The dog days of summer are here, and while some baseball players and fans were sweating it out for tomorrow’s trade deadline, I was content opening a cool baseball card product.

Every summer I look forward to breaking a box of Topps’ Allen & Ginter cards. It’s eclectic, with subjects beyond baseball. There is always a mini-history lesson, and fun facts galore. The format has not really changed since A&G debuted in 2006.

A hobby box contains 24 packs, with eight cards to a pack. The base set remains at 350 cards, with 50 short prints from card Nos. 301 to 350. Expect to pull a short print out of every other pack. Topps is promising at least three hits per hobby box, from a combination of relics, autographs, rip cards or even original Allen & Ginter cards. Most hobby boxes contain an oversized box topper card.

Baseball dominates the product, but there are also actors (Anthony Anderson, Dwier Brown, Timothy Busford and Steve Schirripa), sports agents (Leigh Steinberg), clergy (Pope Francis), comedians (Orlando Jones, and Jay Oakerson), tennis players (Maria Sharapova), boxers (Gennady Gennadyevich Golovkin), college football coaches (Steve Spurrier), Olympic stars (Missy Franklin), sportscasters, (Colin Cowherd, Ernie Johnson, Jessica Mendoza, Michele Steele and Heidi Watney), filmmakers (Morgan Spurlock) and even physical phenomenon (gravitational waves) and ancient relics from the Roman Empire.

A quick note: the non-baseball players have mini-biographies on the card backs. I thought it was interesting that Steele’s card made no mention of the work she did on ESPN’s memorabilia show, Mint Condition.

On to the cards. In a hobby box provided to me by Topps, I pulled 141 base cards. Of those, 12 were short prints. The box topper was an oversized card of Diamondbacks first baseman Paul Goldschmidt. Some collectors will pull relics, numbered to 25; autographs (15), autographed relics (5) and 1/1 cut signatures.

Each pack contains one mini-card. Some are parallels, and Topps notes that at least four of them will be inserts. That was the breakdown I found.

​Of the 20 player mini-parallels I found, three had an Allen & Ginter logo on the card back.
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There were two relics in the hobby box I opened. The first was of comedian Jason Sklar that contained a blue swatch. The second relic was of Yankees catcher Brian McCann, a circular swatch of gray.

The biggest hit in the box was a framed autograph mini-card of four-time Olympic gold medal swimmer Missy Franklin. The signature was written in Sharpie and it looks like she only signed her first name. That’s fine. When it comes to women’s swimming, only one name is required.

Inserts are always a staple of A&G sets. Natural Wonders is a 20-card set that takes the collector on a tour of some of the world’s most breathtaking sites, framed by an ornate, light-colored wood border. There were four of these cards in the box I opened.

​Baseball Legends is a 25-card set that pays homage to the greats of the game; I pulled five of those. And Numbers Game, a 100-card set that plays off a competitor’s number, can be found in every other pack. There were 12 in the box I opened, and each league has a different color scheme — blue for the American League, and orange for the National League.

There are mini inserts, too. Mayors is a 35-card set that is a civics lesson as it honors some of the country’s more recognizable politicians at the city level. There were two in the box I opened.

Ferocious Felines consists of 15 different cards, all devoted to various breeds of cats; there was one in the box I opened. Another 15-card subset, called Subways and Streetcars, provides a history of transportation. There was one of these cards in the box, too.

One mini insert I did not pull was from the Laureates of Peace, a 10-card presentation of Nobel Peace Prize winners. 

​Once again, Allen & Ginter is a product that should resonate with baseball fans that enjoy history, pop culture and natural history. The design remains simple and elegant, and three hits to a hobby box is a good amount for a basic set.

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily previewing the 2016 Panini Immaculate Collegiate Football set.

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/2016-panini-immaculate-collegiate-football-preview/

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about an auction being held to benefit the Jim Thorpe Area Sports Hall of Fame:

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/inaugural-jim-thorpe-auction-to-raise-funds-for-new-statue/

Here's a story I did for Sports Collectors Daily about former NBA public relations guy Nick Curran and the story behind the 1969-70 Topps basketball set.

