Once again, Tom Bartsch pinch-hits for T.S. O'Connell:

When it comes to Bernie Madoff, one of the last things I would have associated him with is baseball cards. Unless, of course, he managed to steal those, too and sell them for his own gain.

But then comes this subject line in my e-mail: "Topps Issues a Trading Card of the Swindler as Part of the New 2009 Topps Allen & Ginter Product Out in June"

I get the whole social scene inclusion in Allen & Ginter but the only thing I want to do with a Madoff card is burn it.
       
The Madoff card will be a part of Topps' Allen & Ginter inserts of cards that feature the "world's biggest hoaxes, hoodwinks and bamboozles," including disgraced ponzi schemer Madoff. The cards feature 20 perpetrators of some of the most notorious pranks, dubious claims and outright frauds of the last two centuries. Other notables in the set will include: Charles Ponzi, Enron, D.B. Cooper and The Run Away Bride, found in 1:12 packs.
 
According to the release, Topps originally developed the idea of "world's biggest hoaxes, hoodwinks and bamboozles," inserts earlier this year prior to the Madoff scandal.

And I suppose he's the icing on that cake.

2009 Topps Allen & Ginter includes a 350-card set featuring Major League Baseball players and champions from other sports. Along with the "Hoaxes, Hoodwinks and Bamboozles" insert set, collectors can also find subsets featuring "Creatures of Legend, Myth and Terror" and "National Heroes" from around the world.
 
So who do you want in your first pack of Allen & Ginter – Madoff or David Ortiz?

The SCD Editor is on vacation for a few days, enjoying golf in the supposedly warmer St. Louis area. And just his luck, he got sick just before he left. Neer fear, nothing will keep him off of the course.

Pinch-hitting for T.S. is Tom Bartsch. Have a great week.

It's always fun when you stumble onto a fellow collector, be it your neighbor, person at the grocery store or a co-worker. You instantly have a connection and can carry on a conversation for any length of time.

When that collecting link connects to someone famous, it's even more fun. Such is the case with Washington Redskins tight end Chris Cooley, who just happens to blog about his collecting adventures.

You can read one of the latest posts here.

The story goes a little like this. Cooley has decided to start collecting cards again, and he can't stop. His wife also gets into the act (wouldn't that be nice?). Now Cooley isn't the first player to get back into collecting, or keep up a childhood love, but he's one of the few that I know of that also takes the time to sell on eBay the cards he doesn't want. Can you tell it's the offseason in football?

If trading card manufacturers were smart, they would ask Cooley to bust boxes on their websites, as long as he then didn't turn around and sell them (if received gratis from the companies). What better way to promote collecting than have an athlete bust open packs? They should be a coordinatd thing between the leagues and car manufacturers.

Having someone who actually enjoys the process, and can speak intelligently on the subject is much better than watching some canned stage show in which rookies open packs during Rookie Premiers, etc. Cooley's blog is more genuine and I think it shows.

   Business was brisk enough at last weekend’s Sun-Times Show in suburban Chicago that I wasn’t able to get away from the SCD table much to check out all the stuff. Because it was too far away from our booth near the front entrance, I did get to see that Andy Madec had some nifty vintage images of Philadelphia Athletics that he picked up at the Philly Show only the week before, and farther back on the show floor there was periodic episodes of the organized mayhem of “Card Wars,” this time orchestrated at the booth belonging to Big John & Little Debby’s of Chicago.
  
   Kip Ingle, one of the best-known golf dealers in the hobby, was displaying items slated for a golf auction nicely timed with a certain event planned for early April in Augusta, Ga. The lineup for that sale includes Masters badges, a 2009 Masters flag signed by Japanese phenom Ryo Ishikawa and about 300 other lots. For more information click here
 
   Kwik Mit Mania
   But for nonstop action at the show, aside from the bustling autograph area, it was hard to top the energy level at the Hartland Ohio booth and environs, where Mike Shuba & Co. were explaining (with a flourish) the attributes of the Kwik Mit, which they are hoping will catch on with an adoring public roughly in the fashion of the Pet Rock or the Hula Hoop.
  
   The genesis of the unusual idea came from none other than 1955 Brooklyn Dodger George “Shotgun” Shuba,” who asked son Mike one day why no one had ever devised something to aid fans in the stands in catching foul balls and home runs.
  
   “We hope it will become a fad for the ballpark and picnics,” Mike Shuba told me only minutes after a demonstration in front of the Legendary Auctions (formerly Mastro) booth near the entrance to the show.
  
   The “mit” is a piece of foam, roughly the diameter of a fielder’s mitt, that is sticky on both sides, with the American flag (and space for corporate sponsorships) on the front and a scorecard on the back. The idea is that fans peel off the protective strips from both sides, place the Kwik Mit against your chest and you’re ready for a foul fly or a home run. Once you jump up and spill your popcorn and beer, the idea is to slap your chest, adhering the the Kwik Mit to your hand, where you then engulf the ball with the sticky portion on the other side.
  
