2021 Topps Archives : One Big Ball of Wibbly-Wobbly, Timey-Wimey Stuff

 

What is a fixed point in time?

            For us mortals that’s every day. Every day is a fixed point in time. We cannot, no matter how much we’d like to, fix the past. I know there were a couple of days last week that I’d like to completely erase from my own space/time continuum. A few meals I’d like to take back. A do over on a couple of hours last Thursday where mundane conversations took my precious time away.

            But I can’t.

            For us fans of science-fiction, especially time-travel science fiction (looking at you Doctor Who fans), a fixed point in time (temporal nexus), are moments in the space/time continuum where events are set in stone, and can never be changed, unless you want reign dire consequences upon the universe.

            And who would want to do that?

            Maybe this guy.

            Pardon the brief science fiction indulgence, but I’m Pavlov’s sci/fi nerd come November. It’s usually the month where my wife and I travel to a galaxy far, far, away, and indulge in other big balls of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. November is the cosmic oasis between the scares of October, and jingling those jingly bells all December long.

            Let’s take this to where it should go.

            Shall we?

            Sports cards.

            For many cards can be a fixed point in time.

            Cards evokes a time and a place. Memories. People. The smell of a childhood home. Or a meal cooked by mom, that you no longer have. Kids on the street. Long, lost summer days that are gone and can never come back. Racing to the corner store to grab a pack. A complete set as a Christmas gift. Racing your friends down the hallway in some suburban mall to get to the LCS first.

            Case in point a card like this.

            Or one like this.

            If you’re my age, maybe it’s a card like this one.

            Or this.

            I know whenever I see those 1987 design cards, I’m thirteen. It’s summer. I’m cross-legged on my bed in my childhood room, looking through a box of cards. Stand by Me is playing on the TV. Maybe the boom box is turned on to the Top 40 station. Or we’re blasting The Monkees (2^nd gen fan) so loud that the next day our neighbor will complain to my old man about the noise. The air is humid and my room smells of Sea Breeze lotion, because chances are good my brother and I got sunburnt again.

           This is a fixed moment in time.

            But what if I show you this.

            Or this.

            Or this.

            And this.

            I'll even toss in these guys for good measure.

            A rupture in the space/time continuum? Perhaps no. And, okay, maybe not true damage to any fixed moment in time. But putting a player from one era on the card design on another era is certainly interesting. Jarring if one is easily affected. What I enjoy about Topps annual Archives release is the very idea of taking a player out of his fixed time and place (the card designs of his era), and placing him at another point in Topps’ timeline.

            This is interesting to me.

            This is baseball cards going sci-fi.

            Yeah, I know these exist.

            But looking at a card like this is just as intergalactic to me.

            I’m a Topps Archives fan. Since I got back into collecting, I look forward to its release every year. I like seeing what designs from the archive Topps choses to use. Seeing what players, they pick to put on their designs. I like to go back and check out older checklists to find players that I collect on designs that I like, and then I buy those cards as well.

            I like that Topps messes with its fixed points in time.

            I like that Archives is a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.

            I think this guy would appreciate Archives.

            Or this gal.

            And I know that Topps pulls this interstellar magic act with other designs and brands. Obviously, there’s Heritage. There are the 35th-anniversary insert cards in the base product as well. But, love it as I do, Heritage’s focus is on showcasing current players on a classic Topps design. And while those 35^th anniversary inserts do feature current and older players; the designs are fixed on a single year as well.

This year, I’ll admit, Topps went hog-wild on the nostalgia by including present players on retail inserts featuring the 1952, 1965 and 1992 designs, as well as featuring players past and present on 70-years of baseball insert cards. But it’s an anniversary. So I’m not going to gripe on the nostalgia overload.

And one can’t beat a mini Ke’Bryan 1960s set.

