In Between Naps - July 2010

One of Rob Dewolf's passions is collecting cards of Cleveland Hall of Famer Napoleon Lajoie. A former minor league baseball player who advanced to Triple-A in the Padres organization, Rob's current job in the newspaper field requires him to get up at 4 a.m., six days a week. Hence the name of his column, which happens to be when he finds time to write about various aspects of the hobby. Rob lives in central Ohio with his wife and daughter.

Sometimes, Luck Conquers All

by Rob Dewolf

Sometimes the collecting gods smile down at you. Granted, they also can be fickle. My 800-count box of 1987 Topps Bo Jackson rookies is proof of that. Rob knows bad buys.

But there are those times when fortune is so good that you almost feel guilty. (But then you remember Cory Snyder, and your conscience is cleared.)

This is a story about one of those times.

For about the past nine years, the highlight of my Cleveland Indians collection has been a 1948 World Series ring. I can't imagine owning a collectible that I'll enjoy more. After I bought it, I somewhat seriously thought about not buying more Indians memorabilia because I knew everything else would pale in comparison. That idea lasted for about a minute, and I returned to my senses.

The ring isn't linked to a player. There's no inscription of a name or anything else that identifies the original owner. Maybe it was given to a front-office employee. I've also heard told that Indians owner Bill Veeck ordered "extra" rings from L.G. Balfour as gifts for special friends, business acquaintances and bar owners.

No matter. It's a ring from Cleveland's only World Series-winning team in the past 90 years, and that's enough for me.

Almost.

As much as I love this Indian artifact, there was this gnawing feeling. Kind of a mix of emptiness and incompleteness. A longing, if you will.

It wasn’t overwhelming, mind you. More like how you feel walking to the car after 2½ hours at a seafood buffet and you realize you forgot to have a cup of the clam chowder.

You're fulfilled, no doubt. But still, the chowder would have been nice.

In this case, my soup du jour (more accurately, soup of the decade, I guess) was a presentation box that once housed the ‘48 rings. Though I'd never seen one, I knew they existed. In the mid-1990s, one was sold by an auction house and, at the time, I had a passing interest. But because I didn't own a ring, the desire to have a box that one came in wasn't very strong. Let someone else have the hood ornament, I'll hold out for the Rolls Royce.

Except now that I had a ring, I was in the driver's seat. And I wanted the complete package. So I kept my eyes open and waited. And waited. I watched three more 1948 rings come up for auction but no presentation boxes.

Then, this spring, one literally fell into my lap.

A group of personal items from the estate of a former Indians player hit the auction block. There were no headline-grabbing pieces but enough interesting things that I ended up buying the lot. The collection was shipped in three fairly large boxes, meaning I got to enjoy a mini Christmas in May – minus the annual houseful of relatives, in-laws and other guests. Yes, I gave thanks.

As I sat on our family-room floor and unpacked the boxes, I mentally checked off the items I knew should be included. All was going as expected as I dug to the bottom of the final box. Then, while scooping handfuls of packing peanuts I also retrieved something that wasn't on the manifest in my mind. After dropping it in my lap (the word literally isn't used liberally in this blog), I picked up a worn, wooden box that measured about 4 by 5 inches.

There were no markings on the outside, so I immediately figured it to be some kind of generic knick-knack box, maybe presented long ago by a local civic organization at an off-season banquet. After opening it, I realized how wrong I was. Printed in red lettering on silk-like lining on the underside of the lid were these words:

WORLD SERIES

CHAMPIONSHIP AWARD

CLEVELAND INDIANS

1948

***

L.G. Balfour Company

Attlesboro, Massachusetts

Realizing what I was holding, I sat in stunned silence. I grabbed the auction catalog and double-checked to make sure I hadn't missed a mention of a presentation box for a 1948 World Series ring. (Yeah, like that would have happened.) Nope. Not a word.

Yet here it was. Just goes to show you really shouldn't believe everything you read.

Missing was the insert that should have sat in the bottom of the box. That was remedied a week or so later with a bit of craft work that required covering a piece of cut-to-fit Styrofoam with black velvet. A few nips, tucks and curse words later, and I thought the finished product looked pretty darn good. Finally, my ring had found a fitting home.

A home run that would have made even Bo proud.

