choice. I think I read somewhere that optimists live longer, or maybe just have more fun for the time that they are around.

   So in that jaunty spirit I am predicting that Rickey “L’etat est Moi” Henderson will be elected, along with Jim Rice. In the case of Rickey, there will be a notable number of scribes sufficiently annoyed with his Rickeyness that they will defy common sense and the underlying charge from their ballot responsibilities and leave him off the ballot. They deserve the same scorn that should be afforded the numbskulls who felt Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, Stan Musial, Joe DiMaggio and dozens of other immortals didn’t warrant election.

   The list of things that make my job pretty cool is lengthy, but somewhere near the top would be the opportunity to be part of various adventures that include looking at some of the nicest card collections in the country.

   Because the hobby is maturing so, uh, briskly, that stuff doesn’t happen as frequently as it once did, but just having the potential lurking out there is helps to keep the enthusiasm going.

   Hard as it for me to believe, it has been 15 years since I traveled to Chicago to cover the evalutation of Mike Keasler’s incredible card collection by Alan “Mr. Mint” Rosen. The collection was slated for Rosen’s auction later that year, and this was part of the process of going through the vast accumulation in prepartion for that.

   Keasler (at right) had been a college basketball coach and was an old-time collector who was there in the heyday when some of the great collections were amassed for a fraction of what they would cost only 20 years later. He had been a partner in the famed Sports Collectors Store; his stuff was nothing short of stunning, especially for a collector from the period when condition would sometimes take a back seat to finishing a tough set.

   That was an accomodation that Keasler never indulged. It became clear as we broke down the vast inventory that rather than plunk down something beneath his near-mint standards, even the trickiest of older issues would go uncompleted. It showed a reverence for condition that few old-timers might have been able to exercise back then.

   For the better part of a day, the three of us trudged up and down the stairs from Keasler’s basement to his kitchen table. He had kept all these great cards in metal drawers in the basement, all of them in semi-rigid holders; none of them slabbed and third-party graded. It’s a pretty good bet that most of them have since undergone that process in the intervening 15 years.

   He had near-mint complete sets from Topps, Bowman and Fleer from 1954 on, plus high-grade tobacco cards and cool stuff like many of the 1930s Goudey and Buttefinger premiums.

   Keasler had also been an early autograph hound, sending out thousands of cards to get signed, including Play Ball Joe DiMaggios from 1939 and 1941. It was hardly the rarest pile he had, but I was particularly fascinated by a grouping of 1958 Topps All-Star Stan Musials, all of them neatly signed by Stan. All 90 of them.

   I was so intrigued by the Musials that I fanned them out and took a picture, but I haven’t been able to find it for quite a few years. I assume it was featured in the 1994 story I wrote about the collection. As you’ll note from the photos shown here, it was so long ago that we were shooting in black-and-white.

   Positively prehistoric!

  
   The temptation would be to trace it all back to Joe Jackson and the melodramatic moment on the courthouse steps in 1920 and the cheesy tale of a youngster pleading, “Say it ain’t so, Joe, say it ain’t so.” The big-time athlete is disgraced and humbled, and in Jackson’s case at least, saddled with an unrelenting banishment that survives eons past his own mortal demise.

   Jackson obviously wasn’t the first to suffer such ignominy – Jim Thorpe had been stripped of his Olympic medals years earlier – but Jackson was perhaps the most famous. Another legendary player from the period, Hal Chase, was banned from baseball by Commissioner Landis at the same time, though the charges against him were not directly related to the fixing of the 1919 World Series, though he was linked to it unofficially because of his gambling connections.

   Comparing the fates of Chase, Thorpe and Jackson nearly 100 years later shows vastly different outcomes, and gives pause to wonder what the historical record will say about another fellow traveler, Pete Rose, many years from today.

   The degenerate gambler Chase is widely felt to have defiled his almost cosmic fielding skills by intentionally botching plays to affect outcomes as dictated by his betting. His fate, nicely summed up in the quotation below, was the most tragic of all.

   In Chase’s own words: “You note that I am not in the Hall of Fame. Some of the old-timers said I was one of the greatest fielding first baseman of all time. When I die, movie magnates will make no picture like 'Pride of the Yankees,' which honored that great player, Lou Gehrig. I guess that’s the answer, isn’t it? Gehrig had a good name; one of the best a man could have. I am an outcast, and I haven’t a good name. I’m the loser, just like all gamblers are. I lived to make great plays. What did I gain? Nothing. Everything was lost because I raised hell after hours. I was a wise guy, a know-it-all, I guess.”

   Thorpe, stripped of his 1912 Olympic medals in 1913 following revelations in the press that he had, gasp, made a couple of bucks playing semipro baseball. The public didn’t care all that much, but the guardians of the “amateur” ideal prevailed at the time.

   It was to the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) that Thorpe sent a letter pleading his case: “I hope I will be partly excused by the fact that I was simply an Indian schoolboy and did not know all about such things. In fact, I did not know that I was doing wrong, because I was doing what I knew several other college men had done, except that they did not use their own names.”

   That reasonable entreaty fell on deaf ears, and the AAU stripped him of his amateur status, later leading to the International Olympic Committee’s decision to yank the medals. By 1950, though, the Associated Press named him “The Greatest American Football Player of the First Half of the Century,” and in October of 1982 the Olympic medals were reinstated. Perhaps of limited utility for the man himself, who died penniless in 1953, but certainly the historical record as been handsomely revised.