But anniversary years aside, Topps Archives, is the only product that consistently uses past designs to showcase players both old and new. And I, for one, love that they do this. I’ve looked forward to it every year for the past few years. Even if I’m not a big fan of the chosen design they use (looking at you 1958), or I gripe about a design they never use (looking at you 1978), I usually find tons of stuff in the product that keeps me coming back again and again.

At least until Fanatics ruins it all.

But…

Topps went all-out on this year’s Archives. While usually going with about three designs per release, the company celebrated their 70^th anniversary by bringing out seven designs from the past; 1957, 1962, 1973, 1983, 1991, 2001, and 2011. That’s one from every year folks. And I don’t know if they specifically had me in mind, but I’m an absolute fan of 1957, 1962, 1983 and 1991 Topps baseball cards. 1973…I like. 2001 and 2011, I wasn’t collecting then. But I wish that I was. 2001 gets better each time I see it, and 2011 might go down as one of Topps last truly classic designs.

In my humble opinion, of course.

Sadly, Topps did include a Topps 2091 design...which I fear is what cards actually WILL look like in the future.

    

            But these two look like they were BORN to be on a 1983 design

So, I went and bought a couple of boxes of Archives, as I annually try to put together a set. And, I like what I got…mostly. The designs, if you read that above paragraph, I’m already a big fan of. But I’ll come out and say it; I’m mostly a jinx with insert and auto cards. Yes, I am the guy who pulled a Yordan Alvarez 1/1 out of a blaster of Stadium Club last December. But I shot my wad with that one.

For some reason, the pack Gods burden me with Braves and Red Sox.

I wanted ONE of these team cards. The Pittsburgh Pirates one.  

And I end up with these.

Also…if Pete Rose ain’t on it, it ain’t The Big Red Machine.

Yo Topps, you have both Willie Stargell and the 1983 design in the same set, and you chose to go with this?

At least Fleer and Donruss got it right the first time.

The autos were a mixed bag, but I’m not really an auto collector. 

Ron Washington is certainly having his moment this fall. But two announcer cards? Still, it is always good to see The Bull. If I were a lifelong Phillies fan, I’d be a lifelong Greg Luzinski collector. No doubt.

I’d even collect his White Sox cards.

I did pull my first Mickey Mantle card!

A short-print on one of my favorite designs of all-time. And I’d like to think Big Ron was smiling down on me with that one.

The complaints are small complaints. Small sour grapes. Overall, I really enjoyed the shit out of opening 2021 Archives. I enjoyed my big ball of wibbly-wobbly, time-wimey trips to the past, the recent past, and, sadly, the future.

Ah, the future.

I guess opening Archives this year is a bit bittersweet with the Fanatics deal coming in the future. I know there are a lot of people out there who believe that maybe Fanatics will buy Topps. Or they’ll work out some kind of manufacturing deal. I’m not one of those people. Full disclosure, I’m a severe pessimist at heart. I catastrophize as well. I’m not too sure any deal between Fanatics and Topps will happen. I’d love to be wrong. I’m often wrong. It comes with the territory of being a severe pessimist. Because of that…I’m also never disappointed.

And this year’s Topps Archives certainly didn’t disappoint me at all.

 Thanks for reading! Happy collecting! And I hope you all had a good and SAFE holiday.

  If you'd like to learn more about what's in 2021 Topps Archives,  Ryan Cracknell has it all broken down for you over at Beckett.

If you'd like to learn more about Greg "The Bull" Luzinski you can do so both HERE and HERE

NEXT FRIDAY: I'm really going to try and kick myself in the ass to get the new novel going, so I'm going to do something here that seems easy in my head, but will probably take up most of my time and keep my from writing a single word of the book. I'm ranking. Yes, I'm going from best to worst, my favorite Topps base designs from the 1980s.

           

           

1981 Topps Stickers : Terrors of the Unknown...or Why the Kool Aid Man Ain't No Joke

 

I remember being crazy for them.

