Brien's Song

I was reading Chuck Klosterman writing on the essential weirdness of nostalgia, and what exactly we remember when we look at something from our past that we have no immediate personal connection to, like a song or a movie, and then I looked at this card of Brien Taylor and was struck with an overwhelming sense of nostalgia – not nostalgia precisely, but a memory of how people viewed baseball's No. 1 draft pick at the time that that was the only way people identified Brien Taylor. Thousands of collectors knew nothing about Brien Taylor other than he was baseball's No. 1 draft pick (by the Yankees): knew nothing about his high-school career or the speed of his fastball or even which hand he threw with. They knew he was baseball's No. 1 draft pick and if they were able to acquire something of him, most commonly a trading card – maybe this card -- Brien Taylor would return 200 percent minimum. He was more than an instant celebrity; he was an instant investment -- in Google stock, not Facebook.

I remember editing an interview with Ken Griffey Jr. where his greatest astonishment was saved for the notion that people were making hundreds or thousands off of his image without any involvement from him. Someone took his picture and made it available at random, and the people who found it sold it again for 50 times what they paid for it. And it was completely legal, and sanctioned by everyone involved. And just like M&M Enterprises in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, everyone had a piece.

It didn't happen that way with Taylor – didn't really happen with any of the No. 1 picks beyond Griffey, just a little with Darryl Strawberry and Alex Rodriguez – but there was always the thought that it could happen with this one, even if this one was Matt Anderson or Phil Nevin.

The thought process reminds me of boy bands. There's a new one of those every year or so, and the thought is always that this one is so different. One Direction is different from Take That because Take That won the Eurovision contest as a group while One Direction was made up of individual singers who appeared on X Factor. Big Time Rush was different from Justin Bieber because their song "Boyfriend" was nothing like his song "Boyfriend."

This is totally untrue, of course, because everyone who's grown up in the rock-'n'-roll age has had a moment when a boy band makes all the sense in the world. The moment happens at a different time for everyone, so they think it's a different moment, but it's actually the same semi-sweet moment, on a tape loop.

So I took all the No. 1 draft picks from 1980 to 2000 – from Strawberry to Adrian Gonzalez, pre-Bryan Bullington and post-Al Chambers – and came up with an equivalent boy band. Here's how it looks:

I never realized the connection between Darryl Strawberry and the Jackson 5. One-fifth of the Jackson 5 – Michael – was transcendent. One of Strawberry's five tools – hitting for power, generated by that incredibly fast, whippy swing – was the Michael Jackson of hitting tools, simultaneously locked into a moment in time and transcendent, and utterly irreplaceable.

(One of the reasons I don't enjoy baseball as much as I used to is that everyone has been coached into near-sameness. The best swing in the game belongs to Josh Hamilton, and it's James Loney's swing, only the middle of the bat finds the middle of the ball more often. There's one knuckleball pitcher in the big leagues, and while every team seems to have a submariner, no one has a pitcher who slings it like Dennis Eckersley, no one whips the bat like Straw, and no one hits from the Walt Hriniak stance that allowed Cecil Cooper to post a .352-25-122 line with the '80 Brewers. Were Hriniak and Charley Lau wrong because no one employs their theories anymore, or were they right because many of the hitters who used their theories put up great numbers ... or were the hitters who followed Hriniak and Lau just great hitters who would have hit .300 standing on one toe? I have a hard time believing that Cecil Cooper would have been a better hitter if he swung like Josh Hamilton, but I also have a hard time believing Josh Hamilton would be a better hitter if he swung like Cecil Cooper. For all the attention giving to batting stances -- there's even a "Batting Stance Guy," who presumably makes a living imitating famous batting stances -- how you stand is just preparatory to setting the bat in motion. Better hitters move the bat faster to the ball, and strike the ball more squarely more often. Judging a hitter on his batting stance is like judging Stevie Ray Vaughn by the way he tuned up.)

I do know this: Ted Williams loved watching Strawberry hit, and it wasn't because Strawberry swung just like Williams. Williams loved the excitement in Strawberry's swing, and I get that. It's why I would still pay to watch Ichiro hit. It's something like nothing else. It's Graceland.

It’s easy to take this too far – was Strawberry’s speed Jermaine or Tito? – but when Michael Jackson released Bad Strawberry was in the midst of a .284-39-114 season. Their careers were frontloaded, and their career arcs were not without parallels.

Straw Dogs

Aw, to heck with it. I can't find this week's card. But here's the post anyway.


As I’ve mentioned several times on these electronic pages, when it comes to sports collectibles I have the world’s largest collection of worthless rarities. I am the person you call upon to fill out your Comic Ball 3 set, to score that elusive Pro Line Portraits autographed card of Aaron Cox, to hold in your hands the glory that is a Star Company Sam Horn set.

But what does that mean exactly? Does that mean I am the world’s greatest pure collector of sports memorabilia in the same unbearable, unlistenable way that Ornette Coleman was the world’s greatest pure musician, because I do not allow the joy of collecting to be sullied by the ogre of value?

