​Why is Dave Bancroft in the Hall of Fame? He was one of the smoothest defensive shortstops in major league baseball between 1915 and 1930, playing for four pennant winners and two World Series champions. His career included the deadball era and the power-hitting game championed by Babe Ruth, but Bancroft was never known for his bat, even though he was a switch-hitter and hit better than .300 five times and finished another season at .299.

Virtually ignored by Hall of Fame voters from 1937 to 1960 — his best showing was in 1958, when he appeared on 16.2% of the ballots (43 votes) in his 14th year of eligibility — Bancroft was enshrined in Cooperstown in 1971 by the Veterans Committee. Critics point to cronyism by Frank Frisch, his former teammate with the New York Giants who was on the committee. Frisch also spearheaded the election of four other teammates into the Hall — Jesse “Pop” Haines (1970), Chick Hafey (1971), Ross Youngs (1972) and George Kelly (1973).

The Hall of Fame has never put a premium on fielding, but the Veterans Committee got it right with Bancroft. He led the National League in assists and double plays three times, topped the circuit in putouts four times, led the league in fielding twice and was in the top-10 among shortstops 10 times. He still holds the record for most chances in a season by a shortstop (984 in 1922). There were no Gold Gloves awarded when Bancroft played, but he certainly would have snagged a few.
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Which begs the question again — why is Bancroft in the Hall of Fame? Author Tom Alesia presents a persuasive argument in his book, Beauty at Short: Dave Bancroft, the Most Unlikely Hall of Famer and His Wild Times in Baseball’s First Century (Grissom Press; $9.39; paperback; 169 pages).

Alesia’s decision to write a biography on Bancroft was just as unlikely as the shortstop’s election into the Hall of Fame. Alesia was vacationing in northwestern Wisconsin in 2011 and checked the internet for interesting tidbits about the area. That is when he discovered that Bancroft and his wife were buried at Greenwood Cemetery in Superior.
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That began a “labor of love” that led Alesia to add another interesting chapter to his writing career. It also rekindled the affection Bancroft’s hometown of Sioux City had for its native son. On July 1 there will be a Dave Bancroft T-shirt night for the American Association’s Sioux City Explorers, and Alesia will throw out the first pitch. The Dave Bancroft Fan Services pavilion will also be dedicated at Lewis and Clark Park.

​Some of the subjects on Alesia’s “Tom’s Write Turns” blog include pig wrestling, profiles of musicians like 1970s soul singer Al Green, a game of “Horse” against a member of the Harlem Globetrotters, a story about a blind bowler and a feature about baseball card collector Larry Fritsch. He has run in 35 marathons, including five Boston Marathons, and beat cancer in 1998. Plus, he grew up a Chicago Cubs fan.

Alesia is now based in Madison, Wisconsin, where he teaches at the Indian Mound Middle School in nearby McFarland.

Bancroft presented a different challenge for Alesia. How does one unearth information about a man who played more than a century ago and died almost 50 years ago?

“Built along the lines of a (Rabbit) Maranville, he is fast and covers a lot of ground,” the York Dispatch reported about Bancroft, who was a rookie trying to crack the lineup with the Philadelphia Phillies during the spring of 1915. Bancroft played deep and was a marvel at “covering loam,” according to the newspaper’s colorful writing style of the time.

Alesia, who has written pieces for newspapers through the years, did plenty of research through publications. He found material from 167 different newspapers, 10 magazines and news wire services, 22 websites or blogs and 12 other reference sites.

And then there is that nickname, “Beauty.” There is some speculation that Bancroft got the nickname for his penchant of saying “beauty” after a particularly good play or pitch.

Alesia notes that the nickname was first used in a newspaper story by a New York newspaper about a week after Bancroft joined the Giants. The origin remains hazy, even though “Beauty” is included in Bancroft’s Hall of Fame plaque.

In four long interviews from the 1950s until 1970, Bancroft never mentioned how he got the nickname.
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“If it bothered him, he never indicated that,” Alesia writes.

​Alesia adds that “Banny” was a more popular nickname and was used more than “Beauty.”

Bancroft’s hitting was certainly not a thing of beauty. Cleveland scout Robert Gilks first watched Bancroft play for the Superior Red Sox in 1912 and pronounced that the young infielder “is not a hitter,” Gilks would say.

Bancroft learned to become a switch-hitter, and from 1918 until 1926 he never batted below .265. He connected for six singles in a nine-inning game and scored a run in four consecutive innings. Bancroft later became an early advocate for what would become the designated hitter.

Bancroft helped the Phillies to their first National League pennant in 1915 and was named team captain five years later. However, a spat with manager Gavvy Cravath in 1920 led to the shortstop’s trade to the Giants. That was a welcome change for Bancroft, who helped the Giants win pennants from 1921 to 1923.

Alesia recounts an amusing story when Bancroft joined the Giants. Catcher Pancho Snyder approached the shortstop and began telling him the team’s signs.

“Why? Have they changed?” Bancroft said.

Bancroft would become the Giants’ team captain but was traded to the Boston Braves to become player-manager in 1924, Alesia writes, a position he held for four seasons. Bancroft had a 249-369-3 record in Boston, finishing fifth, seventh (twice) and eighth in the eight-team league.

Alesia brings up a notable fight involving Bancroft in 1927. Actually, it was a one-punch deal, when Pirates catcher Earl Smith leveled Bancroft, who was scoring on a double. The punch knocked Bancroft out, and Smith would be suspended and fined.

Alesia correctly notes that Smith, who starred on two pennant winners in Pittsburgh and played for the Braves when Bancroft managed in Boston during 1924, was “a career-long hothead.” He makes the point that when Smith died in June 1963, the Pittsburgh Press “published two sentences about his death.”

“The obit’s second sentence was about punching Bancroft,” Alesia writes.

Perhaps that is true, but two sentences about a key player on two pennant winners seemed odd. Smith was not a forgotten man in Pittsburgh, was he? I had to investigate.

The June 11, 1963, edition of the Press ran an obituary written by The Associated Press. The seven-paragraph story did not mention the Bancroft incident. The next day, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette sports editor Al Abrams led his column with memories of Smith and gave the Bancroft incident good play.

