Ghost Of Honus

If you ever collected baseball cards, there are a few you desire more than most. Certainly at the top of your list is the 1952 Topps #311, Mickey Mantle, rookie card from that particular baseball card company. From that same series, #407, Eddie Mathews’ rookie card is also a desirable piece of cardboard. The 1954 Bowman #66A, Ted Williams, is an important card. But after you get past the modern era, there is one that is called the ‘Holy Grail’ of baseball cards…the T-206 Honus Wagner card. Recently a graded (PSA 5 tobacco card)  marked in excellent condition sold for $2.1 million.

Baseball card collecting has long been called the penny stock market. With the latest Wagner sale, it appears it takes 21 million pennies to own it. Baseball card collecting is alive and well.

What makes the Honus T-206 card so valuable? Legend has it that the printing of the tobacco card was stopped when Honus declared that he didn’t smoke and that he didn’t want the kids who admired ballplayers to think smoking was good for them. Imagine: one of the stars of all baseball at the time stood up to the establishment and declared smoking was not good for you way back in 1909? You’ve gotta love a guy like that. Sweet Caporal cigarettes (‘The Standard for Years’) stopped printing the cards and thus created a shortage of the little gems. Or so the story goes.

The continuation of that story is for another time and another place. Autograph collecting is alive as well. Imagine getting a ball signed by Mantle, Mathews or Williams. Now imagine a ball being signed by Honus. After the story of the T-206 card being sold, Nathan Bernstein of Chicago wrote an interesting tale of his life experience with the great Mr. Wagner. He wrote that in 1938 or 1938, his father took him to Wrigley Field for his first Major League baseball game. It must have been a day filled with anticipation, joy and total wonderment. Imagine walking into Wrigley, the park then only twenty some years old, and seeing the magic of the field in front of you, the field where your heroes walked and played the game you loved so much. There were the Waner brothers for the dreaded Pirates from Pittsburgh. And there was the man…now a coach for the Pirates, Honus Wagner himself.

Bernstein wrote, ” after the game Wagner descended the clubhouse steps in street clothes. My father handed me a pencil and the scorecard and said, ‘that bow-legged man is the great Honus Wagner. Go over to him and ask him for his autograph’.” That’s what fathers did back in the day when they didn’t want to appear childlike and ask for an autograph himself. They sent the kid even though the autograph was the dream of the father’s youth.

When Bernstein got to the big man, “Wagner’s reply to me was a sarcastic “I don’t know how to write kid.” And he walked away.

The Ghost of Honus must have been with Bernstein for a time because his story didn’t stop there. He wrote, “In 1944 a fellow printer of my dad went home to Pittsburgh on vacation. When he returned to Chicago he gave my father a Forbes Field Pirates/Phillies scorecard autographed in pencil by Honus Wagner and Pittsburgh blooper-ball pitcher, Rip Sewell. In 1985, I had the scorecard appraised at $350. I was told that the appraisal would have been higher if Wagner had used a pen instead of a pencil.”

What this appraiser failed to realize was that few people went to the ballpark with a fountain pen in those days. As Bernstein noted “1944 was prior to the introduction of ball point pens.”

The Ghost of Honus. Did he really tell the tobacco company to stop the printing of the cards because he didn’t smoke? Was he really that surly in refusing a kid his autograph? All we know for sure is that someone captured the ghost and for 21 million pennies, has him locked up in a plastic covering showing Wagner, Pittsburg (no ‘h’), in his resplendent heroic youth as the greatest baseball player of his time in magnificent form in his grey flannels.

Play Ball!

The Chase For #1

We are in that lull in time that happens each year when the sun is low in the Southern horizon, casting long shadows at midday toward the North. It’s a clean light, a sharp light that bodes hope of the chase which is about to begin. It is the chase for the #1, that first card in the newest Topps baseball card set for the coming year. Who will it be? Arguments are bound to develop.

To be sure, everyone has a favorite #1. The little appreciated #1 on the ’51 Topps Red set was Yogi Berra. On the more valuable ’51 Topps Blue set, Eddie Yost was #1. While many would argue that the ’51 Topps edition was not a card set but rather a game, most consider the ’51 Topps Red & Blue sets as the first Topps baseball card sets. The world-famous ’52 Topps set had one of the most valuable cards leading off that year’s collection. The Andy Pafko card today is of considerable value. As Topps was based in the East, New York teams usually got the #1 card. Pafko was then with the Dodgers.  The next year, 1953, another Dodger was #1, Jackie Robinson.

In 1954, Ted Williams was not only the #1 card but also #250, the last card in the deck. Little doubt that ‘The Kid’ was the star hero returning from the Korean War.

However, one of my favorite #1s was the first card in the 1955 Topps card set, one James Lamar Rhodes. It was one of the under appreciated baseball card sets ever produced. It was also one of the most classic baseball card sets ever produced. It was the first horizontal card sets with a head shot of the player, along with the nickname first name on the card and an action art drawing along with the players signature and the team’s logo. For the record, “Dusty” Rhodes played for the New York Giants and was one of the many heroes of the ’54 Giants’ World Series victory over the Cleveland Indians.

The 1955 Tops set was spectacular in many ways. It was the smallest set Topps ever produced in the standard size issues. It contained 206  cards but was numbered to 210. It is believed that four cards were pulled at the last moment to avoid legal issues. One of the biggest names of the day that was missing was that of Stan Musial, who had signed with the rival Bowman card and gum company.

