Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1162: Coping and Collecting

Episode Date: January 12, 2018

Ben Lindbergh talks to SB Nation’s Grant Brisbee about the Mets’ Jay Bruce signing and finding ways to engage with baseball and keep the content coming during an excruciatingly slow offseason, then brings on Forbes contributor David Seideman to talk about trends in baseball memorabilia collecting, the enduring appeal of historic relics and signatures, and […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1162 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. My name is Ben Lindberg. I work for The Ringer. I am not joined today by Jeff Sullivan, who is on vacation. He will actually be back next week. Later in this episode, I will be talking to David Seidemann about baseball memorabilia and collecting and autographs and signatures, which is one way that I am coping with this awful, awful off-season with zero baseball news. The other way I am coping is by having my first guest on, Grant Brisby of SB Nation. Hello, Grant. Welcome back. Thank you so much for having me on. It's a delight to be back. Yes. I'm sorry if I'm taking you away from any slack debates about whether soup is a

beverage, which I understand is what was keeping you busy yesterday. Yeah, no, we got important things. Someone just dropped in a picture of Patrick Stewart wearing a wig for his Captain Picard edition. Very, very important. Is Patrick Stewart a beverage? He's no more a beverage than soup in my opinion. He's a sandwich. He's a sandwich. I mean, you could make him into a beverage, I guess. We could all be beverages under certain circumstances, but for me, soup is food. It's not a beverage. I don't know where you came down on that one. We probably shouldn't even get into it. Why I'm having you here is to discuss your own coping strategies for this extremely slow offseason.

We had a hint of baseball news this week. We've got arbitration news going back and forth, everyone's favorite type of offseason baseball news. But you have been in the baseball content minds for many a year. Can you remember any time that was tougher to come up with articles every day than this one? No, this is it. This is the toughest offseason. I'm going to pause real quick and note that clam chowder is a smoothie.

But I'm going to move on. It always gets tough around January or February to come up with relevant, fresh content. But this offseason, it's like you know that the content is there waiting for you. Know there's going to be a J.D. Martinez signing. You know you're going to have thoughts. You know that there's going to be a Hugh Darvish signing. You know you're going to have thoughts. It's not like past offseasons where these guys have signed already and you're just sort of spitting your wheels.

But I mean I honestly – I have a list that's like 30 deep of things I want to get to in the off season. So when things die off completely, that's actually fine for me because I've got my list of stupid things I want to write about that I feel guilty writing about in June or July or something. Like last year I wrote an oral history about Tom Brady on the Expos. It was completely stupid. But that's like the kind of stuff I want to get to in January or something. Like last year, I wrote an oral history about Tom Brady on the Expos, and it was completely stupid. But that's the kind of stuff I want to get to in January or February. But now it feels like I don't want to start any project that big, because any second now, JD Martinez is going to sign, or not. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, it looked like there was going to be a Garrett Cole trade briefly earlier this week. I was at MLB Network at the time and there were like

klaxons going off and lights flashing. This is it, people. This is what we've been training for, actual transaction news. Oh, no, it's a false rumor. Never mind. I've got 800 words on that right now. It's just sitting in the drafts. I had some hot takes. No one's ever going to get to read them. So you wrote about the ERAs that have never existed in baseball history. Was that one of the ones that was on your list for a while? Yep. That's a very stupid idea I had in August or something.

And then said, well, I set reminders for myself on Slack. And like January 1st, all of a sudden a Slack minder will pop up and say, hey, write about the ERAs that have never existed. And I'll think, man, that's a terrible idea. And like three days later, okay, yeah, I'll do that. I got the choice. So is there a most interesting ERA that has never existed? I think so. I think that there is, let's see if I can get the exact one. It's 1.05. Yeah. So you have something from 1.00 all the way up to 6.74, except for 1.05. And it's like a doable ERA. So that's the ERA we should all be looking for this year. Some reliever giving up. Boy, I can't remember exactly what it is. It's eight runs and 68 and two thirds innings. let's do it sounds very doable there's yeah there's like hundreds and hundreds of relievers out there you'd think just like a monkey's typing on a typewriter sort of situation

we'd eventually get a reliever with a 1.05 era that's gonna happen exactly i was i was surprised because i thought there would be like one like i don't know what i was thinking i was thinking there'd be like a one like 4.39 that's never existed just i don't know why i just thought there'd be one kind of traditional sounding era that had never existed. Just, I don't know why. I just thought there'd be one kind of traditional sounding ERA that had never existed. Uh, but it turns out like they were all taken before flight, like before the Wright brothers, they were like all taken. Like if that's how quickly it just, it all filled up. Uh, so you had to go to the extremes to get anything that has never existed. Yeah. There's been a lot of baseball. So one thing you did, which is smart, is what Jeff did. You went on vacation. So that ate up some time. Did you go anywhere fun? Did you do anything nice? I went to Disneyland. So it's not a relaxing vacation.

Didn't go very far. It's actually very, very stressful and sleep-depriving. But I did – I mean this – I can segue into baseball content because I was noticing all the baseball caps that were there. And it's number one, Dodgers. Number two, Giants. Number three, like Tigers. Number four, Diamondbacks. And then you had to like get all the way down to like maybe eight or nine for Angels. to like maybe eight or nine for angels. And I was really perplexed about this. But I think what that means is that the locals just know to stay away from the last week of the holiday Disneyland presentation. They've seen it. They don't need to go back when there's a, you know, I think there's

80,000 people there per day. They're cool. They'll go back in February. So I'm not going to extrapolate too much, but that's my baseball related Disneyland content. Yeah. So then you had, let's see, you crossed one day off the schedule just reviewing your best stories of 2017. Always my best, always my favorite. My favorite subject is me. Yeah. Then the most popular genre of baseball article in this off season with no baseball is probably why there's no news. So you had one of those, or at least one of those, right? Everyone, in fact, this has been going on for so long that we've all written that article multiple times because it looked like maybe it was because everyone was waiting for Otani and Stanton

and then a month goes by and nothing happens even after they have their moves happen. And so then we can all write another article about the causes of the slow off season. So you did get at least one of those in there. I think. I don't know if I did. Yeah, you've got the new CBA and fake salary cap makes baseball's offseason less fun. That was December 21st. It's close to opining on why this is happening. So that gets you through a day there.