On June 13, 1963, the Pittsburgh Press ran a column by sports editor Chester L. Smith that led with Earl Smith but did not mention Bancroft.

Pie Traynor’s account of the fight, which Alesia references, came from an Abrams column in the Post-Gazette on June 21, 1963.

That is my only real criticism in this work.

The only other mistake I saw was when Alesia noted that only two players from the 1915 pennant winners —“(Christy) Mathewson and Cravath” — were included on the Phillies’ Wall of Fame. Certainly, Alesia meant Grover Cleveland Alexander.

Alesia takes the reader through the latter stages of Bancroft’s career, when he played two seasons with Brooklyn and returned to the Giants as a coach in 1930 (he did play in 10 games before retiring). Bancroft would substitute as manager for John McGraw when the “Little Napoleon” was ill, but he was passed over for the Giants job in favor of Bill Terry in 1932.

“Bancroft was considered too close to McGraw in style to replace him,” Alesia writes.

Bancroft had been mentioned as a managerial candidate for Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and the Chicago White Sox, but he was not hired.

He would manage at the minor league level in Minneapolis (1933), Sioux City (1936) and St. Cloud (1947).

From 1948 to 1951, Bancroft would manage three different teams in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League: the Chicago Colleens, South Bend Blue Sox and Battle Creek Belles. In 1949, he also managed a women’s team that barnstormed through Central America, South America and the Caribbean island nations.

After baseball, Bancroft worked in the business sector until he retired in 1956. Elected to the Hal of Fame in 1971, Bancroft was too ill to attend the induction ceremony. Cooperstown was the culmination of honors for Bancroft, who was inducted into the Iowa Sports Hall of Fame in 1954, followed by enshrinement in the Superior Hall of Fame (1964), the Sioux City Hall of Fame (1965) and the Duluth Hall of Fame (1971).

“He was a perfectionist in whatever he undertook,” columnist Dick Cullum of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune wrote after Bancroft’s death. “He dressed precisely, spoke precisely, played baseball precisely, and his home town loved him.”

Travis Jackson, the Hall of Famer who replaced Bancroft at shortstop for the New York Giants, never doubted for a minute who the better player was, Alesia writes.

“Listen, if you think I was good, you should have seen Bancroft,” Jackson said in 1967.

Thanks to Alesia and Beauty at Short, baseball fans can finally see why Bancroft deserves that plaque in Cooperstown.

For collectors who love cards of rookies and prospects, Bowman baseball remains the go-to set.

Even if it is an expensive set. A blaster box costs $29.99, and collectors will receive six packs that contain 12 cards per pack. Topps is promising exclusive retail Green parallels in select boxes.

As far as the set configuration, collectors will not notice anything different. The set is divided into three distinct categories. Veterans and rookies comprise 100 base paper cards. There are also 150 Paper Prospects, with the designation of “1st Bowman” cards. There are also 150 Chrome versions of the 1st Bowman cards, designated as “BCP” in the overall checklist.

The blaster I bought had 34 base cards, plus 11 rookies and 10 Paper Prospect cards. On the chrome side there were 11 BCP cards.
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I also pulled a Fuchsia Lava parallel of Cardinals outfield prospect Joshua Baez, a 1st Bowman card numbered to 199.

​The base set of 100 cards is printed on standard stock, with an action photo of the player set against a soft focus background in a vertical setting. The left-hand side of the card has a feathered design for the background, gradually segueing into the soft focus. The Bowman logo is at the top left-hand corner for veterans, with the name plate and team logo stretching across the bottom of the card.

For rookie cards and 1st Bowman cards — including the Chrome cards — the company logo is flipped to the top right-hand corner and the “RC” designation is at the top left-hand corner.

The card backs for all three versions are horizontal, with the team logos in the upper right-hand corner of the card and the player’s name directly to the left of the logo. The type for the card backs are divided into three categories: Résumé, which gives highlights the player’s 2021 season and draft information, where applicable; Skills, which pays attention to the player’s ability; and Up Close, which provides personal information and personal details.
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There are also statistics, with 2021 figures and career totals underneath.
Overall, a very crisp layout and design.

There were several inserts in the blaster box I bought.

Hi-Fi Futures, which falls every six packs, contains 25 cards. It draws its inspiration from album cover art. The card I pulled was of Yankees outfielder Jasson Dominguez.

I pulled two Bowman Scouts’ Top 100 inserts. There are 100 cards in the set and they fall about every four packs. The cards I pulled were of Henry Davis and Hunter Greene.

Rookie of the Year Favorites is a 15-card insert that falls once every eight packs. I found a card of Rays rookie Vidal Brujan.

Virtuosic Vibrations is a 20-card insert that also can be once in every eight packs. The card I pulled was of Cubs outfielder Kevin Alcantara.
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Bowman consistently whets the appetite of collectors who have an eye toward the future. The idea that one of these prospects or rookies could become a big star is a powerful lure. Despite the sticker shock on the blaster box, the 2022 Bowman set is clean, sharp and interesting.

​This is going to be a trip down memory lane, because Robert Garrett's new book intersects with my time as a sports copy editor at the The Tampa Tribune. Many people passed through the sports department while I worked there from 1988 to 2015 (and later when I was a digital news editor in 2015-2016).

Writers, editors, stringers, correspondents — I saw them all. When I joined the Tribune there were 63 full-time employees in the department. That does not include stringers. That number was considerably less when the paper was shuttered on May 3, 2016.

Stringers are the sports correspondents who contribute to the main section, covering games, writing features, and doing it as independent contractors. No benefits, and you have to track your pay to take out the proper amount of taxes.

Super correspondents, or “super corros,” got to cover some of the bigger events in support of the beat writers from time to time.

It can be a thankless job, but there is the lure of seeing your byline. It is like a narcotic. To this day, I still get chills when I see my byline on a story. After 40-plus years, it never gets old.

That’s what Garrett conveys in his sentimental look back at his journalism career. In Stringer (RGMG Publishing; $29.99; hardback; 166 pages), Garrett (we called him Bobby back then, but he returned to his formal name for legitimate reasons he explains in the book) looks back at his seven years as a correspondent and staff writer for the Tribune, the Sebring Daily News, Buccaneer magazine and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Garrett went from emptying trash cans at a Tribune bureau in Central Florida while working for his father’s janitorial service to writing more than 1,200 stories starting in October 1995.