   All I can tell you is that it’s such a unique concept that you probably have to see one to understand it. The marketing plans call for a suggested retail price of $5; the Hula Hoop sold for all of $1.98 in 1958, and if you do the math, that makes the Kwik Mit a major-league bargain a half-century later.

   I saw a news item recently that said the Detroit Tigers were taking a bit of heat because of the scheduling of their home opener on April 10, more precisely noting that some Catholics were upset that the 1:05 p.m. start time came during the noon to 3 p.m. period when traditional Christian belief holds that Jesus was hung on the cross.
  
   It got me to wondering how this particular conflict hadn’t come up before, but of course it might have and simply escaped my attention. What didn’t get past me was the 1965 decision by Sandy Koufax to forego pitching in the World Series opener against the Minnesota Twins because it fell on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year for the Jewish people.
  
   I was just a 15-year-old kid, frantically following the approaching World Series in the New York Daily News, and I was just awestruck that somebody (actually my favorite pitcher) could take a pass on what I regarded as a secular assignment with near-religious overtones.
  
   Mostly it just impressed me with the seriousness of the Jewish faith; the decision only enhanced my view of Koufax, aided neatly by the later developments that saw the Dodgers win in seven games. By my way of thinking, it was no harm, no foul.
  
   (Sandy Koufax artwork by Arthur K. Miller; www.artofthegame.com)
  
   I also found it fascinating to learn years later as I became something of an amateur baseball historian that there was never really any major decision involved for Sandy. He had long since made it clear to the Dodgers’ brass that he would not play on Yom Kippur, so when the prohibition coincided with one of the holiest days in the baseball world, it was what we would later call a “no brainer.”
  
   That same thirst for reading about baseball history would lead me to Hank Greenberg’s decision to skip a game during the 1934 pennant race for the same reason. Scholars have debated the relative importance of the two; for me, it’s enough to note that I lived through the Koufax decision and yet fully understood the heightened significance of Greenberg’s choice because of the confluence of monumental historical events involving Jews in the 1930s and 1940s.
     

“Turn out the lights, the party’s over.”

   With that Curt Schilling announced his retirement, sending off stage a figure who brought a lot to the game of baseball – including an outspoken persona – at a time when such unvarnished maverickiness was sorely needed.
  
   See, even in his exit from the spotlight he inspired me to invent a new word that is – like the man himself – equal parts nonsense and exquisitely annoying. That’s pretty much how I thought of him over the years and so I applaud his good theatrical instincts for always insisting on being true to himself.
  
   He also, I presume inadvertently, performed yet another public service in his choice of rhetorical device for his announcement, noting that, “To say I’ve been blessed would be like calling Refrigerator Perry ‘a bit overweight.’ ”
  
   The Fridge is, in fact, not a bit overweight at all these days as he struggles with Guillan-Barre syndrome, but I think it's fortuitous that Schilling called attention to the beloved Bruin. He was hospitalized last year for five months and turned up at the recent Sun-Times Show in Chicago with the aid of a wheelchair in order to take part in the reunion of the Bears’ 1985 Super Bowl Champions.
  
   Back to Curtsie. A week or so ago I raised the discussion point about evaluating players’ careers for Hall-of-Fame consideration and juggling the dual importance of statistics and postseason excellence. Schilling will present yet another strong element in that debate, with career numbers that might have made him iffy or simply a tough call, but mixed in with that sterling 11-2 October log he seems like a much stronger candidate.
  
   Me, even though I was never a huge fan, I’d be inclined to give him the Cooperstown nod based on the fact that he was one of the dominant pitchers of the period in which he performed.
  
   Plus, he was never boring, and I always like that, even if I don't agree with everything.

   As I have explained numerous times, I am working frantically to get
accustomed to this blogging business, and that includes understanding and
orchestrating the comments section at the end of each blog.
  
   Creating discussion is an important element in the interactive component
of modern media, but in the case of commentary on my blog, it needs to be at
least remotely related to the blog content.
  
   As the editor of Sports Collectors Digest, I have no role in determining
matters related to advertising, and thus am pretty careful about not
creating blogs that blur the line between editorial and advertising.
  
   I also understand that for the individuals who want to control the
direction of commentary on the site that is a point of frustration, but it's
the ground rules that we are faced with. Confronted with numerous posts
about matters over which I have no control, there's nothing that I can
provide in the way of discussion.
  
   I am subsequently charged with being a censor because some posts have
been deleted. Again, there's not much I can say about it, other than to note
that there's nothing in my history or background to suggest an affinity for
censorship or curtailing the free flow of ideas. With this understood, we
will continue to delete comments that simply are designed to harangue me
into discussing areas that fall outside the editorial end of SCD.
  