Must have been a really memorable article. There's always the hall of fame, which I don't know if you're as sick of talking about the hall of fame as, as a lot of people are, but you have gone to that. Well, you you went to that most recently at the MLB page. You've done a couple of those. So when all else fails, at least the hall of fame ballot is there for us. Hall of Fame in January is sort of, I hate it and I love it at the same time. Because I actually, I'm not tired of talking about the Hall of Fame.

I really do enjoy sharing my thoughts with people about the Hall of Fame. I don't know why. Like I get the arguments and when I talk to Jeff and he just laughs at me because he has no interest in the Hall of Fame. And he's just absolutely none. But I, you know, I'm still kind of getting it.

I don't know, I'm a nerd like that. On Twitter, funny baseball reference names has been big for you. Not that that ever goes out of style really, but that has kind of come up clutch during these days when there's no baseball news. Absolutely. That, that came out of the, the ERA search because I had it sorted by date and someone later tweeted at me exactly how i could have done it uh a lot quicker with a spreadsheet export from fancraft but i just did it manually in play index just going up one at a time and it was all sorted by date and that that meant that all these 1900 1910s 1920s names came up and they are just fabulous i mean we need to have baseball players these days that are like, you know, candy bar Goomba, you know, they just have these great names at the front. They're all schoolboy. They're all, you know, umbrella face. I mean, they're all,

I want that sort of creativity or lack of creativity. I don't know which one it is, but I wish that a little bit more of it existed right now. I mean, you've been unearthing these for probably a decade at this point are there still surprises left for you did you come across any new ones always i mean it's uh this one was was filled with them i just i i don't know where these players i think i think they're kind of like slipping new players in just for like you know like a dlc this downloadable content, just to keep the fans coming back. But yeah, I was blown away by Rip the Winkle.

I'm assuming his nickname was Rip because his last name sounded like Van Winkle. Right. It's just a dumb name. There's Phil Bedgood. That's just a great name when you're checking into a motel and don't want to be found out. great like name when you're checking into a motel and don't want to be found out uh and then the i mean i've you know like any uh red-blooded american i've searched for the name dick of course reference over and over and over and over again um because i am i am nine uh but i've never at least i don't remember seeing dick braggins dick braggins is is an all-time uh just kind of

like wow he's he's wow, he's very confident. Yeah. I have just found a second, why is this off-season so slow article that you wrote and already forgot from December 28th. There aren't enough rebuilding teams in baseball, and it's one of the reasons the off-season is so slow. Oh, yeah. Everyone was talking about that one. That's right. It was a big deal on the internet for that article.

Yeah. You wrote one this week that I feel like is a template that you could probably reuse a few more times if you need to. Lance Lynn really shouldn't be looking for a job in January. I mean, you can just Control-F Lance Lynn and put in GD Martinez, you Darvish, whoever is still a free agent, and you're golden. Right. Martinez, you Darvish, whoever is still a free agent and, and you're right. Right. No, that is, I mean, that's, that's, um, that sort of a template that I use every off season for, uh, by free agent predictions, which are always wrong. But it's basically like, I can't use, here's my excuse to talk about this guy, um, as my headline. So I, I make it a

prediction thing. Uh, but you know, Lance Lynn's good. He's good. He's very good. And he's just, you know, no, I don't know. No one really cares. And then you've also always got the Giants, of course, to either fall back on or have as an additional millstone around your neck that you have to produce content for. So you've now got projections for the 2018 Giants. You've got the Zips projections out. So that's a post right there. You've got the Zips projections out. So that's a post right there. You've got arbitration. You've got the Jay Bruce deal, who was a Giants target, I suppose,

and someone the Giants offered less money to than the Mets. Do you have any thoughts, actual baseball thoughts on an actual baseball move that was made? I know we're out of practice. We're rusty with transaction analysis here. You mean an actual move that was made? I know we're out of practice. We're rusty with transaction analysis here. You mean an actual move that was made? Yeah. Well, Jay Bruce, I mean, do you have thoughts on that? I'll ask you.

So they've got Cespedes. They've got Nimmo. They've got Conforto. Now they've got Bruce. What are they going to do? I think of a penny-pinching team, I thought Jay Bruce was a little weird. It does seem strange.

Right. I wouldn't have put that number one on my list of priorities for the Mets. Jay Bruce, bringing Jay Bruce back. I guess he can play first if Dom Smith is not good at playing first. But it does seem like the Mets have maybe prioritized defense and outfield defense and who should actually play where a little less than most teams have in the past year. It doesn't seem like that's all that high on their list of concerns, actually, putting people in places where they have played before or played well before. Or in a position to succeed.

That's absolutely right. I mean, because when they signed Bruce, I mean, I did this about five times. I went back and I looked. I said, man, I guess I forgot, but Brandon Nimmo must have had a rough year. And I went back and I looked I said man I I guess I forgot but Brandon Nimmo must have had a rough year and I go back and I look and now he was fine and I got that's you know a conforto he must have had a rough year go back look he was fine yeah he got hurt obviously but you know yeah right you know the overall numbers made you say okay this guy can can hit that's it in some capacity um so for a team like the mets who aren't going to

spend a whole lot and that's just their mo that's that's the will ponds that's the the hand that they've dealt themselves that just was an odd move so that is my baseball hot take of the of the day yeah yeah the mets made an odd move hot take there brisby you're really sticking your neck out there yeah well i mean that was the most exciting exciting actual baseball news of the week, I guess, other than some weird off the field stories that surfaced, I suppose. But it was like Miguel Gonzalez and Jay Bruce staying with the teams they had already played for, which is never as fun to write about as someone going somewhere else. But was Giants fandom disappointed that Jay Bruce would

not be fitted for whatever you call a Giants uniform? I don't think that I have a really good pulse on like general Giants fandom. I think I've created my own little bubble of people who listen to my opinions and sort of consider my opinions not first or over their own opinions, but like they're attracted to someone who might think like myself. So it's sort of consider my opinions not first or over their own opinions, but they're attracted to someone who might think like myself. So it's sort of a self-repeating cycle. So I didn't really think Jay Bruce was a good fit for the Giants just because he's left-handed. He's got one tool, and that tool left-handed power is the one tool you really want to stay away from at AT&T Park. So if he doesn't have that one tool, he's like a legitimately bad player.

