[charleybrown]

Hey everyone,

I am traveling to Fort Lauderdale, FL tomorrow. Can anyone recommend a good LCS and a decent baseball book (history, not novel) to read? Years ago I used to buy packs from a store in Aventura Mall. I don't know if its still there and I can't remember the name.

Thanks

[brian2345]

Scott`s sports cards 6424 N.University Dr Tamarac Fl. 33321 phone number 954-721-7141.. He is closed on Wed. though.

[DrMitchJ]

The only good LCS in Ft Lauderdale closed a few years ago (Oakland Pk Rd) ... It was awesome, but I was only there once or twice before they left . There is one in Davie on University, just north of Griffen (sorry, don't know the name) but their hours are bad, their prices are high and their selection isn't very good. In Hollywood, Rich Altman's Hollywood Collectibles (Sheridan St) is great (amazing) for autograph memorabilia, but he really doesn't carry cards.
I never saw a card store in Aventura Mall. That must have been a long time ago, or very, very recent. I use to go there often, but not in the past 2-3 years ... So, again, no idea about a LCS there.
As far as Baseball books .... I haven't seen anything new to recommend, but an old favorite of mine
Summer of '49 by David Halberstam
It's awesome .... Here's a review
--------------------------------------
Books of The Times; Yanks vs. Sox in 'Summer of '49'
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
Published: May 8, 1989
Summer of '49 By David Halberstam Illustrated. 304 pages. William Morrow & Company. $21.95.

For people in their 50's now, the summer of 1949 was the morning of life, when to be young (and a Yankee fan) was very heaven. That summer was supposed to belong to the Boston Red Sox, with Casey Stengel, thought to be a clown, newly installed as Yankee manager, and Joe DiMaggio out of the opening-day lineup with bone spurs in his foot.

It was, as a broadcaster observes in this irresistible sports history, ''the last moment of innocence in American life.'' The book's author, David Halberstam, adds that the pace of living would soon accelerate ''from the combination of endless technological breakthroughs and undreamed-of affluence in ordinary homes.'' The opening game of the World Series that autumn would be the first baseball game televised to a mass audience, so the character of the game would soon change.

But in the meantime, baseball remained rooted ''not just in the past but in the culture of the country.'' It still embodied ''the melting-pot theory, or at least the white melting pot theory, of America.'' It ''was not so much the national sport as the binding national myth.''

Mr. Halberstam - whose best-known previous books include ''The Best and the Brightest,'' about United States policy in Vietnam, and ''The Reckoning,'' about the decline of the American automobile industry -writes about the summer of '49 using the Yankee-Red Sox rivalry as the spine of his drama.

If the story can be divided into three acts, they would be these: First, the Yanks' fast getaway on the shoulders of their clutch-hitting right fielder, Old Reliable, Tommy Henrich, climaxing in June with the three-game sweep of the Sox in Fenway Park when DiMaggio came back from his injuries and hit four timely home runs. Second, the Red Sox recovery led by Joe's brother Dom DiMaggio, the Little Professor, who went on a 34-game hitting streak in July and August, and the pitchers Mel Parnell and Ellis Kinder, who from the beginning of August went 21 and 1. And third, the final two days of the season, when the Sox came into New York City needing to win just one of two games to clinch the pennant.

Reconstructing the race of '49, Mr. Halberstam has gone behind the scenes and talked to every living veteran of the season except Joe DiMaggio, who the author says avoided his every approach. We learn of the tensions and passions that drove the two teams, and the strengths and peculiarities of a remarkable cast of characters.

The Yankee players started the season with contempt for Stengel; the pitchers fought a winning battle against him for the attention of their awkward and over-impressionable catcher, Yogi Berra, whose selection of pitches they were determined to control. Even when Stengel began to impress team members with his platooning and relief-pitching innovations, they found him impersonal. Henrich remembers crashing into the outfield wall after chasing a ball hit off a tiring pitcher, and being told by Stengel not to get up too quickly. ''He really cares about me, Henrich thought through the gasps of pain, that coldness I felt in the past wasn't real. This man cares. I was wrong. 'Lie down and give me a little more time to get someone warmed up and get this clown out of here,' Stengel added.''

