Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Dreams Sublime and Quotidian: Putting a Pricetag on Youth and Baseball by Philip Martin

FOUR OR FIVE years ago I drove down to my mother's house in Louisiana and crawled around in her humid attic. I don't remember exactly what I was looking for or even whether I found it or not, but I did fetch something from her rafters that I hadn't allowed myself to think about for years; a cache of Topps baseball cards from the mid-1960s through the early 1970s.

The cards were stored in a couple of orange shoeboxes, strapped shut with black electrical tape. I had lashed them together and put them away back at the beginning of high school, with only a vague idea that I might want to look at them again someday. I put them on a high shelf in the back of my closet.

I had sealed the boxes tight, so no light and only the most persistent mouse could ever intrude. I never once thought to reach back over the yearbooks and high-school clutter to touch the lids and reassure myself they still existed; they were buried then without mourning or regret. By the time I could drive, those cards were a legend only occasionally remembered. At some point, probably after I had left for college and it became clear "my room" was actually somewhere else, the boxes were moved, along with a collection of 45 rpm records and other childish things, into the attic.

When I found them again, a jolt of recognition as palpable as an electric shock coursed through me. I immediately cradled them down the stairs, wiped away the dust and split them open with a razor knife.

I folded back the lids from the center, so they opened like wings. And there were the cards, carelessly jumbled together, a mosaic of slightly off-register colors infused with the faint yet unmistakable flavor of stiff gum. Names like Koosman and Etchebarren and Kessinger and Roseboro and Aparicio. There was Ron Swoboda in mid-swing, in a batting helmet, shot from a low angle, backed by a pale 1968 sky.

If anything, they seemed brighter, the photographs sharper than I had remembered. Quite a few of my cards were from 1971, a series I didn't much care for because instead of printing the player's entire major league statistical history on the back, Topps opted to print only the line from 1970 and career totals. The 1971 series had black borders which has since become infamous among collectors. It is difficult to find cards with "mint" borders.

I had a Nolan Ryan card from 1969 and a Mickey Mantle from the same year. There were a couple of Hank Aaron cards, a Johnny Bench, a Tom Seaver. In all there were probably more than 600 cards in the two boxes. Most of them were cards of ordinary players—cards the collectors call "commons"—like Curt Blefary and Don Wert.

I knew what I had recovered. I knew the cards were worth something. Sometime in between the day I had put away my baseball cards and the day I had retrieved them, they had become a minor industry. Suddenly there were cards shops open in every strip mall, and nine-year-old kids were buying whole sets and putting them away unopened. They knew what Ken Griffey Jr.'s rookie card was worth, and they knew to slip cards into plastic sleeves to protect them from fingerprints and oil.

Kids were savvy, and there were plenty of older collectors too. Baseball cards were booming, four or five years ago, they were investments. I went down to one of the card shops and bought a Beckett's guide and started thumbing through it, estimating what my cards were worth.

It almost broke my heart.

I was not so savvy when I was a kid. I ruined a good many of my cards, by adding, in ballpoint pen, another line or two of statistics. Had I not defaced my Nolan Ryan card that way, it might have had a book value of $600. (Of course, I soon learned that no card dealer will ever pay you book value for a card—that's the price they charge you for a card. For any particular card, you might get 60 percent of what it says in the price guide.) If the word "Yankees" on my Mickey Mantle card had been printed in white rather than yellow, it would have been worth $700 rather than $175. I had, in my reckless youth, denatured a Tom Seaver rookie card by cutting it in half (the bottom portion of the card featured a pitcher named Bill Deheny) and stapling the Seaver photo to an index card on which I carefully printed his statistics each year.

Yet, even though a good many of my "best" cards had been defaced and rendered near worthless, I had a good collection. After I had taken my own inventory, I took the boxes down to one of the card shops to have a professional look at them. He appraised the collection, and made me an offer. It was more than I thought the cards were worth.

I turned him down and took my cards home.

THAT WAS FOUR or five years ago. That’s when the baseball card industry was booming. In 1990, demand for baseball cards—old and new—was at an all-time high. There were seemingly as many speculators buying cards as kids and collectors.

That baseball cards could become an industry might seem fantastic to those of us who flipped and traded them as kids. Their roots go back nearly as deep as the game itself, to the late 19th century, when tobacco companies began inserting them in packs of cigarettes. By the 1930s, they were sold with gum under license. From the late 1950s through the late 1970s, the Brooklyn-based Topps bubble gum company enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the major leagues; a stranglehold that was broken when a rival gum company, Fleer, won an anti-trust lawsuit.