Many who have a published a book note that writing it was “a labor of love,” or something like that. For Garrett, it was a labor — and not because he did not have anything to write. He couldn’t write — having “a booger of a disease” for more than a decade called ALS, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, forced him to use a dictating application to “speak” his memoirs.

And there is a lot to talk about.

He recalls his youth in Cocoa — not Cocoa Beach, don’t you dare say that, since the rivalry between the two Space Coast cities is keen — and living a mile from the Brevard Correctional Institute.

Garrett also discusses the unpredictability of sports, which gives all writers — seasoned pros or stringers — many different challenges.

It was fun to read about some of the characters Garrett encountered during his years at the Tribune, starting with Tom Ford. A veteran journalist who was once the Tribune’s lead beat writer for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Ford was versatile and wore many hats as a sports bureau chief to a sports copy editor at the main office. We worked together for several years as writer-editor and later as desk colleagues downtown — listening to Ford on the phone jousting with then-Bucs coach Ray Perkins was a treat. You did not have to hear Perkins’ end of the conversation to know what was going on.

But Garrett describes him perfectly, noting that Ford would take his glasses off the top of his head and perch them on his nose to read a story. He left out Ford’s penchant for tie-dye shirts, a Ric Flair hairdo and an ever-present yoga mat, but those are my memories and may not have been universal.

Other writers and editors Garrett describes in his anecdotes include Kevin Wells, Scott Carter, Scott Wallin, Pat Yasinskas, Brett McMurphy, Paul C. Smith, David Whitley, Erik Erlendsson, Dana Caldwell, Rozel Lee, Jason Davis and others.

I sort of feel like my old sports editor at the Tribune, the late, great Tom McEwen, who never had a problem with us correcting his grammar (he never met a comma he didn’t like, God love him) but admonished us not to cut out names from his column. Correct the spelling? Certainly. Just don’t delete the names.

“They are there for a reason,” Tom would say.

The names in Stringer are there for a reason. They helped shape the career of a young journalist.
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For those who believe that it is easy to interview sports figures and turn in great stories on deadline, Garrett sets the record straight. Speaking with a famous athlete can be difficult even when you are an established writer, particularly when the questions provoke a testy response. Garrett notes that he was “gobsmacked” by the notion that he could call and speak with an NFL coach, like when then-Broncos coach Mike Shanahan returned a message and chatted about Wayne Peace, his quarterback pupil at the University of Florida in the early 1980s.

​Garrett provides “sidebars” explaining how he covered high school football and basketball and kept statistics. In the pre-Internet or early days of the Web, a writer’s legwork and diligence was the key. Correspondents and writers from Florida’s smaller newspapers would compete against one another while facing tight deadlines. I recall those days as a sportswriter at The Stuart News on Florida’s east coast during the 1980s. A football game might end as early as 9:45, which gave you about an hour to interview the coach, write the story and telephone it in — or drive back to the office, write the story and then finish designing the next day’s paper before a midnight deadline.

Garrett was facing similar pressures and performed well.

And then you were at the mercy of the sports desk. A bad headline could bring the wrath of coaches and parents upon the writer, who had nothing to do with it. And parents, Garrett writes, could be “your biggest advocate or your worst enemy.”

Garrett trots out the Tribune’s infamous “Glades Central makes road kill out of Robinson” headline, which, if memory serves, was from the 1997 Class 4A state football semifinal. It’s still cringeworthy 25 years later.

I was on the Tribune copy desk for 28 years, so I’ve written my share of good and bad headlines. That was not one of them, thank goodness.

Garrett sprinkles his book with passages from his more memorable writing efforts, from clinics for girls hockey to a piece about a boy with spina bifida who struck up a friendship with Bucs running back Mike Alstott. Or even a rodeo event in rural Arcadia called the Wildhorse Race, or a one-on-one interview with actor Jason Priestley.

Garrett also reminisces about his time writing for the Sebring Daily News, a small newspaper in Florida’s heartland. Sebring is nestled between orange groves split by trucks rumbling down U.S. 27. It is also the home to Sebring International Raceway, which annually hosts the internationally famous 12 Hours of Sebring motorsports race.

At times, Garrett disguises the names of some of the people he worked with — “the names have been changed to protect the innocent,” you know — to humorous effect. The sports editor in Sebring, “Herman,” was a convicted murderer, Garrett notes. Some of the sports guys at the Tribune will know who that is and chuckle.

They might also snicker at some of the press box stories. Garrett recounts an outburst from a competing writer in nearby Avon Park, who insisted rather loudly that the Sebring writer was “sitting in my chair” in the raceway press box. Most sportswriters in small towns can sympathize with that story.

Garrett returned to the Tribune in 1997 as a correspondent in the New Tampa area of Tampa and would write “more in the next year than I ever thought humanly possible.”

He brings the reader into the locker room during his time covering secondary angles at Bucs games. Believe me, an NFL locker room may sound glamorous but it is not. The smell from those locker rooms will never leave your nostrils.

Garrett covered baseball, college football, NCAA tournament basketball, the Arena Football League and hockey along with his high school coverage. His clip file “grew fatter and fatter.”

But one stands out — June 2, 1998, the day one of his stories landed on the front page (1A) of the Tribune.

An intoxicating feeling.

Garrett joined the Tribune's sports copy desk in 1999 and tells stories about the characters who would call the newspaper. I was delighted that he included the one German soccer fan who would call and ask for the weekly Bundesliga scores. “How did Schalke do?” he’d ask, and we’d dutifully give him the scores and wait for his commentary. Some of the copy editors would even employ slight German accents, to everyone else’s amusement.

Not politically correct, of course, but it eased the deadline tension that soon would be approaching.

Garrett’s memory was a bit faulty at times, particularly about Ford’s funeral. He notes that it was held outside a non-denominational church, but it was actually held in the courtyard at The Lakeside Inn complex in Mount Dora. The rest of his recollections for that sad day were correct; I recall that at the end, a bunch of balloons were released skyward as the loudspeaker blared Norman Greenbaum’s 1969 hit, Spirit in the Sky.