I hope not. I wouldn’t wish that on BP. Besides, I have kids to put through college.

But to continue, grasshopper, what makes a worthless rarity outside of its lack of value, which is self-evident?

I guess to do that you need to know what makes a valuable rarity.

The valuable rarities I’ve seen have a couple of things going for them. First, they have a story. The Wagner card is the Wagner card in part because of the story, apocryphal or not, that it was pulled from circulation because Honus Wagner did not want his visage associated with tobacco products, Henry Reccius cigar cards notwithstanding.

Second, they need to be associated with a mainstream card set. There are baking issues and candy cards from the 1910s that are much rarer than the Honus Wagner card, but they’re also from obscure regional sets. It’s much more newsworthy when a T206 Honus Wagner showed up in a Maine farmhouse than when the aforementioned Reccius card appeared in a Louisville cigar box.

Then there’s star value and eye appeal, and after that is perhaps the most important thing: quantity. Having the only example of a collectible is not the road to the fortunes of Kubla Khan. Ideally you need somewhere between 10 and 25 examples of a collectible for it to be actively sought-after. Fewer than that and the known examples don’t show up frequently enough to keep the fervor bubbling along. More than that and the rarity deteriorates and takes the value along with it.

That’s why owners of one of 24 known valuable cards root with the fervor of a drunken Scottish soccer fan the existence of No. 25. They don’t want to spend $500,000 for a picture on cardboard and wake up one morning and discover it’s been replaced by a Kia Rio.

Here’s how this wickedness works. About 20 years ago an auction-house proprietor named Joshua Evans turned up what he claimed to be the most valuable card in existence: A U.S. Caramel card from 1932 showing Hall of Fame shortstop Freddie Lindstrom. The Lindstrom was the one card necessary to complete one of the toughest sets from the ‘30s and at that point was the only known example of that card.

This card has star value after a fashion, if you believe Lindstrom qualifies for Cooperstown on his accomplishments and not because Ted Williams got the Veterans’ Committee smashed on grain alcohol and Lithia water and what they wrote sure looks like “Lindstrom” from here.

It has a story. The Lindstrom card was withheld from circulation because kids who got a complete set of U.S. Caramel cards could redeem them for a baseball glove and U.S. Caramel wanted to keep the glove expenditures to a minimum. As in zero.

It wasn’t the best-looking card of the era, even before someone cancelled it. And while the U.S. Caramel set was national after a fashion, U.S. Caramel did not have the zillion slimy tentacles of the tobacco trust. So compared to the Wagner card the Lindstrom card was definitely minor-league.

But Joshua Evans laughs at such hindrances. He dubbed the Lindstrom card “The Million-Dollar Card” and took it on a barnstorming tour that made what C.C. Pyle did with Red Grange look like REO Speedwagon’s summer schedule.

And then he sold it. For less than a million. For less than $100,000 even. For around $90,000, if reports can be believed.

Again we ask, wha’ happen? The easy answer: not enough star power and too much scarcity. One card cannot make a market. Two cards, which is currently the number of known Lindstrom cards, cannot make a market, even if the owners of these cards, once they get them home, realize that $90,000 in the raw is far better-looking, even if it’s in pennies salvaged from automobile upholstery.

(Let this be a lesson to all those Fleer Flair and Stadium Club collectors waiting for the right moment to cash out their one-of-one Terry Puhl cards. Amen.)

So to bring things ‘round again, a worthless rarity has to lack star power, eye appeal, national scope, a marketable quantity, and a story. In short, it needs to be one of nothing.

Meet the 1989 Saranac Glove Darryl Strawberry card.

Let’s dispense with the story, such as it is. Green Bay-based Saranac Glove wanted to package a baseball card with its batting gloves and didn’t think a photo would properly showcase its product, so it commissioned Green Bay artist Dan Gardiner to paint Darryl Strawberry wearing a Metsish uniform and sporting Saranac gloves. It came off fine except for one thing: the Straw Man didn’t like his nose.

Now, Darryl Strawberry resembles nothing so much as a resident of the planet Zorg. For him to complain that they got his nose wrong is like Clint Eastwood complaining that they missed a wrinkle.

And it’s not like Gardiner missed Strawberry’s nose by much. Maybe he was thinking Darryl “Sausage Nose” Hamilton and painting Darryl Strawberry, but it’s close. And, hey, whatever happened to artist’s license?

Still, Saranac Glove would rather pull a perfectly good card off of the market than pay millions to a large-nosed, baseball-playing space alien. So the Saranac Glove card was history. Gardiner got a few, and the company ostensibly kept some, and the rest were destroyed.

Twenty years ago this would have been the perfect collectible storm: Hot player, legitimately scarce card, national distribution, not too ugly, interesting story. But between then and now Strawberry’s career came up short of Cooperstown, which in the card market meant he had the baseball career of a raisin. And no one pays extra for a picture on cardboard of a raisin, no matter how scarce.

So if you were looking for the quintessential worthless rarity, here's your answer. Though a Fleer Flair Terry Puhl sure looks like it qualifies from here.