So I thought it was a poor use of resources. And it sounds like the Giants weren't that interested unless he came super, super cheap. But I did get responses from guys going like, fire Evans, like the guy wanted to play for the Giants and they couldn't even get him. So there is this undercurrent of people who looked and got seduced by the dingers uh i think bruce would have been fine he would have been an upgrade uh definitely i mean the giants i don't remember the exact numbers but they had 13 players play outfield for them and they all combined for negative three war and so that's including branded belt and if you remove him it's negative six and like that's really hard to do. It is. If you get Jay Bruce, he's going to be imperfect at the same time.

He would probably be much better than in-house options or what they had last year. It's just a matter of finding someone who's a little bit better fit. All right. Well, are there any strategies, tactics we haven't covered yet that you as an experienced veteran baseball scribe are going to rely on in the coming days and weeks if nothing continues to happen? No, I mean, I do kind of get a list going during the season and in the off season, I sort of plug away at them. I have something coming at some point. This is my Chinese democracy. This is something that I'm going to work on for like

the next three years. But it's something on superheroes. And so it's comic book related. And it's clearly the stupidest thing I've ever done. And I mean, I say that a lot. And like, haha, it's me being self-effacing. But no, literally the dumbest thing. It makes people that I work with mad. So I'm working on that. I'm very excited about it. Well, that's good. I mean, that's the best strategy of all. If you can manage it is not to write about baseball at all, which is what I've been doing

for the last months or so. But it's not a strategy that's available to everyone, depending on where they work and what they're supposed to be doing. So at earlier times in my career, I would not have been able to do that. So it's tough if you're the editor of the MLB page of SB Nation. There's only so much leeway you have there. But I'm glad that you are breaking those bonds for this upcoming story. I'm looking forward to it.

Oh, and the other thing I've got is I got an SNES Classic. And I had it modded. And so I have all the, you know, whatever games I want, I put on there. And it turns out that there's like 20 different baseball games for the Super Nintendo. Yeah. And so my idea was I would kick off work and go, sorry, I got to play video game baseball. And, you know, sort of like come up with a ranking or a review. But I just, I don't feel comfortable doing that because I'll get into it.

And then JD Martinez will sign and Hugh Darvish will sign. So, you know, I, I don't think I'll ever get to that because it turns out that a lot of these baseball games aren't good anyway. So we'll see if that ever materializes. All right. Well, I know you've got to pick up your kid. I guess, uh, kids are still keeping you busy even when baseball is not, that's the one demand on your time that never goes away. Nope. Nope. Nope. I'm actually, you know, I kind of like January now that you, now that you mentioned it, it's not that stressful. Yeah. All right. Well, you have gotten us about 20 minutes closer to opening day here, for which I am very grateful. And you've gotten me 20 minutes closer to Jeff coming back. I'm

really hopeful that during his time trekking around Patagonia or wherever he is, he's just been brainstorming baseball topics the whole time instead of focusing on natural wonders or scenery. And he's going to come back on Monday and say, I got this for the next three weeks. Don't worry, Ben. I've got tons to talk about. I don't think that's going to happen. He's been riding roller coasters at Dollywood.

You know that. All that mountain stuff is a ruse. Yeah. Well, half his staff has been hired by baseball teams since he left or has been hired from other sites to work with him. So he's going to come back and everyone in the break room is going to be someone he doesn't recognize from when he left. So I hope he's prepared for that. Little known fact, I've never been recruited by a baseball team. Isn't that odd? Isn't that odd? Well, after this ERA story, I mean, that's going to change things, I would think. All right, Grant, thank you very much. You can find his Sisyphean efforts to produce baseball content during times of no baseball at SBNation.com slash MLB, as well as McCovey Chronicles. Thank you, Grant. Thank you very much. and collecting in some of the greatest and most unlikely finds in recent years,

as well as the trends you should know about if you're thinking of buying any baseball memorabilia, or maybe if you have any stuck in a sock drawer somewhere. Back after the thematically appropriate music. Oh collector, I'm so sorry You had the notion I was rolling In the money No, I'm sorry, but I'll pay you no worries. So I'm joined now by David Seidman, who is a contributor for Forbes, as well as many other places covering and collecting in the sports world, and is graciously joining me today despite having a head cold.

Hello, David. Thank you for coming on. Thank you very much, Ben, for having me. Yeah, so before we get into specific pieces, I wanted to ask you about your background and career, because you were at Audubon Magazine for almost 20 years covering the environment, and then for the past few years, you've been covering the sports memorabilia market and collecting. So how did that pivot come about? That's a really good question. While I was at Audubon, and even before that, I had been freelancing for hobby publications. And I started writing out, actually, I started

writing out on sports memorabilia and collecting for Time Magazine, where I used to work in the late 80s and early 90s. I wrote a few pieces for them. And then for Sports Illustrated and did always maintain my freelance work on the sports collecting world, even though my number one passion was the environment. Well, I was an editor at Audubon. And after leaving Audubon four years ago, I decided that the environment was really well covered. There were a lot of great sites out there covering the environment, but there weren't too many people focusing on sports collecting and memorabilia, which was surprising because it's a multi-billion dollar industry. Right. But a lot of fascinating stories and sub-stories.

