Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about a lawsuit filed by Alt against PWCC, alleging shill bidding and market manipulation: 

​https://www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/alt-files-lawsuit-against-pwcc-alleging-fraud-and-breach-of-auctioneers-duty/

Baseball is a game where fans love to argue with one another.

Who is the best player? Who is the best team? Who was the greatest ever?

The list is as long as baseball history itself.

So it is interesting when an author writes a book about baseball’s first superstar.

Who could it be? In his latest work , historian Alan D. Gaff asserts that it is New York Giants Hall of Fame pitcher Christy Mathewson. Baseball’s First Superstar: The Lost Story of Christy Mathewson (University of Nebraska Press; $32.95; 248 pages) offers persuasive reasons why Mathewson deserves that title.

Certainly, there were other candidates before “Big Six” — a nickname Mathewson never liked — took the mound and won 373 games and fashioned a 2.13 ERA over 17 seasons. He was known for his “fadeaway” pitch, which he used at crucial times during his career.

Fans of 19th century baseball could point to Mike “King” Kelly, who had a song dedicated to him in 1889, written by John W. Kelly (no relation). King Kelly played from 1878 to 1893. Or fans could mention Adrian “Cap” Anson, who played from 1871 to 1897 and was the first hitter to collect 3,000 hits. Or even George Wright, who starred for baseball’s first professional team — the Cincinnati Red Stockings — in 1869.

But Mathewson had an aura about him that the others lacked. Even when Gaff named four other candidates from the early 20th century and devoted several pages to each — Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson and Babe Ruth — they could not approach Mathewson as the game’s first true superstar. Mathewson’s death in October 1925 at the age of 45 from the effects of tuberculosis only added to his legend.
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To baseball fans and sportswriters, he was always known as “Matty.”

​“Christy gave baseball a touch of class that it badly required in the early twentieth century,” Gaff writes. “He exhibited a character that set him apart from other ballplayers of his time.”

Gaff, 76, digs in to find the newspaper series published in early 1926 — a biography in serial form pieced together by his widow, Jane Stoughton Mathewson, and prominent sportswriter Bozeman Bulger. Gaff’s book also highlights some unpublished memories written by Christy Mathewson that were discovered among his personal papers.
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That gives the reader an interesting, although at times, slanted view of Mathewson, particularly from sportswriters of the era. The men who covered baseball in the first quarter of the 20th century could lay claim to being the first spin doctors.

The articles are not difficult to find, but putting them all together in one book makes it easier for readers to get a sense of Mathewson and how he was perceived after his death.

Gaff’s career as a historian has spanned more than four decades. He graduated from Indiana University with a bachelor’s degree in history and also owns a master's degree in American history from Ball State University. Since 1984, the Fort Wayne, Indiana, native has been the president of Historical Investigations, a company specializing in historical research. His books about history include On Many a Bloody Field (1997), Bayonets in the Wilderness (2004) and Blood in the Argonne (2005).
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In his first baseball book, 2020’s Lou Gehrig: The Lost Memoir, Gaff dug up columns written by a young Lou Gehrig after his New York Yankees went wire-to-wire to win the 1927 American League pennant and the World Series.

In Baseball’s First Superstar, Gaff breaks down his book into two distinct parts — the first section is an essay about baseball, the history of newspaper competition and sports writing, along with a brief biography of Mathewson. The second part includes the newspaper essays written by Bulger and Jane Mathewson, plus Mathewson’s own thoughts.

Newspapers in general, and sportswriters in particular, had the ability to raise a player to legendary status. Gaff notes that in Mathewson,  newspapers created the first baseball superstar. That was the title of Chapter 1, and Graf adds that “baseball writers were the direct connection between the game and its fans.”

During Mathewson’s era, baseball players and sportswriters ate together, played cards together, stayed in the same hotels and most likely frequented the same bars.

Bulger was a constant companion of Mathewson through the years, sometimes even sharing a hotel room with the star pitcher.