   Some of the comments related to the dissolution of the Mastro Auctions
behemoth do prompt this observation: the available information about what is
currently underway in the hobby is minimal to non-existent at the moment.
Even the initial reporting in the New York Daily News last summer was
virtually without discernible attribution, and nothing reported since then
has changed that situation.
  
   What moves through the hobby is recycled, second-hand speculation that
travels at the speed of light and takes on a sheen of legitimacy that wasn't
present at its birth. If I am going to be a party to disseminating something
that has such extraordinary impact, I would want to be convinced of its
unassailable nature.
   We ain't there yet.

   I spent the weekend at the Chicago Sun Times Show at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, Ill., and it’s hard not to notice that our hobby that’s so resistant to change finds a degree of it unavoidable at modern card shows.
  
   Just as its famous counterpart in Valley Forge, Pa., the iconic Philly Show has done for decades, the Sun-Times Show holds a unique position for Midwest collectors as a twice-annual reminder of how the hobby started and the powerful hold that shows have.
  
   Still, even a horse like the Sun-Times has had to make concessions to the current economic climate, this time with a show about 16 percent smaller in terms of the number of dealers.
  
   Show promoter Brian Schwartz insisted the attendance numbers were probably close to those of the November 2008 show, and noted a strong turnout from fans for reunion of the beloved 1985 Super Bowl Champions Bears on Sunday afternoon.
  
   Chronicling sales is even trickier, since such considerations can vary widely depending upon whom you ask. A number of dealers told me that collectors seemed a little slow to pull the trigger on deals, a perhaps understandable observation given the tenor of the times. For my part, it seemed to me there was a bit more sightseeing than I might have expected, with many collectors seemingly give short shrift to many dealers as they walked by.
  
   Still, there was a lot going on, from a serious buzz Sunday from all those lovable Bears to a Heisman Trophy that walked in the door Saturday afternoon, in a manner of speaking. Plus, all weekend long, the gang from Hartland and Mike Shuba (shown in photo at right), the son of George “Shotgun” Shuba, were hawking a unique “Kwik Mit” that is designed to give fans at the ballpark a big assist when it comes to catching foul balls and home runs.
  
   More on all of that later this week.

   I saw a news item in the New York Times the other day that said Mark McGwire had been working with four current major league players helping them on their hitting, which he clearly knows a little something about.
  
   According to the news report, McGwire agreed to the interview with the understanding that “it would focus on his work as a hitting tutor and not on other issues.”
  
   I was glad to see the story, in part because I was never comfortable with the public pasting that Big Mac took as a result of that ill-fated appearance in front of the chuckleheads in Congress. He took a lot of heat for declining to discuss the past, including seeing his initial Hall-of-Fame vote opportunities plummet, for essentially doing what every last one of us would have done had we been put in the same untenable circumstance.
  
   I don’t much like government compelling people to testify about stuff that they know ultimately puts them in serious jeopardy for their livelihood or even their freedom, or in this instance for well-deserved recognition (HOF) for a lifetime’s achievements.
  
   All the clamor about performance-enhancing drugs drowns out the reality that McGwire was as exemplary a major league ballplayer as we’ve had over the last 20 years, his treatment of the family of Roger Maris during the historic home run chase in 1998 being way up there on my list of stuff that helped remind me that some of the modern guys can be just as cool as my favorte old-timers.
  
   I’ve known a number of people in our hobby who have had considerable contact with McGwire and they pretty universally defend him as being one of the genuine good guys. He took a lot of heat even before that 2005 Congressional hearing because of the price of his autograph or even his willingness to sign in the traditional show setting, but I’m not sure that’s been fairly presented either.
  
   I also really liked a quote in the New York Times article from another modern ballplayer I’ve heard good things about, Matt Holiday. He was one of four ballplayers from the A’s and Cardinals that McGwire tried to help; the first one, Chris Duncan of the Cardinals, credited McGwire’s role in helping him to a .302 batting average last year.
  
   Holliday reportedly brushed off suggestions that working with Big Mac might affect his reputation. “I wouldn’t ever not want to have somebody in my life that could be a good friend or somebody I could really enjoy or learn from based on what other people might think about it,” he said, according to the Times.
  
   I won’t quibble about grammar in a sentiment that I so readily agree with, certainly not from a ballplayer who reminds me of McGwire in terms of the way he conducts himself as a teammate and as a citizen of the world.
  
   It says here that McGwire’s Hall-of-Fame prospects are going to turn around someday and eventually he’ll wind up where he belongs.
  
   Gee, I hope that’s not just wishful thinking.

   The changes that started to happen in Major League Baseball when the red light came on atop that first television camera have only expanded and accelerated in the ensuing half century, but one of the most profound is the all-or-nothing philosophy surrounding the postseason.
  
