Ron Keurajian began collecting autographs during the late 1970s. A devout Detroit Tigers fan, as a middle school student he was writing a report about Ty Cobb and got the idea to interview Hall of Famer Charlie Gehringer about the Georgia Peach. After he finished, he thanked Gehringer and was about to leave when the “Mechanical Man” stopped him.

“Don’t you want my autograph?” he asked.

Keurajian did. And a passion was born.

“Collecting autographs puts me in touch with times past,” Keurajian writes in the preface of his new book, Collecting Historical Autographs: What to Buy, What to Pay, and How to Spot Fakes (McFarland; paperback; $45; 406 pages). This is the second book about autographs by Keurajian, a commercial banker and attorney from Michigan who also collects and deals in autographs. His first book, Baseball Hall of Fame Autographs: A Reference Guide, was published by McFarland in 2012.

In his latest book, Keurajian expands his focus beyond sports, although he still pays attention to some of the bigger sports autographs. The chapters in his book zero in on autographs from the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War I and World War II and presidents of the United States. Other chapters analyze the signatures of Supreme Court justices, scientists, authors, composers, royalty and cultural icons. In sports, Keurajian focuses on baseball and golf autographs, although other athletes find their way into the book. Autograph descriptions are accompanied by a photo (or photos) of actual or fake examples.

It’s an eclectic mix, and all genres are covered. You have to like an autograph expert who gives equal time to the signatures of George Washington and The Three Stooges.

Keurajian’s writing style is direct and informative. He takes great pains to throw in a little bit of history for every autograph he examines. And he doesn’t mince words: when he sees a fake, he is quick to identify it. That has not always endeared him to authentication services, but his honesty is a boon for collectors.

Keujarian advises new collectors to “take it slow and easy.”

“Don’t throw around big money, because there are a lot of forgeries out there,” he writes.

Keurajian really shines when he analyzes the signatures of these famous people. These are not cursory observations, either. He describes the flow of the author’s signature, the construction of the letters and the autograph’s legibility. He also takes into account that people age, and their handwriting could be affected by palsy to the hand. Sports fans who view an autograph of Hank Aaron from 2016 know it belongs to the Hammer, for example, but it lacks the firmness that characterized a signature in say, 1974. Age does that to us all.

He also discusses demand and market value. My favorite section of the book is the one about the presidents. John Adams, for example, signed “in a very structured and meticulous hand,” while his son, John Quincy Adams, signed in “a very confined and tiny hand.” The signature of the younger Adams is the easiest to forge among the presidents, Keurajian writes.

And while he may be known as one of our worst presidents, James Buchanan’s signature “is one of the finest.” “Letter construction is superior. The hand is very legible. Buchanan’s signature has maximum eye appeal,” Keurajian writes. The  president whose signature has the worst eye appeal? John F. Kennedy. Because Kennedy had a sloppy signature, his is one of the easiest to forge.

“I estimate over 90 percent of all Kennedy signatures in the market are forgeries,” Keurajian writes.

Rutherford B. Hayes signed in “a very poignant and demure hand,” Grover Cleveland’s penmanship was “choppy,” and Benjamin Harrison signed in “a very rustic and heavy hand.” While this book went to press before Donald Trump’s presidential election victory, Keurajian does weigh in on Barack Obama, whose term ends on Jan. 20, 2017, noting that he signs “in a fast and sloppy hand.”

“His signature is illegible, and most letters have been pushed aside in favor of scrawls,” Keurajian writes.

As an added twist, Keurajian throws in the signatures of presidential assassins in this chapter, so John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald get equal attention.

This attention to detail is evident throughout the book, which makes it a wonderful reference for autograph hounds.

Some quick transparency as I write this review: Keurajian does mention me on Page 286 of his book, in a nice paragraph about journalists who have written about collectibles. Keurajian also wrote a nice review of my book, Never Fear: The Life and Times of Forest K. Ferguson, last year for Sports Collectors Digest. We have talked on numerous occasions over the phone and via instant message about collectibles issues.

Keurajian, a Cobb aficionado, stubbornly sticks to Ty’s original .367 career batting average and 4,191 career hits, although both have been “officially” readjusted to .366 and 4,189. He also slips in a plug for Bobby Veach as a “potential Hall of Famer” on Page 287 (Keurajian is leading a crusade to get Cobb’s outfield contemporary elected to baseball’s shrine via the veterans committee).

Keurajian notes that Cobb’s signature is one of the most forged autographs, “baseball or otherwise,” and claims that 90 percent of all of his signatures on the market are forgeries.
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None of that affects my analysis of Collecting Historical Autographs. This is an important book and a valuable resource for collectors. Keurajian has put together a detailed, analytical and straightforward look at collecting autographs. He offers fine insight and offers some good suggestions for novice and veteran collectors alike. If you’re going to dabble in autograph collecting, this is a book needed as an impartial guide.