​“Boze” was “the ideal of baseball writers,” Kirk Miller of The Washington Times wrote after Bulger’s death on May 22, 1932.

“His writing style, his genial personality, his storytelling ability and his acquaintance with stars and rookies alike were worth emulating,” Miller wrote. “But Bulger’s duplicate was never born — never will be.”

Sports editors nationwide gave the star treatment to the excerpts written by Bulger and Jane Mathewson, putting them on their front pages. The Fort Worth Record-Telegram, for example, trumpeted in its Jan. 12, 1926, section that the stories would run over a six-week period beginning on Jan. 18.

“This fascinating series is the only complete and authentic story of the greatest athletic hero America has yet produced,” the preview read, an obvious promotional blurb that also ran in other newspapers. Bulger’s essays were closer to a hagiography, focusing on Mathewson’s admirable character. He notes, for example, that the pitcher refused to endorse a brand of Durham Duplex safety razor blades until he tried them personally.

“I’m not finicky and I don’t want to be a sap,” Mathewson said, according to Bulger. “But I just couldn’t recommend the razor until I had tried it.”

Bulger also writes about Mathewson’s prowess in checkers, his golfing ability (“a corking good golfer”), his knowledge of botany and his 1910 appearance in theater when he portrayed a cowboy in a Broadway play. He also recounted Mathewson’s seasickness several times during his life, when he refused to go on a world tour with the Giants on one occasion.

Although Mathewson appeared to be universally loved — in life and in death — there was at least one dissenting voice, brought to light by Ray Robinson in his 1993 biography, Matty: An American Hero.

Robinson quotes Walter St. Denis, sports editor of the New York Globe during the early 1900s, who said he had never been impressed by Mathewson. The writer added that he had traveled with the Giants and that the pitcher “didn’t have all the courage in the world and he wasn’t a team player.”

“There were two Mathewsons,” Walter St. Denis wrote. “The human being and the newspaper invention.”
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Bulger’s essays touch on topics such as Mathewson’s three shutout victories in the 1905 World Series, the heated 1908 National League pennant race and the pitcher’s snake-bitten loss in the eighth and deciding game of the 1912 World Series.

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about the baseball caught by Gary Carter for the final out of the 1986 World Series. The ball has been sold before, but it is again on the auction block. My story at:

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/ball-caught-by-gary-carter-for-final-out-of-1986-world-series-part-of-heritage-auctions-sale/​

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about Artis Gilmore's basketball memorabilia collection, which he has consigned to Grey Flannel Auctions:
www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/tall-order-artis-gilmore-consigns-collection-to-grey-flannel-auctions/
​

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about Rhode Island card dealer Paul Borges, who made an incredible purchase of 1950s baseball cards after a man walked into a card show last month and showed him a "sampling" of what he had. The man had thousands of cards, including 21 Sandy Koufax rookies:

​www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/fabulous-50s-find-rhode-island-dealer-buys-stunning-lot-of-1950s-topps-cards/

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about the effect tariffs on China are having on sports card suppliers and card shop owners: 

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/tariffs-concern-retailers-of-trading-card-supplies-and-shop-owners/

Here's a story  I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about "The Great American Collectibles Show," hosted by Tom Zappala, Rico Petrocelli and John Molosi. I spoke with Tom and Rico about the show, and Rico shared some baseball stories: 
www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/the-great-american-collectibles-show-serves-up-fun-laughter-and-knowledge/​

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about players with mustaches who have appeared on baseball cards through the years. Up until 1970, there were very few: 

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/bristling-with-character-a-modern-history-of-players-sporting-mustaches-on-baseball-cards/

​I was reminded of the disco era this past weekend when my 92-year-old father participated in a fashion show at his independent living facility.