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/1969-70-topps-basketball-set-info-checklist/

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about a nice auction being run by the Mile High Card Company. Lots of good stuff: 

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/66291-2

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about the 1976 Topps football set, which features the iconic Walter Payton rookie card:

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/bound-for-national-sports-collectors-convention-a-little-advice/​

Here's a story I did for Sports Collectors Daily about the 1968 Topps posters set:
www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/1968-topps-posters-were-a-large-addition-for-collectors/​

“Baseball,” MLB Network anchor Brian Kenny writes, “is played both out on the field, and in our minds. I’ve found it to be beautiful both ways.”

He’s absolutely right. And in our minds, baseball is about warm memories, great plays, and numbers. Always, numbers. I learned how to do straight division by figuring out batting averages, for example. Working out ERA was a complex equation, but it was easy once you got the knack of it.

So, I love to play with baseball numbers. So does Kenny, but not the kind “traditional” baseball fans are familiar with. Kenny is the face of sabermetrics on sports television, and his “Clubhouse Confidential” show is a sabermetrics smorgasbord. Kenny is playing with a different set of numbers, and in his book, Ahead of the Curve: Inside the Baseball Revolution (Simon & Schuster; hardback; $28; 353 pages), he provides a cerebral, absorbing and thought-provoking look to baseball’s new algebra.

Say the word sabermetrics around old school baseball fans, and they trot out the garlic, mirrors and sharpened sticks to ward off the evil spirits. True story: I was listening to sports talk radio this morning in Tampa, and one of the announcers said how much he hated sabermetrics. And then he decided to come up with his own formula.

“I know how to figure WAR (wins above replacement),” he said. “Take a guy’s batting average and divide by his address. That’s WAR.”

“Yeah, what is it good for?” his sidekick asked.

While I appreciate the reference to Edwin Starr’s song “War” that hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts in late August 1970 — and I am sure that reference went over the heads of more than half of the listening audience — it was a gratuitous slap and shows that even passionate baseball fans keep sticking their heads in the sand.

The value of WAR, Kenny writes, is that “it forces you to confront the totality of the player’s contribution.”

Kenny is the kind of media guy that doesn’t follow the herd, as he calls it. He’s always looking for a fresh angle, questioning, thinking, weighing different scenarios. And that’s what shines through in Ahead of the Curve. Kenny notes that the three most influential thinkers in baseball history are Henry Chadwick (who invented the boxscore and created batting average and ERA in his role as a baseball statistician), Branch Rickey and Bill James. Rickey was the first baseball man to hire a full-time statistician and to realize that on-base average was important, that RBIs were a misleading statistic and that fielding statistics were “utterly useless.” I don’t know what was written about Chadwick, but I know that both Rickey and James received plenty of negative press for thinking outside the box.

Statistics are a funny thing. We can rattle them off — and so can players — but sometimes old school managers don’t want to hear about them. Pitcher-turned-author Jim Bouton wrote that in 1969, he told Joe Schultz, his manager in Seattle, that he’d only walked two batters in his last nine innings of relief.

“Aww, I don’t want to hear any statistics,” Schultz said with a dismissive wave. “I can see what’s going on with my own eyes.”

The best chapter in the Ahead of the Curve is called “bullpenning.” Kenny argues that it is not good baseball to leave the starting pitcher in as long as possible; rather, wheeling out a fresh arm every one or two innings is a much more effective use of a pitching staff. More pitchers throwing fewer innings can be productive, he says.

“An optimal pitching staff would be made up of roughly the same number of pitchers, but with the workload divvied up,” Kenny writes.

Kenny recalls how the Oakland Athletics of the 1970s did not hesitate to bring out their “closer” in the fifth or sixth inning. It was not unusual to see Rollie Fingers for the A’s, or Sparky Lyle (Yankees) and Mike Marshall (Dodgers) entering the game in the sixth inning to snuff out a rally. To take it back even further, Casey Stengel won 10 American League pennants from 1949 to 1960 and did not hesitate to change pitchers early and often. Perhaps that’s the reason the “Ol’ Perfessor” winked an awful lot; he’d stumbled onto to something valuable.

The game is always on the line, as Kenny writes. Why wait?