So I'm pretty much one of the very few mainstream journalists covering it on a regular basis. And it seems as if you have largely covered baseball with some digressions. Is that because that is your main interest as a fan? Or is it because the baseball memorabilia market is just, you know, because of baseball's long and rich history just pulls you toward those stories or is just a more lucrative and interesting market overall. Yes, actually, that's very wise of you for all those reasons. I mean, first, I am a number one baseball fan, but also in the sports memorabilia world, baseball is still 80% of the business, particularly for vintage memorabilia. And then you have football, maybe 10%. Football and basketball are probably equally divided,

and then a little bit of hockey. But baseball, because it's our national pastime and had such a long linear history, is really where it's at. And that's why I cover it. And there are endless stories I could do. And interestingly enough, when I've done a few on other sports like football or basketball,

they haven't generated as much interest by measuring by traffic. Baseball really is what most people collect. Well, so I want to ask you about some specific stories, but before we get to that, kind of a larger philosophical question about collecting and covering collecting, you and I have just discovered that we have a lot in common. We're both from the New York area. We both studied English and history at Georgetown, but I am not really a memorabilia collector. I've never really been someone who pursued autographs or saw the appeal. And yet reading your stories, they're all

fascinating to me because they are about these rare discoveries and these fragile, tenuous links to history and their personal stories about people who have lost things and then found them again, or have some emotional significance attached to these objects. And reading those stories, I can see where the appeal lies. I don't know if I'll be out there bidding myself, but I am at least enjoying reading these stories. And I would assume that is a large part of the appeal to you in writing about them. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you very much for those kind words. Yeah, I think it does appeal. First of all, I try to use these stories

as vehicles for exploring larger social issues. And so sometimes, I mean, I don't have an agenda I'm pushing, but for example, a few weeks ago, I wrote a story about the discovery of rare contracts and paperwork from the 1890 Players League, which was an early union of baseball

players. And baseball players were exploited for many, many years until Marvin Miller came on the scene. So I like to use sports as a window into the larger world. And also there's a sentimental value of certain things. I wrote one today about a big leaguer recapturing a ball, his only extra base hit ball that someone had notated. And that ball is basically worthless, only adds value to him. And so aside from writing about a $3.1 million bonus Wagner card, I write about a ball that's worth maybe a few bucks and just to the family. And also, I think one of the things I've discovered, the biggest appeal, and it took me a while to figure this out, right? Because I've written a lot and been doing this for more than four years. But the big discoveries tend to go trend or go viral very often because it's like winning a lotto.

Everyone identifies with that. Even if they're not sports fans, they'll have an attic or a basement or a trunk or something like that. So buried away. So it's that buried treasure effect. So it's that buried treasure effect. And also, as a sports fan, I mean, I think a lot of it, and I'm a collector too, though, not nearly as high end as the stuff I write about, but it's kind of nostalgia. There's a great saying about nostalgia.

It's a matter of grammar. The present is tense and the past is perfect. And I was very, very close to my late father. We went to games. He would buy me baseball cards. My mother too. It sort of brings back your childhood fun and innocence. And plus, I will mention in my post, friends of mine I grew up with who I haven't seen in 50 years, but who bought baseball cards with me and traded them and flipped them. So it's a real fun. It's a time machine for me, too.

Yeah. Well, what's the most valuable object you own? And maybe we can say, if we can define value differently, just value on the market and value to you personally. What would be the most, well, I did buy, I did save up my pennies for a rookie Jackie Robinson card and kind of off condition. That's worth about $1,500 to $2,000. And I have actually a card about the same value from the 1880s. It was sold with cigarettes, an old judge card, and it's a player posing with a dog, a dog named Midget. Yeah, and I wrote about that one too. It has a really interesting backstory.

It's a very humorous card. But I don't have the budget to spend like tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions like some of the big big collectors so and it's also i get pleasure from buying a 10 or 15 piece too so um you don't have to be a big spender to uh enjoy the hobby right so maybe we can start with one of the stories you just alluded to the jeff ballard extra base hit baseball which uh again is is not one of the more valuable objects you've written about, although it has personal significance to him. But it's this extraordinarily unlikely story of Ballard, the former pitcher, being reunited with this ball that there's just no reason to think would have been out there somewhere.

Right. What it is, it's called, what I love about this is how much I write, I learn something. This is called, what's called a notation ball, where you write an historic event on a baseball. And one of the most valuable ones is the Mookie Wilson ball that he hit through Bill Buckner's legs in the 1986 World Series. And that changed hands. Charlie Sheen owned it at one point and it sold a few years ago for $412,000. And he signed it, this is the ball, and it was all authenticated. The ball I wrote about most recently was hit off the bat by Jeff Ballard, who at the end of his career for the Pittsburgh Pirates, he had very few at-bats in the major leagues because he played mostly with the Orioles.

And strangely enough, he hit a ground rule double into the stands and some fan notated it with all the pertinent information about the events the date the game the teams and the double and somehow no one knows why he did it it will always remain a mystery and somehow it ended up in a collection a lot of our baseballs were a friend of a friend of mine who's a pirates collector obtained it and he put it on his shelf and then around christmas time he thought it might make a nice gift to jeff ballard yeah and so one thing led to another i've been in touch with jeff ballard and i find i really love interviewing the old major leaguers because they're very they're all very kind and appreciative and i've had really had bad experiences but for him ballard told me that his eight-year-old son his oldest kid he has a five-year-old daughter too

you know didn't really believe he played Major League Baseball. He's seen the baseball cards and stuff. But now that they have this ball, he can appreciate it more. So it's kind of, you know, but I love about it. A lot of this stuff is really mysterious. I mean, again, why anyone would make such a notation like that? The odds are against even the fan realizing that this was like Jeff Ballard's first extra base hit or something. It's such a...