Spry as ever, he bounced onto the runway to the pulsating beat of “Stayin’ Alive” and mimicked some of the moves John Travolta made famous in Saturday Night Fever. Well, not all of the moves, but some a nonagenarian could manage, including a clapping motion to the audience reminding them to applaud. Classic.
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In 1978 the Bee Gees dominated the airwaves with three disco-flavored No. 1 hits, according to Billboard: “Stayin’ Alive,” “How Deep Is Your Love” and “Night Fever.” But the times were changing, with punk music, new wave, R&B and funk music all muscling for attention. Grease would be the word for most of the summer, and a spin-off from television’s hit sitcom Happy Days would kickstart the career of Robin Williams.

And then there was baseball. The 1978 season saw the New York Yankees’ improbable comeback from a huge midsummer deficit to create a memorable, heated pennant race.

​That was capped by an electrifying playoff game in Boston that turned on a home run from an unlikely hero.

It is all there in David Krell’s latest mash-up of baseball and popular culture in 1978: Baseball & America in the Disco Era (University of Nebraska Press; $34.95; hardback; 224 pages). Krell, a baseball historian who considers himself “a pop culture guy,” deftly views 1978 in 12 compact chapters — one for each month, beginning with the death of Hall of Fame manager Joe McCarthy and ending with Herman Wouk’s blockbuster novel War and Remembrance, which would be adapted into a television miniseries a decade later.

Krell digs into the controversy surrounding the playing status of Vida Blue, who was “stuck like a car in the mud after a rainstorm in his home state of Louisiana.” That was when Commissioner Bowie Kuhn repeated his “best interests of baseball” mantra to nix a deal that would have sent the 1971 A.L. Cy Young Award winner from the Oakland A’s to the Cincinnati Reds.

February saw a blizzard that pounded Krell’s native New Jersey and much of the Northeast and New England states. It set the stage for the Happy Days episode “My Favorite Orkan,” which featured Williams as Mork, an alien from the planet Ork, and even a reference to slugger Hank Aaron. Krell goes into great detail about the episode, which would lead to the spinoff show, Mork & Mindy.

“The episode punctuated the show’s magic in capturing America’s hearts during an uncertain time,” Krell writes.

Nanu nanu, indeed.

Many baseball fans know Catfish Hunter’s quip about slugger Reggie Jackson, who had a candy bar named for him — “When you open a Reggie Bar it tells you how good it is” — and Krell notes that if Jackson “were a piece of music, he would be a symphony full of blaring horns, compelling violins, and emphatic timpani.” Jackson was a controversial character, but in Philadelphia, the Phillies unveiled their own character — the Phillie Phanatic.

Besides the Reggie bar and the Phanatic, another key debut in 1978 happened on television, Krell writes. That was Dallas, the primetime soap opera that introduced Larry Hagman (who played good guy Maj. Tony Nelson on I Dream of Jeannie) as the conniving, ambitious oil baron J.R. Ewing.

Free to be devious, Hagman, as J.R., “showed the incredible range of his acting.” He manipulated lovers, rivals, business partners, and family members with the finesse of a pianist giving a performance at Carnegie Hall, and the patience of a wartime general devising a battle plan,” Krell writes.

Almost as in-your-face as Ewing was Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, who managed the team to a World Series appearance in 1977 and would repeat as National League champions in 1978.

On May 14, Chicago Cubs Dave Kingman smacked three home runs in a 15-inning game against the Dodgers, and reporter Paul Olden asked Lasorda after the game about the slugger’s performance. What followed was one of Lasorda’s most colorful, profane rants.

“How can you ask me my opinion like that, ‘what is my opinion of his performance,’” Lasorda barked. “That’s a tough question to ask me, don’t you think? … Well I didn’t give you a good answer because I’m mad, but I mean, that’s a tough question to ask me right now.”

Earlier in May, Pete Rose joined the 3,000-hit club, with a single in the fifth inning off Montreal Expos pitcher Steve Rogers. Rose would later put together a 44-game hitting streak, becoming the first player in years to seriously challenge Joe DiMaggio’s seemingly insurmountable record of 56.

Years later, Rose would be banned from baseball for gambling on games. Ironically, 1978 was the year that gambling also made headlines as New Jersey officially ushered in legalized gambling in Atlantic City during late May.

