Spring Training Is Here!

Quite a few baseball cards depict players in spring training. This is for two reasons: First,

it is easier for photographers to get close to the players when they are playing meaningless games than when they are, and also to get shots of players in new uniforms (See 2008 Tampa Bay Rays Upper Deck cards) or posed shots for various sets. The alternative for this second reason is airbrushing, which is a whole 'nother story.

Along with this rather random Trot Nixon card, here is an interesting poem I came across that seemed appropriate for today.

William Carlos Williams, "At the Ball Game" (from Spring and All)

At the Ball Game

The crowd at the ball game

is moved uniformly

by a spirit of uselessness

which delights them--

all the exciting detail

of the chase

and the escape, the error

the flash of genius--

all to no end save beauty

the eternal--

So in detail they, the crowd,

are beautiful

for this

to be warned against

saluted and defied--

It is alive, venomous

it smiles grimly

its words cut--

The flashy female with her

mother, gets it--

The Jew gets it straight--it

is deadly, terrifying--

It is the Inquisition, the

Revolution

It is beauty itself

that lives

day by day in them

idly--

This is

the power of their faces

It is summer, it is the solstice

the crowd is

cheering, the crowd is laughing

in detail

permanently, seriously

without thought

We're underway with the 2012 baseball season everyone! Go Braves!

Die-cuts part deux

After discussing some classic die-cuts just last week, what arrives in the mail this week but a modern take on the technology? Welcome to my collection multi-MVP and lifetime "I Had to Work for Ted Turner" award winner Dale Murphy, resplendent in 1980s blue-on-blue-on-blue. The card places him (and his 1987 Donruss All-Star Pop-ups brethren) under the Astrodome roof in Houston. He made the team despite a relative lull in production, with an OPS+ of "only" 121. (This was sandwiched between OPS+ years of over 150.)

Some think almost 400 homers, back-to-back MVPs, and six different seasons slugging over .500 make a case for the Hall of Fame. Murphy certainly scared pitchers more than most hitters in the 1980s, even given a penchant for striking out. This photo clearly happens after contact, perhaps with Dale shooting another double into the left-center gap.

As good as card photography gets these days, it was sub-par during the 1980s and well-timed shots like this were few and far between. The same company's regular issue from that year went with a is-he-hunky-or-dreamy shot and even his 1987 Diamond King looks distracted. At least the pop-up puts us into the game.

Once you punch out the card and stand Dale up, I can't help but notice the copious Astrodome advertising just past his shoulders. Around the outfield, it's the Marlboro man, Budweiser, Coke, and FirstCity Bank. OK, Coke is acceptable for kids, but ciggies and beer? Did we learn nothing from the airbrush arteests of the late 1970s? I imagine a Friday-night-working editor seeing the ads in the background, scratching the crown of his thinning scalp, and saying "screw it, it's just a gimmicky pop-up set."

Die-cuts and ducats

I love this card, #5 from the 1934-36 Batter-Up set. It shows off the die-cut process seen in several issues from the 1920s and 30s.

As you can see from the cut line, kids could fold back the top half of the card and pose them vertically. On this Batter-Up card, NY Giants legend Carl Hubbell demonstrates a Golden Age leg kick and delivery, his knuckles only a few inches clear of the mound. It's an excellent photo for the set concept and almost jumps off the card as-is.

Other die-cut set competitors, like the 1920s Major League die-cuts and (super-rare) 1934 R304s, used a one-size-fits-all-players die, but the Batter-Ups have a different silhouette for each card, an expensive process the producer hoped would stand out--or up--from the competition. (The fact they released the set over a three-year period probably reflects the costs involved.)

Our generation saw Donruss dip their toe in the water with some 1980s pop-up sets. Some years, they went out in wax packs with regular cards. Others saw them as oddly matched add-ons to their oversize Action All-Stars, arguably a gimmick themselves. Even though I keep the cards in pages like other sets, I like their physical 3-D nature and opportunity for interaction. As a kid, I arranged my cards around a diamond on the bedroom floor, the better for real-game imaginings. It would've been great to see more sets with classic players and nice composition like the Batter-Ups at the time. ("Hubbell kicks and fires! Joe Cronin swings and smokes a liner toward right field, but Gehringer reaches out to snare it! Whatta play!") I did have a Cronin card at the time--as a faceless disc in my Cadaco-Ellis All Star Baseball board game. Something that recaptured the look of the 40s or 50s era would've been cool. (OK, ASB was cool. I propose my idea as cooler.)

