Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about the September release of Topps' 2017 Heritage Minor League baseball:

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/2017-topps-heritage-minor-league-preview/

Here's a story I wrote about the 2017 Bowman High Tek set that will make its debut in August: 

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/bowman-high-tek-will-debut-in-august/​

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about the 1971 Topps football set:
www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/73666-2/​

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about the 1984 Topps football set, which included rookie cards of Dan Marino, John Elway and Eric Dickerson:
www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/73663-2/

The 1920s were a coming of age for major-league baseball. The deadball era had ended, and the lure of the home run, stoked by the power of Babe Ruth, took baseball fans by storm. It showcased the emergence of the New York Yankees as a baseball dynasty, and was witness to the New York Giants’ dominance in the National League from 1921 to 1924.

There is so much rich material to be mined from this decade, apart from the obvious themes that dominated the decade. And that’s where Steve Steinberg shines, as he prospects for gold and uncovers a gem of a baseball career that was tragically cut short. In Urban Shocker: Silent Hero of Baseball’s Golden Age  (University of Nebraska Press; hardback; $32.95; 329 pages), Steinberg chronicles the career of Shocker, an underrated but respected pitcher who played twice for the New York Yankees (1916-1917, 1925-1928) and seven seasons for the St. Louis Browns (1918-1924).

Steinberg is no stranger to 1920s baseball, particularly with the history of the Yankees. He has collaborated with Lyle Spatz on two books: 1921: The Yankees, the Giants and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in 2010; and The Colonel and Hug: The Partnership that Transformed the New York Yankees in 2013.

Shocker was part of the famous 1927 Yankees team that swept to the pennant and a four-game sweep in the World Series, but his achievements seem to have been buried among the glory carved out by a team that boasted four Hall of Famers in the starting lineup (Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Earle Combs and Tony Lazzeri), two in the starting rotation (Waite Hoyt and Herb Pennock) and one calling the shots from the dugout (manager Miller Huggins).

A four-time 20-game winner in St. Louis — including an American League-leading 27 in 1921— Shocker won 19 games in 1926 and 18 in ’27 in his second stint in New York. He was one of the pitchers allowed to continue throwing the spitball after it was banned after the 1920 season, and while it was not his money pitch, he was crafty enough to keep batters guessing when he might throw the loaded ball. Before dying from a heart valve that degenerated and pneumonia, Shocker won 187 games in 13 seasons and never had a losing record in the majors.

“Shocker is a living example of that thing known as ‘cunning’ in pitching form,” Steinberg quotes sportswriter (and future baseball commissioner) Ford Frick from a 1925 article.

The subhead to Steinberg’s book is almost misleading, since for most of his career, Shocker was anything but quiet. He was a fierce competitor who was not afraid to squawk at umpires and opposing players, and he also had a penchant for enjoying the night life during the era of Prohibition. “He enjoys a scrap almost as much as Jack Dempsey,” Steinberg quotes St. Louis sportswriter Harry Pierce.

Steinberg became interested in Shocker in 1998 when he found an old baseball card of the pitcher at a card show. Steinberg had recently sold his retail company and decided to research the elusive right-hander. By 2002 he had written more than 200,000 words but shelved the project for seven years. In 2009, Steinberg returned to his Shocker manuscript and began to shape it into a readable biography. The hiatus worked wonders, as Shocker comes to life in this book.

Steinberg’s research includes photos from Shocker’s relatives and also from his own personal collection. He also delves into many Canadian newspaper sources to document Shocker’s minor-league career. Steinberg leads off several of his chapters with the verse of legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice, which ties into that chapter’s subject matter rather well.

Steinberg also brings out the showman and downright cockiness Shocker displayed when he pitched for the Browns. He “loved the noisy fans” in an opponent’s ballpark and felt energized by their scorn. In 1920 he pulled off a nifty piece of gamesmanship against Ruth in a July 13 game. Shocker struck out 14 batters, and Ruth whiffed three times. It was the second strikeout that raised eyebrows.

When Ruth came to bat, Shocker waved his outfielders in. Spoiling Ruth’s timing with a slow pitch for strike one, he beckoned his outfielders to move in even closer. After Ruth swung and missed for strike two, Shocker brought his outfielders to the back fringe of the infield. After setting up Ruth with a fastball outside the strike zone, Shocker came back with a slow pitch that the baffled Bambino missed for strike three.