            Crazier than I was for baseball cards at the time. It’s true. Baseball cards came in packs. With gum. And then you either put them in rubber bands (gum bands to you Pittsburgers out there), or stored them in a shoebox. Or you did what I did, which was to simply dump them in a beat-up, old blue suitcase.

            A move I paid dearly for by the way.

            But baseball stickers? Well, they were a different ball game to a seven-year-old like me. They came with purpose. You bought them alongside an album with strict pagination. With uniformed pages. With established 8-player team pages. With an exact spot to place said stickers. I didn’t know about numbers on the back of cards in 1981. I wasn’t hip to collation or set building back then.

            Baseball stickers gave me an order to the collecting life.

            An order that I didn’t even know I needed.

            The stickers were plain.

            But the packaging was striking.

            The album was bright yellow. 

            Topps in black. Baseball in that patriotic red, white and blue. There was a huge picture of George Brett on the cover, swinging his big bat. George Brett identified players that I was getting know, along with names like Schmidt, Rose, Stargell, Reggie, and Rod Carew. Names that I could recognize.

            And the packs?

            Bright blue with the same George Brett image, only in reverse. Like little packets of joy, they came four stickers to a pack. For fifteen cents? I could get fifteen cents. Fifteen cents showed up nearly every week in my house, courtesy of the old man falling asleep on the couch after work. Fifteen cents was negotiable with mom in a corner store, or the G.C. Murphy’s on Butler Street.

            The 1981 Topps sticker album is where I began to learn about statistics. The album opened up with league leader pages. Strikeouts. This thing called .ERA. Batting Average. Thanks to that book I was a kid who knew who lead the league in home runs in 1981.

            It was this guy.

            More than cards, those stickers became my gateway drug to collecting.

            They make me think of Ken Harmony.

            Remember a first friend. Or the first best friend you made in school. Not the kids in the neighborhood. The ones you were lumped in with because your parents chose to move within proximity of each other. I had plenty of those back in 1981. I could write blog posts about the wiffle ball games in concrete, communal backyards of Pittsburgh/Lawrenceville row houses, and the fistfights with Billy Coco.

            Ah, to have one more shot at him!

            That’s not to slag off neighborhood friends.

            I’ve made great friends from living in neighborhoods.

            Still have some today.

            I met Ken Harmony in kindergarten. Catholic kindergarten. We were the morning class. The kids woken up at the crack of dawn to be carted off to St. Mary’s lyceum from the hours of eight until twelve, where we were tortured by the functionality of numbers and letters; all the while given a good indoctrination into the mysteriously silly ways of the Catholic church via song and dance, and stories.

            I was a rebel back then.

            I didn’t sing or dance.

            When the nun rounded us up to do our song and dance number, I abstained. I sat to the side. No cajoling could get me to budge and join the musical crowd. I still remember the song. You’d have to point at the girls in class, and they’d have to point at you. I am your brother/you are my sister/Jesus is our father/and we are one/yes we are one.

            I could go on?

            And what was it with that? You are my sister? I’m your brother? Jesus is our father? Oh yeah? If that was so, then where was Jesus at dinner time? On the weekend? Who was the dude who showed up every evening around six, after working eight hours in a bank? The guy who left free money in the couch cushions for me to go and buy baseball stickers?

            Was he not my father?

            Fucking Catholics.

            But I digress.

            Eventually some of the other boys in class decided to stop singing that whack-a-doo song. They began joining me in my own personal penalty box. Ken Harmony was one of those kids. He was wide-eyed and big-headed. We clicked over Star Wars. We clicked over The Beatles. We clicked over baseball, which in those days, meant we clicked over cards.

            These babies.

            A year later, now in first grade, and pulling a full-day slog; Ken and I would get cards any chance we could get. He lived off Butler Street, which meant he had more access to the various shops along that bustling stretch. Whenever I stayed at Ken’s we’d walk a few blocks to G.C. Murphy’s or to a place called George’s, where we’d buy cards. Or, in 1981, stickers.