Leela's Tips & Tricks - July 2010

Leela’s Tips & Tricks is Leela’s first foray into writing a monthly column – she usually just appears in Mike DeNero’s Neighborhood. As such, she does not have an impressive resume … yet. But give her a break; she’s only five-years-old! We hope you find her vintage collecting tips useful, her butchered attempts at composing sentences in what she calls “Canadien-French” amusing (if not refreshing, albeit confusing), and her unabashed love for her Montreal Canadiens admirable. Enjoy!

A New Venture

(Translation: Une nouvelle entreprise)

by Leela

Bonjour, collectionnuers de cartes! It’s me, Leela, providing you with some vintage cardboard education … my tip o' the month. Voilà!

Well, my beloved Canadiens are now playing golf in the off-season. But just wait 'til next year! (Attendre l'année prochaine!)

Anyway, before I get back to enjoying this 95 degree weather with 85% humidity, I must provide you with my top of the month. My tip is that if you are a collector of sportscards and have never ventured into collecting non-sportscards, you might want to start your venture by purchasing just one card. After you buy it, keep it for one month before you buy another. If after that month you still want to buy more, your first purchase was probably the beginning of a new collecting interest, rather than a passing fancy! It worked for me. I ventured into non-sports with the 1940 Gum Inc. Superman cards and still love ‘em – Superman est de la bombe!

Gotta go. My dry cleaner just called to say that my vintage red wool Maurice "the Rocket" Richard #9 Montreal Canadiens hockey sweater is missing! C'est stupide, incapable, âne. Je vais descendre à son magasin et l'ont battu à une pâte!

Au revoir … Vive Les Habitants! C'est tout!

Mike DeNero’s Layaway Program

In a recent conversation with my aunt about our sportscards business, I mentioned that our company offers a layaway program. She sort of snickered at the thought. While it may sound a bit humorous, it has been our most successful program that we have offered to our customers to date. In fact, nearly half of our revenue for 2010 been generated through that program. Here’s how it works:

- Customers can purchase items for layaway through any of our channels: our website, www.MDsportscards.com, our eBay site, or over the telephone;

- We require a 10% deposit (or more, if the customer wishes) via PayPal, direct credit card payment, money order, or check;

- We provide the customer with six full months to pay off the balance and allow the customer to make as many payments during this time as he or she wishes;

- We email to the customer a brief 2-page layaway agreement that they can either sign and mail back to us or indicate their acceptance of the terms via a return e-mail; and

- We provide full insurance (at no additional cost to the customer) for the purchased products from the date of sale through delivery to the customer; and

If you have any interest in purchasing some of our products through our layaway program, please contact us by telephone at (571) 449-3470, or by e-mail at MDsportscards@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

Bob Lemke's Cool Custom Cards: July 2010

1957 Topps Sandy Koufax (alternate)

by Bob Lemke

One of the best (at least for us old-guy card collectors) player photos to come out of the Topps Vault series of internet auctions caught my eye and provided the inspiration for not one, but a pair of, Sandy Koufax custom card creations. (The photo also caught the eye of some serious Koufax collector specialists and Brooklyn Dodgers team collectors, and it was bid up to $1,275.)

The image was an original Topps color transparency described as dating from 1957. Indeed, the then-21-year-old Koufax is pictured at the top of his wind-up with some of Ebbets Field's outfield signs in the background.

I'm not going to second-guess the designers at Topps in 1957, who chose to go with a great close-up portrait for the Koufax card in their short-printed Fourth Series. But to me, the photo from the Topps vault just seemed like it would have also made a very nice card . . . so I made one.

I haven't often, in my several years of custom card making, tried to improve on an actual card from Topps, Bowman, etc. It's my belief that the graphic artists who created those originals so many decades ago, working with what today is viewed as ancient technology -- a roll of rubylith and an Xacto knife -- do not deserve to have their legacy usurped by me and my computer graphics tools.

But the image of the '57-style card that could be created from this newly re-discovered Koufax photo was just too vivid in my mind's eye, so I made it a reality.

As my custom card projects go, this alternative '57 Koufax was pretty easy. I just had to match the name/position/team typography from 1957 and lay it over the photo. On back, I just made a couple of subtle changes so that the card can't be confused with a genuine 1957 Topps issue.

This Koufax alt card represents my first work in the 1957 Topps set, which is surprising since that issue remains one of my all-time favorite baseball card sets. I have several other '57s on my to-do list, including a Stan Musial, who didn't appear on a Topps card until 1958.