Many journalists will tell you that the business is all-consuming and can kill marriages. It has happened to many of us, and Garrett was no exception. However, he found peace in his second marriage and has two sons. He can look back with pride on a career that allowed him to hone his skills as a writer and editor, and also as a person.

Now a software trainer in the Atlanta area, Garrett continues to battle ALS, and his progression “is slower than typical.” He is unable to use his arms and legs and uses a power chair to get around. But his mind is still sharp. Stringer is evidence of that.

“When you have no way to express yourself physically, you tend to bury yourself in your mind,” Garrett notes. “Reflection is an everyday thing.

“I found direction, purpose, and my voice, and I had some of the best times of my life doing it.”
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Stringer is an interesting read, a nostalgic look at a tough business and a fun look at a satisfying career.

Here is a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily previewing the 2022 Topps Triple Threads baseball set, which is set to be released in October:

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/2022-topps-triple-threads-focus-on-autographs-relic-cards/

The latest version of Topps’ Gypsy Queen baseball shows a slight departure from previous sets as far as designs are concerned. The artwork is still excellent, but some of the elements are smaller or even hidden.

There is a cipher wheel, and the GQ logo is not quite as distinct. In fact, you really have to look to find the GQ logo on the card front.

The 2022 Topps Gypsy Queen set is a less quirky version of Allen & Ginter, as it sticks only to baseball and keeps it simple.
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There are 300 base cards and 20 short prints. The short prints are tough to find and only fall once in a 24-pack hobby box. Since I bought a blaster box, my chances of pulling an SP were slim.
And for the record, I did not find one. The short prints include 17 Hall of Famers and one who should be elected when he becomes eligible (Ichiro). The other two cards feature Bo Jackson and Roger Maris.
A blaster box contains seven packs, with seven cards per pack. Topps promises a Green parallel per pack, and that average was met.

There were 39 base cards in the blaster I opened. The card front has old-fashioned photograph mounts in the top upper left and right corners. The cipher wheel has the player’s name — but only a first initial and a full last name.

The player’s position is directly underneath his name, and an abbreviated team name is situated in the lower right-hand corner of the card.

The GQ logo is much more prominent on the card back, sitting in the top middle of the design. There is a four-line biography under the player’s name.

The card number is to the left and between the GQ logo and the player’s name, with an “out of 320” note directly across on the right-hand side.
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Each player has a four-line biography, which includes interesting statistics and personal information.

As noted, there were seven Green parallels. There was also a Burnt Umber parallel of Edward Olivares numbered to 399. I thought that sounded like a Crayola color I once saw in a classmate’s crayon box in elementary school during the 1960s.

​She had a 64-crayon box with a built-in sharpener, so we thought she was rich.

Sure enough, burnt umber was a Crayola color but it was apparently retired in 1944. Perhaps I was thinking of Raw Umber.
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What is nice about pulling this parallel is that it falls approximately once every 35 packs, so that was a bonus.

There were two inserts in the blaster I opened. Both are making their debut in the 2022 product.

One was Crystal Gazing Die-Cut, a card fashioned in the shape of a crystal ball. This card gazes into the projected future of young players. There are 22 cards in this subset and I pulled a Casey Mize card.

The other insert was GQ Gems Minis, a mini-card collection of 30 subjects that has plenty of foil. I pulled a card of Nolan Arenado.

If you are trying to build a set, it should be fairly easy to complete the Gypsy Queen base set. Short prints, however, will make it extremely difficult to complete a master set.

​Soccer took center stage late last week when the 16 North American venues for the 2026 World Cup were announced. Soccer’s biggest event will be held in the U.S. for the first time since 1994, only this time the Americans are sharing sites with Canada and Mexico.

And while Major League Soccer does not have the worldwide appeal of the World Cup, Topps’ release of its flagship MLS set earlier this month is certainly good timing.
A blaster box of 2022 Topps Major League Soccer is modestly priced at $19.99, a welcome change from the recent price hikes for other blaster products. There are 10 packs to a blaster, plus an extra pack that serves as a bonus. Each pack contains six cards.
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Topps is also promising four exclusive foil parallels in each blaster.
The base set has 200 cards. There are also rookie cards within the set and a 25-card Pitch Prodigies subset that The base cards include eight Pitch Prodigies rookies cards and five rookies.

I pulled 59 base cards and a Green parallel of Talles Magno, numbered to 75. The base cards I pulled included five rookie cards and eight Pitch Prodigies rookies.

Five of the base cards also have an “Under 22” logo in the upper right-hand corner. It is part of an interesting concept created by MLS, called the U22 initiative. The program was first introduced to MLS in April 2021 as an incentive for teams to develop young talent. The initiative allows teams to sign up to three players 22 or younger at a reduced salary budget charge.

The design for the base cards is mostly vertical except for team cards and a few select players. The player is shown in action shot in sharp color, and there is kind of a hazy, smoky background that makes the primary photograph pop. The design definitely utilizes soft focus for an effective contrast.
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The Topps logo is barely visible in the upper-left hand corner on the front.

he player name plate stretches across the card near the bottom, with the player’s name in bold, large white block letters. The team logo is situated to the left of the player’s name. The player’s position is placed underneath his name. The card backs contain a five-line biography for base cards although the Under 22 cards have anywhere between five and seven lines.

Base rookie cards have an “RC” logo in the top right-hand corner of the card.
The Pitch Prodigies cards have a different design, with more of a blocky look. The players’ names and the “Pitch Prodigies” banner run up the left side of the card, perpendicular to the action shot. A wavy box provides the background for the player’s action shot.
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An MLS logo adorns the bottom left side of the card, and the team logo is displayed on the card back, and there is a five-line biography.

There were several inserts represented in the blaster box I bought.

Scholarly is a 20-card subset that falls once every six packs on average. I pulled two of these cards, which showcase homegrown players. Those players were Caden Clark of the New York Red Bulls and Caleb Wiley of Atlanta United.

International Players is a 25-card insert set that falls once every five packs on average. From this blaster I pulled three – Robin Loo (Minnesota United), Latif Blessing (Los Angeles FC) and Chicharito (L.A. Galaxy).