The Batter-Ups aren't an easy set to complete these days, both for availability and expense. At 192 cards, it's nearly the size of Goudey's signature 1933 set and produced in considerably smaller numbers. You'll spend a lot of time and money trying for all the Hall-of-Famers and high numbers. (On the plus side, no pesky Ruth or Gehrig!)

Commons missing the "stand" outline typically go for less than $10. This Hubbell, creased, digned, but otherwise intact, cost about $50. If you like the cards and are on a budget, I recommend looking for cool poses in low grades and high-contrast colors. (They printed the set in several shades and the "warm" colors look muddier than sepia or gray.) Blank backs also mean you can mount or display the cards without missing out on stats or stories. As the 1934 All-Star Game starter, ol' Carl could even be the centerpiece for a 9-man National League lineup...

The Gretzky Wagner

This week, I finished reading The Card by Michael O'Keefe and Teri Thompson, which explores the world of the PSA 8 T206 Honus Wagner pictured at right. The book takes this "Mona Lisa of cards" from a Reagan-era sale at a small card shop to its present status (sold to an anonymous SoCal collector for $2.8 brazillion dollars) and expands the scope to baseball in general, Wagner's personal life, the history of his birthplace (Carnegie, PA), card trading and grading, and the score of people intimately involved with the card's ballooning value.

Rather than retread the book and its conclusions about the card, a few other things appeal to me about the whole melange of myths, opinions, and weirdness that comes of having this particular symbol for one's hobby.

In an artistic sense, the Gretzky Wagner resembles the real Mona Lisa. Both are smaller than you'd expect for their significance, relatively light on the eyes, and given over to an obsessive level of "scholarship." (It took until 2008 for the art world to "confirm" who actually sat for the painting. See Wikipedia for more.)

The pair differ in one important sense, of course. You could never hope to own the painting, a true one-of-a-kind. Enough money--say, a few hundred grand--will get you a Wagner. That card will probably be pounded, folded, spindled, or mutilated. Even the PSA 8 version was, as is well-known now, probably trimmed from a printed sheet sometime in the modern era. Any kind of restoration is typically verboten for grading companies, but figures regularly into Mona Lisa's life and the fine art world in general. So why overlook it here?

One can argue card collectors in general (and PSA specifically) needed a gold standard card to distinguish itself as more than a hobby. This led lots of people to believe or not believe in it, kind of like a sainted artifact. The book goes into some detail--perhaps too much--on accusations and recriminations for card fakery and who gets to do the authenticating. (Conflicts of interest abound in many situations.)

Prior to the grading industry, the Wagner hyper-valuation, and general rise in collectibles speculation, who could say what it meant to be a card "investor?" Wal-Mart, one of our era's biggest card sellers, faced declining revenue in the 1990s. They made a show of purchasing The Card, running a (profitable to them) store-based competition, and then giving it away live on Larry King. The winner, a Florida postal worker, quickly sold it through Christie's auction house, ending a chain of transactions with no "collectors" involved.

In my collecting lifetime, an outsider's first reaction turned almost 180 degrees. "You really collect pictures of other guys?" became "wow, what's your most valuable card?" (Not that others need validate us, since God knows we're secure in our masculinity and possess amazing self-esteem.) My girlfriend even pushes me to set aside a display area in the house for my collection, rather than accuse me of never growing up. If that's all due to the perfect storm of Honus Wagner, PSA, Wayne Gretzky, Wal-Mart, and the hand of fate, should I complain?

From the book's wind-down, we learn that the card was recently re-holdered by the latest owner and is no longer tagged as the "Gretzky Wagner." That probably means the end of featured show appearances, too, such as at this year's National in Chicago...