On the cultural side, Krell notes that American Hot Wax, the story of Alan Freed’s rise and fall as an influential disc jockey. Freed would popularize rock ’n’ roll music but later plead guilty to “payola” — taking bribes to give certain songs radio airtime.

“You can stop me, but you’re never gonna stop rock ’n’ roll,” Freed (played by Tim McIntire) says as the film ends.

As baseball season veered into June, great pitching was the main theme. Tom Seaver threw the only no-hitter of his career on June 16 for the Cincinnati Reds, and Yankees left-hander Ron Guidry struck out 18 batters the next night, dispatching the California Angels in 2 hours, 7 minutes. It was one of many big moments during his 25-3 season.

A longtime fan favorite also reached a milestone as Willie McCovey hit his 500th career home run on June 30.
​
Krell smoothly shifts gears, noting the emergence of Grease, another look back at the 1950s. For a year that also boasted breakout performances by the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Elvis Costello and Dire Straits, the nostalgia in Hollywood during 1978 provided a stark contrast — or perhaps, an escape.

Tensions in the Yankees clubhouse between Jackson and manager Billy Martin would dominate the headlines in July, leading to Martin’s infamous “One’s a born liar, the other’s convicted” characterization of the slugger and team owner George Steinbrenner. That led to Martin’s resignation and the hiring of Bob Lemon, who had “street cred” as a former major league pitcher and restored calm in the Bronx.

Steinbrenner, never one to shy from a splashy headline, brought Martin back five days later to appear at an Old Timers' Game at Yankee Stadium. At that point, it was announced that Martin would become the manager again in 1980, with Lemon becoming the team's manager that year.

Martin would return to the dugout earlier, taking the reins after 65 games in 1979 after Lemon was fired.

There was unrest in Los Angeles, too, when pitcher Don Sutton and first baseman got into a fight in mid-August. Garvey took offense at Sutton’s comments in a Washington Post column, where the pitcher complained that “all you hear about on our team is Steve Garvey, the All-American boy.” Sutton added that the best player on the Dodgers the past two seasons was outfielder Reggie Smith — “and we all know it.”

Sutton eventually apologized and the Dodgers went 10-4 from Aug. 16 until the end of the month.

With all of the widely publicized turbulence among the Yankees, the Dodgers’ spat has been downplayed through the years. To his credit, Krell gives the Dodgers’ tension the credit it deserves.

While the Dodgers rolled along, Hollywood hummed with the release of Animal House, a film that featured Tim Matheson as the fraternity leader who convinces his expelled fraternity brothers to commit “a really futile and stupid gesture” to get even with the haughty Dean Wormer. It also starred John Belushi as John “Bluto” Blutarsky, a loutish, slovenly member of the Delta Tau Chi frat.

Krell gives a blow-by-blow description of September’s “Boston Massacre,” when the Yankees pummeled the Red Sox during four days in early September to move into a tie for first place in the American League East. New York had trailed Boston by 14 games on July 19, but Red Sox Nation was still optimistic.
“We need sports as an outlet for our frustrations,” Krell writes. “The team’s success is our success; we live vicariously through strikeouts, home runs, no-hitters, and batting records.”

Optimism can only go so far, and both teams were deadlocked after 162 games, forcing a one-game playoff at Fenway Park for the division title.

A storybook finish for the Red Sox did not happen, Krell writes. Bucky Dent tore the heart out of the Boston faithful with a two-out, three-run homer in the seventh inning to cap a four-run rally and erase a 2-0 Red Sox lead.

Krell also gives a daily description of the World Series, when the Dodgers, emotional after the loss of coach Jim Gilliam on the eve of the Fall Classic, won the first two games in Los Angeles. That included a classic pitcher-batter duel between Bob Welch and Jackson, with the rookie pitcher striking out the future Hall of Famer with two outs and two on to preserve a 4-3 victory.

Jackson also ignited contoversy in Game 4 when a throw deflected off him after he was forced at second during a potential double play -- a move dubbed the "Sacrifice Thigh."