Yeah, he actually looked up his only extra base hit. Uh-huh. So I think he was either 5 or 6 for 13 with the Pirates. And then he told me, when you start peeling the layers, actually he was a great hitter at Stanford. He actually batted regularly for the Stanford team. And then when he was with the Pirates, the manager, Jim Lewin, thought so highly of his hitting that a couple of times he told him

to get ready to pinch hit. And not only that, but Ballard told me he batted with the regulars rather than the pitchers. So he batted every day in batting practice. So that's kind of cool. Also, I mean, to answer your question, I mean, if you have, the great thing also about the hobby

is you read mostly about the really valuable stuff, but it fits every budget. And you can buy a really cool game-used bat using the major leagues by an everyday player, an average player, for like $50. So there's a huge discrepancy between the $2 million Babe Ruth bat and the $50 bat used by Kurt Bavacqua. Can you tell me about the process of authenticating items obviously there are fakes out there and people trying to take advantage of other people maybe not with jeff ballard's extra base head because they're not going to make much money off that anyway but i mean are there certain objects that well you have written about how the internet has made it easier to document items and provide a backstory for items, which is really fascinating, too.

But there must be certain objects that are just very difficult to distinguish real from fake. Yeah. And it takes years of experience. And the first most commonly forged thing is autographs. And there are about three or four autograph companies that independently grade items and authenticate them. And those are called PSA, DNA is one, JSA, SGC, and Beckett. You can look these all up and send your piece in there. But I would really caution listeners not to spend big money on autographs without it being authenticated. Because the last thing you want is to buy a Babe Ruth or Mickey Mantle, which are very commonly forged, and discover they're worthless.

The bats also have a whole authentication service. And there's a recent Pond Star. I don't know how recent it was. Maybe it was a rerun. There was a big Pond Star show about a famous Babe Ruth bat. Oh, from the called shot in 32. And the guy, Rick Stevens, will fly it all the way out to California. But if he had just looked at the knob, he could have been able to tell that this was never used in a game because there's certain characteristics of a bag.

But anyone buying, spending big money should always have authentication. And you raise a good point. One of the great things about, I have a game-used baseball glove by UL Washington, an infielder from the Royals. That's one of my favorite pieces. I paid $200 for it on eBay. I matched it with his photos. And no one's going to forge a Jeff Ballard, a Kirk DeVos, or UL Washington. It's not worth it.

There's no money in it. So you know it's genuine. Now, the other thing you have to be really careful of, and actually, I'm going to be writing an article about this soon, is buying ungraded baseball cards. That's what's called raw. Usually now, baseball cards. That's what's called raw. Usually now baseball cards are very liquid. They're almost like stocks and bonds where they're graded independently. They're put in a loose side slab and they're given a number from one to 10,

assessing their grade. And the more, obviously in the better condition they are, they're worth a lot more money. But if you buy them raw, there are slight imperfections you might not be able to see. There could be tears or there could even be altered like with a razor blade to make the corner sharper, which makes them look nicer. So really be very careful unless you're buying a low gray card. I bought a nice 1956 Topps Jackie Robinson for 75 bucks. And again, it has a few wrinkles in it and the corners are soft, but no one's going to go fake that. But the higher up you go, you have to be really careful about getting authentication for bats, cards, and just about everything else. Yeah. I guess a clever forger could bank on someone's belief that, well, no one's going to fake that, right? And you could just have a more modest price ceiling,

but manage to crank out enough items that you could take advantage of people thinking, well, there's no margin in faking this. But if you fake enough items like that, maybe there is. Well, actually, really, you know, the big, like there are big five. The Wayne Gretzky rookie card is forged very often. Michael Jordan's rookie card from the 80s is very often. And you see these floating around eBay, too. Mickey Mantle's rookie card from the 52 Tops. You see a lot of those.

And they even age them. They wrinkle them. They put them through in the washing machine or whatever they do, but they make them look, you know, it can be really hard to tell. And what these guys do, these grading companies guys,

that's all they do for a living. And they have microscopes, electron microscopes, and they're very familiar with the paper and the look of it, so they know what they're doing. So, yeah, be really careful on eBay, too, because there's a lot of that going on there, too,

no matter how hard they try to clamp down on it. So the story of yours that drew my attention to your other work was something that you had published in Atlas Obscura last month about one man's search for Moonlight Graham autographs. And of course, everyone knows Moonlight Graham, who played one game in the majors, one inning in the majors in 1905, and then was immortalized later in Shoeless Joe, the book, and Field of Dreams, the movie. And so evidently, there's quite a strong secondary market for Moonlight Graham autographs because there aren't a lot out there. But you found this guy who managed to find a bunch more using, or at least one more for now, using an unorthodox approach, which was very clever.

Yeah, it was very clever. And that really drew a lot of attention. And I have to do an update on it. Basically, he's a construction worker in Pennsylvania between jobs, and he loved Moonlight Graham. Moonlight Graham is one of the very few rare autographs of a player who, you know, basically lousy, didn't cut it. He appeared in just, as you said, one inning.

Actually, it was interesting. So anyway, this guy's a Moonlight Graham collector, and he played for the New York Giants in 1906. And a couple of my readers didn't even realize that there was a real Moonlight Graham. They thought he was fictional from the movie. I thought you shouldn't assume anything. But his autograph, first of all, all autographs from the 1800s and early 1900s are extremely rare because autograph collecting really didn't become big till the 1920s. There were team signed balls, but individual signed items are very rare. So anyway, this guy hatched the brilliant idea of buying yearbooks from Moonlight Graham's hometown.

Moonlight Graham became a doctor in his hometown, and he became the town doctor and the school doctor. So this savvy collector put one and one together and came up with this brilliant idea to buy the yearbook. But the trick was not to alert the seller. Do you have so-and-so? Because the seller could easily look and then realize they're sitting in a gold mine. So he bought about 30 of these yearbooks for 20 bucks a piece. And lo and behold, one of them came and it was signed, a beautiful signature, by Moonlight Graham sometime in the 40s.

And I think there are only about a half a dozen in existence. sometime in the 40s. And I think there are only about a half a dozen in existence. Yes. And one of them is his draft card from World War I that a friend of mine found in the archives.

