Did you notice that the gasps and the collective indignation wasn’t quite at the fever pitch that you might have suspected to learn that another of the top stars in modern baseball, Manny Ramirez, has been tainted by broad brush of performance-enhancing drugs?
  
   Oh, sure, the blaring headlines were there, the cable television news chatter, the great big national sigh as the country shook its head in dismay at yet another revelation that one of the big boys was “cheating,” but our outrage seemed forced and almost a ritual. Is anybody really that mad or surprised anymore?
  
   Speaking of rituals, all the traditional journalism battalions were marshalled and deployed in the usual fashion, thus rounding up the requisite quotes from an untainted modern star – in this case Chipper Jones – lamenting the whole affair and noting that the taint can’t help but be applied to any number of players who quite clearly wouldn’t think of doing anything illegal. I think he meant himself, at a minimum.
  
   It says here that the decibel level on the outrage meter is going to continue to decline over time, even if/when there are additional revelations about new guys whom we previously couldn’t have imagined would be involved in something so despicable.
   
   It’s just human nature that we can’t keep getting worked up to the same degree about events that get repeated with such frequency, but there’s more going on here. Our collective angst diminishes because at some level many of us realize that we’ve overblown the whole thing in the first place. Our initial outrage, while understandable given all the chanting from the sidelines and the peanut gallery to encourage it – think presidents, Congress, the fourth estate, maybe Joe the Plumber – was overcooked from the start.
  
   In 20 years we’ll look back at this and wonder what the fuss was about. The professional athletes who have been doing this stuff were/are doing what performers at the highest level of any field have always done: seek any edge that they can find.
  
   When your body is your instrument, that means all that tinkering with whatever’s available to help with strength, conditioning, recovery from injury, etc. All of the sanctimony and outrage is as disingenuous as a president mentioning it in the State of the Union: the athletes have to pretend to go along with it because of the public relations pressures, but if they really were upset about it they wouldn’t have used them in the first place.
  
   And what of the integrity of the game, the records, our understanding of the relative positioning on the all-time hierarchy between one generation and another? As counterintuitive as it is to suggest it, the integrity of the game will be just fine. Over time, fans will simply learn to compensate in their minds for a 10- or 15-year periold that quite thoroughly distorted the record books. I suspect that for millions of fans already, the all-time home run champ is still the guy pictured atop this page, rather than the one with a half dozen more home runs. That's unwieldy and awkward, but there it is.
  
   I know, I know, it’s a pain in the neck to figure out how to reconcile having the majority of the game’s top home run hitters come from that particular era, but I’m convinced that the game itself is so much bigger than the men who play it that we’ll figure out how to come to terms with the statistical aberrations.
  
    Now figuring out what to do with the Hall of Fame, that’s another matter. And for another day.

   An article that we’re publishing in the May 29 issue of Sports Collectors Digest focuses on the Fleer World Series cards from the 1970s, the ones that utilized the cartoon renderings of R.G. Laughlin, who had actually created several of his own sets in the late 1960s. Over a period of about 15 years, he produced literally hundreds of pen-and-ink drawings that were used first for his own 1960s issues and then for a time in full color with his linkage with Fleer.

   What struck me about the article was the reminder it provides that the passage of time becomes the ultimate determinant of what is actually considered collectible. And deciding when enough time as passed to make that determination is as tricky as knowing which collectibles to pursue in the first place.

   Now past 40 years from his first creations, some of the Laughlin issues can sell for hundreds of dollars in high-grade complete sets, which is not bad for something that wasn’t that highly regarded at the time. Back in the 1970s the Laughlin and Fleer issues held a niche as kind of a diversionary pursuit for collectors at a time when it could be argued that there wasn’t enough product being produced every year.

   I know I stumbled badly when I sold the whole array of Laughlin/Fleer World Series, Famous Feats, etc. issues in the late 1980s, long before the cards had achieved the level of respect that they hold today.

   Not surprisingly, my friend Larry Fritsch, who died in 2007, has a better record in that regard, but in fairness, he bought just about everything and held on to most of it. The other cool thing he did was buy a whole bunch of Laughlin’s original artwork, which he showed me at his store several years ago.

   If the cards themselves have gained a new-found respect within the hobby, one can only guess about the level of regard for the original paste-ups.

   As readers might suspect, a number of our editorial staffers have been charged recently with creating auction descriptions for the Collect.com Auction Catalog, our first company venture into a sports memorabilia auction that is slated to close in late June.
  