The Yankees would win Games 3 through 6 to win their 22nd World Series title.

And Krell would jump back into pop culture with descriptions of the television series The Incredible Hulk and The White Shadow and the TV movie Rescue from Gilligan’s Island.

As 1978 wound to a close, the Reds dismissed manager Sparky Anderson and there was tragedy in San Francisco. Dan White, a member of the city’s Board of Directors, fatally shot fellow supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone at city hall.

But “America found renewed hope with a familiar hero who stood for truth, justice, and the American way” — Superman. The blockbuster movie featuring Christopher Reeve as the Man of Steel debuted on Dec. 10, 1978.

Although some critics “were about as kind to Superman as salt on Frosted Flakes,” the public loved it, flocking to theaters like “overweight guests heading toward the dessert tables at a wedding,” Krell writes.

There are many more stories that Krell tells in 1978.

His narrative is crisp, informal and informative, and his research is extensive. It follows the pattern he has set for a decade. The former MSNBC producer’s book debut was “Our Bums”: The Brooklyn Dodgers in History, Memory and Popular Culture (2015), followed by 1962: Baseball and America in the Time of JFK (2021); Do You Believe in Magic?: Baseball and America in the Groundbreaking Year of 1966 (2023); and his 2024 effort, The Fenway Effect: Cultural History of the Boston Red Sox.

In 2019, Krell edited another look at baseball and culture: The New York Yankees in Popular Culture: Critical Essays. One year earlier, Krell produced mini-biography of actor-singer-game-show host Bert Convy for the Society of American Baseball Research. Who knew that the host of the game show TattleTales was once a minor league outfielder as a teen in the Philadelphia Phillies organization during the 1951 and ’52 seasons?

Krell is also working on a biography of pitcher Bo Belinsky that is scheduled to be published in September 2025.

In his approach for writing The Fenway Effect and 1978, Krell said he went against traditional thinking.

“Every writing class, every writing seminar, every writing conference will tell you, ‘Just write. Worry about making it good later,’” he said on the Hooks and Runs podcast earlier this month. “(Now) I’m only going to do three pages a day, and I’m going to make the three pages as good as I possibly can. I’m also going to frontload as much research as possible.

“If you focus on that, you’ll probably get 90 to 95% of your research accomplished. And then, after two months, start writing … three pages a day. And my stress level went down. My effectiveness went up. I can’t recommend that approach enough. Slow and steady always wins the race.”

Krell writes that disco was powerful and was a dominating force during 1978.

“It fostered an aura of positivity created by the music, something sorely needed after suffering, enduring, and recovering from events that had tested America’s resolve,” he writes. “America wanted to learn disco dances because it gave them a sense of belonging.”

That sense of optimism seeps through in 1978. Krell can mimic my father’s exit from the disco runway at the independent living facility, clapping out to the audience for a positive response.
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Krell deserves one. 

Here is a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about a man who pleaded guilty in a large fake autograph scheme he conducted for nearly a decade:

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/anthony-tremayne-fake-autographs-guilty-plea/

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily that focuses on five cards issued during the career of Hall of Fame pitcher Jim "Catfish" Hunter:

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/catfish-hunter-5-cards-marking-his-hall-of-fame-career-and-a-bonus/
​

​Memoirs written by sportswriters are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, journalists do not like to be part of the story, or the focus of any of them. And do sports fans even care? I guess that depends.

On the other hand, the wealth of stories and anecdotes from a sportswriter who has been on the beat for five decades can be fascinating and absorbing.

Put Bill Madden into the second category.

Yankees, Typewriters, Scandals, and Cooperstown: A Baseball Memoir (Triumph Books; hardback; $30; 276 pages) is a fine read from a Hall of Fame sportswriter/columnist. Madden, who received the Hall of Fame’s J.G. Taylor Spink Award in 2010 for his contributions to baseball journalism, has been writing about the sport since 1970 and has also published seven books.