            George’s, as I remember it, was one of those old-fashioned type places. Like it was a corner store, but had a counter where you could eat a lunch, have a Coke, or eat some Islay’s ice cream. I remember the place as being bedecked in golden wood. But that might’ve just been the lights. But at the counter is where George had the baseball cards and candy. The packs of Topps, and now Fleer or Donruss, stacked in there with the Milky Ways and Hersey bars I was beginning to crave.

            One day in the spring of 1981, George had a rack set up at the counter.

            It housed a bright yellow album with George Brett on the cover.

            Next to it was a yellow box with a happy kid on it.

            And a long row of those beautiful, blue packs.

            Ken and I were hooked upon sight.

A small digression before I continue with my tale. Did two seven-year-olds, their pockets packed with change, go to a corner/convenience store to buy baseball stickers on their own. Yes. Sometimes. You see, the 1980s were a different time. Kids could walk a few blocks alone or together back then. We weren’t consistently watched or tracked, like kids are now. And we walked alone with the full-knowledge that someone was going to maybe put us in a van, and we’d never be seen from again. That someone was definitely going to put a razor blade in our Halloween candy.

Terror of the unknown was part of the experience of being a child.

And a good many of us made it through the fire.

It became mine and Ken’s goal to complete the 1981 Topps Baseball sticker album. I bought packs when I could. Ken did the same. We put our stickers in together. We updated each other on our own progress at recess. We hid the sticker albums from our teachers. We traded doubles, except our precious Pirates. We hoarded the foil all-star cards. We protected our sticker albums with our lives. We had the time of our lives.

Until Ken’s sister Lauren decided to make cherry Kool-Aid one Saturday afternoon, and it all went to shit.

Did I mention Ken Harmony had a sister?

An older sister?

A tall, blond, eleven-year-old sister who had an infectious laugh, and liked to tease me by rubbing my hair?

We could discuss first crushes here…but I think you get the idea.

Lauren Harmony.

At times I think I stayed over at the Harmony house because of her. I did this even though Lauren made me so shy. So red-faced. I liked to peer into her room when she wasn’t in there. Not like a creepy kid. It was just such a different world from my bedroom, from Ken’s with his Star War sheets and baseball posters. Lauren’s was a lighter room. Airier with a faint flower scent and dolls lining windows and walls.

Her world was a riddle wrapped in a mystery to me.

And Lauren had friends. Other tall eleven-year-old girls with infectious laughs who liked to make seven-year-old boys blush while they were trying to put baseball stickers into albums. The Harmony house was full of those girls. They stayed into the evening. They stayed overnight. Ken and I could hear them giggling in Lauren’s room. We woke up the next morning and stared bleary-eyed at each other over pancakes.

They drank Kool-Aid and ruined my life.

That might be an over-statement.

But let me paint a picture for you.

It’s an idyllic spring afternoon in 1981. I’m at Ken Harmony’s house. Ken and I doing what we usually do, which is combing over our Topps Baseball Sticker Album at his kitchen table, in between bouts of playing with Star Wars figures or hitting the ol’ wiffle ball around in the alley behind his house. Suddenly, there’s a commotion. Then the house is filled with the sound of a small pack of eleven-year-old girls. The kitchen becomes filled with them and their various, flowery scents. They attack unoccupied seats. They attack the fridge. Lauren sees that there is no Kool-Aid left so she begins to make a batch.

            The girls tease Ken and I.

            They rub our hair.

            They make us blush.

            Ken decides he’s had enough, so we leave the kitchen to play Star Wars again.

            We leave behind our Topps Baseball Sticker Albums.

            They might as well have been lambs to the slaughter.

            We hear a thud on the kitchen table. One of the girls shouts, shit. Then there’s hushes. A Quiet commotion that draws Ken and I back into the room. A girl is holding Ken’s sticker album, waving it as if its on fire. There’s a bright red wet spot in one corner. A small damage in comparison to what I see, which is Lauren holding my sticker album, fanning it as one of the other girls begins wiping it down with a paper towel.

