Click here for Ted Taylor's research on Philadelphia A's uniform numbers

 May 5-21, 2008

This is our 33rd Year of hobby columns

Ted Taylor’s Collector’s Corner

***

“The Stark Truth”…

JASON STARK’S NEW BOOK LEAVES ME, WELL, COLD

            My wife gave me Jayson Stark’s new book “The Stark Truth” that features the most overrated and underrated players in baseball history.  I was excited. I always enjoyed Jayson when he was a scribe for the Inky in Philadelphia.  But after my initial enthusiasm, I quickly found another response. Yawn.

            The book took me one evening to read.  It’s not that compelling and apparently, like a lot of people, I don’t agree with him on many selections. Andy Van Slyke (who?) thinks that the book should be in Oprah’s book club and Peter Gammons really likes it too. So maybe it’s just me. Somehow, though, I doubt it.

            And maybe what ticks me off is Jayson’s cutesy pie approach to things, including demeaning some pretty darn good players.

            I rolled with most of them (including his calling Nolan Ryan the most overrated pitcher), but when he belittled Bing Miller (as not being a worthy ballplayer and also not a 1940’s band-leader, a lame stab at his name) well that drove the cutesy meter right off the dial.

            Bing Miller had a 16 year big league career (1921-36) and then spent a lot of years as a coach with Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics.  Bing’s lifetime batting average of .312 (in 1,821 games) tells me that he belongs in the Hall of Fame (not in Stark’s Hall of Ridicule). Bing batted over .300 nine times and in the .290’s three more.  He only hit 117 homeruns – 117 more than Mr. Stark, by the way – and that is what kept him out of Cooperstown.  Bing played in three World Series with the A’s, batting .258.  An apology is owed.

            I know why Van Slyke likes him, though.  He claims the former Pirate was one of the five most under-rated centerfielders of all times.  Horse feathers!  He completely missed Roger “Doc” Cramer and Van Slyke and Jimmy Wynn couldn’t carry his jock (rhymes with “Doc”).

            Cramer played for 20 seasons (Van Slyke played 12, 1983-95). Cramer’s lifetime batting average was .296, Van Slyke’s was .274. Doc batted over .300 eight times (and over .290 four more). Van Slyke batted over .300 once. Wynn played 15 years and had a lifetime mark of .250. Wynn batted over .300 exactly no times.

            I know that Van Slyke and Wynn were good fielders but they called Cramer “flit” because he was “death to flies” (as in fly balls, not the insects). So, sorry to say Jayson, your apologies to guys like Wally Berger (Wally Berger?), Reggie Smith, Larry Doby, et. al. remind me why I don’t rely on the baseball info being sold us often on ESPN.  If it didn’t happen last week you guys just don’t know about it.

            And, yes, I feel better. And if you haven’t gotten a copy yet, save your money and get it at the library.

THERE USED TO BE A BASEBALL CARD STORE

Ten-or-fifteen years ago there was practically a baseball card store in every neighborhood and a hobby show somewhere in the area every weekend.  In 1992, when I assumed the job of vice president of hobby sales for the Fleer Corporation, there were thousands of shops and loads of local and national shows populated by weekend hobby dealers who, in real life, had 9-to-5 jobs.

Now, like video stores, they are all fading away.

What killed them?  Well, mostly eBay and other internet hobby venues.  Why venture out to a store when you can buy whatever you want from the comfort of your own home by simply using your computer?

A few Saturdays ago my STAT Authentic business partner Jeff Stevens and I offered free appraisals and evaluations of collector’s hobby treasures at one of the few remaining shops in the Delaware Valley.

Owned by John Drake, “The Sports Gallery” is located on the second floor of a building right above the intersection of Cottman and Castor Avenues in the Great Northeast (15 minutes from the Jenkintown-Abington-Glenside area). John, a lifelong collector, opened the shop ten or so years ago, after he sold his interest in a highly profitable machine shop.

As Jeff and I sat there in one of the three rooms that comprise his little piece of collector heaven, we realized that we were witnessing Americana at the grass roots level.  What was happening in that shop couldn’t happen on the internet, but it has been happening in various venues for a couple of centuries.

Plain and simple, John’s store is a gathering place for people.  Most of his customers are men, many are middle-aged.  They come to buy baseball cards and autographs and memorabilia, true, but they also come there to “hang out” with other people who have similar tastes.

John laughed and said he was “part bartender, part psychologist and, mostly, someone to listen to their stories”.  And we saw that first hand.