As for the Red Sox: While they were long on hitting and short on relief-pitching, booze seems to have been both a strength and a weakness. The manager, Joe McCarthy, kept a bottle hidden in the dugout, which may have contributed to what some team members considered his erratic judgment. On the other hand, the more Ellis Kinder, the ace Sox pitcher, caroused, the better he seemed to get. Ralph Houk, the Yankees' scrub catcher, managed to keep Kinder drinking until dawn before a crucial game in September. Kinder responded by pitching a shutout and pulling Boston into a tie for first place.

If there is a moral dimension to Mr. Halberstam's story, it concerns the mental toughness bordering on arrogance that characterized the Yankees. They felt they had to win, if only to improve their contract leverage with their despised general manager, George Weiss, who, it turns out, got as a personal bonus 10 percent of whatever he could save of the million dollars the owners allotted him for payroll negotiations.

Unhappily for the team's fans, the Yankees' arrogance eventually caught up with them after they refused to sign the good black players. In 1949, Mr. Halberstam reports, they failed to sign Willie Mays because, according to one of their scouts, he could not hit the curveball.

By contrast, the Red Sox had to lose. They too disdained Mays, but losing was part of their destiny. As Mr. Halberstam writes of one Boston rooter he interviewed: ''It was as a Red Sox fan'' that A. Bartlett Giamatti, the new Baseball Commissioner, ''first learned that man is fallen, and that life is filled with disappointment. The path to comprehending Calvinism in modern America, he decided, begins at Fenway Park.''

Yet whatever the deeper truths this volume may contain, it's the memories of the players that hold us. There is Ellis Kinder's undying bitterness at Joe McCarthy for taking him out of the final game when he was still going strong and the Yanks were leading by only 2 to 0. And there's Ted Williams, still passionate in his pursuit of perfection, recalling the bloop double that Gerry Coleman hit off Kinder's replacement to ice the game and the pennant for the Yankees: ''Oh, God, that cheap hit . . . It's like yesterday. . . . It was the worst thing that had ever happened. That cheap hit. Forty years later I can close my eyes and still see it . . . squirting to the line. . . .''

-------------------
End of review ... Hope this helped!

[garrisc]

Hey everyone,

I am traveling to Fort Lauderdale, FL tomorrow. Can anyone recommend a good LCS and a decent baseball book (history, not novel) to read? Years ago I used to buy packs from a store in Aventura Mall. I don't know if its still there and I can't remember the name.

Thanks

My favorite non fiction baseball book is Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn. A great read about the history of the Dodgers up until 1955.

[bamyanks]

There is another excellent book by the same author, entitled "October 1964". Does carry the factors for the Yankee decline (and I'm a Yankee fan by the way) over the next 10 years or so. Since I was 11 in 1964 (right after the WS) I do remember the season vividly. I highly recommend the book. What's funny is I'm a Yankee fan (as I said) and my father was a Cardinals fan. Oh was it a long winter after the Cardinals won. :-) I owe my father big time for passing along the love of baseball.

Brian

The only good LCS in Ft Lauderdale closed a few years ago (Oakland Pk Rd) ... It was awesome, but I was only there once or twice before they left . There is one in Davie on University, just north of Griffen (sorry, don't know the name) but their hours are bad, their prices are high and their selection isn't very good. In Hollywood, Rich Altman's Hollywood Collectibles (Sheridan St) is great (amazing) for autograph memorabilia, but he really doesn't carry cards.
I never saw a card store in Aventura Mall. That must have been a long time ago, or very, very recent. I use to go there often, but not in the past 2-3 years ... So, again, no idea about a LCS there.
As far as Baseball books .... I haven't seen anything new to recommend, but an old favorite of mine
Summer of '49 by David Halberstam
It's awesome .... Here's a review
--------------------------------------
Books of The Times; Yanks vs. Sox in 'Summer of '49'
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
Published: May 8, 1989
Summer of '49 By David Halberstam Illustrated. 304 pages. William Morrow & Company. $21.95.