But they're very, very rare because, of course, he died decades ago, long before the book was written or the film was made. It's a great story. And apparently, one of the things I learned

is that Moonlight Graham got his name because he was so fast. So, interestingly enough, a friend his name because he was so fast. Interestingly enough, a friend of mine had a signed postcard. He barked to someone else. It says, The Scranton Miners. It's a team photo postcard from 1905. And it had Graham written on it.

And it turned out it was Graham's signature. It's his last name. And he had marked the postcard. He had nailed it to someone. And the seller of it didn't realize. And so this guy made several thousand dollars on the postcard. He had nailed it to someone, and the seller of it didn't realize, and so this guy made several thousand dollars on the postcard. And now there's another postcard of Moonlight Graham up in an auction right now, but not autographed. So anyway, the autographed yearbook is worth a few thousand dollars. And again, this is the fun of the hobby, that you can still make these kinds of discoveries and do it for very little money. Yeah. And is that guy still out there buying yearbooks, hoping to find more?

Yeah, he is. In fact, I didn't mention this in the article, but I have to touch base with him. Before Christmas, he had six boxes containing yearbooks, which he was waiting to open for Christmas. Again, the odds of that are still so slim. I mean, if you think about going back to high school or junior high, you rarely got the nurse or doctor's autograph. Right. He was apparently very popular with his students or kids. Yeah. Is there a larger secondary market for other players like Moonlight Graham who played for one game or one inning?

Or is it just specific to him because he's been immortalized in fiction? I'm wondering because there is a man at my grandmother's assisted living facility named Nick Testa, who, like Moonlight Graham, played one inning in the majors for the Giants, as Moonlight Graham did. This was in 1958, so he's 89 years old now. And he played one inning as a catcher. And there was a pop fly that went back to the screen and he couldn't catch it. And he was credited with an error for some reason. So he's got one inning in the majors with an error. And then he was supposed to be up, I think in the bottom of the 11th, he was due up, but the guy in front of him hit a walk-off grand slam. And so he never got in a bet.

Oh, no. That was the end of his career. So I think he and my grandma have been dating, kind of. I don't inquire too much into her life life, but it seems like they're pretty close. So I'm wondering if I should stock up on Nick Testa autographs just in case someone writes a book about him. No, generally, that's a funny question. just in case someone writes a book about him? No, generally, that's a funny question. Unless he had kept his jersey or his uniform or his cap

because those are so rare, or his glove. But generally, those guys who had a cup of coffee necessarily went on to greater things like Graham did as a doctor and some generally don't. Yeah, the guys with a cup of coffee, they're pretty... Yeah, I'm thinking of Papa Hallis, the coach of the Chicago Bears in the 30s. I forget his first name. Is it Bert Hallis or George Hallis, I think.

I think he played in the major leagues and had a cup of coffee. And then I went through a cup of coffee phase. I was even going to write a book about guys who had a cup of coffee. And I think a Supreme Court justice played one game or something. So if something like that, if they became famous in their secondary career. But it's interesting you raise this because I wondered the same question while writing the article. And the only name that came to mind was Eddie Goodell, who Bill Veck put up to bat in, what was it, in the early 50s for the St. Louis Browns. And his autograph is worth a tremendous amount of money.

Though less than Moonlight Graham because he was an entertainer, Goodell, so he signed a lot more than Graham. But those are the only two that have come to my mind of obscure ballplayers who've had a flash of fame. Can you relate any other examples of times that the internet has helped someone track something down? I know you wrote a story about a sweaty Babe Ruth jersey from 1939 after his playing career that was able to be validated because there was an obscure YouTube video of Ruth wearing this jersey, which established its provenance. Oh, the World's Fair jersey. Are there a lot of stories like that? Oh, absolutely. There are a million stories like that and and the great thing about the internet is you would think that it would make this less likely but it's if anything it's made

it much more likely and i was just talking to the head a few weeks ago he had a preview an auction preview in new york his name chris ivy he runs heritage out of dallas which is the biggest auction collectibles auction house in the world and the third big auction house period but he was saying now that everyone has a phone and can shoot a picture and look up the internet sports auction house it comes up i can't even keep up with these discoveries because they happen so regularly and oh a good one which i loved writing was a norman walkwell print that was hanging on a wall in dallas and it's the famous print called Tough Call with the two umpires and the manager. It was on the cover of Saturday Evening Post in the 40s.

It's a pretty iconic photo. It's been reproduced on key chains, on liquor bottles and coasters. Anyway, this family was descendants of an umpire, a famous umpire who was featured in the painting, in the print. And so they shot a picture of that, and along with some paraphernalia, some signed baseballs that really weren't worth anything. And it went to Heritage in Dallas, and they started sharing the photo that they'd sent. And I said, wait, that's not a print. That looks different than the final one. It turned out to be a study Norman Rockwell did. But just before doing the painting. They would do early versions. So it turned out to be an original Norman Rockwell painting of one of his most famous works.

Ended up selling for about a million and a half dollars. And one of my favorite stories, and this, again, if you don't know someone, someone usually knows someone. Like, oh, there are a couple of, I could just spin these stories all day. But Wisconsin Cop had a Cracker Jack poster that had been hanging in a barn for 90 years. And when he bought the property, he took it down, he put it away. And then some of his guys down at the station were talking about a TV show, and they discovered that baseball memorabilia was very valuable. And it turned out this was an ad display poster with Joe Jackson, Ty Cobb, Trish Speaker,

Christy Matheson from the early 1900s. It would have only two known. And even though it was pretty weathered and battered, it sold for about $80,000. And again, because of the internet and because of all these collecting TV shows now, people know that to look for something instead of just giving it away or selling it at the art sale. Yeah, right. And these stories just keep repeating themselves over and over again.