In recent years, the gum has disappeared from the packs. It risks discoloring the cards, and upsetting collectors.

Opening the market was perhaps the best thing that ever happened to Topps. Through the 1980s, more and more companies joined the fray, until there were six companies printing more than 27 different lines of cards featuring the likenesses of major league players.

Card manufacturers begin to produce and sell more cards. (Topps sells many more cards today than it did in the years when it enjoyed a monopoly.) They introduced premium and so-called "super premium" lines. Kids could reel off the trading prices of a Don Mattingly card as quickly as they could relate his batting average. Baseball cards were collectibles, and if the public wanted them, the card companies were willing to oblige.

Books with mercenary titles like Collecting Baseball Cards: How to Buy Them, Store Them, and Keep Track of Their Value as Investments began to appear.

Then, quite naturally, the market began to settle and grow soft. Faced with myriad choices, collectors began to concentrate on buying the sets they liked best. Some kids, grew bored with the hobby. A lot of dealers found it hard to hang on and by 1992, most of the card shops had closed. A few hung on, servicing the hard-core collectors and kids newly introduced to the hobby.

Even after the boom subsided, baseball cards are still big business; Greg Ambrosius, the editor of Sports Card magazine estimates they made up $946 million of the $1.7 billion generated by the sports trading card industry in 1994.

Then, last August, major league baseball players went on strike. There was no World Series. There were no real major leaguers in spring training. Suddenly, baseball cards seem a precarious business; even though 1995 sets have been issued, and you can buy packs of new cards, production has been cut way back. And interest is disturbingly low.
Marty Appel, the director of public relations for Topps, the oldest and best-known of the card companies, downplays the affect of the baseball strike on the hobby. He says that while there’s a "large segment of consumers" angry with baseball and with sports in general, card collecting "has a life of its own."

"It can continue to flourish even without the games on the field," he says. "America maintains a passion for sports collectibles. If you look beyond the labor unrest, sports is a very healthy industry, and trading cards are a significant part of it."

Vince Nauss, the director of marketing for Donruss, echoes Appel's optimism one can hardly imagine a director of marketing doing anything else. He claims Donruss has yet to see any "major turnoff" from collectors, though he says he assumes that card collector interest will fall off if the strike affects the 1995 regular season. Accordingly, he says, Donruss has cut production on 1995 cards.

For that matter, so have Topps and most of the rest of the card companies. Apparently the demand just isn't there.

"You'll definitely see less Topps products on the market," Appel says, though he insists that as fans get over their anger the 1995 cards will eventually become highly prized by collectors.

"No matter how angry people are at the moment," he says, "last year may be one of the most historically significant and interesting seasons this century, in the sense it was an incomplete season. There will be considerable historical interest in the 1995 cards."

Cameron Broussard, the director of communications for Upper Deck, admits that the strike has significantly affected his company's sales.

"Fans have just stopped buying trading cards, period," he says. "It not because they feel badly about the cards, it's a measure of how they feel about the sports themselves."

Still, Garrison says cards like the vintage ones I stuck away in my shoe boxes more than 20 years ago have generally held their value. They were insulated from the boom. Few kids bought them, so they were scarcer and hence more expensive than newer cards—and why should a 12-year-old be interested in owning a 1966 Matty Alou card anyway?

ALL THE FLASH and glory attends the new millionaires, the cocky young men of the '90s who patrol the base lines draped in gold, wearing space-mask sunglasses. Barry Bonds, Kenny Lofton, Deion Sanders—the kids want the footwear heroes. That's who brings $5 a pack.

That's OK, I guess. Kids can’t help the time they're born in. If Roberto Clemente played today, he would be different too. Joe DiMaggio couldn't retain that hermetic cool; Mickey Mantle might be a candidate for intervention and substance-abuse treatment.
Big-league baseball wasn't better in those days—just different.

Baseball cannot, as some suggest, be boiled down to a line of statistics. The reams of quantifiable data produced by baseball don't equal the game, any more than a couple of shoe boxes full of trading cards equals a childhood. Baseball cards are sublime and quotidian, at best; they might be the receipt stubs of abandoned dreams.

Baseball, with its quiet stretches and languid rhythms, tempts writers into silliness all the time. They try to make a second baseman into a shaman. They try to make baseball cards into symbols of unrecoverable youth.

That’s not what they are. My cards had nothing to do with the game, just like the game has nothing to do with the strike or even with the rude young millionaires who play it. It is, as Stephen Jay Gould has written, profound all by itself.

I think sometimes I should have taken the cash for my cards. I don't really have any excuse for not taking the money, had the dealer offered a bit more money I'm sure I would have taken it. And I'm sure that money, whatever the sum, would be gone by now.