They may be men chronologically but, at heart, they are still little boys and this is the corner candy store of their youth.  (For me those stores included Lou’s Smoke Shop, Koenig’s Drugstore, The White Pharmacy and Tompkin’s Corner in Glenside.)

John’s patrons dress the part.  Just about every man that came up-the-steps and through-the-door were dressed the same.  They each wore a baseball cap and either a sports-related jacket or sports-related tee shirt.  A couple of them were ex-cops and they stayed the longest.  Others came and went.  But they all had one thing in common, they were infatuated with the hobby of sports collecting (mostly baseball, by the way) and, of course, sports in general.

One man came with his son and daughter.  The kids were pre-teens, I’d guess, and the little girl knew as much about sports and “who was hot” (collecting-wise) as her dad and brother.  The sports collecting hobby has always been something that families have done together.

It was a scene that Normal Rockwell would have loved – and we loved being a part of it.  It was at the same time a refuge from the real world and a place where people could go and be themselves.  Just a few of these places still exist. How sad.

 Commentary

 WHEN THE INTERNET TURNS UGLY IT’S TIME TO ACT

 An acquaintance of mine has been the subject, lately, of some pretty nasty attacks on a small “hobby” internet blog.  The participants have attacked his education, his skills, his integrity, his honesty and now are impacting his livelihood.

Its part of the ugly side of a hobby that I have lived and loved since I was a small boy and it’s a shame. In fact it makes me sick.

The person in question is a professional authenticator and in addition to things he does for collectors, dealers and auction houses in the hobby he has done forensics work for the U. S. Government, taught forensics at a prestigious university and even worked for the Secret Service.  The bloggers have decided that none of this is true and that’s where the ugliness begins.

The internet is unregulated, so you can pretty much voice any opinion you want and challenge his autograph opinions all you want – because unless you saw an item signed the best you can render as an authenticator is your opinion.  Self-anointed “experts” can find fault with his findings all they want (heck, I disagree with him at times, too) but you cannot assail his integrity.  That’s the breaking point.

So now this man, with the financial assistance of a few of his well-heeled friends and regular customers, has hired a slander and libel lawyer and the man he has contracted with is, what they call, a bull dog. 

The lawyer has assured him that, eventually, the problem – and the trouble-makers – will go away, but not before he gets a large financial settlement from the bloggers.

The cowardly part about many of the bloggers in this case is that their screen names are pseudonyms and they hide their real identity that way.  I, too, have gotten cranky e-mails from people with absurd names (also related to authentications) and there is no simple way to find out who they are – at least that’s what they think.

But that veil of secrecy can be lifted by a court order – and that process is already underway.  The internet carrier has no choice but to disclose the source of the e-mails or blogs and also the identity of the individual senders.

The unexpected fall-out from this, I just learned, is that a lot of these cowardly blogs are coming from the computers of the employers of the slanderers.  Now what that means, in legal terms, is that they are co-responsible for the damages.

In other words if you decide to call someone a crook from your work computer and cannot prove that they are both you and the company you work for are liable.  (Businesses as you may have heard are now expected to keep track – and have copies available - of all outgoing internet communications.)

The lawyer told the man who filed the suit that the companies will likely have deeper pockets than the spit-ball throwers and he fully intends to aggressively pursue them.  I can see how thrilled a company CEO will be to learn that one of his employees has plunged him in to an ugly lawsuit.

At least one major hobby player, who should know better, has provided a forum for the blogs.  He, too, will be sued.  It will get ugly.

Don’t expect the mainstream hobby media to cover this story because it will impact many of the hobby’s self-appointed guardians.  On the other hand you can count on updates from this column as things unravel.

 THE HOBBY TICKER

            Not much new in the way of hobby product this outing.  Where are all the baseball issues?  Isn’t it baseball season?

            The only thing I’ve seen lately is Bowman Sterling 2007-08 Basketball and of course that high-end product will be hot during the NBA Playoffs.  Each mini-box contains five cards – one of them autographed and two of them relic cards. 

What’s on your mind ????

Don’t’ be bashful.  Drop us a line (ted@tedtaylor.com) and let us know what you think. Has the recession impacted your hobby purchases?  Did you ever feel cheated when buying a hobby product? What you like about new products – or don’t like.  Have you ever been frustrated with a deal on eBay or other auction houses? Tell me about it. Thanks for reading the column.  Your feed-back is important.