Category Archives: History - Page 4

Pieces of Shea

Posted by on 19 October 2012 2 comments

How the hobby remembers 45 years of Mets history

On April 17, 1964, the New York Mets finally had a home to call their own.  After spending two years at the Polo Grounds, the Mets began their 45-year stay at Shea Stadium.  It may not have been the fanciest stadium around, but it hosted one All-Star game, four World Series, and a fair number of Hall of Famers.  Unlike the stadium celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, Shea’s era couldn’t go on forever.  In 2008, fans said a final goodbye to the only Mets home many of them had ever known.

A bittersweet part of any stadium demolition (or sometimes even renovation) is the selloff of anything that can be unbolted or torn off.  In the old days, wooden stadium seats would find their way into museums and private collections (and later baseball cards, as seen in this year’s Heritage and Gypsy Queen).  Until its demise, Shea had never been cut up and stuck into cards.  This changed with 2009 Topps Heritage, which featured Shea Stadium memorabilia in its American Heritage Relics insert set.  For the first time ever, fans would be able to buy a tiny piece of their home stadium (if they thought that $100 or more for a plastic seat back was a bit too steep).

The stadium memorabilia of choice in this case was padding from the outfield wall.  The big question though would be who to put on the cards with tiny pieces of blue wall embedded in them.  Mike Piazza had previously appeared on game-used wall cards, but for other stadiums; this of course made no sense because Piazza was a catcher, but that didn’t really matter for these cards.  For Shea though, it wouldn’t do to put the faces of players from other teams alongside the last remnants of the Mets’ former home.  So who would make sense?

Lenny Dykstra immediately comes to mind.  His crashes into the outfield wall earned him the nickname “Nails” (and probably a bit of brain damage), so how could you go wrong with Lenny on an outfield wall card?  Dykstra was flying high as a financial genius at the time, right before filing for bankruptcy and landing in jail on every kind of non-violent felony charge you could imagine (and maybe a few not so non-violent ones).  OK, so we dodged a bullet there

How about the 2000 World Series starting outfield of Benny Agbayani, Jay Payton, and Timo Perez?  Could there be a more unlikely starting outfield in the World Series?  This story would probably play out better if they won that one, but it’s still worth a thought.

You could just go with a big star who played in the outfield at Shea and Willie Mays is about as big as they come.  Despite spending only the very end of his career with the Mets, he is still featured on plenty of cards in blue pinstripes.

There’s always Darryl Strawberry, who still holds several team records (at least until David Wright breaks them).  Or maybe Carlos Beltran, one of the best Mets from the 2008 team.  There are countless stars and fan favorites who could have worked..

Forget all that, there’s only one Mets player who should be on a card with a piece of Shea Stadium’s outfield wall.  The Catch.  For most baseball fans, that phrase is associated with Willie Mays.  To Mets fans though, The Catch is synonymous with Endy Chavez and his picture-perfect home run-robbing catch in Game 7 of the 2006 NLCS at Shea, right in the middle of an AIG ad that said “The strength to be there.”  The Catch was such a significant baseball moment that it was even featured in 1 and 1/3 of a second of Fox’s two hour 25th anniversary special this year.  It was just meant to be.

Which is why it never happened.  So who would be deemed worthy of this honor?  Not Mays or Chavez.  Not Dykstra or Strawberry.  Not Benny or Timo.  Not even Beltran.  The winners were Joe Namath, Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, President Bill Clinton, and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Namath actually played at Shea for most of his career, but what the heck do popes and politicians have to do with the outfield wall at Shea?  Apparently the criteria for selection ended somewhere around “visited the stadium at least once.”  And I guess they couldn’t get the rights to The Beatles.  Worse though is that Endy’s catch, while widely covered in photos, went unrecognized in baseball cards.  Until now (or a few months ago to be precise).

And we finally get to the point of this piece, the 2012 Topps Gypsy Queen Glove Stories card that commemorates The Catch at long last.  It took almost six years, but we finally have a cardboard reminder of one of the best postseason plays in recent history.  If only this could have been combined with the Shea outfield wall cards…

I Have Been a Terrible Mets Fan

Posted by on 30 August 2012 Comments Off on I Have Been a Terrible Mets Fan

Atoning for two decades of fan neglect

As I’ve said before (or at least thought many times), I have been a terrible Mets fan.  I can blame part of that on my upbringing, which was devoid of any die-hard Mets fan role models.  Aside from some Mets merchandise and trips to two Mets games (only one of which was at Shea), we were largely content with watching an afternoon game on television on the weekend or listening to a game on the radio; I listened to more than a few late games on my non-Sony walkman-equivalent in the summer of ’88.  We had no Mets t-shirts, jerseys (replica or authentic), jackets, or other such luxuries.  The Mets sundae helmet was used to scoop rabbit food.  We enjoyed the things we enjoyed without anything outwardly visible to show it and without any big effort to seek out opportunities to engage in fan activities.

