LET'S PLAY BALL! BASEBALL

And here I've been thinking all along, "Y'know, that swvl seems like a good guy." But now I learn that you support the wicked Pinstripes from the Bronx, and I do not know what to say about you and your kind. It is well known that the Yankees sacrifice kittens before every game - oh, yes, they do! - and still, they allow women and children into their park to watch the games, corrupting the heart and future of New York, rotting it out from within, even. Ohhh, the degradation of it all!

Seriously, as a minor customer of a metals distribution center in New Jersey, I used to get comps to Yankee Stadium back in the 1980s and early 1990s. And when I say minor customer, I mean the comps were for minor games: Wednesday nights when the Mariners or some team that absolutely nobody in Eastern Daylight Time cared about were in town. And I have to say that sitting in the loge with ancient New Yorkers who could gas on all night about Elston Howard and Ross Moschitto¹ was an excellent experience. Certainly the Mets of the 1980s were far more depraved than the relatively benign Yankees of the Dennis Rasmussen/Wayne Tolleson era, as were Mets fans, flotsam and jetsam as they were in culture's soft underbelly².

As much as I know the awful truth about baseball in the Bronx, I join all right-thinking Americans in finding it impossible to hate Yogi Berra. And that stamp is the best baseball stamp ever! It looks like a baseball card, but it doesn't - the design is brilliant that way. And it's the best, most positive portrait of Yogi Berra that I've ever seen. He looks like Mister Baseball, dashingly cheerful in the Tools of Ignorance³.




¹ Elston Howard was an excellent catcher. Ross Moschitto's career lasted about twenty minutes. True fans remember guys like Moschitto and should probably take up philately or otherwise reorient their remarkable capacity to store unremarkable knowledge.
² I always liked National League fans who grew up with the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Mets in the 1980s attracted a lot of front-runners of the type who would never be heard from again once the team stopped winning, but when the team was good they'd sit around at the park, take off their T-shirts, drink 300 beers, and chant moronic and obscene slogans until they passed out or the Mets fell behind, whichever came first.
³ So-called because many baseball players couldn't understand why anybody would want to dress up like that on an already hot summer day, crouch for nine innings, and get hit by foul balls, baserunners trying to score, and clumsy umpires. Actually, catchers are often the most intelligent people on the field, and many of them go on to become managers and coaches.

Look what showed up in my mailbox today!


Okay, get ready for a quick yarn…

Back in April 2022, I saw that the Smithsonian’s Postal Museum was offering a pictorial postmark to celebrate its big exhibit on baseball and philately. As you can guess, this idea was right up my alley, so I dashed off a very quick sketch on a cover and dropped it in the mail to the prescribed address.

Nearly a year went by with no response. Eventually I figured this cover had been lost and stopped looking for it. No sweat, that’s always part of the bargain when you send off a postmark request. But then.... voila!

The pictorial postmark reads April 6, 2022, but there’s a spray cancel on the back recording the real date it re-entered the mailstream: Feb. 2, 2023. I will always be curious about where it was sitting for the ten months in between.

(The stamp, of course, shows Yogi Berra. The cachet is my attempt at drawing wily Yankees southpaw Nestor Cortes Jr. in the act of striking out some schmo who wasn’t ready for his singular style on the mound.)

Baseball season is back underway, and frequent readers of my posts can guess how happy I am. I made this event cover last week to commemorate Opening Day, mailing it from the small post office around the corner from Yankee Stadium — this time getting a postmark that shows where it was mailed!

Here’s a nice recent addition to my collection of baseball covers: An unofficial-location FDC for the 1982 Jackie Robinson commemorative (Scott 2016), one of my favorite stamps, postmarked at the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers instead of the official first-day location in Cooperstown. The cachet reproduces a newspaper advertisement that ran on October 10, 1956, the day of the decisive Game 7 in that year’s World Series. The Dodgers and the Yankees were tied at three games apiece; the kid in the ad prays for just one more win for her beloved Dodgers. In fact, the Yankees would clobber them 9-0 that afternoon and collect another ring, which is sad for Dodgers fans but just fine by me. Also of note, and probably the reason for the cachet: This was the last game that Robinson played in before his retirement.



It’s a really nice FDC, with an interesting stuffer (below). I’ll be on the lookout for any of the other covers serviced by this cachetmaker.

My latest cover featuring Scott 5608, Yogi Berra, is this one that I made for the National Baseball Hall of Fame's annual Induction Day pictorial postmark. I chose to honor Fred McGriff, one of the great players of the late Eighties and Nineties, who was inducted to the Hall last month. I made the cachet by jotting down some of his key accomplishments and affixing a baseball card showing him in 1989, the year he led the American League in home runs.