In Between Naps - August 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.

Local Shows Were About More Than Cards, Cash

by Rob Dewolf

As we celebrate the coming of another “National,” let us also pause with a moment of silence for a long-departed friend of the hobby: the local, monthly card show.

This week the 31st National Sports Collectors Convention will take place. Tens of thousands will flock to the Baltimore Convention Center. Enough money will be spent to make Congress blush.

Hall of Famers from three major sports will be on hand to trade their autographs for a fee, while card companies and auction houses will have smiling representatives stationed behind their tables in an effort to generate goodwill and business -- not necessarily in that order.

Cities that have hosted previous Nationals include Los Angeles, St. Louis, Chicago, Anaheim and Detroit. At one convention, 10 T206 Wagners were on display.

Needless to say, the National is a big deal where lots of big deals are made.

So like many, I celebrate its annual arrival. But I do so with a trace of regret.

Regret that the National pretty much has become the one "card show" I attend each year. Why? Because there simply aren't that many card shows anymore. Certainly not like the ones that helped lay a foundation for my love of sports collecting.

Growing up in northeast Ohio in the 1970s, I was a typical kid collector. Bought packs of cards at the Quik Stop on Route 62 and Monty's gas station on Wales Road. Traded doubles in study hall and put together multiple sets of whatever was in season. Discovered through hobby publications like The Trader Speaks and Sports Collectors Digest that my card transactions didn't have to be with just friends and classmates.

Buying cards via the mail certainly expanded my cardboard horizons, but it wasn't until the Canton Sports Card Collectors Club was formed and started hosting monthly card shows at the Nazir Grotto hall did the final piece fall into place. Attending these shows with Bob and Bill, two other "serious" card collectors at my school and the ones I hung out with most often, was something like a regularly scheduled epiphany. Here was a place we could go and pay fifty-cents admission to see tables and tables of baseball cards we could buy -- right then and there! No having to ask our moms to write checks, then mail the payments and wait weeks for our purchases to arrive. And no settling for just the current offering from Topps. We were able to choose from a cornucopia of T cards, Goudeys, Bowmans and 20-year-old Topps cards.

Heaven had opened a branch in Canton, Ohio.

And it got better. It didn't take long for Bob, Bill and I to figure out that we could just as easily be behind the tables as in front of them. Why not? We were buying regularly through the mail and amassing fairly impressive "inventories." Bill, thanks to stories about his collecting in a couple community newspapers, was able to buy several large collections. Bob, the truly innovative thinker in our trio, saw the wisdom in purchasing large lots of 1940s and '50s cards through the mail and breaking them down to sell individually at shows. I know: It sounds simple now. But at the time it was an impressive display of business acumen.

So there we were, three high school freshmen -- the only "dealers" in the room who depended on their parents to drive them to the show -- sharing two tables. The night before we would meet, usually in the basement of my house, and lay out our respective merchandise on the floor, within a 3-by-16-foot space marked off by masking tape. If you don't think a lot of painstaking thought was spent on deciding whether to place a binder of 1960s minor stars or a box on 1970s high numbers at the front of your selling space, well, you've never been a teenager who only recently discovered that good money could be made without sweating your butt off mowing lawns or shoveling snow.

The Sunday afternoons spent wheeling and dealing usually were capped by a half-mile walk down the street to the Spaghetti Tree. After packing up our unsold wares and safely hiding them in one of the dusty rooms down a dark hallway of the Nazir Grotto, the three of us would wait for our ride home while gorging on pizza, pasta and enough Pepsi to gag Denny McLain. Most of the time we weren't even hungry; it simply felt great to spend some of the money we had just earned … BY SELLING BASEBALL CARDS!

The joy ride continued for a few years, and the thrills were numerous (including arriving one day to find that Bob Feller also had paid the requisite $5 fee to set up shop, but that's a story for another time). In my mind, the beginning of the end came when the first Beckett guide was published. While heralded at the time, it also laid the groundwork for monthly card shows to become little more than tables covered with monster boxes full of cards of Mike Greenwell, Tommy Glavine, Gregg Jeffries and the like.

But before rookie-card fever hit the hobby, followed by the modern card entering a coma in the 1990s, the local card show was the place to be.