   The importance of the World Series was always enormous – and thus the failure to get there a significant disappointment – but it wasn’t until the Fall Classic moved into prime time in the early 1970s that the true distortion really took flight. Now, failure to get there is a cross to bear for individuals and teams, despite the fact that mere numbers make it so much tougher in 2009 than it was in 1959.
  
   Just looking at it as a question of raw numbers, without accounting for things like big market vs. small market, etc., a team today has about a 7 percent chance of getting into the World Series; that bald number would have been about 13 percent in 1959. So in the same span that we have grossly overemphasized the importance of the prize itself, we have made it twice as difficult to achieve it.
   
   I personally blame Brooks Robinson for all of this. His remarkable 1970 World Series upped the ante for ballplayers in terms of what the ultimate stage could mean to a career. I had never seen one player so completely dominate a Series in the fashion he did that glorious autumn; another Hall of Famer, Roberto Clemente, would have the same kind of extraordinary impact just one year later, this time as the game’s marquee event made its first-ever sorties into television prime time.
   
   Thus we have these annual rituals where we have to tolerate incessantly regurgitated blather about Cubs Curses, A-Rod’s October misses and related meanderings about this or that player who – gasp! – has never been to the postseason.
  
   One wonders if Ernie Banks would have been forgiven his career-long absence of October pay stubs enough to have still made his way to Cooperstown.

   A fellow posed the question the other day on one of those Network 54 forum threads asking what percentage of their net worth was tied up in baseball cards or memorabilia, and as you might have imagined, just offering the question prompted a lot of interesting stuff.
  
   It was not so much that the responses were terribly illuminating, since a majority probably declined to provide such a potentially significant personal financial revelation, but that raising the question about investment vs. collecting can be fascinating.
  
   I still contend that part of the emphasis can be traced back to the 1970s, which, with current economic strangulation aside, was arguably the lamest decade I can remember in terms of the national economy.
  
   When our hobby took off back then in the mid-1970s, there was still enough of a residual sense that baseball cards were something pursued by arrested adolescents, and the principal way that we countered that thinly veiled charge of immaturity was to say, “Hey, look at how much money these things are worth!”
  
   The implication was that collectors were savvy investors rather adults still clinging to a childish pastime. I have little but instinctive or anecdotal evidence to back this up, but I would contend we have perpetrated a grand charade for about 35 years that was designed to protect that initial subterfuge.
   
   Clearly there have been thousands of genuine investors who have entered the hobby over that span, but my perhaps naive view is that the first wave was really just guys who liked baseball  cards adopting what seemed like a tolerable excuse for doing so past the age of puberty.
  
   But the real reason I wanted to run this particular blog was so I could use the cool picture of Thurston Howell III that was nestled comfortably in one of those Network 54 threads.

   In the early 1990s when the new-card end of our hobby was a much larger part of the whole pie than it is today, the card companies would issue so many card sets so quickly that it was hard for me to get too worked up about any individual ones. But around the turn of the century, old geezers like me caught a break when Topps launched the Heritage Series.
  
   For nine years we’ve at least had the fun of seeing one card set every year that looked just like the ones we collected when just about everything was being left to Beaver.
  
   The 2009 edition of Heritage, based on the oddly shaped but nostalgically attractive 1960 Topps set, is reportedly out and about in the world, but it hasn’t made its way to the cornfields of Iola, Wis., just yet. Which, when you think of it, is almost quaint. Here I am, a whisper away from being eligible for Social Security, and it’s spring and I am wondering about the arrival of baseball cards.
  
   One of the reasons that product is so much fun is the company’s commitment to matching every idiosyncratic foible from the original issue, and it’s a lot of fun either trying to spot the connections or when you stumble across them without trying.
  
   What prompts this was a press announcement via e-mail listing the shortprints from the issue, which, ironically, is a bone of contention for some collectors, but I understand is probably unavoidable given the structure that the card companies have developed for marketing new cards.
  
   While I ain’t thrilled with the additional cost that all those shortprinted numbers place on set collectors, the procedure has been successful from Topps’ perspective. The latest list showing the high numbers shows the Coaches cards, which according to Heritage orthodoxy, are supposed to match the 16 Coaches cards included in the original 1960 set.
  
   But the checklist shows the Tampa Bay Rays instead of the Kansas City Athletics, which I guess is merely another case of Topps working in mysterious ways, which is yet another tradition dating back to the beginning in 1951.
  
   It could be argued that the Oakland Athletics would have been the suitable replacement, but I won’t quibble on that one. I am, however, a bit more mystified by the inclusion of the New York Mets further down the checklist, penciled in instead of the San Francisco Giants. The Giants were in San Fran in 1960, and the Mets were still two years away from their National League debut. Huh?
  