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about the upcoming 2017 Topps Inception baseball product, which will be released in April.
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www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/2017-topps-inception-baseball-preview/​

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about Panini America's Immaculate Collegiate Baseball set, a high-end product that was www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/paninis-immaculate-collegiate-baseball-loaded-with-hits/released Nov. 28: ​

Here is a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about Ben Gillis, a collector from Orlando who specializes in autographs of professional athletes who graduated from the University of Utah.

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/utah-fan-specializes-in-collecting-utes-autographs/
​

Here's a story I did for Sports Collectors Daily about Panini America's Black Gold football, a high-end product that will be released next spring.

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/paninis-black-gold-adds-new-hits-inserts/

Here is a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily, previewing the high-end, 2017 Topps Museum Collection baseball set:

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/2017-topps-museum-collection-baseball-preview/

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about the 1962 Topps Baseball Bucks set, a test product that featured players on facsimile versions of $1, $5 and $10 bills.
www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/topps-baseball-bucks-fit-the-bill-for-1960s-collectors/

This is a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about the 1948 Bowman football set, the first NFL set of the "modern," post-World War II era.

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/1948-bowman-football-set/

Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, written about the Permian High School football team in Odessa, Texas, was a wonderful look at how life revolved around sports in a dusty west Texas city. The 1990 book was so good, it was adapted into a television series.
 
It has spawned similar books through the years; I had this fantasy to write about my own high school, Delray Beach Atlantic, a program that reached the state football championship game in Florida four times during the 1970s but lost each time. They mirrored the Minnesota Vikings of the same time frame, but at the prep level. So close, but yet so far.
 
Maybe someday.
 
But the latest work about high school football is a good, compelling story. In Lasting Impact: One Team, One Season, What Happens When Our Sons Play Football (Liberty Street; hardback; $27.95; 238 pages), author Kostya Kennedy explores the culture surrounding New Rochelle High School’s football team, a successful program located in the New York City suburbs. But it’s not just the story about the Huguenots’ successful 2014 season; Kennedy, a former senior editor at Sports Illustrated who is now an editorial director at Time, Inc., also tackles some key social, domestic and medical issues that came to the forefront that season and still are causes of concern now.
 
The safety of the players on the football team, as doctors grappled with new information about concussions and its effects on players, is an underlying theme. So is domestic violence, as New Rochelle’s most famous alumnus, Ray Rice, was under the microscope in 2014 for his violent treatment of his then-girlfriend (now wife) on an elevator at an Atlantic City casino. Socially, New Rochelle reflects the melting pot mixture of the metropolis located not too many miles away — players come from different family dynamics, with different levels of wealth and racial makeup.
 
From the outset, Kennedy distances himself from similar works. “It’s not about football at a high school in rural Texas,” nor did “a tornado or earthquake or flood or natural disaster devastate a team and town before folks and athletes rallied together in a stirring revival (that probably references Jere Longman’s 2008 book, The Hurricanes: One High School Team's Homecoming After Katrina).

It’s about a team in “a fairly ordinary suburban town” where football is valued “but not revered,” where people are living in an economic gulf between the affluent and the needy.

Once Kennedy gets those disclaimers out of the way — certainly, he was anticipating the inevitable comparisons — he does a solid job meshing the story of the Huguenots and its hard-boiled coach, Lou DiRienzo, the son of Italian immigrants who passes his rock-solid core of family values and work ethic (he worked in a quarry, and so did his father) to his players.

“‘I’ don’t make a play at New Rochelle,” he tells his players. “‘I’ have never made a play at New Rochelle. “‘WE’ make a play at New Rochelle,” DiRienzo tells his players during a summer training camp.”

Sticking together as a team, ignoring distractions and remaining focused on the game are mantras preached by all football coaches. DiRienzo is no different. “This right here is the inner circle,” DiRienzo tells his players. “And nothing and no one penetrates this circle.

“When things are going good everybody’s got a hug for you. But when things are going bad they’re going to have something bad to say about you.  … You’ve got to keep that outside the circle. Because they have no idea what we do. How we do.”

There is plenty of joy, teamwork, adversity and bonding throughout Lasting Impact, and Kennedy is descriptive and sets the scenes well. The 2014 squad is a special group and overcomes its weaknesses to play a solid season. But Kennedy also presents some sobering stories that demonstrate that football can be a violent game with fatal results.

Kennedy notes that from the 1982-83 to the 2012-13 seasons there were 222 known and reported “indirect fatalities” associated with high school football. And over that same time frame, there were 180 in the following high school sports combined: baseball, gymnastics, cross-country, soccer, field hockey, swimming, wrestling, volleyball, ice hockey, lacrosse, track, tennis and softball.

