Since it was fairly moderate yesterday I decided to tool around the attic in yet another attempt to purge. That’s where I have the bulk of my library as well as other baseball-related items, including a foot locker of baseball cards.
Problem with trying to clean up is that you get caught up in a lot of these items. The main reason for venturing into the upwards abyss was to find a tin box of photos of my college baseball team in the mid-late 1970s. A few of them are online and it’s interesting to see how we’ve “grown up.” I thought it wold be nice to find these snapshots, scan them, and post or send to the guys.
Alas I could not find them. (Fear not; they’re around someplace.) But what I did find were a number of items that made me stop and think about what they meant to me at the time of acquisition.
This was the very first baseball book I recall buying. Got it at a a little used book store on Nostrand Avenue in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. Had to have been before 1967 because that’s the year we moved to another apartment in Flatbush. So that means I was younger than 10. I guess I thought it would make me look smart. I’m still thinking that because I still don’t get most of it. The cover price was $3.95 but I know I didn’t pay that much; it would have been way above my means on an allowance of 50 cents a week.
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Shoeless Joe and Ragtime Baseball was the one that started it all: my very first book review. I wrote it for the now-defunct Elysian Fields Quarterly in 1993. I posted about it in 2009 following a SABR Convention.
I didn’t receive payment for the review but that didn’t matter. At the time it was enough of a thrill to see my byline (as well as getting the book for free). This paved the way for future assignments for a number of other reviews in such publications as Nine; the Cleveland Plain Dealer; Irish American; New York Sports; Irish American; and Bookreporter.com, for whom I’ve been contributing reviews and features for more than 20 years. Some of these paid very well, other very little or not at all. But they did allow me to build up a portfolio that would one day give me the gravitas and reputation to write my books.
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These also came from the used book store for a quarter apiece. No stamps in them, though. Dated in the mid-1950s and still in pretty good shape. That’s more than I can say for some other books I have, like Aaron to Zipfel, which came out in 1985 and is almost 600 pages in paperback. It’s getting to the point where I’m afraid the thing will crumble in my hands.
Aaron to Zipfel is a fascinating look, “profiling all the new major league players of the sixties from, rookie to Hall of Famer…” according to the book’s cover. And it seems that any player, even if he appeared in just one game, was worthy of inclusion as long as he made his debut within that decade. The authors — Rich Marazzi and Len Fiorito — also published Baseball Players of the 1950s: A Biographical Dictionary of All 1,560 Major Leaguers (2004). Needless to say, there’s just a paragraph or two for each player but can you imagine doing something like that today? Of course, back in the fifties there were only 18 teams. Even until the end of the sixties, there were still just 24 teams. Today, it strikes me that it would take over 1,000 pages to get everyone in.
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Remember Baseball Weekly? I have several years-worth collected in binders. I also have pages from newspapers regarding the 1969 Mets Worlds Championship that are obviously brittle with age. If anyone has any ideas about how to preserve them, please let me know. While the copies of BW are obviously more recent, they are also starting to show signs of decay (aren’t we all?). Even the binders are fraying, despite being kept in a drawer for years.
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Then there are the baseball cards in that foot locker, including a couple of sets I’d forgotten I still had from 1969 and 1970. I actually broke down and bought a Beckett’s Card Guide to see if they’re worth anything. I must admit I did not take care of them, as did many of my generation who just collected for the fun of it, rather than looking at these pieces of cardboard as an investment.
There are also complete sets from Upper Deck, Donruss, and Score, but I doubt there’s much value there. Then there are a couple of oddballs one-offs like this one. As well as small sets put out by cereal companies and stores like Woolworth’s, Toys R Us, and others.
It’s been fun visiting my past, but I sure didn’t get much accomplished, throwing-out wise.
Maybe next year.
is available on Amazon.com,
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