Kenny also uses new numbers to argue for some retired players that didn’t get close to the Hall of Fame — but in Kenny’s analysis, should have. For example, Tim Raines compares favorably to Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn in terms of on-base percentage, slugging percentage and WAR. Gwynn has a big lead in batting average, and there is the argument: batting average over OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage). Isn’t a player who gets on base via a walk and enhances his chances to score by stealing bases (like Raines did), just as valuable as a man who has a gaudy batting average?

Kenny thinks so. And that’s no knock on Gwynn, either. But Raines helped produce runs, too, and runs help win ballgames.

He also makes the argument for Keith Hernandez based on his fielding ability and his talent for leading his league in assists — not a flip to the pitcher, but throws to second and third base to cut down the lead runner.

It’s fun to argue numbers. And Kenny jumps into another numerical debate when he argues that Mike Trout, and not Triple Crown winner Miguel Cabrera, should have been the A.L.’s most valuable player in 2012. As Kenny points out, in figuring out batting average, a single can be just as valuable as a home run. That’s not always the case in real action, but you get the idea. If I collect 265 hits and all of them are singles and I bat .412, is that more valuable than a guy who hits .290 but hits 45 homers and drives in 150 runs? Interesting question.

And about those homers and RBIs. Are they meaningful? That is to say, do the homers come when the game is on the line, or are they solo shots late in the game when the outcome already has been decided?

Back to Trout vs. Cabrera. The argument for Miggy “flouted the basic set of principles of the old school’s beef with SABR members” — you can’t judge everything by the numbers.

And yet, Kenny writes, the voters for the MVP award handed the honor to Cabrera based on three hitting numbers.

The arguments will continue to rage, and as Kenny writes, “it’s about to get wonky.”
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Other issues Kenny writes about include the wisdom of bunting, who should bat second in the lineup, and downplaying the glamour of a pitcher getting a win.

This is an entertaining book. You can still be old school and enjoy it. All Kenny is asking is to look for the difference between what seems obvious and what is actually going on.

“Ask a question, get your answer, and ask the next question,” he writes. “Think critically and independently.

“Avail yourself of bright people and new ideas.”

That way, no matter how you prefer to crunch the numbers, baseball will remain a beautiful game on the field — and in our minds.

Here's a story I did for Sports Collectors Daily about the auction that will be held July 13 to benefit the V Foundation.

http://www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/v-foundation-auction-includes-memorabilia-experiences/​

Here is a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about an auction taking place near Chicago in late July. Gus LeDonne was a collector who specialized in posters, broadsides and schedules of football teams and boxing matches. It's quite a collection.
http://www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/ledonne-auction-features-eclectic-mix-of-memorabilia/​

Here is a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about the November release of Topps Premier Gold soccer. 

http://www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/2016-topps-premier-gold-preview/

What made John J. McGraw a great manager was his belief that in major-league baseball, brains beat brawn. A master of the scientific game during the dead ball era, McGraw coveted speed, defense and pitchers who could throw strikes. He baited umpires and was merciless to any player who committed a mental error. “The Little Napoleon” won 10 National League pennants and three World Series titles.

In 1911, the Giants returned to the World Series after a six-year hiatus, stealing a major-league record 347 bases — a mark that still stands. Eight players had stolen base totals in double digits, and Giants pitchers combined to swipe six bases. Outfielder Josh Devore led the team with 61 thefts, and Fred Snodgrass had 51. Pitching ace Christy Mathewson would win 26 games and lead the league in ERA at 1.99, and Rube Marquard would add 24 wins. The Giants went 99-54 to win the N.L. pennant by 7½ games, but would lose in the World Series in six games to the Philadelphia Athletics.

McGraw would have appreciated the meticulous and thorough approach taken by Maury Klein in Stealing Games: How John McGraw Transformed Baseball With the 1911 New York Giants (Bloomsbury; hardback; $34; 368 pages). This book gives the reader a well-rounded view of baseball — and the United States — from the 1890s until the 1910s.