I’m glad I didn't sell my cards. I’m glad that I gave them to my niece, who was then too young to understand that the scraps of paper represented men who once played a boy's game. She could delight in their flat colors and the cartoon drawings on the back. I didn't care if she put them in her mouth and crimped their corners.

Her parents, being practical people, put them up for her.

— Philip Martin

Originally published in July 1995
Vol. 2/Number 2


Monday, June 30, 2008

A Certain Grace: Reflections on the Negro Leagues by Philip Martin



There is something in the way old ballplayers carry themselves that suggests nobility. Even 20 or 30 years after their time, even when they are old men, they move with an animal economy and a physical confidence that manifests itself as grace.

Football and basketball hobble and grind their players; short brutal careers chew knees to gristle, gnarl knuckles and snap tendons. Baseball players get hurt too, but not so often and not so dramatically. And even the crippled Mickey Mantle—the only player who was a bigger hero to his teammates than to the fans—drags himself from the oldtimer dugout with a king quiet dignity and forbearance.

It might have something to do with having played a game that requires, more than brute strength or speed, a certain litheness and precision. No other sport demands so much of those who would play it, even on a ordinary level. Baseball is too difficult a game for recreational players; slow-pitch softball, with its lobbed pitches and mighty muscular cuts is the domesticated, playable version.

To throw a strike, or even come close to throwing a strike, a pitcher must release his pitch at a certain point. An instant early or late produces embarrassing disaster. In baseball, the tolerances are extraordinarily close. It requires a kind of visceral genius to make the spatial and temporal coincidences necessary for a superbly batted ball occur; those who doubt the difficulty need only look to Birmingham last season, where a genius athlete, perhaps the finest specimen in the world, could barely hit his weight.

And, at that, Michael Jordan did not disgrace himself. Most of those who truly know the game are surprised he did so well.

So, if you have ever played the game at a high level, you know that you are capable. You might, indeed, hold yourself a little more erect, and level your eyes at those who approach you. You might know that you were always good enough to play against the white boys, even though they never let you in the major leagues.

* * *

Verdell Mathis played the game. He is nearly 80 years old, but there is, in the looseness of his stride and the dangle of his long arms, a quality that gives him away. He was left-handed, always an advantage in the game, a pitcher mostly but he played a little in the outfield and at first base, mainly for the Memphis Red Sox. He is a quiet gentleman, an aristocrat born in Crawfordsville, Arkansas.

They called him "Lefty," naturally, and he was one of the best in the old Negro League. He played with and against men like Satchel Paige and young Henry Aaron (then a 16-year-old shortstop) and Jackie Robinson and Cool Papa Bell and Willie Mays. He faced the white boys too, playing for Paige’s barnstorming All-Stars against a team led by Bob Feller. By the time Robinson broke the line in 1947, he was too old to think about the majors, but then, he had nothing to prove anyway, he had tested himself against the best.

* * *

Timing is everything in baseball

Robinson got his chance not because he was the best player in the Negro League, Mathis says, but because he had the right education and maturity. Robinson was better known as a football player at UCLA. He was also an All-Pac 8 basketball player and an expert tennis player.

"He was known," Mathis says. "He wasn't the best player, but he was a good player. He was agile. When he was with the Kansas City Monarchs, he had never played professional baseball before. But he could bunt, he could drag it down both lines and beat it out for a hit. And he could hit too—they said he couldn’t hit a fastball at the letters, but he showed them he could."

He sure did.

* * *

Joe B. Scott—another former Red Sox—was the first black man to play in Chicago’s Wrigley Field. In 1937, his high school played there, for the Illinois state championship. Scott was a freshman, and the only black boy on either squad. He played with and against major leaguers in the service, there no doubt he too could have enjoyed a long and relatively lucrative career in the bigs.

“Toughest pitcher I ever faced was Detroit Tiger ace Virgil Trucks,” he says, without too much deliberation. “When he threw the ball, it was like a pea, and it twisted all around. First time I faced him, he struck me out. Next time up, I doubled. But he was tough. Satchel was tough. This guy behind me—Lefty—he was sure tough. They all were tough. It weren’t never easy.”

Their stories are gentle stories, told by gentle men. They look back not in regret or horror that our society could have at one time, not 50 years ago, considered their ghettoization normal and proper.

I think maybe it is because the game they played is so humbling, so difficult and demanding that they are now able to maintain themselves with such Buddha-like composure.

They waste no gestures, their eyes are clear of hate.

