What took you so long, Cooperstown?

As long as there is a Baseball Hall of Fame, there will be a debate among fans regarding who belongs and who should forever be on the outside looking in.  Cases can be made for, and against, Bert Blyleven, Don Mattingly, Dale Murphy, Alan Trammell, and Roberto Alomar among several others.  For entirely different reasons, cases can be made for and against Roger Clemens, Pete Rose, A-Rod, and Barry Bonds.  Aside from all those, one guy was denied entry into the Hall far too long, and the recognition he received over the weekend rectified what I consider to be the longest snub in the history of Cooperstown. 

John Fogerty wrote the OTHER National Anthem for baseball fans, "Centerfield", as an 8 year old kid.  He recorded the song and released it in 1985.  His ode to the game of baseball and gift to the fans got him into the Hall......25 YEARS LATER!!!  If he had been a player, his enshrinement ship would have sailed 10 years ago with his only hope being the long shot of the Veterans' Committee.  He was also a "first ballot" Rock and Roll Hall of Famer in 1993.  Kudos to the baseball writers for eventually doing the right thing in finally recognizing one of the all-time greats who never swung a bat at the big league level, along with his guitar, Slugger..........about 10 years too late.
Fogerty is a MUST SEE if he comes near you on tour.  The guy is ageless, and he's playing the best shows of his life the past few years.  He has one of the best bandmates in the biz, and his song catalog stacks up with any rock & roll musician in history!!  I saw him w/ John Mellencamp in 2005 in Raleigh, North Carolina and again w/ Willie Nelson in Birmingham.  Phenomenal shows!!!  But don't take my word for it...........

They do NOT put their pants on the same way....

Have you ever heard someone try to knock a celebrity or athlete down a few notches from their pedestal and try to "normalize" them by saying, "He (or she) puts his (or her) pants on the same way I do?" These days the internet seems to exist solely for the purpose of proving them wrong. There's TMZ, thousands of celebrity gossip blogs, a site dedicated to the best and worst celebrity restaurant tippers, and my personal favorite, the "Backstage Pass" page from thesmokinggun.com. Seriously, 80's hair metal band Poison, A CASE of condoms? For ONE stop on the tour?

Turns out Major League Baseball players have as many strange contractual demands as other celebrities. Just substitute condoms and brown M&M's backstage for a bulldozer and an apartment complex in Memphis.

Further proof that celebrities do not put their pants on the same as you and I. They have it written into their contracts and riders to have someone do it for 'em.

Weird baseball contract clauses

Uh oh

The news continues to get worse for Upper Deck. Their problems have been well-documented, from lawsuits to settlements to losing both the Major League Baseball AND NFL licenses.

Now, according to the New York Times, they're also running out of money and haven't paid Major League Baseball players for autograph deals. It's becoming more and more impossible every day to envision a scenario under which the company will be able to survive. A merger or buyout might be possible, but short of that, the beginning of the end is underway.

It's sad for me as a collector and fan of their work from their initial 1989 baseball set to see this happen to a company that set the gold standard for the hobby. It's even more disappointing to see this play out the same way that killed many other companies in the past decade beginning with Enron.......shady leadership at the top, lots of great employees loyal to the company seeing their lives disrupted by layoffs in an ailing economy, and a CEO who was playing the fiddle while Rome was burning and will walk away with millions nonetheless.

As a radio guy by trade, Upper Deck reminds me of a station that launches in a market to try and take down the #1 station. If they succeed, which is rare, it's a testament to their people and their expertise. If they fail, at worst you hope they've at least made the #1 station earn it by shoring up their weaknesses and becoming a better station. Hopefully Upper Deck has raised the stakes and made Topps, Panini, and the others bring their "A" game, which makes the customers the winner.

Down, and now very possibly out......