It was part of Shocker’s crusade to let Huggins know that he made a mistake trading him to St. Louis in 1918. Indeed, Shocker was eager to pitch against his old teammates, and while he only went 22-25 against them in 53 starts, he still gave the Yankees fits.

Steinberg speculates about how Shocker might have fared had his peak years been with the Yankees and not the Browns. New York finished third in 1920 and then won three straight pennants from 1921 to 1923. Shocker went 91-51 during those seasons in St. Louis, including a 27-12 mark in 1921. From 1920 to 1924, the Browns finished fourth, third, second and fifth in the American League. It’s an intriguing thought, particularly in 1920 and 1924; several well-placed Shocker victories could have resulted in five straight pennants for the Yankees.

There are some marvelous nuggets of information culled from the sportswriters of the day, and Steinberg uses them to great effect. Here’s a colorful, descriptive quote from The Sporting News: “Shocker is a trifle temperamental — headstrong, it might more aptly be called. Like all stars, he wants his way. A Bolshevik? Well, no, it’s not that bad.”

By the end of 1927, Shocker’s physical condition was worsening. In June 1928, shortness of breath and bouts of dizziness caused him to collapse; the Yankees released him on July 4, since “illness had stepped in where age had failed,” in the words of sportswriter Fred Leib. Shocker would be dead two months later.
It was time, Steinberg writes, to tell Shocker’s story. “He’s been waiting for almost ninety years,” he writes.
​
It was worth the wait. Steinberg presents a fascinating portrait of a pitcher who was respected by his peers but faded into obscurity. This new biography brings the pitcher — and the man — back to life.

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about an RMY Auctions that features more than 1,770 photographic items. Roger Maris is one of the featured auctions.

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/maris-photograph-among-more-than-1700-at-rmy-auctions-sale/

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about the 1972 Topps football set:

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/1972-topps-football-offered-stars-scarce-high-numbers/

I have this vision of a young Marty Appel, working as publicity director for the New York Yankees during the early 1970s, combing through the depths of old Yankee Stadium in search of old treasures.  Knowing Appel’s natural curiosity and tenacity, he would uncover some gems.

That’s the same vision readers will have while reading Appel’s latest book, Casey Stengel: Baseball’s Greatest Character (Doubleday; hardback; $27.95; 413 pages). That’s because Appel, who has written extensively about the Yankees — his portfolio includes 2012’s Pinstripe Empire: The New York Yankees from Before the Babe to After the Boss; and Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (2009) — has produced an entertaining look at the “Ol’ Perfessor.” He unearths facts about Stengel’s youth, his rough-and-tumble days in the minor leagues, and his eventual rise to the major leagues. And Appel strikes pure gold at every turn.

The label of “baseball’s greatest character” was not an arbitrary one, The MLB Network’s Prime 9 show made that determination in 2009, and they had plenty of evidence — Stengel’s ability to mangle the English language (his version was called Stengelese, as a Congressional panel famously discovered in 1958), and his talent for holding court with sportswriters for hours.

And those quotes, burned into a baseball fan’s soul: “There comes a time in every man’s life, and I’ve had plenty of them”; “I’ll never make the mistake of being 70 again”; and “If anybody wants me, tell them I’m being embalmed.” And let’s not forget his plaintive cry about the 1962 New York Mets: “Can’t anybody here play this game?” The Mets were awful, but Stengel was able to deflect the attention of fans and sportswriters away from his team’s terrible record because of his personality and colorful persona. He was a marketing genius before the term existed.

A definitive biography of Stengel already exists, written by Robert Creamer in 1984 (Stengel: His Life and Times). However, Appel gained access to Edna Lawson Stengel’s unpublished memoirs, which proved to be a valuable resource. Appel also notes that digitized newspapers and access to them via the internet enabled him to find information that was not as readily available when Creamer wrote about Stengel in the 1980s. Appel also tapped into an unpublished memoir of longtime Yankees coach Frank Crosetti and an audio interview with Roger Peckinpaugh.

Stengel himself might have called Appel’s researching ability “amazin’.” His bibliography taps a wealth of sources (including Creamer’s book), four of his own books and an unpublished 1963 manuscript that he co-wrote as a teen with Jeffrey Krebs, “Let’s Go Mets.” In addition to his own research, Appel builds his narrative with plenty of help from other sources. His bibliography includes books written by Peter Golenbock, Donald Honig, Fred Lieb, Roger Kahn, Richard Ben Cramer, Jimmy Cannon, Grantland Rice, Jimmy Cannon, Jimmy Breslin and many others. He also cites dozens of newspapers, and not just from New York. Websites are consulted, along with work done by the Society for American Baseball Research.