   Jackson, though his “Permanently Ineligible” status persists a half-century past his own demise, is largely vindicated in the public’s eyes. He is as revered in our hobby as any Hall of Famer, and his cards and memorabilia are treasured to the point of being beyond the reach of any but the most affluent collectors.

   Pete, who used to routinely disavow any linkage with Jackson back in the heady days when Rose was still denying he bet on baseball, would do well if the public would ultimately hold him in the same regard it has now for “Shoeless Joe.”

   All different sins, I know (I’m not even convinced Thorpe’s offense rises to that level of ecclesiastical effluvium), but vastly different outcomes as well.

   On a fairness scale, I would rate it two right on the mark, one clearly unjust and one on the bubble. Hopefully, the fun is in deciphering which is which.

  
   There is much that links our hobby to the wider world at large, but I think the most important is the understanding that the passage of time ultimately has a dramatic effect on what survives as valuable and collectible.

   For older collectors, that’s a pretty significant distinction, because for the better part of nearly two decades, the hobby has gotten twisted around to the idea of the companies that produce cards and collectibles apparently making the decisions about long-term collectibility. That, my friends, is an illusion.

   I am not suggesting that all of the glitzy stuff that is being produced these days (in relatively miniscule quantities) will fizzle out in 20 years, but merely observing that – just as it is in the wider world – we just don’t know.

   Which leads me to a story (parable, really) that I am going to try to tell as best I can remember it.

   A rabbi in a Russian village in the mid-1800’s would walk across the village square every day at noon for morning services at the synagogue. Year after year, rain or shine, he would walk slowly across the center of the village to attend services, without exception or interruption.

   The village constable, a surly Cossack, watched this every day, and finally, on a day when he was particularly cranky, snarled at the rabbi as he was in the middle of the square. “Where are you going, Rabbi? the Cossack asked. “I don’t know,” said the rabbi in a soft voice.

   The answer infuriated the Cossack. “Where are you going?” he asked again, and again he was told, “I don’t know.”

   With that, the enraged Cossack grabbed the rabbi  by the scruff of his neck and dragged him to the local lockup. The Cossack rudely shoved the rabbi into the cell, and as the iron door banged shut, the rabbi quietly said to his jailer, “You see, you just don’t know.”

   I hope I told that adequately. I’m not suggesting that the Conlon Collection card pictured here, which I think are among the coolest things produced in the hobby in the last 30 years, are going to be more highly regarded in 20 years than some of the shiny stuff offered in those expensive packs. Since roughly 1990 or so, the card companies (for example) have been telling collectors what’s collectable (ie. valuable), a designation that is implicit in the price of the packs that house these creations. I just take comfort in the fact that the passage of time is going to render the final verdict.

   “You just don’t know.”

   Change is a pain in the neck. Most everybody resists change, and God knows institutions resist it with an even stronger collective zeal than might be the case with any one individual.

   Change is coming in this hobby of ours, what with a shrinking and convulsing economy that has already and will certainly continue to exert downward pressure on anything that might be regarded as frivolous. Much as I like ’em, sports cards are certainly all of that.

   The card companies are going to have to find innovative ways to maintain revenue streams, and it says here that one way would be a greater utilization of reprinted cards. That obviously means different things if you’re Topps or Upper Deck, but there should be potential there for both behemoths to sell cards to the modern generation and also to the baby boomers who launched the hobby in the first place.

   I am convinced that the efficacy of such an idea hinges upon MLB finding a way to get an umbrella licensing arrangement with retired players. Topps hasn’t reprinted one of its vintage sets in 14 years, presumably because of the double-edged dilemma of getting licensing for so many long-retired players and the wrangling that surrounds the top guys, like Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, Willie Mays, Henry Aaron and Roberto Clemente.

   I suspect it’s the former problem that poses the greatest obstacles. Before there was a union, players signed individual contracts with Topps in an egalitarian system that gave everybody the same amount of royalty money. With the union, the monies are likewise divvied up on a similarly socialistic platform, but when dealing with long-retired guys, it’s probably tough to convince Hank Aaron that he and Hank Foiles should be on equal footing.

   Still, you have to think that for an area not already trampled to death with expensive autographs, jersey swatches, bat chips, etc., there ought to be some potential in tapping into that nostalgic vein.

   For one thing, the scale is likely much more attractive today than it would have been 14 years ago, relatively speaking. The new-card hobby was so much larger at that time that you would think trying such a project in the new, smaller-scale version would make it more enticing.

   I think I once calculated in a column that Topps produced enough of the 1954 Reprint Set to account for almost 200,000 sets or so. Even at that big number, boxes of the 1954 Reprints are tough to find in 2008, and pretty expensive when you do, certainly above their original retail price.
Even more striking (pardon the pun), the two Ted Williams cards and the ersatz 1954 Topps Mickey Mantle that were missing from the Topps Reprint but picked up by Upper Deck in a kind of unique, hybrid licensing deal, are even tougher to find.

   Buying an unopened box or the whole 1954 Reprint set might set you back anywhere from $75 to $125; picking up just those three single cards would like add more than another $175 to your price tag.

   I know Upper Deck would be faced with a greater challenge, but I still think it would be cool to charge your designers with trying to replicate the tenor of the times.

   For Topps, it’s obviously a lot simpler (assuming the licensing problem could be solved). Anybody else out there would like to see a reprint set of 1956 Topps?