But the #1 card was always the most chased. On the back of the card were all the stats that could propel you through the cold days of winter, allowing you to wait for that first wisp of spring that would occur when the first familiar voice of the your favorite team’s play-by-play announcer broadcast that first spring training game in the warm climes of Florida. Now you could know as much as that announcer. You had all the facts at your finger tips. It was right there…on the back of the card. Height: 6′. Weight: 180. Bats: Left. Throws: Right. Home: Deatsville, Ala. Born: May 13, 1927. He had been in 82 games the previous year, was at bat 184 times. He scored 31 runs and had 56 hits, with 7 doubles, 3 triples and 15 home runs while driving in 50 RBI. He hit .341.

This was the bible of baseball, the stats of life. And every kid could own this amazing encyclopedia of information by merely putting down a penny and having that light green, red and white wrapper in your hands with the words “Topps, Bubble Gum, 1 cent and Baseball across the front. “Buy Bazooka the Chew of Champions” emblazoned across the side of the pack assured you that you were now in the hunt and the dream of a great season floated in your head while a smile came across your face. Could this pack have the  #1 in it?

Play Ball!

The Pasteboard Era of Legendary Charlie Silvera

It was a nice day. Sun was shining. Temperature wasn’t too bad. I was examining the yard when a neighbor asked if I would come over to their house in a day or two to look at some baseball cards he and his wife had collected. The neighbor was wondering what to do with them and how to sell them. As one who has collected the ‘poor man’s stock market’ material for years, I said I would. The day came and I dropped over.

When I sat down and began taking them out of their containers, the anxious rush of childhood enveloped me once again, full of anticipation that the next card would be that of the ‘big one’, Mickey himself. Naturally I want through the 1952 Topps first. And there it was.

The one card that nobody ever wanted to see in their pack, the pack that cost them a nickel which was everything in the world at that time, was that of one Charles Anthony Ryan Silvera, better know as Charlie Silvera. On this card was a brilliant yellow background behind the portrait of the back up catcher for Yogi Berra of the famed New York Yankees. For much of that summer of my youth, to avoid the Silvera card was the task. Every pack that was bought would be carefully peeled away at the back, slowly removing the folded wax paper wrapper to make sure we did not tear the wrapper, damage any of the cards and get the flat wide stick of sugary bubble gum and make sure it didn’t leave a stain on the card.

Then we would look at the first card.

Invariably it would be someone whom few had ever heard about except for his family and friends. This is where Charlie Silvera usually came into our lives. During the course of a year you could end up with five, six or seven Charlie Silvera’s which had absolutely no value in ‘kiddom’. You could only hope that there was a newbie who would move into the neighborhood and not know a thing about the value of these pasteboard wonders. Or, you hoped that a kid would come along and want to trade a card, any card, for a Silvera which he would usually put in the spokes of his bike, secured by a clothes pin to the front bike fork, and create a loud mechanical sound that represented a mad drummer banging at a  faster and faster rhythm against a metal drum the faster the kid peddled his bike.

Silvera was omnipresent. Two kids could go to the corner store and buy two packs of Topps. When they came out and unwrapped their packs, you had a very good chance of each pulling the dreaded Silvera yellow background card from their packs. Ugh……..

Silvera killed us that summer. Topps must have printed 10 Silvera’s for every star player card.

But it wasn’t the first summer he had done that. The 1950 Bowman packs contained the first sighting of Charlie Silvera. Card #96 was his true rookie card. In the 1951 Bowman set, he was missing. But the 1952 Bowman set contained a horizontal beauty. On #197, there he was in a throwing position, ball in his right hand cocked and ready to throw while his big pillow glove on his left hand sighted the way. With his cap on backwards and a stern, square-jawed portrait, it is one of the better looking cards of that era. But, it was a Charlie Silvera card and not that of Mickey, or Yogi or Whitey or ‘The Scooter’, ‘Willie’ or ‘Duke’.

That same year he made his way into one of the two greatest baseball card sets of all time…the 1952 Topps. (Along with the ’52 Topps, the 1957 Topps is one of the most popular Topps sets ever produced.) In fact, he was in every early Topps set from 1952 (#168), 1953 (#242), 1954 (#96), 1955 (188) to 1957 (#255) with the exception of the 1956 set.

Charlie Silvera played for part of 10 season in the Major Leagues hitting .282. However, he only played in 227 games. But he has two things he can tell his grandchildren: he hit one home run. And, although he was on six World Series teams, he only played in the 1949 classic and faced Preacher Roe of the Brooklyn Dodgers twice without a hit. But, he played in the Classic.

So there I was, once again flipping through memories of youthful dreams past, spouting off various statistics to my neighbors about the cards that I knew so well as I was flipping them over and WHAM!

There it was again, Charlie Silvera’s 1957 card, his last. Will this dreaded curse of Silvera never end?

It was a different place in a different time. Here’s to you, Charlie. Hope today in San Francisco you experience nothing but pleasure. I can only say that now. When I came across your image in those glorious days on the front steps of Lincoln Avenue unwrapping that treasured pack of baseball cards with Snookie, my next door baseball friend, seeing you was a dreaded reminder that we were all another pack away from collecting a quiniela of Silvera cards.

Play Ball!