Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about the 2023 Donruss Optic set, which was released on July 31: 

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/2023-donruss-optic-football-set-to-arrive/

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about a Heritage Auctions sale that includes a pocket watch presented to Joe DiMaggio after he hit safely in 61 consecutive games as a minor league rookie in 1933:

​www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/watch-presented-to-joe-dimaggio-honoring-61-game-hitting-streak-in-1933-part-of-heritage-auctions-sale/

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about Wheatland Auctions Services' August sale, which runs through Aug. 4:

​www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/wheatlands-800-lot-auction-offers-a-little-bit-of-every-era/

Ron Fraser was a coach worthy of his nickname.

Fraser, who guided the University of Miami to a pair of national championships and 1,271 victories during his 30-year career, impacted college baseball on and off the field. The man known as the wizard of college baseball was a showman and a marketing genius whose innovative promotions were a template for future programs.
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David Brauer examines the trailblazing career of Fraser in The Wizard of College Baseball: How Ron Fraser Elevated Miami and an Entire Sport to National Prominence (University of Nebraska Press; hardback; $29.95; 232 pages).

Brauer, who grew up near the University of Illinois and is currently the commissioner of the Prospect League, met Fraser briefly during the 1992 College World Series as a youth. Twenty-five years later, Brauer was vacationing in South Florida and visited the University of Miami Sports Hall of Fame. He spoke with Earl Rubley, who was the Hall’s former president, and became intrigued after listening to stories about Fraser. Realizing that no book had ever been written about the coach, Brauer said “the wheels started turning” and he began gathering information.
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The Wizard of College Baseball is the result. Brauer does a thorough job of chronicling Fraser’s career and his P.T. Barnum-like mind for showcasing the sport. Fraser was the coach who helped get the College World Series on ESPN during the 1980s, giving the sport valuable exposure and boosting the sports cable network’s prestige in the process.

​There are some structure issues in the book, but they do not detract from the overall effort and may simply be my personal preference. More on that later.

Despite its location in sunny South Florida, baseball at the University of Miami was practically a wasteland when Fraser arrived at the school in 1963 after coaching the Royal Dutch national baseball team.

Even Hall of Famer Jimmie Foxx could not lift the program when he coached the team to a 20-20 mark in 1956-57.

Fraser told USA Today in a 1989 interview that when he took the job he wanted to take a bat and ball to meet the team but the program did not own either, Brauer writes. The baseball field was in terrible shape, players wore hand-me-down uniforms from other programs and Fraser had received a mandate from the university’s athletic director “not to spend any money.”

That forced Fraser to build the program from scratch, and his resourcefulness and ability to connect with donors in South Florida molded the Hurricanes into a formidable program.

Not every trick worked, Brauer writes. Fraser reconditioned stained baseballs by soaking them in evaporated milk. The baseballs were white, but the smell was horrible.
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Other plans did not have a sour ending. Fraser introduced fall practices and home-and-home exhibitions against MLB rookie teams. He added night baseball, figuring correctly that more fans would attend games at night, rather than sitting in the broiling South Florida sun and energy-sapping humidity.

He added early season tournaments and invited programs from northern schools to compete, making sure the Hurricanes played their games during the late afternoons during the round-robin events.
Fraser also introduced the Sugarcanes, batgirls who also worked the concession stands and the manual scoreboard. They also passed out promotional literature to fans, Brauer writes.

Some of Fraser’s on-field innovations were viewed as radical when he introduced them. He installed artificial turf at Mark Light Stadium, which played to the Hurricanes’ strengths of pitching, speed on the bases and defense. He also relied heavily on relief pitchers to close out games; previously, starting pitchers with a lead were expected to go the difference. Fraser saw the advantage of using fresh arms late in the game to nail down victories, Brauer writes.

Fraser became adept at raising money
for the Miami program, offering nine-course meals on the infield at Mark Light Stadium for donors. The “Cruise to Nowhere” allowed guests to enjoy wine, dinner and entertainment  aboard an ocean liner — for $125 per ticket.
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“He had an enormous knack for promotion,” broadcaster Roy Firestone, who worked at WTVJ and WPLG in Miami before embarking on a long career at ESPN, told Brauer. “No idea was silly to him.
 
“Even if it started out silly, he could shape it and make it an idea.”