   It’s an all-hands-on-deck sort of thing, so being an old sailor I am familiar with the concept. I have been writing descriptions for a host of card lots, and it’s provided a whole new appreciation for the monumental challenges that confront auction houses as they scramble to produce their catalogs.
  
   Finding new and interesting ways to describe an auction lot of baseball cards, for example, has to yield to the more fundamental burden of accurately describing the items in the lot so that bidders can have as clear a picture as possible about their potential bids.
  
   And I gotta admit, it’s kind of fun as a change of pace, at least in small does, especially when you’re able to look at cool stuff that you don’t see every day. For me, that would involve a lot of the hockey and basketball cards that are included, since I haven’t collected either and didn’t do too much with those sports in the giddy days years ago when I was traveling around the East Coast and Midwest and pretending to be a competent card dealer.
  
   I also didn’t do too much with unopened material, not out of choice but because I didn’t have too many opportunities. But I really love the whole concept, which is why it was neat to write up descriptions for a number of 1968-70 Topps Baseball unopened cello packs.
  
   I always lusted over unopened material, mostly because I never understood how people managed to leave them that way. As I noted in the writeup, these things could have had lesser men gnawing on those impregnable GAI holders.

   There are few things in the world more subjective than art. That said, the artwork that we’ve plunked down into the pages of Sports Collectors Digest over the last 15 years has been so uniformly compelling that its popularity has been quite broadly embraced, which is extraordinarily gratifying.
  
   That very association with SCD helped us entice two of those amazing contributors, Darryl Vlasak and Charles De Simone, to include some of their original pieces in the upcoming Collect.com Auction that marks the inaugural effort by our company into that arena. Both artists are also featured in the Yankee Stadium book that Krause Publications released this month.
  

   Vlasak’s and De Simone’s work couldn’t be more different, save for rather significant point of intersection: a photo realism that borders on the uncanny, even though directed in two vastly different fashions.
  
   De Simone’s work elevates the memorabilia of the greats of the game to almost iconic status, telling the story of the ballplayer in an array of artifacts that look so real you want to reach out and pluck them off the canvas. Vlasak’s talent is to bring the famous ballplayers a sense of humanity and realness that goes far beyond the ballpark in giving the viewer a glimpse not remotely available in a faded photograph or musty newspaper clipping.
  
   Vlasak has originals of Walter Johnson (shown), Joe Jackson and a single painting of Babe Ruth and Miller Huggins in the auction; De Simone’s lineup includes Brooks Robinson (shown), Ernie Banks and Stan Musial.
  
   It might normally be considered gilding the lily to point out that the De Simone works also include an actual autograph from the player himself, except that this particular nuance is an intrinsic part of the unique, 100-plus piece “set” that he has created over the last 20 years.
  
   Both artists are nothing short of sensational.

   Right around 1962 or so, I got out of the football card collecting end of things, trading my entire stash at the time, maybe four years worth of cards, to a friend who lived nearby. The deal was he got all of my football, and I got all of his 1960 Topps Baseball. Since he wasn’t as enthusiastic about his cards as I was about mine, his 1960s were a lot more pristine than my cards, so unlike so many of the cards that I owned back then, many of them have never felt the indignity of an upgrade.
  
   But after doing a story in SCD last week about 1961 Topps Football, it sorta made me wish I still had those beauties around nearly a half century later. I’d forgotten what a great set of cards that is, and few things work better to get you re-involved with a card issue than researching and writing about it.
  
   I won’t rehash the article (SCD May 22), but I will say it’s maybe one of the best vintage Topps sets ever, with the reasons more elaborately enumerated in the article. But I have a kinda grim rule of thumb for cards: they are winners if they would work well with an obituary for the individual, meaning essentially the the image on the card nicely (dare I say elegantly) illuminates something about the player and his personality.
  
   By that morbid rule, I’d say about half of the issue fits the bill. Hard to pick a favorite, though I could contend that it starts right off with the No. 1 Johnny Unitas gem, but for pure, unadulterated joy, I gotta go with Leo Nomellini’s No. 64.
  
   It probably wasn’t used with his obituary (the Hall of Famer died in 2000), but it should have been. If there is a better card that says “1950s-60s football” than this one, I’ll eat my beret. I also assume that he was the inspiration for the comic strip character Tank McNamara, but of course I can’t prove it.