I could give you a half dozen more examples. Yeah, you've written a lot of, you know, found in Ant's attic and old shoebox and sock drawer. There's no end to them. One of my favorites was, you may not have seen it, it was a few years ago, but it was a Lou Gehrig bat that a woman, an elderly woman in a trailer park in new jersey had propped against her door to use as to for defense to brain robbers if they broke in i can't remember

my story how one thing led to another but it ended up at an auction house and they were able to find a photo of garrick at the 34 all-star game using that bat, that very bat. And you could see, luckily, the way he was holding it, you could match the grain of the bat and the markings, and it was the identical bat. And that went for like half a million dollars. And it's always fun to see that because it's life-changing money for these common folk. Well, you've also written about how almost capricious and unpredictable the market can be in that something that is extremely rare can be a lot less valuable than something that is not quite as rare.

Everyone knows the famous Honest Wagner T206 card, but you wrote recently about another Wagner card that is even more rare, but is worth a tiny fraction of as much. So, I mean, how does that kind of mystique accrue to certain cards or objects and not to others? Well, the Wagner card is the most iconic card. And even their articles, newspaper articles from the early 1900s saying how rare it was and how kids were buying cigarettes to get the card or pestering cigarette customers to buy it. So it has this whole fantastic history. So there's the 52 Tops mantle. And that's another great story. They had an excess of them and that's set and they dumped them in the Brooklyn Harbor in the New York Harbor after trying to get rid of them for pennies at a

carnival. And now they go for tens of thousands and the wagon goes for millions. No, it's interesting about, I asked an auction house owner recently why they're very rare coins of what's their only one or two and or stamps that are one of two. The problem with something that's one of a kind is there are no comps. There are no comparables and baseball cards are memorabilia, but mostly baseball cards. So there's no basis. They couldn't even authenticate the Honus Wagner card. It was from an exhibition game he played in his last season. They tried to raise money for Wagner and his wife at an exhibition game in Northern New Jersey. And none of the

grading companies would authenticate the card because they'd never seen it. So everyone thought it was real. So one big difference between a baseball card and a coin or a stamp is it's not legal tender. It's not issued by the government. So it's pretty much, it's just a piece of paper with no intrinsic value. So Mickey Mantle cart that had been recently found again through the Internet in a hobby collecting form. And it was sold with a defunct, now defunct dog food company in the early 50s out of Philadelphia. And you would think at this point, since Mickey Mantle is such a god and so valuable, that someone would have found this. But no one knew it even existed. And there was a Yogi Berra card, too. But that one's up to about $17,000, the Mantle. And I'd'm really curious.

You would think because it's so rare, it's worth far more than the 52 tops or the Wagner. But again, in baseball cards, it seems like unless there are a few dozen to sustain the market, it generally doesn't determine the value. It doesn't necessarily escalate the value. And then there's the genre of cards or items with some sort of error or something that slipped through unnoticed, like you've written about the old Haas Radborn card or, you know, multiple images of him giving the finger to the camera, which is great and very in character and adds value to those. Of course, is that your favorite of that type of item? Yeah, actually, no, my favorite is still of that year was the dog posing with the player. Yeah.

And apparently that set is called the 1880s Old Judge set from the late 1880s. Had a lot of humor to it. There are a lot of funny cards in there. It's hard to believe they had, you don't even think of people having sense of humor back that long ago and the player posing kneeling with the dog was supposed to be a joke on the player because he would move around so much in the big leagues because he was and so he was never loyal to his team but the dog was loyal to him but then i wrote a revisionist history that he the reason he moved around was because of the reserve clause and he had no choice and he's just trying to make an honest living but yeah eric error cards sometimes, the big error card in the 80s

was the Billy Ripken F-face, F-U-C-K face. Yes. Which he wrote on a knob, and that's pretty worthless now. And the more interesting things they would do, though, is kind of scams of cards. What they would do is, in the early 30s, they would print a set of cards,

and back then, and still pretty much today, you would try to complete a set, but they would omit numbers. So you would never get a certain number because they didn't print it because they wanted kids to keep buying the gum candy or whatever the product was. And it happened twice. The most famous example is in the early 30s with a card of the Hall of Famer Napoleon Lajoie. And they never actually, it was the previous year, they didn't print a certain number. So people were irate and they wrote in.

And if you wrote in, they give you this card the next year. So only the people who wrote in got this card, which now goes for tens, even hundreds of thousands. So that's kind of an error card. But in general, I discovered a few months ago, and again, I'm always learning new things, that Hank Greenberg's name was misspelled, the Hall of Famer. And that's a fairly rare error card that goes for more money. And I thought there might even be a whiff of antisemitism in that, that they misspelled such a common, such a famous player's name. But it's not like, I'm thinking of like the, if you're familiar with coins, the double die, 1955 penny, that goes for a few thousand, or the upside down

airplane stamp from the 20s that goes for tens of thousands. There aren't too many examples of that in the sports card hobby. And since we were just talking about old Judge, maybe we could talk about young Judge as well. Aaron Judge, you've written about him a couple of times recently, because evidently there is a big market for Aaron Judge rookie cards, which I would not have thought that someone so recent would have that kind of cachet attached to him. Well, and it's also, I know less about the new card market, I have to admit, because when you go to these shows, 98% of it is vintage, but the new card market is thriving and the people, and they do short prints. The companies do, or they used to be called chase cards, where they do one of a kind with certain characteristics.

It's called like gold chrome refractors that he signed. It might be one of one. And so last summer, I wrote about a guy who had sold one for $20,000 of these kinds of cards and then used the money to finance his two little boys to go to Yankee Stadium to see Judge. And Judge actually threw them a ball in the outfield, and they caught the ball, which is an amazing story. And then he had another one, which he was asking $125,000 for. And I wrote about that and people just vilified him on the internet because they thought he was greedy, but you know, it's capitalism. So it's a free country, but people are buying with judge. You know, I have a couple of stories in the works about that. They're really buying his promise. And if you break down Judge,

his actually his autograph now goes between 350 and 500. And the kid's only 25 and he has many decades to sign. So I'm not sure how wise an investment that is. And, you know, at 25, if you start computing his home run numbers, you know, be hard pressed even at 500. So and then you get into the fact that he's a big guy. And I heard a commentary the other night, compare him to Richie Sexton. It was nothing for Garo, who's a commentator for the New York Mets here in New York, was saying that, you know, these big guys have big strike zones. And other than Dave Winfield, it's really hard to find the huge guys who succeed.