   I put in a call to my favorite PR guy, Clay Luraschi of Topps, but the immediate nature of the blogging phenomenon means this goes to cyberpress (I made up that word) and the explanation will follow.
  
   Besides, I am sure I’ll blog some more about Heritage once that 20-mule train makes its way to central Wisconsin to drop off the samples.

   When I was the editor of a weekly newspaper in Wilmington, Del., roughly 20 years ago, there were early rumblings that the state wanted to bring in off-track betting and maybe even casino slots, with the prime candidate being a moribund Delaware Park Racetrack that fell within the circulation area of my newspaper.
  
   Well, all of that came to pass, with the racetracks now cleverly dubbed “racinos,” but according to ESPN.com, there’s more afoot here than that, if you’ll pardon the lame (hobbled?) pun.
  
   The story this week said the First State’s governor, Jack Markell, is going to propose legislation next week that would legalize sports betting in Delaware, making it the first state (no pun) east of the Mississippi to offer that colossal bogeyman for the first time.
  
   I understand how the prospect of this terrifies NFL officials, but you have to think that with state treasuries collectively facing shortfalls running into the tens of billions of dollars, the writing would seem to be on the wall, or more precisely on the betting slip.
  
   The Delaware governor made the cliched-though-cogent observation about the futility of being “half-pregnant,” citing the countless state lotteries and horse racing betting opportunities for citizens, to say nothing of all the “winked at” illegal ones.
  
   I grew up in a time before off-track betting, working as a 16-year-old at a leather factory in Upstate New York, about 35 miles from the legendary Saratoga Racetrack. The factory covered three floors; if you wanted to make a bet on any of the afternoon’s races at Saratoga (or at Aqueduct or Belmont at non-August times), you didn’t even have to bother going up or down the rickety stairs. There was a bookie on every floor.
  
   That’s a confusing message for a teenager; gambling is illegal (no state lotteries to speak of in 1966), and yet certain types of gambling are essentially winked at. Such has been the case with growing severity for the last 40 years as states plunged into the lottery business and Indian casinos sprouted up across much of the country.
  
   The NFL has fought the good fight for all of that span, but you have to wonder if the forces aligned against it in the form of impoverished state governments may now be too big to resist.
  
   Thank heavens our gentle hobby of sports cards collecting has been able to steer clear of the mire. You’d hate to see the little cardboard hosers turned into de facto lottery tickets, wouldn’t you?
  
   Uh, wait a minute ...

   I guess it’s a week for taking note of hobby pioneers stepping out of the spotlight, at least for the moment. The same week that Bob Schmeirer hands over the reins of the famed Philly Show to David Hunt of Hunt Auctions (yesterday’s blog), Bill Mastro has apparently stepped off stage as the famed Mastro Auctions has essentially been dissolved and instantly re-emerged as a new entity, Legendary Auctions.
  
   According to the press release (see our home page), the new company will look remarkably like the old one, at least in terms of three of its principals, except there will be no Mastro in any fashion.
  
   In a hobby/industry that lives and dies by the power and pervasiveness of the “rumor,” the odd, abrupt end of Mastro Auctions is an awkward final chapter to one of the great success stories we have ever seen. Given that just about the only information available falls under that sordid category of the unsubstantiated verified by the ignoble or uninformed, I’ll pass and stick to what I know firsthand.
  
   Our hobby has had a long and fascinating embrace of the auction as a means of moving material, but the elemental components would change over time. In the earliest days it was designed more to move quantity; as the hobby grew and evolved, it ultimately became the vehicle for getting the top prices for the very best material.
  
   Bill Mastro had as much to do with that evolution as anybody, initially with his consultant work with giants like Sotheby’s and ultimately with his link with another hobby pioneer, Don Steinbach, and later the creation of the Mastro auction behemoth.
  
   Over the last dozen years, it grew to dominate the sports memorabilia business and even spread to numerous other areas like comics, coins, art, Americana and even publishing. In the middle of all of that was Mastro, as tenacious a hobby figure as we’ve ever encountered, often brashly redefining the process of acquiring material for his auctions. He was, by his own admission, a barracuda when it came to deal making.
  
   From my perspective, he was a joy to deal with in the hobby press: accessible, candid, colorful and uncensored.
  
   I apologize for blogging something that sounds like an obituary. It ain’t. Regardless of how long Mastro’s hobby hiatus runs, I am going to miss him. 

  
   In a couple of days, Hunt Auctions is going to raise the curtain on the newest incarnation of the famed Philadelphia Sportscard & Memorabilia Show and like most collectors and dealers who have been part of this 34-year-old institution, we’re hoping for continued grand success.
  
   I thought the occasion called for a proper nod to the show’s legendary host over that incredible span, Bob Schmeirer (at left). The 2009 version takes place at the Valley Forge Convention Center in King of Prussia, Pa., which is a new site for his show, but my old friend Levi Bleam reminded me the other day that Tony Carrafiell of Delco Sports Cards had promoted shows in King of Prussia in the 1980s.
  