Another big chunk of the blame has to go to the timing of the team’s fortunes taking a nosedive as I gained the means and opportunity to better express myself (i.e., have money, will spend).  The success of the ’80s left many of us unprepared for what the ’90s held in store.  It was hard to get behind those early ’90s teams, especially when they added Bobby Bonilla of the much-hated Pirates.  There was no heart to these teams and their record reflected it.  Mets fans, who weren’t all that visible to begin with, went underground with their fandom.  The low point for me came in 1994, when one of the items on the packing list for my hiking trip at Philmont Scout Ranch was a hat.  Such a simple item, but I was at a loss to come up with anything.  A Mets hat would be the logical choice, but I no longer had one and didn’t think it would go over so well anyway.  I briefly considered getting a hat from some other New York sports team, but I didn’t follow any other sports and knew that only ridicule could follow being found out as an impostor.  I went hat-less and bought a hat in the Philmont base camp shop, choosing to be that guy wearing the hat of the place he’s hiking in over representing a Mets team I no longer felt connected to.

With the present Mets filled with nothing but disappointment and shame, the ’90s were a time for looking back at a team that went from laughingstock to World Series champion twice in less than 25 years.  Many of the heroes from those championship teams regularly appeared at random events in nearby towns to sign autographs.  Back then, I got the chance to meet familiar players like Howard Johnson and Lee Mazzilli as well as ’69 Mets like Ed Kranepool, Tommie Agee, Jerry Grote, and Cleon Jones.  It was a great time to be a Mets fan, or it would have been if I had actually known who any of those guys were at the time.  Like I said, I was a terrible Mets fan.

When the Mets started winning again, I started paying attention, finally watching Mets games when they made the postseason in 1999 and a young player by the name of Melvin Mora came through in high pressure situations against a fearsome Atlanta Braves team.  When Mora was shipped to Baltimore for a disappointing Mike Bordick rental a few months later, it was like the early ’90s were clawing their way back into the picture.  Within two years, the transformation was complete and I was no longer watching.

We all know what happened in 2006, 2007, and, 2008.  This time though, I held my ground.  It was easier than ever to follow the team through commercial sports web sites and fan blogs, so I kept at it through the collapses and the misery that followed.  I even got a Mets hat, my first in 20 years.  That hat traveled with me around the world, through good times and bad.  I wasn’t going to let this slip away again.

By this point, I had a lot of catching up to do.  So many washed-up stars and terrible players made their way through the Mets over the previous two decades and I set about collecting autograph and game-used baseball cards of all of them.  How did I never notice that Orel Hershiser had been on the Mets?  Who the heck was this Yusmeiro Petit guy?  The depth of my ignorance was without end.  Finally though, I had caught up on everything I had missed by 2011, largely with the help of blogs like Amazin’ Avenue and Mets Today.  Now I was ready to set my grand plan in motion.  A Mets-themed Twitter account to keep up on all of the news, a new blog to begin the process of documenting the history of Mets in game-used and autograph cards – I was finally building and contributing to the fan community.

One thing was missing though – actual baseball games.  Citi Field was out of range for me and Fenway wasn’t hosting the Mets this year, but I could probably make do with some minor league games, no matter who was playing.  They’ve had a team up in Manchester for a few years, let’s see who they play…  The Binghamton Mets???  All this time, the Mets’ AA team has been playing away games right up in Manchester!  How did I not know this?  OK, no need to beat yourself up too much, just get some tickets when they go on sale and we can start making up for years of neglect.  How about the Lowell Spinners, they play in the same league as the Hudson Valley Renegades, right?  It would be nice to see the Renegades again, so…  The Brooklyn Cyclones are in the same league???  When did THAT happen?  What’s next, the Buffalo Bisons playing nearby?  No, only as close as Rhode Island, too far for me.  Well, except for when they play at Fenway in August.  Hey, I caught that one as it was announced!  I just might be digging myself out from being the World’s Worst Mets Fan after all.