Sure, they still exist in some form in some locales. In fact, there's a fairly successful one held every couple of months about a half-hour from my house. I've debated about going but have thought better of it. I know I'll compare it to its predecessors, and that wouldn't be fair.

Plus, there's not a Spaghetti Tree within miles.

Leela's Tips & Tricks - August 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 still playing golf in the off-season -- but just wait 'til next year! (Attendre l'année prochaine!)

Anyway, before I get back to enjoying my summer camp activities and the local pool club, I must provide you with my top of the month. My tip is that if you were forced to choose between all characteristics of a card’s condition (e.g., corners, centering, surface) and could only have one be perfect, the one you should choose is registration. There’s nothing that drives me more nuts than looking at a blurry card! Cartes floues obtenir me bonkers! I mean seriously, how can you stare at a blurry card?

Gotta go. My dry cleaner just called to say that my vintage red wool Maurice "the Rocket" Richard #9 Montreal Canadiens hockey sweater has been found – it’s been missing for a month! Last month, when I went there to pick it up, they handed me a Joe Pepitone jersey instead -- C'est stupide, incapable, âne. Je vais descendre à son magasin et l'ont battu à une pâte! So, I guess I’ll bring Mr. Pepitone back to the shop and swap him for my beloved Richard! Ah. Tout va bien dans le monde quand je peux porter mon chandail avec fierté Richard.

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

Bob Lemke's Cool Custom Cards: August 2010

1958 Topps All-American Roman Gabriel

by Bob Lemke

I've finally added a Roman Gabriel card to my checklist of 1955-style All-American football cards. But it wasn't easy.

I've always had Gabriel on my mental to-do list for the project, but had never run across a useable college photo. The Rams were always among my Top 5 favorite NFL teams in the 1950s and early 1960s, and when Gabriel finally got off the bench and became a starter, he became a player of more than moderate interest to me.

Maybe it was because he was the NFL's Joe Namath before there was a Joe Namath. He was literally tall, dark and handsome (he was once described as the "world's biggest Filipino) and his long hair made him stand out from the establishment quarterbacks like Johnny Unitas and Bart Starr, with their crewcuts. To a rebellious teen-ager (at least as rebellious as you could be in the mid-Sixties when you're white, middle class and living in a small Wisconsin city) who hadn't yet been brainwashed to hate pro football as a metaphor for The War, Gabriel was a player whose career I followed for a time.

I thought I'd struck paydirt in my card quest when I discovered Gabriel was included in the photo spread for Playboy's All-American team in the magazine's annual Pigskin Preview issue in 1961. I bought a copy on eBay for six or eight bucks, but when I got the magazine in hand, my hopes were dimmed considerably.

Creating a custom card from a magazine photo is always dicey. I knew from the preview I'd seen on line that Gabriel's image in the group photo was going to be small. It also turned out to be a bit fuzzy upon enlargement and the color printing was somewhat out of register. I diddled the image for a couple of hours last weekend, then plopped it onto the card's background. I didn't like the result (shown at left).

Another hour searching the Internet for a suitable image didn't turn up anything useful; everything was either too small or too low-res. Fortunately, the search turned up an image of the cover of the 1961 NCAA record book, with an action pose of Gabriel.

An eBay browse offered my choice from among a handful of copies. Most were priced in the $15-25 range, which is more than I like to pay for the materials I use. I spotted a copy that had some items clipped from the interior pages and my low-ball offer was quickly accepted.

I was able to colorize the black-and-white cover photo and achieve an acceptable result, the image shown here at top.

As is almost always the case, boiling down the copy for the back of the card to about 90 words was a challenge. Even though he never won an NCAA Championship or a Super Bowl, Gabriel had a great career and has led an exemplary life.

He was a three-sport star in high school and after sifting through college scholarship offers, elected to stay in his native state at North Carolina State. While he played freshman basketball and varsity baseball (a slugging first baseman, he once hit three home runs in a game), eventually he came to focus on football.

Even though the Wolfpack was mediocre during his three seasons as quarterback (11-18-1 from 1959-61), he caught the pro scouts' eye. He was both All-American and Atlantic Coast Conference Player of the Year in 1960 and 1961, and was academic All-American in 1960. He completed 285 of 506 passes in his collegiate career, for 2,951 yards. He threw for 20 touchdowns and ran for 15. During his days at N.C. State, his fans developed a new Wolfpack fight song, "Throw, Gabriel, Throw."