For people in their 50's now, the summer of 1949 was the morning of life, when to be young (and a Yankee fan) was very heaven. That summer was supposed to belong to the Boston Red Sox, with Casey Stengel, thought to be a clown, newly installed as Yankee manager, and Joe DiMaggio out of the opening-day lineup with bone spurs in his foot.

It was, as a broadcaster observes in this irresistible sports history, ''the last moment of innocence in American life.'' The book's author, David Halberstam, adds that the pace of living would soon accelerate ''from the combination of endless technological breakthroughs and undreamed-of affluence in ordinary homes.'' The opening game of the World Series that autumn would be the first baseball game televised to a mass audience, so the character of the game would soon change.

But in the meantime, baseball remained rooted ''not just in the past but in the culture of the country.'' It still embodied ''the melting-pot theory, or at least the white melting pot theory, of America.'' It ''was not so much the national sport as the binding national myth.''

Mr. Halberstam - whose best-known previous books include ''The Best and the Brightest,'' about United States policy in Vietnam, and ''The Reckoning,'' about the decline of the American automobile industry -writes about the summer of '49 using the Yankee-Red Sox rivalry as the spine of his drama.

If the story can be divided into three acts, they would be these: First, the Yanks' fast getaway on the shoulders of their clutch-hitting right fielder, Old Reliable, Tommy Henrich, climaxing in June with the three-game sweep of the Sox in Fenway Park when DiMaggio came back from his injuries and hit four timely home runs. Second, the Red Sox recovery led by Joe's brother Dom DiMaggio, the Little Professor, who went on a 34-game hitting streak in July and August, and the pitchers Mel Parnell and Ellis Kinder, who from the beginning of August went 21 and 1. And third, the final two days of the season, when the Sox came into New York City needing to win just one of two games to clinch the pennant.

Reconstructing the race of '49, Mr. Halberstam has gone behind the scenes and talked to every living veteran of the season except Joe DiMaggio, who the author says avoided his every approach. We learn of the tensions and passions that drove the two teams, and the strengths and peculiarities of a remarkable cast of characters.

The Yankee players started the season with contempt for Stengel; the pitchers fought a winning battle against him for the attention of their awkward and over-impressionable catcher, Yogi Berra, whose selection of pitches they were determined to control. Even when Stengel began to impress team members with his platooning and relief-pitching innovations, they found him impersonal. Henrich remembers crashing into the outfield wall after chasing a ball hit off a tiring pitcher, and being told by Stengel not to get up too quickly. ''He really cares about me, Henrich thought through the gasps of pain, that coldness I felt in the past wasn't real. This man cares. I was wrong. 'Lie down and give me a little more time to get someone warmed up and get this clown out of here,' Stengel added.''

As for the Red Sox: While they were long on hitting and short on relief-pitching, booze seems to have been both a strength and a weakness. The manager, Joe McCarthy, kept a bottle hidden in the dugout, which may have contributed to what some team members considered his erratic judgment. On the other hand, the more Ellis Kinder, the ace Sox pitcher, caroused, the better he seemed to get. Ralph Houk, the Yankees' scrub catcher, managed to keep Kinder drinking until dawn before a crucial game in September. Kinder responded by pitching a shutout and pulling Boston into a tie for first place.

If there is a moral dimension to Mr. Halberstam's story, it concerns the mental toughness bordering on arrogance that characterized the Yankees. They felt they had to win, if only to improve their contract leverage with their despised general manager, George Weiss, who, it turns out, got as a personal bonus 10 percent of whatever he could save of the million dollars the owners allotted him for payroll negotiations.