​The final insert I pulled came from the Topps ’22 Minis subset, which has 25 different subjects. The card I found was of Miles Robinson. This card design shows the player in sharp relief against a soft focus background.

The special foil cards I pulled included base cards of Kevin Molino, George Campbell and Paxton Pomykal. The fourth foil is a Pitch Prodigies rookie card of Ake Loba.

If you enjoy soccer, this is a nice set to collect. The cards have a pleasant design and there is plenty of information about the player.

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about the October release of Bowman Inception baseball:

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/2022-bowman-inception-features-flashy-designs-future-superstars/

Trying to project how a baseball prospect will do in the future is dicey at best. A college or high school star may turn out to be just as good at the major league level, or he could simply fizzle and never see action  in the majors.

That is what makes Panini America’s USA Baseball Stars & Stripes so interesting. The casual collector may not have heard of any of these guys, but there could be some hidden gems who will be in the headlines years from now.

America’s national teams are featured in Stars & Stripes, and it is the first time since 2020 that there was a card release.

The 100-card base set is divided among the three current USA Baseball national teams: Collegiate, 18U and 15U.
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A blaster box promises two autographs or memorabilia cards. The box I bought yielded one of each, so that was a happy medium.

Blasters contain six packs, with six cards to a pack. The card stock is thin and foil is the main characteristic for the card front.
Card Nos. 1-46 are collegiate national players. Cards Nos. 47-72 are for the 18U team, while No. 73-97 depict players from the 15U team. The final three cards in the base set are checklists for each squad.

In the blaster box I bought, I pulled six cards from the 15U team plus a checklist. I also found nine cards from the 18U squad, and 16 cards and a checklist from the Collegiate team.

There also was one Ruby parallel for the Collegiate squad of Sean McLain.

The design for this set is solid. All of the cards I pulled had vertical designs on the front — except for the checklists — and while some of the shots were posed there was also a good amount of action photos. The USA baseball logo anchors the bottom left-hand corner of the card front, and a solid green bar frames the right-hand border and most of the top and bottom of the card. The rest of the card has two thin orange and green bars with even thinner white bars separating those two primary colors.

The card backs are also clean and crisp, with 12 stars distributed evenly across the top left and top right of the card. The player’s name is in white block letters that are italicized, and there are seven lines of descriptive biographical information. I am not sure why the info had to be displayed in all capital letters, but I will give a shout-out to Panini for the nice layout.
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Near the bottom of the card are the player’s height and weight, and also their hometown.

While the regular cards have a shiny finish, the autograph and relic cards do not.

I pulled an autograph card of Brennan Phillips numbered to 399. Phillips, a left-handed pitcher, is a native of Owasso, Oklahoma, who has committed to Oklahoma State.

The signature is on a sticker, which I never like. I also would have liked a nicer autograph. It looks like Phillips signed his card “BP.” I realize his fastball is potentially a gasser — he’s only 19 and he throws consistently in the high 80s— but his signature looks more like a promotion for the gasoline company with the same initials. Just sayin’.

The second hot card is a bat relic of Braeden Weckman, an outfielder who currently attends Winter Springs High School in Central Florida and has committed to the University of Florida.
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Overall, a nice product. It remains to be seen if any of these players make the big leagues, but it is always makes for some good discussion.

Panini America’s 2022 Diamond Kings baseball set is an artistic product with images that create a semi-soft focus. As with any piece of art, there is plenty of room for interpretation, and Diamond Kings exhibits some versatility in its design across its base set and inserts.

A blaster box contains six packs, with six cards to a pack.

There are 200 cards in the set, including 75 base cards and 40 short prints (card Nos. 101-140). There are also four tiers of rookie cards: Rookies I (Nos. 76-100), Rookies II (No. 141-160), Rookies III (Nos. 161-180) and Rookies IV (Nos. 181-200). I am not sure why the SPs were wedged between Rookies I and II, unless Rookies I were considered “base” first-year players.

It just seemed a bit odd.
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From the blaster box I bought, there were 18 base cards and two short prints, along with an Artist’s Proof parallel of Jacob deGrom. As far as rookies are concerned, I found three from Rookies I, three from Rookies II and one from Rookies III. None from Rookies IV. I also pulled an Artist’s Proof card for Greg Deichmann, who appears in the Rookies II tier.

The design for the base card features mostly color artwork of the player. Older players from the mid-20th century and earlier are featured in black and white settings. Cards I pulled with that black-and-white look included Stan Musial, Sam Crawford, Honus Wagner and Charlie Keller.

An orange stripe goes down the left-hand side of the card front, and the player’s name begins in the bottom left-hand corner in white block letters and a green background that looks like grass.

There is a crown in the upper right-hand corner of the card front.

The card back shows a baseball diamond and a crown (Diamond Kings, get it?) with the player’s name in large white block letters. The team name is underneath the player’s; interestingly, the player’s position is nowhere on the card.

For blaster buyers, there is one red frame parallel per box. The card I pulled was of Domingo Acevedo, a Rookies III card.
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The design for each “Rookies” card is different. The detailed artwork of the players is attractive, especially in Rookies II.

Rookies I has an action shot of the player on the left-hand side of the card, with what appears to be a flash of light on the right-hand side with the player’s name in small type.

And really, in this age of PEDs, is it a good idea to have the world “Supplier” above the player’s name? I get it, “Sam Supplier” is a popular disc jockey, radio host and producer, and that’s what the sign actually says.

But you have to look carefully, and if you are musically stuck in the 1960s, ’70s, or ’80s like I am, that is puzzling.

The card backs feature a large crown to drive home the point of Diamond Kings, and there is also a crown on the card front in the bottom right-hand side. There is a six-line biography on the card back.
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The design for Rookies II features an action shot of the player inside what appears to be a vortex. The color scheme is flashy and splashy, with pink, yellow and green dominating the card front. The word “rookies” is placed at the top and bottom of the card front, but it is a subtle look. The “RC” logo is at the bottom left-hand corner. 

The card back utilizes the same main shot from the front, using mostly cyan as it is contrasted with the yellow and green color scheme. The Diamond Kings crown is much more subdued.