            Fuck.

            And fuck this guy.

            Lauren looks pained.

            She looks like she killed my dog.

            When I finally get ahold of my sticker album again, the entire back cover is red. Or pink. Or whatever color cherry-flavored Kool-Aid and bright yellow paper make. Some of the back cover has already rippled. It looks like a pink sea. The back few pages have a little bit of red on them as well. The edges of all of the pages will turn pink.

The album isn’t ruined.

            But it’s less than it was.

            And I sit at the Harmony’s kitchen table crying over that fact, until Ken’s mom comes in to see what is wrong.

            I was inconsolable.

            Of course, Lauren is crestfallen. She’s not a monster. She knows how much Ken and I love those albums. Lauren offers to buy me a new album with her allowance. Mrs. Harmony offers to take me to George’s right then and there to get it. But there is no logical point in that. The book is over half-full with stickers at this time. The Pirate page long complete. Buying a new album would require me starting over. And I wouldn’t start over. I didn’t want to start over.

            You see…I was already going to have to start over.

            It was that very same spring of 1981 that I learned that my family were moving. My old man had taken a job at a small bank in Wellsburg, West Virginia. The town was only forty-five minutes away from Pittsburgh, and he could’ve easily commuted.

But taking the job came with a caveat.

My old man would have to move to Wellsburg, West Virginia. Show that he was willing to become a part of the town. This mean that I was moving. That my family was moving. That we were leaving Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh and Lawrenceville, my row house, my concrete, communal backyard, those fistfights with Billy Coco, The Pirates, The Steelers and my school.

            And Ken.

            I was going to be leaving the very first best friend that I’d ever made. And I know, I know; a forty-five-minute drive seems like nothing now. But to a seven-year-old I might as well have been moving across country. Ken would make new friends. I would make new friends. He’d have new experiences. So would I. Both bad and good. There’d be new places to explore. New neighborhoods. New corner stores that sold packs of Topps Baseball Stickers.

            And I’d end up completing that album.

            On my own.

            Terrors of the unknown, right?

            Maybe that’s why I cried so much over a little bit of Kool-Aid. Because I knew what was coming. I knew that mine and Ken’s time together had an end date. Time had to be perfect. There was no room for cherry Kool-Aid spills and damaged baseball sticker albums. For eleven-year-old girls to look at me sobbing with their empathetic, ashen faces.

            Time was fleeting.

            So was my time collecting Topps stickers.

            I did finish the 1981 album, thanks to a corner store in Wellsburg that my mom walked me and my brother to a few times a week. But, by 1982, I’d begun to figure out how to really collect cards. How sets were built. How to collect teams and players that I liked. Though I did buy 1982 stickers (was kind of hard not to with Topps putting them in packs of cards), it would be my last year buying them. Coincidently enough, I made a brand-new friend while trading baseball sticker at recess.

Calvin DeFlino.

He needed Terry Kennedy to complete his album.

And I had doubles.

Thanks for reading! Happy Collecting!

If you’d like to learn more about Topps Baseball Stickers, you can do so HERE.

NEXT FRIDAY: We’re going to discuss fixed points in time…and why I like Topps Archives so much.

Music to the Ears: Opera and Base Ball Come to Old Chicago by Russell Streur

 

Music to the Ears: Opera and Base Ball Come to Old Chicago

 

Baseball has been played in Chicago for a long time, a lot of it at Wrigley Field. Before Wrigley Field, there was Comiskey Park, and before Comiskey, there was West Side Grounds.  Before that, there was Washington Park, and before that, there was Lincoln Park, and before Lincoln Park, there was…Opera.

 

Postcard. Wrigley Field, c. 1956.  The Cubs host the Milwaukee Braves.

 

 

Postcard.  West Side Grounds, c. 1913.  A play at the plate.

 

 

Postcard.  Spectators crowd the field during a match played in Lincoln Park, Chicago, c. 1908.