​Speaking of donors, Brauer brings the legacy of plastics magnate George Light to the forefront. Light’s donations helped fund lights and artificial turf at the Hurricanes’ field. The stadium was dedicated as Mark Light Stadium in 1978, named after Light’s adopted son, who died from muscular dystrophy in 1957.

He also raffled off car batteries and presented the Sugarcanes in bikinis for one promotion, but also worked hard to present a family-friendly atmosphere.

“I was more interested in getting the people in the stands,” Fraser said. “Because I knew we’d never be really successful unless we made money.”

Fraser had compassion and saw his players as family members. He reveled in their successes and grieved when tragedy struck.

When one of Fraser’s former pitchers, Rob Souza, was killed in an automobile accident in January 1985, a reporter called the Miami baseball office and asked to speak to Fraser. An official in the Miami sports information department initially said that Fraser was in a meeting, but that changed when Souza was mentioned.

The call was immediately put through to Fraser.

“We’re all shocked down here,” Fraser told The Stuart News, his voice cracking with emotion as he called Souza a “fierce competitor” whose victory in a regional championship in 1984 sent the Hurricanes to the College World Series for the seventh time.

Fraser was diplomatic but also knew how to navigate treacherous political waters. When Team USA played during the 1987 Pan American Games in Cuba, President Fidel Castro entered the stadium and wanted the Americans to come meet him.

Fraser demurred, insisting that he was there to play baseball and not to meet Castro. Fraser was not going to play politics, especially given the anti-Castro sentiment in South Florida from Cuban exiles. If Castro wanted to meet Fraser’s players, he would have to make the move.

Castro visited the Americans’ dugout and “politely grabbed Fraser’s arm in greeting,” Brauer wrote, noting that Fraser did not shake hands with the Cuban leader.

“That was unbelievable,” Vinny Scavo, who was the team’s trainer at the Games, told Brauer. “I knew that was for Miami — all the people that struggled. He wasn’t going to let them see him go up and meet Castro. He could come to meet him.”

Fraser even took a page out of Casey Stengel’s playbook, catching players who broke curfew by using a hotel employee. Fraser would hand the worker a baseball and ask the staffer to get autographs of players that wandered in late. Fraser was more subtle than Stengel, chatting up the employee and making that person a fan of the Hurricanes.

The ploy worked.

The structure issue mentioned earlier was about Fraser’s personal life, which Brauer delegated as the book’s final chapter.

While Fraser was a household name among college baseball fans, a generation of fans may not have been familiar with his formative years since he died on Jan. 20, 2013. His accolades were plentiful — Fraser has been elected to eight halls of fame, including the College Baseball Hall of Fame’s inaugural class (2006), the Florida Sports Hall of Fame (1986), the University of Miami Sports Hall of Fame (1983) and the Florida State Athletics Sports Hall of Fame (1981).

He was a four-time NCAA coach of the year, and piloted the 1992 U.S. Olympic baseball team.

But how did he get there?

I would have preferred that Brauer’s closing chapter, “Personal Life,” had been split, with information about Fraser’s youth until his hiring at Miami created as an earlier chapter. That would have given the reader a taste about Fraser’s path to success.

His married life, anecdotes about his children and hobbies, and stories about his many friends that make up the final chapter are appropriate toward the end of the book.

Just a personal preference.

The only other criticisms were the misspelling of “unfazed” as “unphased,” and Brauer’s penchant for maybe using “legendary” more than necessary. That’s a career copy editor’s observation.

Fraser never had a losing season at Miami and the Hurricanes appeared in 12 College World Series between 1974 and 1992, including five consecutive berths (1978-1982). Three of his teams won more than 60 games in a season, and the 1980 Hurricanes won 59 times.

Fraser was eager to share his secret to success with other programs, and assistant coaches like Skip Bertman, who would lead LSU to five national championships.

“I got a lot of credit as a leader because I had big crowds at LSU, and now they have big crowds everywhere,” Bertman told Brauer. “Ron was doing it ten years before me.

“I wouldn’t have the success I had without Ron Fraser.”

What makes The Wizard of College Baseball so insightful are the interviews Brauer conducted. He relied on newspapers, books and media guides for information, but interviews with more than 100 former players, coaches, administrators, reporters and family members give the reader a well-rounded picture of Fraser and the program he built.

There is a reason there is a statue honoring Fraser outside Mark Light Stadium. He was a giant among college baseball coaches, saving Miami’s baseball program from being cut in the early 1970s.