There is a much longer biography on the card back, but some of them seem to be esoteric, keeping with the artsy presentation. On Deichmann’s card, the collector is told that while the outfielder “didn’t major in philosophy” while the Louisiana native attended LSU, “he certainly took the minimalist teachings of Henry David Thoreau to heart.”

Or this, on the bio of pitcher Camilo Doval: “Doval had opponents singing Dead or Alive’s hit ‘You Spin Me Round’ all season, thanks to his fastball.”

Now that’s a 1980s reference I can get behind.
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Rookies III depicts the player in a black-and-white format, with splashes of green and purple near the bottom of the card. The card back is more austere, with no photography and a seven-line biography framed by a brown box.

There are 13 insert possibilities in Diamond Kings. I pulled inserts from six different subsets, and all were either established current stars or Hall of Famers.

Nice.

There was a Babe Ruth insert from the 10-card The Art of Hitting subset, and I also pulled an Artist’s Palette card of Johnny Bench.

​Ken Griffey Jr. was the Maestros insert I pulled, and Pete Alonso was featured on a Gallery of Stars insert.

I also pulled a Mookie Betts card from the 10-card Elegance insert set, and an Aficionado card of Rafael Devers.
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Diamond Kings is an interesting set with some competing artistic ideas. Variety is certainly a strength, and this set has plenty of different looks.

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily previewing the 2022 Topps Update baseball set, which is due out in October: 

​www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/2022-topps-update-series-follows-usual-formula-for-season-ending-flagship-product/​

Reaction to Ken Caminiti’s death on Oct. 10, 2004, was almost universal — one of sadness and regret. Caminiti was a cannon-armed third baseman who was the National League’s unanimous choice as MVP in 1996, but he will always be known for his excesses — including alcohol, cocaine and steroid use.

He also will be remembered for his eye-opening interview with Sports Illustrated in 2002, when he tore the cover off the baseball establishment by admitting he used steroids during his career. It was a brave move that isolated him, but it revealed a festering problem in the game that still lurks today. Baseball officials finally were forced to confront an issue that had been simmering under the surface for at least a decade.

When Caminiti died, there was an underlying “tsk, tsk” tone among headline writers, and by players who meant well. A sampling:

“He Couldn’t Conquer Demons” — The Sacramento Bee.

“A Strike to the Heart” — Miami Herald.

“Caminiti haunted by own demons” – Ventura County Star.

“It’s a terrible thing,” former teammate Alan Ashby said.

“He was a great player but he got mixed up in the wrong things — taking drugs,” said another former teammate, Steve Finley.

You get the idea. But Caminiti’s life was not that simple.

“His story was too sad and too complicated,” author Dan Good writes in his compelling new biography about Caminiti.
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Playing Through the Pain: Ken Caminiti and the Steroids Confession that Changed Baseball Forever (Abrams Press; $27; hardback; 378 pages) is a well-researched, unvarnished look at the life of Caminiti, who won three Gold Gloves and was a three-time All-Star during his 15-year career in the majors with the Astros, Padres, Rangers and Braves.
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There were plenty of highlights but some devastating lows. Yes, Caminiti used steroids, and while they helped him, they did not totally define his statistics or his marvelous fielding skills.

​Good digs into Caminiti’s substance abuse, drinking, infidelity and brushes with the law, but handles them with sensitivity while still reporting the facts. It is a delicate balance that works.

Good spent 10 years researching Caminiti and interviewed 400 different sources. Add the thousands of documents and articles Good sifted through, and the reader is presented with a well-rounded picture. Good pulls no punches, and while there may be a hint of sympathy for Caminiti — he was, after all a likeable guy early in his career before drugs changed his moods — the author maintains balance and presents all sides.
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That is a credit to Good’s reporting skills honed during his years on the desk and in the field with the New York Post (where he is currently the deputy managing editor for news), the New York Daily News, ABC News and NBC News. Playing Though the Pain is his first major sports biography. Good also wrote 2020’s The Microsoft Story: How the Tech Giant Rebooted Its Culture, Upgraded Its Strategy, and Found Success in the Cloud, and he partnered with Silicon Valley entrepreneur Art Cohen for the 2021 self-published book Trump You: Promises, Lies, and Corruption: My Battle with Donald Trump’s Fake University.

What is impressive about Good’s approach is how he referred to Caminiti. It was “Ken,” or “Kenny.” Very informal, and an effective way to introduce the various stages of the player’s life. There is something almost collegial about it all, as if the reader is sitting in the room listening to a storyteller — and Good is a very effective one.

This was especially a useful device when Good writes about Caminiti’s early years, his college athletic career, his attempt to make the U.S. national team that went to the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and playing winter ball in Puerto Rico. One also has sympathy as Caminiti toils in the minor leagues, showing flashes of talent but making rookie mistakes after reaching the majors, like showing up late during spring training in 1988 — twice.

There are very lively, crisp quotes from sources, which makes Good’s prose crackle. There are few, if any, hackneyed quotes or cliches, and Good’s descriptive prose is a plus.

For example, Hal Lanier, the Astros’ old-school manager when Caminiti broke into the majors, “made porcupines and thumbtacks look soft.”

He was “like a bottle of turpentine,” Good writes, “Extremely useful but mildly toxic with increased exposure, apt to cause headaches and dizziness.”

Priceless.

Or, watching Caminiti play third base “was like listening to Hendrix wail on guitar.”

“It was a revelation,” Good writes.

As a player, Caminiti was all in, all the time.

“(Caminiti) kind of played baseball with a football mentality,” former San Jose State teammate Dana Corey said in a 2017 interview commemorating Caminiti’s induction into the San Jose Sports Hall of Fame.
​
One play defines Caminiti’s career. On April 22, 1996, during the sixth inning at Joe Robbie Stadium in Miami, the Marlins’ Greg Colbrunn hit a ball “that screamed down the line like a tired toddler: waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
Caminiti dived to his right and caught the ball, then rolled over and threw Colbrunn out while sitting on the ground — by three steps.

Go to Retrosheet.org and you would never know it was a great play. “Colbrunn grounded out (third to first),” the entry reads.
 
Go watch the play on YouTube to get the full effect.
 