It’s a thorough presentation.

Stengel had a modest major-league career, playing with Brooklyn, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, the New York Giants and Boston Braves from 1912 to 1925. He batted .284 during his career and appeared in three World Series, hitting the first postseason home run—an inside-the-park home run — at Yankee Stadium in 1923. But it was the time spent as a manager — particularly his 12 years managing the Yankees — that cemented Stengel’s fame and a plaque at the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Stengel won 10 pennants and seven World Series between 1949 and 1960. He came to the Yankees in 1949 after a successful minor-league managing career, but had flopped in the National League with Brooklyn and Boston.

He was considered a clown by critics, but Stengel, blessed with talented players for the first time in his managerial career, revolutionized the game. Although he hated being platooned by manager John McGraw when he played for the Giants, Stengel did the same thing with the Yankees, shuffling lineups and plugging in players. He was not afraid to send up a pinch hitter early to break open a game, and sometimes had his pitcher bat eighth in the lineup. He also was not afraid to yank a starting pitcher out of a game when he faltered, even if the game was in its early stages. The moves were unorthodox, but Stengel had a .636 winning percentage with the Yankees, compiling 1,149 regular-season victories.

Boston sportswriter Dave Egan, who watched Stengel manage the Braves poorly in the late 1930s and early ’40s, wrote that the Yankees were mathematically eliminated from the 1949 American League pennant race when Stengel was introduced as manager. “Stengel is not a baseball manager at all,” Egan wrote. “He is purely a baseball politician, which explains why he keeps cavorting into good jobs while his betters stand on the outside hungrily looking in.”

Stengel would get the last laugh, and as Appel writes, “Egan died in 1958, eight Casey pennants later.”

Appel uses Edna Stengel’s memoirs liberally, and it helps make Stengel more human. Sure, he was a winking, grimacing, smiling, wise-cracking manager, but his wife’s observations gave Stengel more depth; he was more than just a manager.

It’s certainly true that the 1949 pennant and World Series title changed Stengel’s life. “He had gone from clown to genius ‘overnight,’” Appel writes, “and suddenly he was baseball nobility.”

That credibility would not fade even after Stengel took over the Mets and never won more than 53 games in a season.

Appel’s research is certainly excellent and thorough, but a few glitches did slip through. For example, he writes in Chapter 18 that the minor-league Milwaukee Brewers went 102-1 in 1944 to win the American Association pennant. Perhaps Appel was thinking of his 2010 book, 162-0: Imagine a Season in Which the Yankees Never Lose. But that was a typo, albeit an eye-opening one. The Brewers actually  went 102-51 that season.

A more unfortunate one comes in the same chapter, when Appel notes that Cookie Lavagetto was a hero in Brooklyn during the 1947 World Series when he robbed Joe DiMaggio of a home run and broke up Bill Bevens’ no-hitter. Appel is correct about Bevens, but it was Al Gionfriddo that robbed the Yankee Clipper of a homer during that World Series. He also misspells the maiden and married names of Babe Didrikson Zaharias in Chapter 35.

These mistakes, however, are peripheral to the actual narrative, so they really do not detract from or damage Appel’s credibility. And while this is a positive look at Stengel, Appel does not hesitate to cite his critics (and there were many), who looked at him not as a genius, but as a manager who was at the right place at the right time. It was the same type of charge leveled at Joe McCarthy, who was called a “push-button” manager near the end of his tenure with the Yankees. McCarthy answered his detractors with eight pennants and seven World Series titles; Stengel would do the same, with 10 pennants and seven World Series rings.

Success can silence your critics.

I doubt that Appel has many critics. He writes in an easy conversational style, at times throwing in little asides for humorous effect. He writes in Chapter 43 that an aging Stengel, in his final years, cursed at a young Yankees publicist in 1974 when prodded about responding to an invitation to an Old-Timers’ Day game. That publicist was Appel, who became the Yankees’ public relations director in 1973.
​
Casey Stengel: Baseball’s Greatest Character is a fitting title for a unique figure in baseball history. Marty Appel brings him back to life, giving a new generation of baseball fans a taste of the brilliant, witty, sarcastic and irrepressible figure who dearly loved the game.