On the website ratemyprofessors.com (a purely subjective site, to be sure), Klein received mixed reviews. Negative comments referenced that he was a tough grader. Yeah? So? As another poster noted, “do the work.” Still another former student characterized Klein as a “superb, thoughtful, talented teacher who knows history well and communicates it with humor and intelligence.”  I’ll go with that characterization, because in Stealing Games, Klein has done his research; indeed, there are plenty of citations throughout the book.

There’s nothing wrong with a teacher holding students to a high standard. In Stealing Games, Klein sets the bar high. Klein’s writing career has mostly been tied to economic subjects, and he is Professor Emeritus at the University of Rhode Island, a college where he taught from 1964 until 2008. Klein’s books have mostly been about economics and American history. They include A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II (2013) The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America (2010); and Rainbow’s End: The Crash of 1929 (2003). Three other books were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize: The Life and Legend of Jay Gould in 1986; The Flowering of the Third America in 1993, and The Life and Legend of E.H. Harriman in 2000.

In the first half of Stealing Games, Klein builds toward the Giants’ epic 1911 season. After a brief prologue about spring training in 1911, Klein devotes the first 126 pages of the book (called “The Groundwork”) about McGraw’s life, his playing career and his early years as the Giants’ manager. He chronicles the Giants’ back-to-back National League pennant-winning teams in 1904 and ’05 and their near-misses over the next few seasons. The most galling miss came in 1908, when a base running gaffe by Giants rookie Fred Merkle snatched defeat from victory and would force a makeup game when both teams tied for the pennant. Klein, interestingly, refers to that game as a playoff. But while the game itself had many postseason ramifications, it was simply a makeup of a tie game.

The second half of the book is a month-by-month breakdown of the 1911 season. In some cases a blow-by-blow account of a baseball season — like a season itself — can be a grind. But Klein avoids that, sprinkling the chapters with anecdotes about stars (Mathewson), up-and-comers (Rube Marquard), untapped potential (Bugs Raymond) and the eccentric (Charles “Victory” Faust). He also writes some nice time pieces, like the devastating Coney Island fire of May 27, 1911.

The subtitle of the book is sort of misleading. Without a doubt, McGraw transformed baseball. But it didn’t just happen in 1911. This was a process that began in 1904 with two great pennant winners. McGraw had to rebuild his team when it failed to win in 1906 and ’07, and by 1908 the Giants were ready to challenge again for a pennant. They missed by the narrowest of margins. McGraw continued to build and mold a championship team, and 1911 was the culmination of that hard work. It was the beginning of a three-year run of pennant winners for New York, and although the Giants lost in the World Series each year, they were certainly the class of the National League.

Stealing Games is a well-researched, pleasant read that fans of baseball history will enjoy. Klein neatly ties in the cultural changes that were emerging in the days prior to World War I, and gives some good representative accounts of baseball games without going into excessive detail. It’s a fun read. 
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When I couldn’t play baseball outside as kid — South Florida was notorious for rain in the summer — I still could manage my own team.

Thanks to a pair of dice (one red, one white), four two-sided master charts made of cardboard and a packet of cards with symbols for 36 different dice rolls, I could be Earl Weaver. Or Casey Stengel. Or even Connie Mack.
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APBA Baseball was a great tabletop game when I was growing up, and even 65 years after company founder J. Richard “Dick” Seitz produced the first game set, it still resonates. A fan can play the board game or play it on a computer. I always preferred the board game; it took 15 minutes to a play a game, and it gave me a better insight into every major-league player.

 The game was based on official statistics from the previous baseball season. It was played by throwing dice, looking up that number from the batter's individual card and finding the result on the master chart. There was always a sense of mystery surrounding the game, from the formulas used to determine hitter and batter grades to the pronunciation of the game itself — is it app-bah, or ay-pee-bee-ay? The company’s 1964 brochure said the first pronunciation was used if “you are a hep APBA fan.”

“It’s a game no matter how you pronounce it,” Thomas Nelshoppen says. “Roll the dice and play the game.”

Nelshoppen, 53, runs the APBA Blog, an online site that features stories, chatter, opinions and helpful hints. Since 1975, he has belonged to the Illowa APBA League, a 10-team setup of players who meet at least twice a year to play the APBA basic board game and swap tales. The league’s spring convention was held this year in Moline, Illinois, and the participants played at least 30 games apiece.