But, you know, don't forget the Yankees hype and the Yankees history. And Judge is also a really nice, likable guy. And he hits the home runs a million miles. So it's kind of fun, but I don't think it's a safe investment at those prices. Yeah. Well, you've written about the market for more vintage cards very often. And, you know, when I started collecting cards, that was right around the time that the market for new cards kind of tanked and just fell apart. And so I wasn't aware that the market for vintage cards, every now and then, of course, you hear about the huge sales, but that market as a

whole has been extremely strong until maybe a more recent downturn. But on the whole, it seems like that has been a really extraordinary investment if you were buying old rookie cards or cards from old sets from, say, the 50s or earlier. Yeah, absolutely. Over the last five, 10 years, it's performed extremely well, though it has softened the last six months to a year in certain grades. It's all about condition like comic books coins just about any collectible and the nine which is a mint and the ten which is a gem mint those things are still going explosive because there's so few of them there might be only a handful of the thousands and thousands of a certain card known only very few get that kind of great but the sevens which

are kind of a near min card that market's kind of softened. And most of the activity centers on Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Sandy Koufax, Jackie Robinson, Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio. And those are the cards to really look for that keep increasing in value. And Jackie Robinson is one of the hottest collectibles right now, hottest cards and collectibles. And a lot of that is because some of his stuff has come off. Some of his relics, his jersey, his cap, and now his contract from 47 is coming up. But also the movie. Movie 42 has had a huge effect on Jackie Robinson, just like Fields of Dreams with Moonlight Graham. It makes it much more, widens the mass appeal. Well, I've pulled you from your sickbeds long enough, maybe. But are there any other stories that are special to you that we haven't talked about, whether it's someone finding something, some unlikely discovery or some more Jeff Ballard type find?

Because I am endlessly interested in these things. Yeah, I wanted to also ask about vintage cards. I know you're a pretty young guy, but the stuff in the 80s and 90s, a lot of the cards since then are pretty worthless because one, mothers didn't throw them away. Two, they were so overproduced and mass-produced. And you can get those things for pennies. And actually, someone told me, I have to write this story someday,

what to do with all those cards. Because I've met collectors who think whose fathers or uncles left them thousands of cases of those cards and they're sitting on basically a paper drive, you know, a contribution to the recycling center. But one of my favorites, there was a fairy godmother find of a rare box of tobacco cards in the early 1900s from a godmother. They believe it was her brother and those went for hundreds of thousands of dollars. what one of the hottest new trends in baseball cards is unopened material and i wrote a several posts that what i called the beer box

fine because the cards were stored in an old beer box advertising strobe beers and what it was it was a candy company in the 60s that did tv cards of tv shows was trying to break into the sports market so they bought all these cards from the 60s and before then for research and development. And they opened usually just one pack and left the others and put the others away. And all these cards, the oldest pack, the oldest box of cards was the 1948 Bowman bubblegum cards,

which were really not even a very attractive set. They're just black and white and square. But they had Yogi Berra, Warren Spahn, Bob Feller, Stan Musial, rookie cards, and rookie cards are always the most valuable. So this unopened pack, this unopened box of cards, except one pack, sold for $520,000. And then the whole collection of unopened packs sold for a million and a half dollars. And so unopened, and the great fun of unopened is to open or not to open. Right. Because sometimes it's worth more unopened, but then if you open it, the pack that was open had two Faux-Rosullos and one Musil, so it was already worth tens of thousands.

And a friend of mine calls it an open material like vintage wine. And also, people authenticate that too, because that can be tampered with very easily too. So be very careful if you buy old, unopened material. Aside from the fact, I guess, that there's something to be said for being able to enjoy these objects and look at them, which you can't do with something that's unopened. That's just an investment more so than the actual object itself.

Absolutely. And interestingly enough, I discovered in reporting that story that two of the buyers, the biggest buyers of an open material are Hal Steinbrenner, the part owner of the chief owner of the Yankees, and Ken Kendricks, the owner of the Arizona Diamondback. And they have the kind of money where they can open a pack for $20,000 from the 50s. And if it has a bunch of Joe blows, it doesn't mean anything. You know, it just wasted 20,000. So they can afford to take. Yeah. All right.

Well, this has been fascinating. Oh, yeah. Well, thank you very much. And people can find David writing at Forbes. He has a big archive there. New stories coming all the time. He's on Twitter at David Seideman. That's S-E-I-D-E-M-A-N.

You can look for his new stuff there as well. And thanks again, David Feel better Okay, thank you so much, Ben I appreciate it Have a good night You too All right, so that will do it for today

And this week And Jeff Sullivan's vacation Jeff will be back next week I hope you've enjoyed the shows I've put together without him As I have And I hope you're also looking forward to his return As I am But thanks to all the friends who have filled in in Jeff's absence.

And thanks for sticking with the show during my brief solo career. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have pledged their support include Nick Feely, Paul Garrity, Shane Allen, Alexander Elschultz, and Dan McKinley. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. You can keep your questions and comments coming for me and Jeff. I can say that now again via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. Thank you to Dylan Higgins for not taking a vacation and continuing to help out with editing

the podcast. You probably should take a vacation sometime soon. The song you're about to hear is called Crooked Numbers. It's from an album also called Crooked Numbers that is out today from the Pacific Northwest indie supergroup Unlikely Friends. This is a baseball song. It's also a baseball album. There's a sketch of Oral Hershiser on the cover. I just bought it today. I'm really enjoying it so far. It's on Bandcamp. I hope you have a wonderful long weekend, and we will be back, most likely after the holiday, to talk to you next week. go watch baseballs fly throughout the summer

some stay and some go and I won't I won't I won't I won't forget you especially with how much you think you owe.

So give me all your crooked numbers. So give me all your crooked numbers.