— Philip Martin

Originally published April 1995
Vol. 2/Issue 1

Little League Confidential by Stephen Buel



Vince Coleman wasn’t the first aspiring demolition expert to throw a firecracker into a crowd of people outside a ballpark. Near as I can tell, that honor belongs to me.

I was outside the ballpark, but my targets were in the visitor’s dugout. They were Little Leaguers. Me, I never played.

Coleman, you recall, hurled an M-80 out the window of a car driven by Eric Davis. Three were hurt, one of them a two-year-old girl. Coleman was a New York Met and Davis an L.A. Dodger. Hell, they should have thrown ’em both in jail for that alone.

Me, I was running with the wrong crowd too. It was 1969 and my family had just moved to Tampa from Chicago. Tampa didn’t even have a baseball team, serving only as the spring-training home of the Cincinnati Reds. But it did have its share of juvenile delinquents,

On the day in question, Mitchell, Jeff and I were riding our Stingrays and chuckin’ Black Cat firecrackers at stuff. I was doing most of the chuckin’, actually, because I was the guy trying to prove he was cool. We rode past a Little League game and one of the players riding the pine for the home team dared me start shelling the opposition. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so I lit a Black Cat and fired it at a small window in the visitor’s dugout.

I guess you’d have to call my throw a “wild pitch.” It was the kind of toss that makes batters charge the pitcher with their bat in hand. I missed my target by a mile. The sizzling firecracker hit the cinder block dugout wall and came flying toward me like a liner back to the mound. I tried to slap it away just as it detonated. After my hand exploded—and after I stopped crying—I remember making up some story about how two or three “big guys in a car” threw the firecracker at me and then drove away. (“Honest, coach, it was the big guys.”)

Didn’t Vince Coleman finally say he’d learned a lot from his mistake? I learned a lot, too.

Little League is where you acquire ball control. And stay out of baseball if you have a short fuse.

— Stephen Buel

Originally published 1994
Vol. 1/Number 2

Friday, June 27, 2008

The Haiku Hut by Andrew MacFarland


A foul pole yellow
Defines the limits of green
As dust rides the breeze

Barbeque fires burn
Smokey flavor fills the air
Sun drops behind hills

Evening chill arrives
Tiring pitcher departs
Orange seats grow harder

— Andrew MacFarland

Originally published in July 1994

Vol. 1/Number 3

A Giant Rivalry by Philip Martin


My father was a Dodger fan. My earliest memory involves a blue and white T-shirt emblazoned with the team’s logo. In those days, of course, they were the Brooklyn Dodgers, though they wouldn’t be for long.

He knew well those post-war teams, those names that ganged together in a kind of incantation: Furillo, Reese, Snider, Hodges, later Robinson and Campenella and Newcombe and Drysdale and the others. The Dodgers were my father’s team, the team of his adolescence and young adulthood, and though it was a long way from Ashville, N.C., to Ebbets Field, he mourned their move to the coast.

Though he thought O’Malley’s desertion was a cynical and soulless thing to do, he soon forgave the Dodgers, and later, when we also moved west he would take me to games at Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine. We always arrived early enough to watch batting and infield practice, and he took advantage of the time to instruct me on the small points that made a man a ballplayer. For a time he had been a professional shortstop, small but with quick wrists that gave him surprising power. He had favorites, and the players he particularly admired reflected his own ethic of duty and work.

He liked Wally Moon because the big man had adjusted his left-handed stroke to take advantage of the short leftfield wall in the Los Angeles Coliseum, where the Dodgers played their first year out of Brooklyn. He liked Maury Wills because he saw in the scrappy shortstop a man of meager natural gifts who had made himself first into a switch-hitter, and then into an All-Star. Junior Gilliam similarly impressed him—especially when, in 1965, at the age of 36, he came out of retirement to hit .280 and (temporarily) solve the Dodger’s perennial third base problem.

1965 was also the year Tommy Davis broke his right ankle early in the season, depriving the Dodger’s of their starting leftfielder and one of the game’s best hitters. To replace him, manager Walter Alston called up a 31-year-old veteran named Lou Johnson. Johnson had spent 13 unspectacular seasons in the minor leagues, but that year he went on to hit a dozen home runs and drive in 58 runs—not an inconsequential amount for a team that scored as infrequently as the Dodgers. My father became a Lou Johnson fan in 1965.

Ironically perhaps, 1965 was the year I learned to hate the Dodgers.

I would like to be able to write that I hated them because they broke my father’s heart, but that would be romantically inaccurate. I was never a Dodger fan, probably because the Dodger teams I first became aware of were squads built on speed and pitching, finesse teams that manufactured runs and won and lost boring games by one-run margins.