“That was the best play of my career, so far,” Caminiti said. “I knew I did something good, but I didn’t know how good.”

The game that clinched Caminiti’s “Scary Man” nickname went down in history as the “Snickers game” in Monterrey, Mexico, on Aug. 18, 1996. Caminiti was ill from food poisoning after eating a salad the night before, but he insisted on playing despite being dehydrated.
 
Assistant team trainer Todd Hutcheson and team doctor Jan Fronek gave the player two bags worth of IV solution. Just before game time, Caminiti asked Hutcheson for a Snickers bar to give him some energy. He responded with two home runs and four RBI in San Diego’s 8-0 victory.
 
“Some IV fluid and a Snickers bar, and Ken went from death personified to hitting a home run,” Good writes.

The Padres would win 10 of their next 11 games en route to winning the N.L. West title.

Chapter 14 is only seven pages long, but Good says that other than the final passage of the book, this chapter was the most difficult to report and write. Caminiti was a victim of child abuse, a secret he buried for years until he revealed it during rehabilitation sessions in 2001 and 2002.

“Devastating to learn,” Good told KHOU-TV during an interview in May.
​
Caminiti was in middle school when the abuse began. His parents never knew about it, and the man’s identity remain unclear, Good writes. When his shame would resurface, Caminiti would use drugs and alcohol “to try and anesthetize his inner pain.”
​
“He spent years trying to escape, but eventually he couldn’t run from his secrets anymore,” Good writes. “The things he couldn’t talk about were consuming him.”

Good’s narrative is helped greatly by his interviews with Dave Moretti, Caminiti’s childhood friend who supplied him with steroids. Good first interviewed Moretti for this book in 2014, and he never flinched, sitting for “dozens” of on-the-record conversations to fill in gaps and provide needed perspective. It would have been difficult for Good to write such a thorough biography without Moretti’s candor.

And when confronted by teammates, Caminiti startled them with his honesty.
“He was quite honest about what he was doing, and I was actually stunned,” Phil Garner told Good.

“He was very honest about it,” teammate Bip Roberts told Good. “As a teammate, I knew exactly what was happening.”

Through the years, Caminiti’s wife, Nancy, was his foundation. “She was a rock,” Brian Jordan told Good.

Nancy was responsible and trustworthy, “the kind of girl you’d want to start a family with someday,” Good writes. It was a great choice for Caminiti, as his wife stood with him for many years, trying to keep their family together. It did not work, but Nancy certainly tried her best before divorcing her husband in 2002.

Good concedes he was unable to do on the record interviews with Nancy and her three daughters, but that was not surprising.

“Good luck reaching Nancy,” Ken Caminiti’s mother, Yvonne, had warned Scott Miller of Bleacher Report for a 10th-anniversary story the website published in October 2014.

Good also came up short, but he said he respected the family’s privacy and did have casual contact via text messages with Caminiti’s youngest daughter. He sent family mmebers copies of Playing Through the Pain before it was published to give them a sense of what was included.

“There were people close to (Caminiti) including relatives who decided that they didn’t want to participate, and I was as respectful as possible in trying to get them to connect … trying to get them to talk,” Good told KHOU. “I respect their decisions not to talk to me. Obviously, I wish that would have happened, but eventually I just said, ‘You know, I need to move forward,’ and there it was.”

Good writes that the steroids cloud that hovered over baseball both “tarnished and burnished” Caminiti’s reputation.

“As the years pass, Ken’s words loom larger and larger,” Good writes. “Who else has come forward voluntarily to talk about what they took? Who else spoke as unflinchingly as he did?”

Nobody.

Caminiti was found dead in a seedy Bronx apartment in 2004. He was in town to help his girlfriend’s son, who had run afoul of authorities. Caminiti died from cardiac arrest that the coroner said was caused by a mixture of cocaine and heroin. He died near Yankee Stadium, where he appeared with the Padres in 1998. The “speedball” caused his accidental death, the same mixture that killed John Belushi and Chris Farley.

Playing Through the Pain is an important book, a necessary book. It is at times uplifting and funny, but also sobering and too sad in a complicated way.

“You think you're like iron and steel,” Elvis Costello sang in 1996, which was coincidentally Caminiti’s MVP season. “But iron and steel will bend and break in those complicated shadows.”

And so it did.

Here 's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about the 2021 Panini Flawless football set, which is due out June 15:

​www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/2021-panini-flawless-football-info/

​I was always an American League fan. I rooted for the New York Yankees during the 1960s —the late 1960s, when they stunk it up — and always wanted to see the A.L. win the All-Star Game.
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It did not happen often. From 1961, when baseball first expanded, until 1977, when Toronto joined the A.L. with the Seattle Mariners, the junior circuit stunk it up. The National League went 17-2 in All-Star Games (two games were played in 1961 and 1962).

Why, I wondered. I knew why. The National League had talented, exciting players, like Willie Mays, Roberto Clemente, Joe Morgan, Hank Aaron, Bob Gibson and Maury Wills. The N.L. squads had speed, power, pitching and could play defense.

The A.L., on the other hand, played ponderous, station-to-station baseball, relying on the long ball but striking out more than connecting.
​
Things were more even in the World Series — the A.L. held a 9-8 advantage from 1961 to 1977 — but the league always seemed to lack imagination and overall, the N.L. always seemed to have the edge.
​
A pure case of mismanagement and missed opportunities.

Andy McCue’s latest book, Stumbling Around the Bases: The American League’s Mismanagement in the Expansion Eras (University of Nebraska Press; $29.95; hardback; 189 pages) shines a light on stark differences between the leagues. While the A.L. dragged its feet with integration and made some poor ownership decisions, the N.L. scooped up big markets and sold plenty of tickets, helped in part by signing Blacks and Latino ballplayers. Overall the N.L. was slow in terms of integration early in the process, but compared to A.L. owners they were sprinters.
As McCue writes in his introduction, the N.L. “was simply better at recognizing their collective interests, at screening their owners, and at recognizing the markets with the better long-term potential.”

McCue notes that in the A.L., “prejudice overcame economics.” Plus, as the nation’s population shifted more to the West and the South, “National Leaguers had been better at geography.”