   I was already hooked on the hobby by the time I went to my first EPSCC Philly Show at Willow Grove in the early 1980s, but if I weren’t, that show would have taken care of that chore handsomely.
  
   I suspect younger collectors offer a collective yawn when they hear such things, but for collectors who remember that show at that cheezy hotel in Willow Grove, the excitement of the hobby was never more visceral or profound, not even at National Conventions, save perhaps for the nutty one at Anaheim in 1991.
  
   I understand now that it was a special time in terms of the exploding growth being experienced by the hobby, a convergence of factors that can never be replicated or artificially reproduced. Fair enough.
  
   But for someone who hates cocktail parties and other instances where I have to nuzzle up to my fellow man way past acceptable boundaries for me, I gotta admit there was nothing better than showing up at that hotel, wrestling for a parking spot in the odd bowl-shaped lawn in front of the convention hall and then diving into one of the great scrums that were the hallmark of that show for so many years.
  
   Every time I went I had a list of a half-dozen dealers whom I had dealt with for years that I wanted to see, but I never went to directly to their tables, since that wasn’t how it worked in those days. As you entered the show floor, you ran smack dab into this huge mass of collectors, and so the whole group moved like a herd of Wildebeest, and once you got to a dealer you wanted to see, you then had to elbow your way toward his table and get in line to wait your turn.
  
   It was all so exhilarating that I promptly signed myself up for Schmeirer’s famous waiting list, and so waited impatiently until 1984 or 1985 for my first chance to be on the other side of the table. Hard as it may be to believe, there was actually a lot less space behind the tables than in front, as I think there were 150 or so tables crammed into a relatively tiny convention hall. Most graphically, I remember having to crawl under the table on my hands and knees to get out to use the rest room or snag a grotesque, flaccid hot dog and frigid french fries. And I loved it all.
  
   As Schmeirer steps away from something that he helped orchestrate for virtually half of his lifetime, I am sure that he can take enormous pride in knowing he was part of something so special.
  
   Heckuva job, Bob.

  If you’ve never been to the Network54 Vintage Card Forum website, you’ve missed out on sitting down in a dugout filled with genuine hobby enthusiasts.
  
   The site, boasting perhaps 30 threads largely confined to discussions of baseball cards and memorabilia older than 50 years, routinely engenders lively discussion about a wide range of topics within those parameters.
  
   One of the neatest threads I’ve seen lately was launched (is that the right word?) by a well-known hobby veteran, Ted Zanidakis, encouraging the group to talk about some of their personal meetings with baseball players.
  
   Zanidakis talked about meeting Ted Williams 25 years ago in Cooperstown and subsequently talking with the Hall of Famer for 25 minutes. The topics touched on included hitting (mandatory), the Yankees (optional) and even Ted’s 1959 Fleer set that followed a nifty bidding war for Ted’s exclusive rights between Topps and Fleer that year (elective).

click here

   According to Zanidakis, with only one modest prompt from a question about his 1954 Bowman card, Williams went into a long soliloquy about Sy Berger and how Fleer and Topps got into a largely unprecedented bidding war for Ted’s exclusive rights for 1959.
  
   As serious hobbyists know, Fleer won that particular wrangle, as Zanidakis explained came after Fleer pushed the bidding all the way up to $5,000, and which point Topps hollered “Uncle.”
  
   Zanidakis’ account of Ted’s story fits nicely with a rare radio interview we reported about last year where Ted had also discussed the 1959 deal.

   Tobacco card expert Keith Olbermann e-mailed me the other day with some thoughts about the column I did recently about a 100-year-old article in the Charlotte Observer talking about youngsters in 1909 clamoring for “pictures” that came in the various American Tobacco Co. cigarette packs sold at local drugstores.
  
   Alluding to the two most prominent theories that would seek to explain why the T206 Honus Wagner card is so rare (a – he didn’t approve of smoking; or b – he wanted to be paid for the use of his image with a commercial product), the MSNBC news anchor toyed with a third option. “What if both theories about the T206 Wagner are wrong? Not just the ‘didn’t want to encourage kids to smoke’ one, but my theory that Wagner hit them up for money for his likeness?” Olbermann asked.

   With that he cited fragments from the news story: “Greatest desire to procure Cobb and Wagner ... no reference to Wagners ... kids in North Carolina desperate for the Dutchman from Pittsburgh ... buying pack after pack."

   "To hell with Admiral Schlei," he muttered at the end, assuming you can mutter in an e-mail.

   Still, he’s not ready to abandon his original theory just yet. “Although, as I think I pointed out in an article on T207  that I did 20 years ago, if you look at the progression of the American Tobacco sets, there is a definite “star drain” – T206 has Plank and Wagner, evidently withdrawn. The T205 issue has neither player (pretty much busting the Plank ‘broken plate’ theory) and is missing a few lesser stars.
  