Next: A Major Thanks to the Minor Leaguers

Happy Birthday to the New York Mets

Posted by on 11 April 2012 Comments Off on Happy Birthday to the New York Mets

6 of the 14 Mets to appear in the first Mets game in 1962

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the first game for the New York Mets.  With a lineup filled with aging stars, including one future Hall of Famer, the eventual record-setting finish of 40-120 wasn’t the expected result.  Still, win or (three times more likely) lose, this team ushered in a new era of New York baseball, which had been reduced to just the Yankees after the Giants and Dodgers moved to the growing California market.  50 years later, the Mets continue to frustrate fans with alternating periods of dominance and dismal failure, but we still root for the perpetual underdog and two-time champion.  Here’s to 50 more years of Mets baseball.

Baseball card collecting: Hobby in crisis, Part 2

Posted by on 27 March 2012 Comments Off on Baseball card collecting: Hobby in crisis, Part 2

Baseball cards and traditional media, pot and kettle?

In Part 1, I looked at the factors that I saw playing a part in the success or failure of the baseball card industry. I wrote this without having seen the CBS News piece that has stirred up this discussion over at Beckett, Panini, Upper Deck, and Cardboard Connection. To me, the health of the hobby comes down to interest in the sport, innovation in the industry, and cost. Cost is the tricky one.

Today’s baseball card market looks nothing like it did 25 years ago. There are far more choices, a higher barrier to entry, a much wider spread between low-end and high-end, and a lot more baggage from years past. As I’ve lamented here, the small local card shows are largely a thing of the past. Even the regular mall shows are slowing down with eBay providing a much better option for buying and selling the kind of merchandise that pays the bills. Way back in 2000, I was at a mall show and saw a 2000 UD Legends Gary Carter Gold Autograph that would have been perfect for my then-fledgling Mets autograph collection. When I asked if the price was flexible, the dealer just asked if I was on eBay. Since I was, he said that we wouldn’t be able to make a deal. He just couldn’t compete with a global marketplace and wasn’t even going to try, instead opting to put his effort into selling to people who hadn’t yet gotten with the times. His market was dwindling and he knew it; it was just a matter of time before the old ways would no longer be viable.

The dealers I met during my third life as a card collector (2000-2003) were a much different breed from the ones back in the ’80s and ’90s. As with my local shop owner from the ’80s, these dealers had largely abandoned the storefront and now dealt in cards as a side business out of their homes, loading up their cars one weekend a month to set up a few tables in a mall and make deals with the ranks of the nostalgic and the faithful. They could cut you a deal on a complete 1978 Topps set or the Lenny Dykstra rookie that was inexplicably missing from your 1986 Topps set. They would gladly take any cards of local interest for trade or credit and would talk sports or cards with you when things slowed down. It was a support group for people trying to figure out how to cope with the changes in the hobby.

And that brings us to the CBS piece. The hobby is dying. A weekly local card show filled with ’70s Topps cards isn’t drawing in the kids. Cards are too expensive. Kids are only interested in video games and computers and girls. Times are tough for a celebrity card dealer who used to be rolling in cash. Give me a freaking break.

You know, we had video games, computers, and even girls (well, that one’s a bit of a stretch, for me at least) back in the ’80s. We didn’t have global networks and smartphones, but things haven’t changed that much on the “how kids spend their free time” front. The biggest change has been the social aspect – the Internet-connected game consoles and smartphones are bringing kids together like never before. Even the anime-inspired trading card games of the ’90s (and still going strong today) emphasize the social aspect of cards. What about baseball cards?

The appeal of baseball cards has been constantly changing since the mid ’80s. First popular for pictures of players and listings of stats, cards became seen as a viable investment as prices of older (and much scarcer) cards went through the roof. Baseball cards had gone from a novelty to a collectible, which can be a dangerous shift. When collectibles become self-aware, greed can bring about self-inflicted ruin. Overproduction made just about everything from this boom period worthless and created the unrealistic expectations that served as the point of comparison in the CBS report.

But who cares about what the market did ages ago? The rise of inserts and premium sets shifted the focus from sheer numbers to diversity. Upper Deck was premium from its start in 1989. Leaf went premium in 1990. Fleer and Topps launched premium lines in 1991. Bowman and Donruss went premium in 1992. Fleer, Topps, and Upper Deck launched super premium lines in 1993. Upper Deck went premium again in 1994. It was a never-ending escalation. Kids were priced out of the market.