 

One day in the spring of 1863, an opera impresario by the name of Jacob Grau brought a touring troupe of tenors and sopranos to Chicago.  The city batted its eyes at the elegant company and swooned in delightful anticipation.  Booking a three-week run at McVicker’s theater, Grau opened a box office at a downtown music store on Monday, June 8, and was mobbed by customers.  The impresario pocketed $4,000 in subscriptions during his first day in business and was deluged again the next.  On Wednesday, the last of the subscriptions was sold and speculators immediately launched a vigorous scalping trade.

 

A few days later, Grau inaugurated his musical festival with a production of Donizetti’s popular Lucrezia Borgia. The divas and their masculine counterparts on stage earned an enthusiastic round of applause from the Chicago Tribune, and the paper was equally impressed with the opening night parade of fashion.  “The Belles of the avenue breathe free once more,” the Tribune’s review exclaimed.  “New bonnets and head dresses, opera cloaks, and what you call ‘ems, have all been exhibited and admired, and Chicago upper ten is in ecstasies.”

 

For the first two weeks of the lyrical gala, the cream of Windy City society rewarded the melodies of Verdi and the arias of Rossini with packed houses.  A heat wave and the rigorous performance schedule dented the attendance figures for the final quartet of shows but did little to mar the season’s overall success.  Grau staged the twelfth and last of his glittering sensations on the Fourth of July and then issued well-deserved furloughs to his retinue.  As the musicians decamped for cooler climes, the city turned its attention to a more familiar pastime—picnics. 

 

Chicagoans in 1863 deserved a carefree day in the countryside.  With the American Civil War passing into its third and grimmest year, the pages of the city newspapers were blotted with dense, long lists of the dead and wounded from Illinois regiments.  Picnics offered residents an escape from the bleak news and the busy press of urban life.  Encouraging a particular excursion to a rural spot west of Chicago on the Rock Island Line, the Tribune urged its readers to take advantage of the chance “to breathe the pure country air, free from the dust of the city, and the effluvia of the Chicago river.” 

 

Resorts competed for patrons with advertisements of deep ravines, cool springs and romantic paths in the woods.  There was also plenty of room for athletic exercise.  Women and girls practiced grace hoops, both sexes competed in foot races and archery contests, and “staid old gentlemen” pitched quoits.  Younger men played a sport just beginning to take shape in Chicago that summer—Base Ball.

 

 

Postcard.  A family enjoys a picnic in Washington Park while a baseball game is played in the background, c. 1910.

 

The Opera House— Opera had been sung in Chicago before 1863, and games of bat and ball had been played in Chicago before 1863.  But there was something different in the air that spring and summer, a yearning to make a bigger and better future for the city.  Both opera and base ball gave the city something it wanted, and so the city permanently inscribed a new season for each on its calendar that year, finding a voice in the world with the art and flexing some muscle with the sport.

 

Chicago embraced the opera first.  In return for its affections, Chicago demanded a quality product from the touring companies.  “We have been humbugged and victimized over and over again, but those days are over,” the Tribune announced in one oration.  Insisting on “legitimate opera, legitimately performed,” the paper then served notice that the city expected all future productions to measure up to the same standards prevailing in New York.  Later, the construction of Chicago’s first opera house prompted the paper to declare the city’s musical independence from Gotham’s influence.  “Westward the star of Opera takes its way,” the Tribune sang in the fall of 1864.  “We are at length free of New York opera, New York artists and New York music hashed over for Western consumption.”

 

The New York Herald ridiculed the notion and jeered Chicago’s opera goers:

 

The Chicago gentlemen are greatly troubled about the full dress regulations.  They say that dress coats are very dear, and can be used on no other occasion than opera nights, and they hold that frock coats, with white gloves and neckties, ought to be allowable.  The ladies are in a terrible flutter, and every dressmaker is engaged ten deep.  These rural ideas of fashionable manners and customs are very amusing.  By their very attempts to rival New York the Chicago people admit it to be the only metropolis of the country.  We wish them joy of Grau and their opera, and shall try to keep them posted upon all the latest styles here.