From 1995 through 2014, Kennedy writes, there was an average of 12 deaths per year of boys playing high school football. One-third of those deaths, he writes, were classified as “direct fatalities”— a result of impact on the field.

He uses the examples of the football-related deaths of Tom Cutinella of Long Island and Miles Kirkland-Thomas of Staten Island to illustrate the frightening side of the game.

Kennedy’s chapter on Rice returning to his alma mater for a game was a fair rendition. It would be easy to sensationalize the visit, and New Rochelle certainly could have distanced itself from the actions of the Baltimore Ravens running back. DiRienzo turned it into a teaching moment, stressing that despite all the charitable work Rice had done for the Baltimore and New Rochelle communities, and despite his reputation as a “good guy,” that image can be “ruined in 20 seconds” by a violent and unacceptable act.

Kennedy answers the question that has been posed to him, addressing it at the beginning of the book and answering it in his conclusion: Would he allow his son (if he had one) to play football?

“I’d want him to play for a responsible, intelligent coach who abided by the values of discipline and honesty, who had a kindness to him and who thought of his players’ safety before he thought of winning a game,” Kennedy writes. “But I wouldn’t kid myself. I’d know that no coach, however scrupulous and well-intentioned, could eliminate the risks of the game.”

Lasting Impact is a passionate but balanced look at a football program, its coach and players, a city and a sport. There are probably hundreds of programs like New Rochelle throughout the country, but Kennedy takes a penetrating look at athletic, social and medical issues. It’s an entertaining book, but it also serves up a warning that Friday night glory (or Saturday afternoon, in New Rochelle’s case) can be fleeting.

​The release of the 2016 Topps Update Series baseball completes the annual cycle of cards for the company’s flagship product with a familiar but leaner look.

Set builders will rejoice, as Topps cut back its base set from 400 last year to 300 this year. And with a hobby box containing 36 packs and 10 cards per pack, it’s a good bet that completing the base set will take place.
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That was the case in the hobby box I opened — a complete base set plus 21 doubles. So I was definitely rejoicing. But just to make things a little difficult, Topps threw in some base card variations; I received one of Cubs outfielder Albert Almora. In the variation, Almora is holding a weighted bat; he assumes a batting stance during game action in the base version.

Parallels are sprinkled throughout the box. A typical hobby box will yield at least three rainbow foil parallels (I pulled four) and six gold parallels numbered to 2016.

Other collectors might find negative parallels, black numbered to 65, pink (50) and 1/1 versions in platinum, silver frame and printing plates. The black, silver frame and printing plates are hobby/jumbo exclusives.

The design mirrors those used in Topps Series 1 and 2 this year, so there are really no surprises there.
Topps promises one hit per hobby box, and the card I pulled was one of the 60 All-Star Stitches. This one was of Indians ace Corey Kluber and has a yellow swatch.
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Inserts were plentiful. First Pitch returns for the Update set with 10 cards that fall one in every six packs. True to the average, I pulled six cards from the hobby box I sampled. These cards depict celebrities or special guests who threw out the first pitch of a game this season. My favorite is of 92-year-old Burke Waldron, who was dressed in his World War II sailor’s outfit and tossed a left-handed pitch to open the Mariners’ May 30th game. 

The 3000 Hits Club features 20 of the 30 players who have hit one of baseball’s big hitting milestones. Expect to pull at least six out of a hobby box; that’s how many I found. Another insert with a 3,000-hit theme is Chasing 3000, a 30-card set that commemorates key hits in the career of Ichiro Suzuki.

It’s a continuation from the Series 2 set, so if one collects from both products there are 60 cards in total. A collector should easily pull four of these inserts from Update; I managed to find five.

Team Franklin is a 20-card insert set that features some of the top hitters in the game. The Franklin sporting goods logo is prominently displayed on the top right-hand side of the card. These cards fall once in every eight packs on average; I managed to go above average again and pull four of them.

The final insert is called Fire Baseball and also drops once in every eight packs of a hobby box. It’s a 15-card set, and I was able to find four of them.
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Topps ends another successful run with its flagship product. On a topic not quite relevant to the update series — but I am going to mention it anyway — it’s too late to give advice for next year’s No. 1 card for the 2017 Series 1 set. After all, the contest held by Topps for fans ended in October. However, I’d seek an election recall and replace whatever won with a team photo of the Chicago Cubs. Heck, after 108 years, they deserve to enjoy that top spot.       

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about Panini America's Phoenix football, which debuted this month:
www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/paninis-football-presence-rises-with-debut-of-phoenix/​

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about an auction held by SCP Auctions that will include four Babe Ruth items from the family of the Bambino: 

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/babe-ruth-uniform-from-worlds-fair-promo-tour-put-on-block-by-scp-auctions/