The reality was that pack prices were always rising. The premium craze sped things up and undoubtedly pushed out the indifferent collector, but experiments in low-price alternatives like Triple Play and Collector’s Choice proved an important point – the market wanted a quality product. It wasn’t a market that catered exclusively to kids, and certainly the proportion of kids to adults had changed, but what could be done? Can you force a market to reduce profits just to match your nostalgic view of how things should be?

Maybe I just don’t get it because my nostalgia doesn’t fit the narrative. I knew very few card collectors when I was a kid and most of them were into higher-end products than I could afford. I was priced out of the market. And yet I still bought lots of cards until other obligations took over my time and attention, sampling most of the premium and super premium lines along the way (and now wishing that I had focused on quality over quantity). Have the demographics really changed all that much in 20 years?

And this is where I’m as lost as you are reading it. I’ve tried to touch on all of the factors that play into the success and failure of baseball cards. CBS showed how things are different now compared to an unrealistic bubble economy. I’ve painted a complex picture of an industry with many facets. CBS showed two very limited data points. I see uncertainty with signs pointing to at least modest success. CBS showed certain doom. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised though, CBS produced a 5 minute fluff piece while I tried to capture the history of an industry and my connection to it. Reality often fails to fit into a convenient narrative.

Why even bother running a piece on an industry just to say “it’s doomed” and not even bother to back it up? Why not look at the tragic end of Upper Deck as a fixture in the hobby or Panini’s clumsy revival of the Playoff/Donruss brand? Why not point out the inherent irony in MLB Properties granting Topps a monopoly to encourage innovation? Of all the signs of the hobby’s impending demise they could have chosen, CBS went to the local interest well for a bunch of guys who are about as out of touch with the hobby as the reporters themselves. That’s the sign of an industry on the brink of failure.

I really don’t know what the future holds for the baseball card industry. And I don’t know if that future even matters to collectors, whatever it might hold. Collectors will continue no matter what happens in the industry, changing their focus to keep the hobby interesting, taking a break when they need to, and eventually coming back if and when they see a future in the hobby. I’ve been in and out of this hobby so many times that I barely recognize what I was in my previous incarnations. I look at cards that have no place in my collection now but were centerpieces once upon a time; I see others that mean far more to me now than they did years ago. Most of all though, I see this hobby’s past as being something that is rich for mining, with every new set adding to the diversity of a mosaic that is too great to be seen in whole. The totality of the hobby is not in the current month’s or year’s offering, it is in all of the products and collectors that have come before. The hobby is bigger than any one product, manufacturer, collector, or card show. The hobby is bigger than eBay, Beckett, or even the entire Internet. The hobby will live on long after cards stop being produced or games stop being played.

Now about that stack of 1975 Topps in the CBS piece, could someone check it against my wantlist? I really need to get working on that set…

Baseball card collecting: Hobby in crisis, Part 1

Posted by on 27 March 2012 Comments Off on Baseball card collecting: Hobby in crisis, Part 1

The hobby is dead; long live the hobby!

A recent CBS News report about the decline of baseball cards has, predictably, received a bit of criticism from the sports card industry. Beckett and Panini have weighed in, please start there to see where this controversy is coming from. Are the days of baseball cards numbered? Is this hobby dying a slow but certain death? Can the hobby survive without massive popularity among kids? Was this piece produced 15 years ago? The answers to all of these are a bit murky and require digging deep into the history of the hobby (well, the last one is a definite “it might as well have been”). In Part 1, I’ll take a stab at why the hobby could be in trouble. In Part 2, I’ll take a look at what CBS thinks and see where we can go from there.

There are two distinct points in time when I would have emphatically agreed that baseball cards could be headed for oblivion. The first was in late 2005, when Fleer went under and Donruss let the door hit its ass on its way out of the licensed baseball card business. Fleer’s demise was really not all that surprising (its reign as the longest-running non-Topps licensed baseball card manufacturer is the surprising part). The loss of Donruss, after five years of driving the industry to deliver more variety to collectors, was like the MLB Players Association giving fans the finger.

More than anything else, the move was made to ensure that cards were all about advertising the on-field product; the simplification of the product line, reduced emphasis on retired players, and MLBPA-mandated definition of Rookie Card (which now is the most meaningless designation in the sport, several rungs below Game Winning RBIs and ceremonial first-pitch throwers) all showed that the MLBPA was not happy with the baseball card industry catering to collectors and not impressionable children who could be counted on to buy lots of MLB-licensed merchandise if only baseball cards could be made simpler.