I liked the Boston Red Sox, the Cincinnati Reds of Frank Robinson and Vada Pinson, and—of all teams—the vainglorious New York Yankees with Mantle and Maris and Yogi Berra and Tom Tresh. Later I would come to love the Pittsburgh Pirates with the sullen, masterful Roberto Clemente.

But most of all, I liked the San Francisco Giants. I liked them because, most of the time, they were the team that was playing the Dodgers when we went to Dodger Stadium. I liked them because my uncle lived in San Francisco—he took me to games at Candlestick.

I loved Willie Mays and Orlando Cepada and Willie McCovey and, beyond all comprehension, a little outfielder named Mateo Alou who—in 1965—definitely seemed the lesser of three brothers. (Once, I think in 1966, the Alou brothers, Felipe and Jesus and Matty, comprised the Giant’s outfield for an inning—the only time in major league history brothers have accomplished the trick.

The Giants were, as the team name implies, big and thundery. They were hitters mainly, though they had the elegant Juan Marichal, and they were not so subtle as the Dodgers. I mean those fierce old Giants no disrespect when I say they were a boy’s team; the Dodgers were for more sophisticated tastes.

Yet, if I am honest, I must admit I loved the Giants out of mischief too. I know it annoyed my father that I preferred Marichal to Koufax, a Mays double to a Wills bunt-and-steal. I took some delight in rooting for the Dodgers’ mortal enemies—it made those games more interesting.

What everyone remembers about 1965 is the ugliness that occurred on August 22 at Candlestick Park. Giant pitcher Marichal went after Dodger catcher John Roseboro with a bat, cutting his head and touching off a 14-minute riot. Marichal was suspended for eight games, and forbidden from accompanying the Giants on their final trip to Los Angeles on September 6 and 7. I remember my father’s anger that any man would use a bat on another player, particularly one so gentlemanly as the quiet Roseboro.

I remember a flush of shame, but it passed. That year Mays hit 52 home runs, and McCovey 39, and though the pennant race was close—there were no playoffs then—the Giants reeled of a 14-game winning streak in September and moved ahead of the Dodgers by four-and-a-half games.

But then the Dodgers finished the season by winning 15 of their last 16, overtaking my Giants and winning the pennant by two games.

My father, I remember, was exceedingly kind at the end. Yet something went bitter in my young heart—the disappointment stung so bad I cried.

It is spring again, and I am no longer the youngest person in the office. Probably most of the folks around here were yet to be born in 1965, even those who care about a thing as picayune as baseball probably wonder at my affinity for a team that can only be reassembled in my imagination. Where have you gone, Tito Fuentes? Or you, Jim Ray Hart?

The game is different, these days, not better, not worse, but different. Now we root for players more than teams, if we root at all. I still love the snap of baseballs through bright air, the rub of leather, the pregnancy of a curve ball about to snap...

But I no longer hate the Dodgers. And somehow, there is something sad in that.

— Philip Martin

Originally published in April 1994
Vol. 1/Number 1

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Little League Confidential by Bob Hansen

My relationship with my mother was never the same after Little League. Well, it was never that great to begin with, but after the Orioles kicked me off their team, I forever viewed her through cynical eyes.

The trouble started one warm spring afternoon in 1964. I was 10-years old and playing right field for the Orioles at Encino Park down in the San Fernando Valley.

It was a slow game without much action—especially in right field—which was just how my coach liked it after seeing me in action at practice.

As I stood their and cursed myself for not wearing my athletic supporter, I heard the screech of my mother’s voice, a sound not unlike two submarines bumping together. “Bob-arrrhhhh,” she spat out, coughing half way through Bobby.

I turned and looked at her. Actually, I gaped at her.

She was holding a hotdog.

“Here,” she said, motioning with the weenie. “I brought you something to eat.”

I recoiled in horror. “Mom!” I pleaded. “I can’t eat that out here.”

But she persisted. Eventually, I figured what the hell, strolled over to the fence, and went to work on the dog.

That’s when it happened.

All day, and not one single ball was hit my way. But no sooner had I taken a bite of ballpark frank than some punk kid connected at the plate, sending a slicing rocket to rightfield .

The ball landed with a dull thud and skipped toward the back fence. I didn’t have a clue to what was going on because I was talking to my mom, who wondered aloud seconds later whether I should do something about that pesky ball that had come to rest on the warning track.

By that time it was too late. The kid had already rounded the bases with and inside-the-park homer.

I was kicked off the team later that week.

I love you, mom, but I’ll never forgive you.

— Bob Hansen

Originally published April 1994
Vol. 1/Number 1