* Bits and pieces

Still trying to catch up from Yankee Fantasy Camp, so we’ll take it a few steps at a time:

• Richard Barbieri writes an intersting “This annotated week in baseball history” for The Hardball Times that deserves mention. The same can be said for Rob Neyer’s postings at ESPN.com, in particular his daily doses (Friday Filberts, Wednesday Wangdoodles, etc.) on his Sweet Spot blog.If you’re gonna get technical on me and say these are not books, etc., I would remind you that a laptop or netbook fits nicely on a bookshelf.
• Baseball Past and Present (“A historical look at the national pastime”) posted this review of The Boys of Summer.
• Bruce Markusen (A Baseball Dynasty: Charlie Finley’s Swingin’ A’s,  The Team That Changed Baseball: Roberto Clemente and the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates, Tales From The Mets Dugout, and The Orlando Cepeda Story) contributed this profile of Satchel Paige on Hardball Times. Markusen is currently working on a book about iconic baseball cards since the 1960s.
• Michael Hankison at BaseballReflections.com wrote this review of Sixty Feet, Six Inches. Upshot: “a great baseball book.”
• I quite enjoy it when baseball cards return to their roots. Wish they would do it more often (and cut back on these hundreds of subsets).
• Pirates broadcaster Nelson King has self-published his memoirs in Happiness is like a Cur Dog: The Thirty-Year Journey of a Major League Baseball Pitcher and Broadcaster.
• Here’s a shocker: baseball owners back in the day were racists. Film at 11.

* Bits and pieces: Hot Stove edition

My apologies for falling way behind. Still basking in my post-Yankee fantasy camp experience, which you will be able to read about in the pages of the New Jersey Jewish News in the next week or so, as well as Broadside Bombers next year.

So without further ado:

• Ron Shandler, who publishes the popular Baseball Forecaster, contributed this essay on the Arizona Fall League to the Huffington Post last month (told you I was behind).
• Chad Finn on Boston.com’s “Touching all the Bases” blog notes that “the annual Bill James Handbook is out, and it’s arrival in the mailbox and the immediate aftermath is one of the finest hours — make that roughly three of the finest hours — in a baseball nerdle’s year.” Finn also includes a card from the 1966 Topps set, one of my favorites.
• We all know that Boston fans are among the most well-read. Here’s a chance to prove it.
• I used to think it was kind of sad when an athlete put his prizes and trophies up for auction. But as I’ve gotten older, my philosophy on material things has changed. Why not out some of this stuff to good use?
• I’ll trade you one John Roberts for two Ruth Bader Ginsburgs. Seriously, it’s nice and all but I hope this didn’t come out of taxpayers funds.

* Last week (Aug. 24) in Sports Illustrated

Hey, I missed one. So sue me.

Just wanted to highlight this article by Luke winn about “The Last Iconic Baseball Card.” Care to guess who it is before you read the piece? A Hint: it cae out 20 years ago.

In a similarly belated development, MLB picked Topps as its “official” card of choice. Everything old is new again.

Yay! Bring back the wax packs!

* Author interview: Pete Wiliams

The author of Card Sharks: How Upper Deck Turned A Child’s Hobby Into A High-Stakes, Billion-Dollar Busines was interviewed by the blog Wax Heaven: Trading Cards and Pop Culture.

* Mensa meeting

The following comes from my Mensa page-a-day calendar (no wisecracks) for March 19:

The storage box for my baseball cards has room for most of my cards, and, on a nearby shelf, I keep the extra 16 cards that do not fit. If I expand the length of the box by 30%, I’ll have room for all my cards, plus enough room to store another 20 cards in the future.

How many cards do I currently own?

* Magazine review: Beckett 2009 Baseball Preview

Beckett offers a very straightforward product. Aside from the team-by-team analysis, the only additional articles deal with the top ten free agent signings (Mark Teixeira leads the list) and ten worst off-season moves, which includes bad trades and poor acquisitions (Nick Swisher’s departure from the White Sox heads this one).

There’s also a small 2008 statistical leaders section and 25 sleepers and busts for fantasy players (a tease for a stand-alone publication).

One quibble: the teams are arranged in alphabetical order, rather than in divisions, which makes it a bit unwieldy to see who’s where.

Since Beckett is known primarily for cards and memorabilia, the team reports include a unique and fun feature: An account of the cards that have been produced for every ball club, the total value of those cards and the average price per card, all with their overall MLB rankings. Some of the numbers are surprising.

The one figure that jumped out at me was the card count for the Washington Nationals: 10,199. I mistakenly assumed that the figure included the previous incarnation as the Montreal Expos, so it seemed very low; the San Diego Padres — which entered the Majors the same year (1969) — had 42,934. An email to Beckett explained the discrepancy: those 10,000+ cards were solely for the Nationals, which have only been around since 2005. In that case, the number seems pretty high.

The New York Yankees have the most total cards — which includes every set Beckett includes in their regular publication — with 113,694. In second place with — and more than 40,000 behind — are the Boston Red Sox.

One would think the older the team, the more material produced, but the more successful teams would merit extra cards based on World Series appearances, statistical leaders, or historical achievement.

Understandably, the Yankees also lead in total value with $2,592,652.60; the Pittsburgh Pirates are next with $1,538,499.10. They also rank #1 in average value per card at $51.76; the Detroit Tigers are next at $45.51. I’m guessing — since Beckett doesn’t offer any explanation behind the numbers — that the Honus Wagner card comes into play here.

It’s interesting to note that the Washington Nationals are carrying on the tradition of the Montreal Expos: their total card value is almost $100,000 worse than the 29th team.

A complete list of rankings follows:

* Now hear this: Joe Orlando on the memorabilia industry

Joe Orlando, author of  Collecting Sports Legends: The Ultimate Hobby Guide (Zyrus Publishing) spent a few minutes with the Bookshelf discussing the state of the memorabilia industry (surprisingly healthy at the high end) and the difficulty in choosing what to focus on as a collector.

* Can’t blame moms for this one

I had this little comic book, an insert that came in packs of 1970 Topps cards. I also had coins, deckle-edged cards, miniposter, “playing” cards, all premiums in sets for others years.

“Had” is the operative word. Can’t even blame my mother for tossing them away. This was my fault. had all the extras in a plastic shoe box that somehow got lost moving from one residence to another. Dammit. It’s not the money these treasures might have been worth, it’s the nostalgia factor. And the money.

* The most infamous baseball card, 20 years later

Why were those naughty words written on the knob of Billy Ripken’s bat in his 1989 Fleer card?

More on the card here, from CNBC.

* Time to sell the cards?

With these tough economic times, I wonder if there’s been a run of card collectors trying to unload their little pieces of cardboard. For those of you interested, here’s a piece describing the appraisal process
and another on the determination of “book value.”