The second major blow was delivered by MLB Properties when they reinstated the Topps monopoly in 2009. While Topps wasn’t the only player in the baseball card market from 1956 to 1980, it did everything it could to keep competitors out of the market. In this time, about the only thing Topps didn’t try was innovation; the product in 1980 differed from the product of 20 years earlier mainly in photography. Card quality, design, and subject matter remained virtually unchanged for decades.

Things changed in 1981 when Fleer and Donruss finally entered the market with the intention of sticking around. For the rest of the decade, the three fought to get cards of the hottest new rookies into their products, making update sets standard (and creating the XRC confusion). Fleer and Donruss, forced to abandon gum after the court ruling that let them into the market was overturned, moved to slightly better card stock, with Score and then Upper Deck taking things further in 1988 and 1989, respectively. By the time Topps countered with a largely irrelevant late-season Bowman set, it was clear that change was necessary to keep up in the booming card market.

That’s what happens when you have competition. Sure, people complain about how it’s not like it was in the “old days,” but chances are that the real old days weren’t what they think they were. Things are always changing, whether it’s the price of a pack of cards, the number of cards in the pack, or the mix of cards from month-to-month (well, that stopped changing in 1974); the quality of the gum is the only true constant (kudos to Topps for getting the 2001 Heritage gum formulation so perfectly putrid). Monopolies slow the pace of change and put the industry at risk of irrelevance.

This is what makes the 2009 exclusive trading card deal between MLB Properties and Topps so troubling. Worse, when Upper Deck snubbed its nose at MLBP and produced a 2010 baseball card product with visible team names and logos, the resulting court battle ended in a settlement that all but guaranteed that Upper Deck would not be returning to the baseball card market; in addition to agreeing not to use MLB team names and logos, Upper Deck agreed not to use photos that had been altered to remove offending logos, leaving only artwork and non-baseball imagery as fair game should UD wish to produce an unlicensed set.

Things took a turn for the better in 2011 when Panini, the current owner of Donruss and Playoff (but not Leaf), secured a license from the MLB Players Association. While this is certainly a positive development, Panini has a long way to go to bring its cards up to the current industry standard (the lack of team logos and names and the continued release of 2011 products well into 2012 aren’t helping matters any either). Even Leaf (formerly Razor, not to be confused with the Donruss incarnation of Leaf) has managed to produce high-quality cards with no official licenses, so Panini’s initial efforts under their MLBPA license are disappointing to say the least.

So what does this say about the health of the hobby? Not a heck of a lot. You can talk financials (Upper Deck was near-ruin in the mid-90s and Topps was in the middle of several takeover/merger attempts in 2007), but that’s too far removed from the average collector to be relatable. The booms of the mid-to-late-80s and early-to-mid-00s can teach us a few lessons. Mainly, interest in the sport is a big factor in the success of baseball cards; unlike what the MLBPA would like to believe, the sport is an advertisement for the hobby, not the other way around. The strikes in 1981 and 1994 corresponded to down years for the baseball card industry, while renewed interest in the sport in the following years corresponds to the previously mentioned booms. Today, we’re coming off another downturn caused by the revelation of the Steroid Era and should be looking at an upswing in the near future (particularly if perennial losers Royals and Pirates and big-market busts Mets and Dodgers can get competitive again). This should result in a stronger baseball card market, all things being equal, but are they?

Check back tomorrow for Part 2: Baseball cards and traditional media, pot and kettle?

Gary Carter: A History in Cards

Posted by on 19 February 2012 2 comments

In the wake of his death, countless words have been written about Gary Carter and all that he did in his life.  I’m not going to try to duplicate any of that.  I didn’t know Carter, I never met him, and I only saw him play in person twice, both from high stadium seats (once in 1986 and once in 1988).  All I have of Carter is in cardboard and ink, so that will have to do.

The start of Gary Carter’s tenure with the Mets just happens to coincide with the start of my time as a Met fan.  As with any fan of the Mets in that era, I saw Carter as part of the team’s foundation and, essentially, the face of the franchise in the late ’80s.  This was perhaps shown best when it came to boxes of wax packs.  While Keith Hernandez (1985 Topps), Dwight Gooden (1986 Fleer), and Darryl Strawberry (1990 Score) would all have their cards featured on a wax box, Carter’s smiling face took up most of the space on the top of the boxes and sets of 1989 Fleer.  He was such a dominant baseball figure in that day and continued to have a strong presence in the baseball card hobby right up to his death and hopefully well beyond.

Alpha to Omega: Carter’s rookie card and the final card released in his lifetime

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