What Fraser did was contagious, and the entire Hurricanes program benefited tremendously.
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Brauer’s attention to detail, his anecdotal prose and insights from his interviews make The Wizard of College Baseball a success.

Here is a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about an R316 Kashin Publications set coming to a Heritage Auctions sale next weekend:

​www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/r316-kashin-publications-complete-set-from-1929-part-of-heritage-auctions-sale/

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about the cards and career of Hall of Fame pitcher Robin Roberts. On July 5, he pitched his 28th consecutive complete game, an amazing stat that seems impossible today because of pitch counts and managers with quick hooks:

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/robin-roberts-baseball-cards-chronicle/
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Author Larry Gerlach calls Bob Emslie “the least-known famous umpire in baseball.”

Umpires are supposed to be anonymous. They are like offensive linemen in football. They only get noticed when they make a bad play, or in an umpire’s case, a bad call.

As Mitch Miller’s 1951 song “The Umpire” notes, “We ain’t got no use for the umpire unless he calls them our way.” Major leaguers Tommy Henrich, Ralph Branca, Phil Rizzuto and Roy Campanella have lines in the tune, sung by Miller and the Sandpipers.
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Only 10 umpires have been elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Starting with Bill Klem and Tommy Connolly in 1953, nine arbiters were selected by the Veterans Committee. The last umpire chosen was Hank O’Day, selected by the Pre-Integration Era Committee in 2013.

That dovetails nicely with Emslie, who was O’Day’s contemporary and a good friend.
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In Lion of the League: Bob Emslie and the Evolution of the Baseball Umpire (University of Nebraska Press; hardback; $39.95; 432 pages) Gerlach examines Emslie’s life and umpiring career during the late 19th century and early 20th century. It was a rough-and-tumble era for the men in blue; the four-man crew was still a pipedream as each game had only one umpire, and later, two.

That meant that players could take liberties, by cutting corners on the basepaths, trapping the ball in the outfield and other ploys that gave teams an edge. It was difficult for an umpire to call balls and strikes and then hustle down the basepaths to decide plays on the bases. Umpires were also subjected to more verbal — and in some cases, physical — abuse from players. Unlike today’s thin-skinned, quick-trigger umpires, Emslie was reluctant to eject a player who was “kicking.” And there were plenty of reasons, as ballplayers — particularly in the 1890s—used profanity freely.
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According to Retrosheet.org, Emslie ejected 163 players and managers during his 35-year career.

​Judging from Gerlach’s strong research, Emslie was one of the game’s best. Even though he was respected by most players and manager for his fairness and evenhandedness in running a game, Emslie never got to work a World Series.

His knowledge of the rules made him a “go-to” official for major league executives, and while he was criticized late in his career for his work behind the plate — New York Giants manager John McGraw, a frequent nemesis, called him “Blind Bob” — Emslie’s work on the bases was beyond reproach.

Gerlach is qualified to write about Emslie. Now in his 80s, the native of Lincoln, Nebraska received his bachelor’s degree in education and his master’s in history from the University of Nebraska. He earned his doctorate in history from Rutgers University and began teaching at the University of Utah in 1968. Since his retirement in 2013, Gerlach has been a professor emeritus of history at Utah.
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A former board president for the Society of American Baseball Research, Gerlach wrote the 1994 book, Men in Blue: Conversations with Umpires. He is also the coeditor of The SABR Book of Umpires and Umpiring.
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In May, he was one of three recipients of the Henry Chadwick Award, presented annually by SABR to honor baseball’s great historians, statisticians, archivists and annalists.

So sure, Gerlach is qualified to write about baseball history, but why choose Emslie? Gerlach admits in his prologue that he had no intention of writing a biography about the umpire. But he made a 20-miunte speech about Emslie during a Canadian baseball history symposium. Gerlach then realized that a biography about Emslie and the era when he umpired would provide a valuable addition to baseball literature.
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Readers will be educated through Gerlach’s careful research and casual narrative about Emslie — he calls him “Bob” more often than not, a device that personalizes what until now has been an obscure baseball figure. And Gerlach’s research also shows readers what umpires faced during the pre-1900 era. It was not an easy time.
Gerlach draws from publications from the late 1880s, like Sporting Life and the Spalding Guide, newspaper articles and even Emslie’s memoirs.