Unhappily for the team's fans, the Yankees' arrogance eventually caught up with them after they refused to sign the good black players. In 1949, Mr. Halberstam reports, they failed to sign Willie Mays because, according to one of their scouts, he could not hit the curveball.

By contrast, the Red Sox had to lose. They too disdained Mays, but losing was part of their destiny. As Mr. Halberstam writes of one Boston rooter he interviewed: ''It was as a Red Sox fan'' that A. Bartlett Giamatti, the new Baseball Commissioner, ''first learned that man is fallen, and that life is filled with disappointment. The path to comprehending Calvinism in modern America, he decided, begins at Fenway Park.''

Yet whatever the deeper truths this volume may contain, it's the memories of the players that hold us. There is Ellis Kinder's undying bitterness at Joe McCarthy for taking him out of the final game when he was still going strong and the Yanks were leading by only 2 to 0. And there's Ted Williams, still passionate in his pursuit of perfection, recalling the bloop double that Gerry Coleman hit off Kinder's replacement to ice the game and the pennant for the Yankees: ''Oh, God, that cheap hit . . . It's like yesterday. . . . It was the worst thing that had ever happened. That cheap hit. Forty years later I can close my eyes and still see it . . . squirting to the line. . . .''

-------------------
End of review ... Hope this helped!

[DrMitchJ]

My favorite non fiction baseball book is Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn. A great read about the history of the Dodgers up until 1955.

Agreed! Great book!
Another favorite of mine The Duke of Flatbush by Duke Snider (& Bill Gilbert)

---

There is another excellent book by the same author, entitled "October 1964". Does carry the factors for the Yankee decline (and I'm a Yankee fan by the way) over the next 10 years or so. Since I was 11 in 1964 (right after the WS) I do remember the season vividly. I highly recommend the book. What's funny is I'm a Yankee fan (as I said) and my father was a Cardinals fan. Oh was it a long winter after the Cardinals won. :-) I owe my father big time for passing along the love of baseball.
Brian

I've read that, too! Great book, but as a whole, I just think Halberstam did a little better in telling the story of post-WWII America thru the eyes of baseball and the classic Yankee/Boston knockdown dragout battle. Both great books by the same great author. You can't go wrong either way.

Another great book recommendation
Giants of The Polo Grounds by Hynd ( forgot his first name ... Noah, Noel ?!?)
Anyway, great story of turn of the century baseball and lots of John McGraw stories. Legendary!
Heck, my shelves are filled with baseball history books as well as baseball biographies and autobiographies ... I'd rather read baseball non-fiction than any other non-fiction books out there.
Jane Leavy wrote 2 great biographies on Mickey Mantle and Sandy Koufax. Both are good reads, too! Probably easier to find in book stores than the 2 Halberstam books recommended above.

[madamson]

Although it is from the 80's.....The Pine Tar Game. It was a can't put down'er!

[charleybrown]

[quote='DrMitchJ' pid='2606515' dateline='1458077943']
The only good LCS in Ft Lauderdale closed a few years ago (Oakland Pk Rd) ... It was awesome, but I was only there once or twice before they left . There is one in Davie on University, just north of Griffen (sorry, don't know the name) but their hours are bad, their prices are high and their selection isn't very good. In Hollywood, Rich Altman's Hollywood Collectibles (Sheridan St) is great (amazing) for autograph memorabilia, but he really doesn't carry cards.
I never saw a card store in Aventura Mall. That must have been a long time ago, or very, very recent. I use to go there often, but not in the past 2-3 years ... So, again, no idea about a LCS there.
_________________________________________________________
I went to the shop at Aventura Mall probably in 2001. They had mostly memorabilia. It was like a field of dreams store. I remember getting nice hits of 2001 SP Game Used and Topps Retired Signature a few years later.