   “T207 has no Plank, Wagner, Cobb, Mathewson, etc., and is filled with obscure rookies who wouldn’t get their own card in any set today. That certainly fits the idea that there might have a growing money issue."

   So what’s your verdict, either about Wagner specifically or some of the other tobacco card rarities in general? And your choices don’t have to be limited to anti-tobacco bias, royalty compensation or deliberate chase card. We are willing to listen to other suggestions as well, just don’t blame it on the guy on the grassy knoll. He’s got enough on his conscience already.

 
   I ran across this TCMA card of Eddie Gaedel the other day and it reminded of an old friend from another time who was just about the same size as the famous St. Louis Browns pinch hitter.
   
   About 35 years ago I was living in a good old-fashioned boarding house in Plattsburgh, N.Y., where six or seven boarders essentially took over the upstairs section of a private home, sharing the restroom but not getting any dining privileges.
   
   Just down the hallway from me was a guy named Johnny Allen, a dwarf from England who had emigrated from the United Kingdom and somehow settled in northern New York to ply his trade as a tailor. We had been pals virtually from his first day in Plattsburgh when I was an undergrad at the state university.
  
   Johnny used to drive a brand-new Mustang with special doo-dads added to the foot pedals to allow him to reach them. He wasn’t a very good driver, couldn’t hold his liquor too well (I’d carry him home under my arm) and wasn’t much of a pool player (table’s edge was at eye level for him), but he was an amazing tailor at a time when the profession was probably fading away a bit.
  
   After a couple of years in Plattsburgh, he announced he was moving to The Big Apple. We were all instantly terrified for him, as it turns out for no good reason.
  
   We never heard anything from him, other than a note that he was doing costume tailoring for some Broadway shows.
  
   Then, in 1979, I was at the theatre with another of Johnny’s old mates, as he might have described us, and there barely 10 minutes into the 1978 thriller “The Eyes of Laura Mars” with Faye Dunaway and Tommy Lee Jones, was Johnny, up there on the silver screen. He even had a line spoken to the Oscar-winning actress, one clearly cobbled into the screenplay to get him the scale fee from the Screen Actors Guild.

   My friend and I almost fell out of our seats, and made something of a fuss in the theatre exclaiming, “There’s Johnny,” at a time when movie staffers were a bit stricter than they are nowadays.

   We never did hear from Johnny again, though we subsequently saw him in the “Buck Rogers” television series, in the Sylvester Stallone movie “Paradise Alley,” and in the Sex in Cinema section of Playboy magazine. Plus, he showed up as one of Santa’s elfs in a Penthouse magazine advertisement.

   Just for the record, I wasn’t a subscriber to either of those two. On those rare occasions when I ran across either one, I was always impressed by the literary content, which I think has been widely underestimated. Seriously.

   This kind of stuff must read suspiciously like the old Reader's Digest "Most Unforgettable Character" feature, so I won't try to deny it. I'd be interested in some of the readers' choices as the most memorable persons they encountered in the hobby over the years. Especially if you ran into any dwarfs, or Minis, as we might call them in the card-collecting world.

    Tom Hultman, whom SCD readers will remember as one of our editors for many years and who is now a school teacher here in Central Wisconsin, sent me a link to a movie trailer the other day. In keeping with our nostalgia theme around here, the movie in question is almost 20 years old, and the reason he sent along the link to the trailer is to enjoy once again the appearance of yet another SCD notable.
  
   Rick Firfer, our longtime correspondent in the metro Chicago area, is a member of the Screen Actors Guild and has turned up in a number of major motion pictures over the past 20 years.
  
   In the trailer of the hit 1989 film “Home Along,” Firfer is the manager of the grocery store where Macaulay Culkin goes for supplies as he stocks up for the ordeal of being a home “survivor” as an enterprising 8-year-old kid inadvertently left alone by his family over the Christmas holiday.
  
   As Culkin checks out at the cash register, Firfer questions the kid about where his mother and father are and whether he has any sisters or brothers. Told that that he is an only child, Firfer asks the kid where he lives. “I can’t tell you that,” Culkin tells him. “Why not,” Firfer counters. “Because you are a stranger.”
  
click here
  
SCD readers wouldn’t concur with that, but it is great fun to see somebody you know show up in a movie. Toward the end of the two-minute trailer, the Firfer charcater sets up the ultra-precocious kid for a line that ultimately became a real-live catch phrase in the early 1990s.
  
   Asked if he’s at the grocery store alone, Culkin responds, “I’m 8 years old. Do you think I’d be here all alone? I don’t think so.”
  
   So Firfer’s got a claim for a role in altering the national lingo, to say nothing of all the different roles in various movies he's been part of. He also gets those residual checks ... and it hardly matters that the film editors clipped his talking part out of the final version for widespread release.
  