 “It’s a really intense weekend,” Nelshoppen said (There's a photo of Thomas playing in a tournament-- scroll up). “Some of these guys I’ve known since I was a sophomore in high school. It’s not just a game, it’s a group of us getting together to have fun.”
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He’ll be playing in another tournament later this month in Chicago.
In addition to the game boards, Nelshoppen also plays online against fellow APBA fanatics in The Boys of Summer league.

I got my start in APBA thanks to my neighbor, who was a huge Detroit Tigers fan and owned the 1961 season.

I owned the 1971 set and was immediately enthralled. I never stopped liking the game; in fact, when the baseball strike hit in the summer of 1981, I replayed the 1961 World Series with my sports editor and published the results in a column. I took the Yankees and he took the Reds, but in an upset, Cincinnati won the Series. To this day, I believe my boss played with loaded dice.

Yeah, I’m still bitter.
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Nelshoppen, who grew up on a farm in western Illinois near the Quad Cities area, began playing APBA at a young age.
“My older brother played the game and he included me,” he said. “I was 9-10 when I started playing alone.
“Most kids my age knew who Joe Morgan and Pete Rose were. To learn about past seasons was pretty neat.”

Nelshoppen is currently doing a replay of the 1966 National League season, using the same starting lineups and pitching staffs as he follows the day-to-day schedule of that year. And while he will play on his computer, Nelshoppen leans toward the traditional boards.

“I do feel with dice and cards I have more control over my destiny,” he said.

He’s right. Start rolling some good numbers and it feels like a big payday in Vegas.

Nelshoppen, who lives in Urbana, Illinois, works in the information technology department at the University of Illinois, his alma mater — class of 1986, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science. He says that APBA steered him toward his current career. “The reason I bought a computer was to try APBA baseball on it,” he said.

Having a computer also inspired him to create the APBA Blog eight years ago.
“I did it because I wanted to talk about the game,” Nelshoppen said. “It started slowly, and then I made adjustments and it took off.”

The blog even has gotten the attention of APBA’s CEO, John Herson. Nelshoppen writes stories and has a network of writers. Scott Fennessy, for example, recently replayed the 1902 season and reported the results.

“He’s my deadball guy,” Nelshoppen said.
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Rod Caborn, meanwhile, is “a consummate replayer” who compares his results to the actual season. 

Because APBA decided to reprint seasons and also produced a World Series set and team All-Star packets, older versions of the game do not generally sell for large sums on auction sites.

All APBA players have a favorite player card or a season. Nelshoppen’s favorite card is the 1999 Mark McGwire, which draws its information from his record-setting 70-homer season.

“He broke our league home run record,” Nelshoppen said. “He did it in his last at-bat of the season.”

As you might have guessed, Nelshoppen is an APBA fanatic. When he married his wife Joan in 1989, part of their honeymoon was spent visiting the APBA store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The couple also traveled to Cooperstown that same month to watch Johnny Bench’s induction into the Hall of Fame.

Being a dutiful spouse, Joan even tried out the APBA game — once. “She wanted to see what it was like,” Nelshoppen said. “Once was enough for her.”
His 19-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter are not interested in sports. “I don’t know what happened,” Nelshoppen laughed.

APBA fans are legion and are very protective of their game. Some do not like the game’s closest competitor, Strat-O-Matic. It’s almost like a Coke-Pepsi rivalry, or Yankees-Red Sox. Nelshoppen won’t be lured into the debate.
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“I’ve played Strat-O-Matic and I think it’s a fine game,” he said. “If someone enjoys Strat-O-Matic, I’m fine with that.

“I don’t get into religious wars about it.”
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It’s all about the game and the roll of the dice. Because the game can be finished quickly, short attention spans are not affected. It’s fast-paced, adheres closely to the team and player results from the previous season, and brings friends together. Even this ad by The Sporting News in 1951 (right) can't help but get a baseball fan excited.

“APBA has a good flow, a good rhythm to it,” Nelshoppen said. “When I look at an APBA card I can see how well a player will do.”
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And a good roll of the dice will confirm that.