 

In journalistic terms, the Tribune politely invited the Herald to either shut up or step outside.  The mudslinging between the papers had no effect on Chicago’s carpenters and the city’s Opera House opened more or less on schedule in April of 1865.  As far as the Tribune was concerned, the triumphal event concluded all debate:  the opening of the doors granted Chicago entry among the great cities of the world, and that was that. 

 

 

 

Opera House Stereograph, c. 1870. Chicago’s Opera House was a palace, and the opulent construction financially ruined its builder, Uranus H. Crosby, an ardent city booster and generous patron of the arts who had made a fortune distilling liquor during the Civil War years. 

 

 

Opera House Lottery Ticker, 1865.  On the day after Christmas of 1865, Crosby put the Opera House up for auction, every nickel of his fortune gone and unable to pay the bills.  Concocting a bizarre lottery, Crosby somehow regained his property from his creditors, only to later lose it again, forever, in the Great Chicago Fire.  Crosby never regained his business touch and he died in 1903, poor and forgotten.

 

 

Squeeze Play—The 1865-66 opera season nearly ruined Crosby, and it nearly ruined Grau, too. Fast talking with the bankers saved Crosby.  Fancy footwork in Louisville saved Grau.

 

Marooned in St. Louis one day and desperate for cash, Grau shared his financial woes with Diego De Vivo, a fellow impresario.  De Vivo pondered the problem a few minutes and then remembered a recent newspaper article.  There was a theater manager named Munday in Louisville, De Vivo told Grau, who was fast losing money on a certain prima donna whose expenses were exceeding ticket sales.  De Vivo wondered if a week in Louisville could get everyone’s accounts back into black ink.  Grau calculated he could rescue himself and Munday for a $5,000 fee, $3,000 to be paid in advance. 

 

De Vivo pulled on his hat and made a beeline to the telegraph office, informing Munday that Grau’s opera troupe was available for six performances but omitting the price.

 

Munday wired back, bidding the needed $5,000 for six performances, and De Vivo, figuring there was more to be gained, tendered the proposal to Grau, recommending a rejection.

 

“Accept his offer,” Grau said, “before he changes his mind.”

 

“Leave all that to me,” De Vivo said.

 

De Vivo took a train east that night and met Munday the next morning in Louisville.  Inflating the expenses of the opera troupe, De Vivo calmly stated that Grau needed $7,000 to set up shop in Louisville.  Munday countered with $5,500.

 

“Am offered $5,500,” De Vivo wired Grau.  “Telegraph me you cannot accept.”

 

“For God’s sake, sell,” Grau quickly answered, “and send me $3,000.”

 

De Vivo ambled back to Munday’s office and breezily waved the telegram before the theater manager, artistically concealing the contents of the wire.

 

“It is as I expected,” De Vivo gravely explained.  “Grau cannot sell at that price.  He must have $7,000.”

 

“I’ll give you $6,000, and that is all I will give,” Munday replied.  “Take that or leave that.”

 

De Vivo lit up a Havana cigar and walked back to the telegraph office.  “I am offered $6,000,” De Vivo wired Grau.  “Telegraph me you cannot accept.”

 

“You are crazy,” came the reply from St. Louis.  “Sell and send me $3,000.”

 

De Vivo returned to Munday’s office and gave the telegram waving routine an encore.  With a shrug of his shoulders, De Vivo told Munday that Grau was firm.  The price was $7,000. Munday conceded another $500 to the pot.  With time running out on the business day and an evening train to catch, De Vivo finally compromised.  “I will accept the responsibility and the risk,” De Vivo grandly offered, “and split the difference.  I will close the contract for $6,750.”

 

Munday signed, and Grau pocketed his $3,000 advance the next day, back in business.  