The N.L. grabbed markets in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and later, made inroads into the Southwest and South by securing an expansion franchise in Houston and moving the Braves from Milwaukee to Atlanta. The league also placed a franchise in New York to satisfy fans upset by the Dodgers’ and Giants’ exodus and to blunt the formation of the Continental League.

The A.L., meanwhile, allowed Calvin Griffith to move from Washington, D.C., to Minneapolis and stubbornly held on to the idea that baseball could be viable in nation’s capital.

It could not.

The owners also feared congressional action against the game’s antitrust exemption, figuring that politicians unable to watch games in Washington would be angry enough to reexamine the rule and might even look the other way when a third league — like the Continental League pushed by Branch Rickey — challenged the two-league format.

The A.L. would play second fiddle in Los Angeles with the Angels, while allowing the Athletics to move from Kansas City to Oakland. That diluted enthusiasm for baseball in the Bay Area for both leagues and nearly led to the Giants moving to Toronto.
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McCue develops these scenarios clearly, demonstrating how the owners were merely members of a cartel that put their interests first. The N.L. was simply better at advancing their goals, which benefited all of its franchises, he writes.

McCue has been a SABR member since 1982 and served on the organization’s board for nine years. He was SABR president from 2009 to 2011. McCue also won the SABR-Macmillan Award for Baseball by the Books: A History and Bibliography of Baseball Fiction.

McCue earned the Society for American Baseball Research’s Seymour Medal in 2015 for Mover and Shaker: Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers, and Baseball’s Western Expansion. The 2014 biography of the longtime Dodgers owner was groundbreaking because it pivoted from the emotional baggage carried by heartbroken baseball fans in Brooklyn. It showed O’Malley for what he was — a shrewd businessman who knew how to market the Dodgers in Los Angeles, and a powerful, respected baseball executive who was a major force in the game for three decades.

Accolades aside, McCue’s business background allows him to clearly describe how A.L. owners haphazardly approached expansion — and how O’Malley would outflank them by ensuring that Houston would be in the N.L. fold, opening the vast Texas market to the senior circuit. The A.L. owners, with a chance to grab the Dallas-Fort Worth market, stayed in D.C. and went to Los Angeles even though they had not analyzed the latter market “realistically.”

McCue provides nice biographies of the American League owners, starting with the “Singing Cowboy,” Gene Autry, who “kept his hands off his general managers and managers.” Then there was Charlie Finley, the polar opposite to Autry. Finley, who owned the Athletics and eventually moved the franchise from Kansas City to Oakland and won three World Series with the “Swinging A’s” from 1972 to 1974 despite cantankerous battles with players and managers.
Like another maverick owner, Chicago White Sox owner Bill Veeck, Finley “was simply incapable of playing well with others,” McCue writes. Unlike Veeck, however, Finley “had no modesty and limited social skills.”

Detroit’s John Fetzer was ahead of his time by proposing a nationally televised baseball game on Monday nights, but the networks did not bite. However, the networks wanted the rights to the World Series and the All-Star Games, so Fetzer packaged those with a “Game of the Week” broadcast. But Fetzer’s role in choosing a successor to Ford Frick as baseball commissioner — William D. Eckert — backfired badly.

The A.L. owners were successful businessmen in their own fields, McCue writes. They simply were unable to duplicate that success in baseball.

McCue’s portraits of the 10 A.L. owners give the reader insights into why the junior circuit did not succeed — the owners simply could not row in the same direction.

The second round of expansion in 1969 showed once again that the N.L. still held the upper hand. The N.L. awarded franchises to San Diego and Montreal, while the A.L. set up shop in Kansas City (after the Athletics bolted for Oakland) and Seattle.

The new N.L. cities could draw from a base of 4.1 million people, while the A.L. expansion teams had a population base of 3.1 million, McCue writes.

Ah, Seattle. The Pilots were a franchise that had no direction for a year and are remembered mostly because of Jim Bouton’s 1970 baseball diary, Ball Four.

Sick Stadium was an abysmal park, and Seattle’s mayor and two of the five city council members were opposed to spending money on improvements. But A.L. leaders, “mesmerized by the idea of another West Coast franchise,” overlooked the red flags, McCue writes.

The Soriano brothers, Dewey and Max, were comfortable but not wealthy enough to properly support a major league franchise, so they enlisted outside help, McCue writes. The stadium only drew 15,014 for its opening game and some parts of the facility still needed to be built, even as fans entered the ballpark. It was an omen of things to come.

A.L. leaders had not properly vetted the Pilots’ ownership, so when the Bank of California called in a $3.5 million loan, they were caught flatfooted. The Pilots’ parent company filed for bankruptcy, and as the team headed north from spring training in Arizona, it made a turn to the east and headed for Milwaukee to become the Brewers as a group headed by Bud Selig bought the franchise.

McCue also writes about the addition of George Steinbrenner and Bob Short to the ownership mix. Steinbrenner would set sail on a 37-year stewardship of the Yankees, winning 11 pennants and seven World Series. Short moved the Senators to the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where the team was renamed the Rangers. Short was succeeded several years later in Texas by Brad Corbett, who was “consistently incapable of consistency,” McCue writes.

Eventually the American League went through another round of expansion, bringing baseball back to Seattle and introducing it to Toronto. There would be two more rounds of expansion in the 1990s, with the addition of the Marlins, Rockies, Diamondbacks and Devil Rays (now simply known as the Rays).

Interleague play would arrive in 1997, umpiring staffs were merged and league presidents were phased out. That gave baseball a more streamlined look, with all parts working together, rather than one league pitted against another. Certainly league pride and rivalries remained, but these moves helped homogenize baseball.

Stumbling Around the Bases is only 140 pages of prose, but McCue packs in a great deal of information and insight, armed with his customary attention to detail and deep research. MLB may seem like one big happy family now, but it was not too long ago that there was intense competition.

As McCue points out, the National League won most of those battles. It took the American League decades to catch up.

And, what the heck, the A.L. even regained the lead in the all-time All-Star Game series. The A.L. now owns an 46-43-2 advantage, going 29-14 since 1978 and winning the last eight games. The baseball fan of my youth would be thrilled.