Emslie began his career as a right-handed curveball specialist. Playing in the from 1883 to 1885, American Association, he fashioned a 44-44 record in three seasons. That mark is deceptive since a sore arm ended his career. But in 1884, Emslie put together a 32-17 record with a 2.75 ERA for the Baltimore Orioles.

More impressively, he started and completed 50 games that season and pitched in 455.1 innings. But the toll on his arm resulted in a rough 3-10 record in Baltimore the following season before he was released and finished his career in Philadelphia, going 0-4 with the Athletics.

Still enamored with the game, Emslie turned to umpiring, coming out of the stands on Dominion Day in 1887 to help out when the regular umpire did not show up. He would work his way through the minor leagues before landing in the American Association in 1890. His first game as a major league umpire was April 17, 1890, and his career as an umpire lasted until Sept. 28, 1924, when he worked the bases for a game in St. Louis between the Cardinals and the Cincinnati Reds.

When Emslie began umpiring, Gerlach writes, “it was the best and worst of times for umpires.”

But as it turned out, he was “a born umpire.” His “tactful, conciliatory approach” to defusing controversy was admired by players, managers and fans — although there were times when his decisions did not sit well with them.

But that is an umpire’s life.
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Emslie called four no-hitters during his career and worked the bases in four others. With Klem behind the plate, he was part of the fastest nine-inning game in MLB history — a 51-minute sprint at the Polo Grounds between the Giants and Philadelphia Phillies in the first game of a doubleheader on Sept 28, 1919. 

​He was umpiring the bases on Sept. 23, 1908, in the famous “Merkle’s Boner” game, also at the Polo Grounds. Emslie had to duck to avoid Al Bridwell’s apparent game-winning hit to center field, but when Fred Merkle failed to touch second base, Chicago Cubs second baseman Johnny Evers called for the ball.

t most likely was not the game ball, as fans swarmed onto the field, but Evers caught “a” baseball and stepped on second base, claiming the winning run was nullified by the force play.

Emslie appealed to O’Day, the plate umpire, who called Merkle out. The game was eventually called a tie and was replayed at the end of the season when both teams finished with 98-55 records. The Cubs would win the rematch and the Giants were furious.

In addition to “Blind Bob” affixed by McGraw after that controversial, Emslie was also known as “Wig” because of his receding hairline and his penchant for wearing a toupee, according to some sources. Gerlach disputes that despite the “execrable rowdiness of the 1890s,” there was no evidence that Emslie had that nickname.

However, players did make mention of his lack of hair, with Jack Doyle taunting him in an 1897 game by suggesting he “get a hairpiece.” Doyle took it a step further in 1898, Gerlach writes. Angered by being called out, the player grabbed the umpire’s toupee and took off running. Doyle later said his $20 fine “was worth the laughs.”

Emslie’s duties behind the plate diminished beginning in 1909, and he constantly lived in fear of being forcibly sent into retirement thereafter because of criticism over his farsightedness. At times during the 1910s, he was part of a team of replacement umpires.

And yet Emslie persevered, becoming the “Dean of Umpires.” After retiring from active duty, he became chief of umpires and continued to be the game’s expert on rules.

By the time Emslie retired, he had set records for most seasons (35) and regular-season games (4,231) as an umpire. Klem, who was an umpire for 37 years, topped that mark with 5,375 games, a mark that stood for 80 years until Joe West finished his career in 2001 with 5,640 regular-season games across 43 seasons.
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Gerlach concedes that trying to “capture the private person” was difficult with Emslie, outside of his love for baseball, trapshooting (of which he was an expert) and curling. Very little was known about his family life after he got married, but Gerlach has extensive information about Emslie’s formative years.
Years after his death in 1943, Emslie was elected to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 1986. A baseball field in St. Thomas, Ontario, is named in his honor. It would be another decade before an umpire would be elected to the Hall of Fame.

Gerlach makes a case for Emslie’s enshrinement but conceded that his lack of postseason umpiring and a refusal to wear glasses to cure his farsightedness worked against him. Umpires did not wear glasses until 1956, when Ed Rommel and Frank Umont became the first.

In Lion of the League, Gerlach writes ’em like he sees ’em. It’s a fascinating view of an often overlooked — but extremely important — part of the game.

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about Panini America's Caitlin Clark Collection of cards that was released on July 1:

​www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/2024-panini-caitlin-clark-collection/