Recently, I talked about Upper Deck's recent woes involving the loss of their license with Major League Baseball and the subsequent lawsuits filed when they brazenly released several 2010 sets complete with team logos and uniforms. At the time, I truly felt like the company would be OK as long as they were somehow able to keep a license with the NFL and the NFLPA. Things seemed to headed in that direction when the NFLPA marketing arm announced a 2-year renewal of Upper Deck's license through 2011.

Today, however, brings a much different story. While Upper Deck's PR shill tried to his best to make it sound like there could be some sort of NFL-related release for 2010, I can't believe the company would touch any sort of pro football product with a 10 foot pole given the baseball legal mess and the millions it cost them.

So now it's down to the NHL and NCAA collegiate cards for Upper Deck in the Sports category. Time will tell if that is enough to sustain the company, but in the short term, things definitely don't look good. Upper Deck and Topps are the two card companies whose name transcends the product they sell and has penetrated the mainstream. At the moment, they seem headed in opposite directions. Topps, under the leadership of former CEO Michael Eisner, has a hot product with Topps Attax, which seems to be having some inital success at luring kids back from collecting mostly non-sports related cards since the boom of the early 90's. Upper Deck might find themselves on a far more dubious list if their losing streak continues.

Down, but not out......

As David Letterman often says, I wouldn't give Upper Deck's troubles to a monkey on a rock. If you're an avid card collector or dealer, their troubles are well-documented. I'm just beginning to plug back into the hobby, but based on the blogs and message board posts of those who have remained close to the hobby over the past decade, I can come to two conclusions about Upper Deck.

First, most collectors seem to be pretty passionate about Upper Deck's product across multiple sports, with a few exceptions. Second, the company's CEO, Richard McWilliam, seems to be portrayed as a incurable egomaniac......a trait you rarely ever see in a big corporate CEO :-)

The past year has been brutal for the company with multiple lawsuits and ultimate settlements costing tens of millions of dollars, but a silver lining seems to be on the horizon.

Just as it appeared Upper Deck might be in danger of losing licensing for producing cards for the second major sport in as many years, the NFL Players Association's marketing arm announced yesterday that they would renew Upper Deck's license for two more years through 2011.

The loss of the Major League Baseball license and subsequent settlement with Topps over the alleged breach of the MLBPA agreement certainly knocked Upper Deck to the canvas, but the fact that football will still be part of the equation is welcome news to those in the hobby.

If this were a heavyweight fight, Upper Deck is still certainly down, but as of yesterday, any cries of "no mas" are definitely premature.

Investment advice or psychobabble?

There are two morals to this story. First and foremost, that Matthew Lesko guy (you know, the one with that stylish sport coat w/ all the question marks on it?) on the infomercials on VH1 @ 3:30 a.m. is right.....apparently the government really will shower money on people for research on anything. Literally. Second, assuming you believe what you're about to read, there's some valuable investment advice here for both card collectors and dealers. The wider the smile, the better their chances of playing long enough and well enough for Cooperstown. SO HOLD ONTO THEIR CARDS! :-) Anyone who actually follows that investment advice probably also took everything Lenny Dykstra ever said to the bank. So there's this.....

It's All in the (Baseball) Cards: The Wider the Smile, The Longer the Life

For fans in the "small markets".......

The Joe Mauer deal has changed Major League Baseball as we know it, at least for the time being. The Twins have become the first "Moneyball" team since the Rockies sprung for $141.5 million for Todd Helton in 2002 to back up the Brinks truck for a single player. The obvious question is....will the Twins be able to develop or acquire the talent around him to be competitive for the life of the contract? As with most situations in life, there are precedents here. One is a success story and one is a cautionary tale.

Let's start with the bad news.....the now infamous A-Rod deal w/ the Texas Rangers. At more than $25 million a year, or about 25% of player payroll going to a single player, owner Tom Hicks was duped by A-Rod's agent, Scott Boras, into overspending for a superstar in what Bud Selig classified as a "small market". That "small market" is, in reality, the 5th largest media market in the country, but Hicks and Selig can't be burdened with details. Coupled with a weak farm system and saddled with the inability to acquire the talent necessary to build around their franchise player, Hicks eventually cashed in his chips and made the rich Yankees richer. As an average fan, I remember wondering why Boras didn't just eliminate the middle man and have him playing in New York or Boston three years earlier. The Rangers are only now beginning to dig out from the A-Rod hole with stronger homegrown talent.