Madden, 78, has spent most of his career covering the baseball in New York, and he gives a unique perspective of the competitiveness between the Yankees and Mets — and also between the newspapers that covered the two teams. Madden was — and remains — a dogged reporter and a journalist whose reputation for fairness has gained the trust of baseball players and managers, and has also helped him get some scoops along the way.

Writing about sports is a tightwire to walk in New York, which is a hotbed for sports and whose fans are passionate. Madden spent a decade with United Press International before landing a job at the New York Daily News.

And while his latest book contains plenty of anecdotes about Madden’s years in the trenches of Big Apple sports writing, two chapters really caught my eye. One chronicled the career of Milton Richman, the columnist and sports editor at UPI.

​Allow me to take a brief detour.

When I worked at The Stuart (Fla.) News during the 1980s, the newspaper subscribed to UPI as a news service. That meant we ran Richman’s daily column, “Today’s Sports Parade.” We’d jokingly refer to Richman as “Uncle Miltie,” and he actually stopped by our office one spring to say hello. We were thrilled.

One spring, Richman asked if we could give a copy of a published column he wrote about Ron Cey to the Dodgers third baseman. A few days later, I went to Vero Beach, where the Dodgers held spring training, armed with a notepad and a copy of the column that had been published in the News.

I approached Cey, who sort of waved me off with a “not talking today” growl.

“But I have a column Milt Richman wrote about you that he wanted you to have,” I said.

Cey brightened up immediately. “Milton wrote about me? Really?” he said. “Wow, thanks.”

Then he looked at me and asked, “You wanna talk?”

I sure did. Thanks, Milton. I got an interview with the Penguin thanks to your pull.

Richman, along with his brother Arthur, grew up in the Bronx near Yankee Stadium. But the boys were not fans of the Bronx Bombers.

“My brother and I, you see, were wayward boys,” Richman wrote in a March 1982 column. “We never did anything to land us in jail, but we did something far worse.

“We rooted for and followed the St. Louis Browns.”

And Harlond Clift was Richman’s idol. He devoted an entire column in July 1984 to the Browns’ underrated third baseman, writing in the earnest, friendly style that was his trademark.

While Richman wrote about many sports, baseball was his passion and.

Madden writes about Richman excitedly running into the press room in Miami the night before Super Bowl X and telling then-UPI football writer Joe Carnicelli, “Joey, I got it!”

Carnicelli, who was writing on deadline, stopped and asked in an exasperated tone, “What, Milton?”
​
“Then, leaning down and whispering in Carnicelli’s ear, Milton pronounced: ‘Dick Drago to the Angels,’” Madden writes. “To Milton the trade of a marginal relief pitcher the first week of January was a far bigger ‘stop the presses’ story than the Super Bowl, especially because Milton had it alone.”

​The other chapter that intrigued me was “The Great Baseball Card Explosion.”
In addition to his writing duties at the New York Daily News, Madden wrote a biweekly column in The Sporting News about collectibles. Madden had been a collector since 1953, so writing about cards was an attractive side job.

When a judge ruled in June 1980 that other companies besides Topps could produce baseball cards, Madden hooked up with Donruss, one of the beneficiaries of the ruling (Fleer was the other company). Madden had called Steve Lyman, the president of Donruss, to do a reaction story about the lawsuit. Lyman lamented he wanted to be the first set on the market in 1981 and wondered if Madden knew anyone who could help with the logistics of putting out the set.

He did. “Me,” Madden told Lyman.

“I’ve always wanted to be a part of the process of creating” a set of cards, Madden writers, recalling his conversation with Lyman.

Madden would write the brief biographies on the Donruss card backs for the company’s inaugural 1981 set. He writes in his book that he suggested that Donruss would set itself apart from the other companies if it gave added emphasis to first-year players — hence, the birth of “Rated Rookies.”