   Just like the guys who get a cup of coffee in the major leagues, it leaves the rest of us green with envy to be able to say you’ve had your moment up on the silver screen.
  
   Tomorrow I’ll tell you about another friend who suddently popped up in a number of movies and several television roles. Here’s a hint (though not a particularly helpful one): he’s much, much shorter than Firfer is.

   The latest news that the Barry Bonds perjury trial has been postponed to at least July and possibly beyond has left me with the nagging realization that the whole enterprise has been ill conceived, ill directed and ill considered in its entirety. And the other thing I realized is that I have enormous respect (potentially qualified) for Bonds’ former personal trainer, Greg Anderson. There, I’ve said it, er, blogged it.
   
   Bonds is a victim, and a scapegoat of the first order. If it wasn’t always apparent – and it should have been – the period covering much of the 1990s and first few years of this millennium was clearly plagued by widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs. Widespread.
  
   What pushed me over the hump finally was the release of Alex Rodriguez’s name from a list of 104 that was supposed to be kept confidential. Once that got out, almost nobody complained about the unfairness of one guy being singled and pilloried for the sins of so many.
  
   And I don’t care a hoot about the technicality that Bonds’ is supposedly being pursued for perjury rather than the alleged steroid use. His Fifth Amendment rights were violated by the whole process when he was essentially compelled to give testimony against his own best interests. And don’t tell me he could have exerted those rights; ask Mark McGwire how well it works to even informally decline to offer self-incriminating testimony to the 536 hypocrites on the hill.
  
   Even if you want to insist that Bonds needs to be punished for what he did, isn't it pretty clear that he's already been punished enough? He has presumably spent many millions of dollars defending himself against a federal behemoth run amok. He has presumably surrendered at least a year of his baseball career and the many millions that would have meant, and he may even have torpedoed his chances at enshrinement in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Does that sound like a suitable spanking for a "crime" that is being ignored for so many of his peers?

   If you don’t think the injustice of the whole prosecution is reason enough to urge its termination, then give up on it for practical reasons of expense. Ultimately, the federal government will end up spending tens of millions of our tax dollars to convict someone of doing something that more than 100 other people also did at a time when his own employer (MLB) was willing to wink at what was clearly a financial boon to just about everybody involved.
  
   And Anderson is probably more of a victim than Bonds, having already paid for his initial crime as dictated by a plea agreement with the government, then hounded for the next several years because of his refusal to toss Bonds over the side.
  
   Though I concede I can’t possibly know if the motivations are any more complicated than what they seem, but Anderson has already spent more than a year in prison for refusing to rat on a friend about something that never should have aroused the interest of the Feds in the first place. If you can get past the icky nature of the basic enterprise, it ought to occur to us that Anderson's refusal to testify – at great risk to his own freedom and well being – would be applauded in other circumstances. Plus I hate that the Feds are also bullying his family as well in an effort to turn the screws on him. Uncle Sammy needs to get a grip on something other than Anderson's neck.
  
   Leaving aside everybody’s hysterical reaction to the steroid boogeyman, this has been 21st-century McCarthyism gussied up to look like something more noble. It isn’t.

   To illustrate how oddly my mind can operate, back when I was a youngster in my 20s or so I used to ponder that if I were ever sent to prison, I would be able to amuse myself by conducting Strat-O-Matic Baseball Games in my head from the cards that I had all but memorized over my teen years.
  
   Just musing about what you would do in prison is goofy enough – there was no attendant crime that I had in mind that might have explained how I got there – but the absurdity of my being able to remember so much data is now stunning 35 years later. I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday.
  
   Anyway, while I no longer daydream much about how I would spend my days in the slammer – that television show “Lockup” on MSNBC has drained all the utility from that notion – my daily sorties into cyberspace do make me think once again about that strange exercise.
  
   If someone had access to the Internet (presumably not an ideal situation for some felons), one could easily wander off into the endless digital universe and pursue almost anything in the world, from mischief and mayhem to culture and advanced education.
  
   And if studying the Warren Commission Report or 17-century literature wasn’t your bag, just relegating yourself to our hobby, for example, would lead to so many cool things the amusement would be bountiful and the education unavoidable.
  
   I scoot around to a dozen or more websites every morning searching for blog fodder or whatever they call it, and this a.m. that meant a stop at http://www.vintagecardtraders.org/, and if you’ve never been there I can’t recommend it enough.
   
   Along with creating a great venue for trading with like-minded collectors, it also links to a host of similar-type sites, all seemingly with a genuine affection for collecting first and foremost.
  
   As it turns out, I have to drag myself away from all of these enticing locations every morning just to ensure that I get back to the business of my antiquated print magazine, for which, I might add, I still have a great deal of affection.