The Rockies just signed Helton to a 2-year extension through the 2013 season, and the team has successfully built around him over the past few years, culminating in that unbelievable World Series run of 2007. They've developed one of the best farm systems in baseball over the past decade, and they've kept payroll manageable in spite of Helton's hefty salary and acquired players to fill holes as needed. They also have seem to have a pretty bright foreseeable future. The difference is a stronger top-to-bottom organization, from the farm system to the front office to the big league player roster.

So which way will the Twins' movie end @ the expiration of Mauer's megadeal? Recent history seems to point more to the Rockies than the A-Rod era Rangers. The Twins have done a masterful job developing talent that has defied Bud Selig's big market mentality for the past decade. They have also locked up their core of young stars early, wisely avoiding huge arbitration deals. Ron Gardenhire is one of the best field managers in the game. The Target Center will be open for business this season, so fans should flock to a state of the art facility, especially now that their hometown hero will be playing there for years. I won't guarantee a World Series, but for now they are in pretty good shape to make a run.

Or the whole thing tanks and he ends up in pinstripes in exchange for some mid-level minor leaguers three years from now........ :-)

Great Duos in History

Welcome to my first blog! Hope you enjoy your stay. I know you have a choice when reading blogs, and I thank you for choosing Airwaves, Baseball Cards, and Me. I hope you will read these again. I will update upon inspiration or whenever zany life events dictate.....whichever comes first.

For my opening post, I would like to discuss Great Duos in History. Plenty come off the top of my head. There's Hall & Oates, Batman & Robin, Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis, and the one that perplexes me most.......

Rednecks & Fireworks.

I've been studying this phenomenon closely since I first began in Country radio about 17 years ago. I'm sure this is as much of a byproduct of living in the South as anything else, but I'm not sure. All I know is that from my first day on the air, I was getting at least one call asking, "Hey......where are the July 4th farworks gonna be?" That's how we pronounce it in the South......."farworks". This was a little unusual to me for 2 reasons. First, it was JANUARY!!!! Second, Tuscaloosa, Alabama had its 4th of July fireworks in the same location for YEARS!! Guess they thought we were gonna move it to some undisclosed Dick Cheney-esque bunker and not tell 'em.

Flash forward to last night @ Turner Field. Fireworks following the Braves/Dodgers game. Typical fireworks display......color me unimpressed. But in addition to the typical crowd in total awe of the same fireworks display they've watched in various locations all their lives, I discovered something that I guess I had noticed on the periphery but had never given much attention. Not only were they watching the same display.......THEY WERE FILMING IT!!!! Cell phone cameras and hand held minicams EVERYWHERE!! Are these people bright enough to realize you totally miss the whole thing LIVE if you're videotaping it? And WHY......Dear God WHY......would you waste precious hard drive space on a fireworks display, especially a run-of-the-mill one after a baseball game? And this time it wasn't strictly a redneck phenomenon. There was an Asian-American couple taping the whole thing. Perhaps I'm a little stereotypical here, but it would seem to me that they would be the only ones more unimpressed by pyrotechnics than me........SINCE THEY INVENTED 'EM IN THE FIRST PLACE?!?! Am I the only one who thinks driving from miles around for a fireworks display is like watching a movie on a continuous loop for days on end?

In fairness, I'd like to end by giving props to the one fireworks display that has ever really bowled me over. Illuminations @ Epcot Center not only impressed me, it made me want to see it again even though I knew it would be the exact same display at the exact same time the next night. The rest are like the Jean Claude Van Damme movie library....you've seen one, you've seen 'em all.

If anyone has any explanation, scientific or otherwise, to explain the love affair between rednecks and fireworks, please leave comments below :-)