The Oakland Raiders made Gabriel the No. 1 overall pick in the 1962 AFL draft, while the L.A. Rams chose him with the No. 2 pick in the NFL draft. Back in those heady days of NFL vs. AFL bidding wars, Gabriel's football fortune was assured. He signed with the Rams, but later said that's because while he was being "baby sat" in a hotel room by the Rams' Elroy Hirsch, a phone call from the AFL with a $100,000 offer was intercepted by Hirsch, who being mistaken for Gabriel's agent, assured the upstart league that Gabriel was firm in his desire to play in the NFL.

Gabriel was among the first of the "big man" quarterbacks in the NFL, at 6'4" and 235 lbs. He had an incredibly powerful arm and took the Rams to two NFL Championship games. He was a four-time Pro Bowl selection and was league MVP in 1969. Plagued by knee and shoulder injuries, he went to the Philadelphia Eagles in 1973, when he was named Comeback Player of the Year, and retired after the 1977 season.

As a starting quarterback in Los Angeles, and given his physique and dark good looks, it was natural that Hollywood came calling. He played an unnamed prison guard in the 1968 LSD film trip Skidoo, and had his biggest role as John Wayne's adopted Indian son Blue Boy in the 1969 Western, The Undefeated, which also included in the cast teammate Merlin Olsen. He had a number of television appearances, including as a headhunter on Gilligan's Island, and also appeared in the Raymond Burr series Perry Mason and Ironsides.

Gabriel did some assistant coaching in the USFL with the Boston Breakers and Arizona Wranglers, and in the World League of American Football in 1991-92 was head coach of the 0-10 Raleigh-Durham Skyhawks.

Though slowed by a stroke in recent years, Gabriel has devoted enormous time and energy since his football days to raising money for charities in and around North Carolina. I'm glad I was finally able to add him to my checklist of '55-style college custom cards.

*****

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.

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Contact us today to discuss your collection. You can call us at (571) 449-3470 or e-mail us at MDsportscards@gmail.com. We look forward to speaking with you.

Mike DeNero's Neighborhood: July 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.

Strasburg + Me = ?

Strasburg + Me = ?

by Mike DeNero

What does Stephen Strasburg mean to me? I’ve been seriously pondering that question since spring training.

I must confess that although I, as a wee lad, became a diehard Yankees fan in the mid-1970s, the Yankees and I started to drift apart when we both started seeing other people – me, the lovable, lowly Nats in 2005; the Yanks, players of whom I didn’t approve (e.g., Bobby Abreu, Randy Johnson, Johnny Damon, Jason Giambi – my Yankees were Louisiana Lightning, WPIX and the Scooter, Burger King cards in 1977 and 1978, the Reggie Bar, Mick the Quick, Big Dave Winfield, and, later, Jeter, Mariano, El Duque, and Matsui).

I moved to Washington, D.C. in 1998, and while I carried a torch for my beloved Bombers for the ensuing five or six years, the Montreal Expos (soon to be Washington Nationals) caught my fancy. Immediately upon the Nationals’ arrival in D.C. in 2005, I became a dedicated fan (and season ticket holder) who only occasionally secretly pined for the Bombers … at least until they became nearly unrecognizable to me, courting the likes of the aforementioned players, who I would never consider “Yankees” in the truest sense of the word.

I supported the Nats through thin and thinner -- tough times, save for Opening Night at RFK Stadium in 2005 and the opener in 2008 at the new Nationals Park (see picture of me in front of the Red Porch arm in arm with broadcaster and former Reds/Mets 3rd bagger Ray Knight, who is currently a Nationals broadcaster -- if you look closely to the right of Ray Knight, you can see the back of then Nats first baseman, Nick Johnson, who was presumably giving a pre-game interview on that Opening Night at Nationals Park).

One day, in late 2008 (another lean year for the Nats), my father, who still lives in New Jersey, told me that as one of the league’s worst teams, the Nats were in the “running” to get a young pitcher named Stephen Strasburg, a nineteen year-old kid phenom who pitched for San Diego State. “He throws the ball over 100 miles an hour,” my dad said. My reply? “We’ll see.”

