Baseball Nation: All Posts by Jim Baker

The gang's all here

2013-05-24T18:20:51Z

Here they are; the 19 Hartland statues from the 1958-1963 period. No hunting, no searching, no longing in the dark - you can have Mickey, the Babe, Yogi, Stan the Man, Hammerin' Hank, Teddy Ballgame and all the rest in one shot. Of course, you're going to miss a few house or rent payments to get them, but sacrifices must be made. You might even end up homeless. But so what? Picture yourself living under a bridge with your little, plastic friends lined up next to you as you listen to the trains pass overhead. Yup, you made the right decision!

Baseball robot took our jobs!

2013-05-24T02:15:17Z

Baseball robot wants your job, human player person - and he's willing to play without a C.B.A.

Follow Jim Baker on Twitter @jimbaker1066

Honus Wagner says hello

2013-05-22T13:01:09Z

You don't see many of these come up on ebay (or anywhere else), so if you want to own the one baseball card that's known to even people who hate baseball and old stuff, here is your chance.

Understand, though, that the seller has already turned down 30 offers. This tells us that it's priced too high for its condition. A better gambit would have been to start the bidding low and let it build from there, creating a bidding frenzy. I've seen that strategy work on high-price items such as cars, so there's no reason it wouldn't work here.

If we learned nothing else from the collapse of the baseball card pricing structure in the early ‘90s it's that the market is the market is the market. You can't wish an item's value into existence. The people will always tell you how much something is worth with their wallets.

When everything cost a penny

2013-05-21T12:01:35Z

Why, 50 years ago, everything cost a penny - not just the pack of baseball cards that came in the 1963 wrapper you see here. A gallon of gas was a penny. So was a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs. If you broke your arm playing baseball with your pals, the doctor would come right to the field and set it for a penny. Of course, there were no cell phones then, so you'd have to call him from a "pay phone" - but it only cost a penny. General admission to a big league ballgame was a penny. Hot dogs at said ballgame were a penny. If you lived in a city with a subway system, you could get to the ballpark for a penny. Girls would sell kisses for a penny a piece. You could buy a brand new puppy for a penny. Blue jeans - or "dungarees" as they were more properly called - were a penny per leg. Newspapers were a penny and if there'd been an internet back then it would have cost just a penny to read something like this. Everything cost a penny.

Mr. Ball-in-Play

2013-05-19T13:57:17Z

Sure you know about jinxes, but have you ever actually seen one? Well, now you have, thanks to the inspired cover artist of this 1943 issue of True Sport Picture Stories.

By the time this issue appeared, Buddy Hassett was already in the Navy and, as it would turn out, had played his last in the majors. His career was marked by one notable skill: the ability to not strike out. In 1936, he set the rookie record for fewest strikeouts in a season and he still owns it. Because he also didn't hit many home runs, his career BIP average is only 10 points over his career batting average (.302 to .292). That's not a record, but it puts him in the company of famous non-whiffers like Joe Sewell (only 7 points different) and Lloyd Waner (8 points).

The Green Hornet's bent perspective

2013-05-19T06:34:05Z

The only way the perspective on the cover of this 1947 Green Hornet comic makes any sense is if they're the watching the game on a large-screen television in a room that has steel columns, a vendor and an armed bookie. Since there were no large-screen TVs in 1947, we are forced to assume instead that the artist skipped drawing class on the day they were teaching perspective.

When a car was your reward

2013-05-18T04:21:56Z

Sal Maglie, who didn't get a real shot at the major leagues until he was 33 years old, went 59-18 for the New York Giants between 1950 and 1952. When you did stuff like that in the old days, they'd give you a Cadillac. Now they would give you a salary large enough to purchase an entire Cadillac dealership.

When cartoonists ruled the land

2013-05-17T02:59:50Z

There was a time when most every big-city paper in the land had a sports cartoonist. One of them was Jo Metzer, who worked in Chicago and Philadelphia. And, for about the price of two movie tickets, you can own one of his original baseball drawings, the caption for which reads: "Maybe umpire Bill Klem does ‘call them as he sees ‘em' - but I SEE them as I CALL ‘em!"