*****

Bob Lemke is a collector of bubblegum cards in the 1950s-1960s, Bob Lemke's hobby today is creating cards of current and former “players” in those "golden age" styles. He currently edits the vintage sections of the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards and maintains a hobby blog at boblemke.blogspot.com.

1950-51 Toleteros Josh Gibson - consigned to us from its original owner!

This extremely rare and sought after 1950-51 Toleteros Josh Gibson is, in our humble opinion, severely undergraded at an SGC 40. This card was consigned to us by its original owner, who collected the Toleteros cards in Puerto Rico as a ten year-old kid. In our August e-Newsletter, which is scheduled for distribution on July 31st, we will feature an article about our consignor and his Toleteros Gibson card. This is your chance to own one of the most rare and sought after cards in the hobby ... and purchase it from its original owner! It is believed that there are approximately one dozen of this card in existence. Please contact us at MDsportscards@gmail.com or (571) 449-3470, if you have any questions. To view our website listing for this item, please click here. To view our eBay listing for this item, please click here.

Mike DeNero's Neighborhood: June 2010

Mike DeNero's Neighborhood was created by superstar cartoonist Jim Hunt – check out his website at www.jimhunt.us. To view a synopsis of the comic strip, past months’ strips, and sketches of the four characters with whom you will soon become quite familiar (Bernie, Tony, Leela, and, of course, Mike), please visit our custom eBay page dedicated to Mike DeNero's Neighborhood by clicking here.

The Mammoth Shot

The Mammoth Shot

by Mike DeNero

Forty years from today, a sixty-seven year-old man will be at a family gathering in Bayamon, Puerto Rico (perhaps a grandson's birthday, perhaps a milestone wedding anniversary, perhaps a relative's graduation) and he'll be asked by some of the attendees at the event - some of whom will be his close family members, some of whom will be significant others of distant cousins - to recall his days of playing Major League Baseball for the Seattle Mariners. While he undoubtedly will wax poetic about his three years worth of brief stints with the big club in Seattle, he will invariably steer the conversation to an at-bat on May 29, 2010 in a packed Triple-A ballpark in Syracuse, New York, because on that night, he hit what he now describes as a “mammoth shot” over right-center field wall in his first at-bat against the best pitcher of the 21st Century, Hall of Famer Stephen Strasburg, who finished his career with an astonishing 310-138 record, a 2.61 ERA, 5,212 strikeouts, seven National League Cy Young Awards, and four World Series titles, all with the team for which he played his entire career, the Washington Nationals.

Some of those in attendance at the family gathering will have heard the old man's story before (several times, in fact), but those witnessing the old man's bravado for the first time will pull out their iPads (measuring 4 inches by 3 inches, weighing 2.1 ounces, and projecting High Definition images onto any surface) and speak into them: “Rene Rivera; home run; video; Google.” Instantaneously, the most oft searched Rivera bomb link appears at the top of the search page and the guest clicks on it and projects the video highlight onto the plastic siding exterior of the McFive Guys Mansion next door (Five Guys, the best hamburger shop in the nation, will have expanded into Puerto Rico by 2015).

There it is. A 99 mph fastball delivered by the twenty-one year-old phenom (who would make his Major League debut just days later) to the twenty-seven year-old journeyman catcher. It leaves Rivera's stunned bat faster than it arrived and, more importantly, via the opposite trajectory. The "mammoth shot" clears the right-center field fence and all 13,000+ Strasburg disciples in attendance fall silent and Strasburg screams violently at himself while covering his face with his gloved left hand – it is the first home run he has surrendered in his minor league career. A couple fans in attendance can be heard booing as Rivera crosses the plate. A couple fans in attendance can be seen grabbing their iPhones to retract the Auction Sniper bids they had placed for the "1 of 1" Bowman Superfractor Stephen Strasburg "rare" rookie card, which would sell later that night for north of $16,000.

After watching the video, those in attendance who are hearing the old man's tale for the first time suddenly act a little differently. They immediately feel more important -- that they are somehow dining with royalty. Their grasp at greatness is in the guise of a balding sixty-seven year-old man with a potbelly, a moustache that is in bad need of trimming, workingman’s hands, and bifocals. He's old beyond his years, but after those at the family event witnessed the video of his "mammoth shot" from Syracuse, New York, 2010, his step is springier, his former athleticism is more apparent, and his bravado is even more exaggerated, if that were even possible.