Madden writes that while it was exciting to contribute to a new brand of baseball cards, the first set was “an unmitigated disaster.”
​
“A good many of the photos were either grainy or out of focus,” Madden writes. “The cards were printed on flimsy stock, and there were numerous error cards with misidentified players, typos, and wrong stats.”
The only consolation, Madden notes, is that Fleer’s 1981 debut set had the same issues.

He continued in the “baseball card business” until 1989, adding that he had fun “riding the crest of the wave” but was glad to exit before the 1990s, when overproduction caught up to the hobby.

Madden’s stories about Barry Halper are also interesting, noting that the collectibles guru “loved the chase as much as the actual acquisitions” and was “both ingenious and tireless.”

Madden also digs into the reporting he did for the Daily News in 1994, a series that “exposed an industry rife with deception, shill bidding, secret deals, and outright fraud.”

Madden does defend Halper, whose reputation took a big hit when some uniforms he believed belonged to the Baltimore Orioles of the 1890s were discovered to be fraudulent, along with other forged and fake memorabilia.

“In an industry full of swindlers and crooks, Halper was not one of them,” Madden writes. “He honestly believed all his stuff, for which he paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, were real.”

Part of Madden’s lengthy career was spent covering the turbulent Yankees franchise of the late 1970s and early 1980s. And his book has plenty of stories from that era.

He writes that 1982 was “the craziest season of them all,” at one point filing a breaking story about a fight between Lou Piniella and Bob Lemon from a payphone in the women’s restroom of a South Florida restaurant.

Madden had become fond of Lemon and even talked the manager out of resigning halfway through the 1982 season when the pressure became too much for the former star pitcher, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1976. Lemon shared his thoughts about quitting while they were taking a taxi to a Chicago bar, and Madden told him to “let (owner George Steinbrenner) fire you, but don’t quit.”

“I had just talked the manager of the New York Yankees out of quitting, but this would’ve been one scoop I wanted no part of,” Madden writes.

Lemon followed Madden’s advice and waited until Steinbrenner fired him from his second tenure as manager (he piloted New York during parts of the 1978 and ’79 seasons). And Madden believed that not publishing his conversation with Lemon in the taxi was better left unreported.

“It would’ve been a betrayal of Lem’s confidence,” he writes.

Integrity was — and remains — one of Madden’s core values.

He points to a story he broke about Tom Seaver being left unprotected in the 1984 free-agent compensation draft. Madden was tipped off to the story and dutifully spoke with the New York Mets’ public relations department, who connected him to Frank Cashen. The general manager confirmed the move, but Madden took an extra step by contacting Seaver.

The pitcher was surprised by the move, and Madden had his story. However, the Daily News sat on the news for more than 12 hours until the newspaper’s four-star edition was printed at 1:30 a.m.
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No one else had the story, something that “could never happen today in the age of cell phones and social media,” Madden writes.

The story also established a bond between Madden and Seaver.

“Though I didn’t realize it at the time, my handling of this story dramatically changed my relationship with Seaver from player/journalist to player/friend,” Madden writes. “He later told me how appreciative he was that I called him before going to print with the story.”
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It also led to Madden's 2020 book, Tom Seaver: A Terrific Life. Madden has also written biographies about Steinbrenner and collaborated on the autobiographies of Lou Piniella and Don Zimmer.

Yankees, Typewriters, Scandals, and Cooperstown: A Baseball Memoir is an interesting read. There are stories about Hall of Famers like Ted Williams and Kirby Puckett, and he writes about his rise from covering events for the University of South Carolina school newspaper to the highly competitive baseball beat in New York.

Madden left South Carolina during the 1960s before graduating, but in 2019 he would take classes again and earn his journalism degree.
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From Ralph Houk spitting on his shoes in their initial encounter to Steinbrenner upbraiding him about a story, Madden’s anecdotes are lively and fun. Perhaps a sportswriter’s memoir is not such a bad thing after all. By the way, a book about my 46 years as a sportswriter, sports copy editor, columnist, digital editor and blogger is in the works — Just Remove the Adjectives is the working title.

Just kidding. Well, half-kidding.