 

 

 

 

Sized slightly larger than Bowman baseball cards, Liebig advertising cards circulated in Europe during the late 1800s and early 1900s and often featured operatic themes.  The cards have been collected for more than a century. Top:  Fidelio Beethoven (1893).  Middle:  Don Juan Mozart (1893). Bottom:  La Traviata Verdi (1913).

 

The Italian composers Gioachino Rossini and Giuseppe Verdi were subjects of British Imperial Tobacco cards.

 

     

 

Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868), pictured above on Wills's Cigarettes Musical Celebrities No 8 1912, composed 39 operas including The Barber of Seville, William Tell, and Le Comte Ory.

 

 

Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), pictured above on Ogden's 'Guinea Gold' Cigarettes No 63 c 1901, composed Rigoletto, La Forza Del Destino and Otello among his 25 operas.  The back of the card is blank.

 

Early Innings—Chicago’s affair with base ball took a little longer to blossom.  Schoolboys had played barehanded games of bat and ball in America from colonial times.  A still gloveless but more mature and regulated brand of the recreation emerged in New York City during the 1840s.   Partisans gave it the two-word name, Base Ball, and wrote a rulebook.  The entertainment soon spread from the boroughs to other Eastern cities but was slow making its way west.  In 1863, the number of diamonds in Illinois could probably be counted on one hand.   A small scattering of amateur clubs practiced the game in Chicago and only the Empire Base Ball Club in Freeport tended to the sport outside the city.  That summer, the Empires challenged any of the big city clubs to play for an Illinois championship.  Chicago’s Garden City club accepted the invitation and fell to the Empires in a politely-disputed three-game series.

 

Base Ball was wildly popular across the upper Midwest in the years following the end of the Civil War.  This handbill is an example of the new game’s enthusiasm.  It advertises an 1867 match between the doctors and lawyers of Beloit, Wisconsin, describing the sport as The Best Thing Yet, and confidently promotes an admission fee of 10 cents for the event.

 

 

Excelsiors—The end of the Civil War allowed the game to flourish in Chicago.  Hailing the exercise as a superior refreshment for mind, body and soul, the Tribune stamped its approval on base ball’s local growth:

 

In this city at least 500 young men, many of them members of the “first families,” and all of the respectable class, are members of different clubs whose headquarters and batting grounds dot the city in all directions…Everywhere the game is a decided institution.

 

There was also the city’s reputation to consider, and the nagging matter of the state crown, still jealously held.by the stubborn Empires of Freeport.

 

In 1866, the Chicago Excelsiors rose to the top of that city’s base ball rankings, based in in part on its wealthy pedigree, maintaining a fashionable office downtown and a practice field on Lake and May.  But the team proved its worth on the diamonds that season, knocking the Freeports off their perch to start the year and then defeating a Detroit ball club in a memorable match that concluded a tournament for the Midwestern championship in June.  Detroit complained about its loss for decades.  In a 1903 interview, Detroit right fielder David Barry said:

 

The umpire beat us.  He allowed the Chicago pitcher to ‘bowl’—use a slight overhand motion in delivering the ball.  Everybody knows we had to deliver the ball underhand those days.  The advantage their pitcher had over us was enough to win the game.

 

That old grudge rankles deeply in our hearts yet.

 

The Excelsiors ended the year by winning the first-place prize in a September tournament, besting a brace of well-respected St. Louis clubs along the way and then dispatching the rival Chicago Atlantics in a hard-fought showdown. 

 

Dodging insistent invitations from Detroit for a rematch, the Excelsiors finished their campaign without a loss, kings of the game from the banks of the Mississippi River to the shores of Lake Erie, and the unblemished record had a certain ring to it, and it made a certain noise.  It sounded like music. 

 

 ---Russell Streur 

Thank you for reading! Happy Collecting!

And thank you Russell!

NEXT FRIDAY: 1981: Part 1.....things are gonna get sticky around here. That's right, I'm talking the 1981 Topps Baseball Stickers...and album.