Sure enough, the Nats won the right to draft the kid and did so in June of 2009. At the time, I was cautiously optimistic, as I seriously thought the Nats would likely be bullied by Strasburg’s agent, Scott Boras, and the deadline would pass without getting him to “sign on the line which is dotted,” as Alec Baldwin’s character in Glengarry, Glenross would say.

I recall being on vacation in late August of last year (2009) at the wonderful beach house my family rented in Sea Bright, New Jersey. Each night, I watched SportsCenter to see if the Nats had managed to sign Strasburg. As luck would have it, they got him with a few seconds to spare before the deadline. Optimistic? Yes, with a side order of pessimism (“Sure, they signed him. But the Nats will surely screw this up somehow,” I thought).

Fast-forward to spring training 2010. The reports from Florida were that he was already the Nats’ best pitcher, even though he’d never stepped foot on a pitcher’s mound in a Major League regular season game. Again, “we’ll see,” I thought.

Like many Nats (and other baseball) fanatics, I followed his every move in the minors as the early season progressed, knowing that he’d probably arrive in D.C. by early June and that I would be in attendance at his first Major League game.

As that early June target approached, I grew more and more anxious. On June 8^th, my wife and I attended his first Major League start (see photo below) – we sat five rows from the rail in the upper deck, midway between home plate and first base. The outcome is already the stuff of legend – thus, no need to recount each strikeout and 100 mph pitch here. I, for one, got my money’s worth as soon as he blew away former Nationals underachiever and head case extraordinaire, Lastings Milledge, for his first Major League whiff.

A funny side note is that my wife recorded his final two (of fourteen) strikeouts on her new iPhone camcorder. At one point, with one strike on the final batter, who would be Strasburg’s 14^th strikeout victim of the evening, a barely audible comment – “c’mon, mow this bum down” – can be heard from the froggy throat of yours truly. It was within moments that my wife and I agreed to try to attend each game he pitches in D.C. this season. Thus far, we’ve kept our vow (we’re currently four for four, and have great seats for this Saturday’s matchup against the Metsies and then the July 9^th game versus the Giants).

But back to my question posed at the outset of this essay – what does Stephen Strasburg mean to me? I am still not entirely sure. I know it’s not grotesquely over-hyped, new “1 of 1” manufactured scarcity cards. I do know that because I (as does everyone else) have a family to support, children to help raise, a career to develop, and a small business to run with my business partner and good friend in our free time, the time I can (or choose to) dedicate to sports fandom is dwindling every day (as it should). But this baseball season is different, solely because of Strasburg.

Because he plays for my Nats, he represents to me something that each underdog (and heaven knows the Nats and, consequently, their fans, are underdogs) longs for or, if he’s lucky, has already witnessed – that precise, glorious moment at which he feels his fortunes begin to turn for the better.

After the Nationals made the final out in their final pre-Strasburg era game (an extra inning affair during which the Nats blew a two-run lead in the ninth inning), Nationals President, Stan Kasten, turned to a friend and said, “Thank goodness that era is behind us.” Kasten acutely recognized that the Nats’ final out in the pre-Strasburg era was the turning point – the worst days were suddenly beginning to appear in the Nats’ caravan’s rearview mirror.

While the Nats have struggled mightily since the June 8^th Stras-Mania began (e.g., losing 1-0 to the Royals on June 23^rd after Strasburg fanned 9 and yielded no extra base hits; back-back-back blown five and six run leads to the lowlier Orioles just last week; and a total of one run scored in the last three games Strasburg started), and will likely continue to struggle for the near future (at least as long as guys like Nyjer Morgan continue to bat leadoff, our middle infielders continue to kick the ball around the infield, and our non-Strasburg starters continue to roll the ball to home plate), it would be shortsighted for anyone to believe that Strasburg’s mere presence in the Nats’ dugout has not already resulted in the team’s fortunes starting to take a u-turn.

While witnessing Strasburg’s sheer dominance on the mound from my perch in the upper deck of Nationals Park on June 8th (see photo above), I began to believe. Not just in the Nats’ chances of becoming a baseball force within the next few years (although that’s a really fun, yet nearly unfathomable, thought), but in the possibility of the things in our everyday lives that can sometimes seem impossible – the beacon of light at the end of, at times, a seemingly endless tunnel.

It’s always been there, and it always will be, but sometimes it takes a 21-year-old fireballer to remind us.