Mantles and Koufaxes

The Philadelphia papers today tell us that a trade for Allen Iverson is off the table. #3 will be back- helping the Sixers strive for .500 and an eight seed- you know, for as long as he feels like the coach is not a fool.

It is easy- and ergo fashionable- to dismiss AI’s return as a mistake. It is pretty obvious the Sixers have sort of exhausted both the on and off-court relationship with this guy. Maybe the jury is still out on whether you can win a title with AI’s singular demand for the ball and all-encompensing soap opera. But it is obvious the Billy King and Mo Cheeks have no way, no plan to do it.

But, the evidence suggests that the main reason AI is coming back is that there was no serious market for him- no trade that made the Sixers better now, would potentially make the Sixers better later, or at the worst got them even. So if my choices were blow the Sixers up and get nothing- or not blow them up, keep a decent chance for semi-competency (a play-off spot say, another campaign or two of 44 wins) and maintain the option to deal AI later- maybe the latter is what they need to do?

I guess I’d rather them be mediocre and entertaining than be the Atlanta Hawks.

Slate has an article worth reading if, like me, you have boxes and boxes of baseball cards in your ancestral home. The bad news is that our extensive collections are worthless:

In the early 1990s, pricier, more polished-looking cards hit the market. The industry started to cater almost exclusively to what Beckett's associate publisher described to me as "the hard-core collector," an "older male, 25 to 54, with discretionary income." That's marketing speak for the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. Manufacturers multiplied prices, overwhelmed the market with scores of different sets, and tantalized buyers with rare, autographed, gold-foil-slathered cards. Baseball cards were no longer mementos of your favorite players—they were elaborate doubloons that happened to have ballplayers on them. I eventually left the hobby because it was getting too complicated and expensive. Plus, I hit puberty.

It's easy to blame card companies and "the hard-core collector" for spoiling our fun. But I'll admit that even before the proliferation of pricey insert cards, I was buying plastic, UV-ray-protectant cases for my collection. Our parents, who lost a small fortune when their parents threw out all those Mantles and Koufaxes, made sure we didn't put our Griffeys and Ripkens in our bicycle spokes or try washing them in the bathtub. Not only did that ensure our overproduced cards would never become valuable, it turned us into little investors. It was only rational, then, for the card companies to start treating us like little investors. The next wave of expensive, hologram-studded cards didn't ruin collecting for us—we were already getting too old for the game. It ruined baseball cards for the next generation of kids, who shunned Upper Deck and bought cheap Pokémon and Magic cards instead.