Tuesday, June 16, 2015
In the beginning…
There may not have
been a sports collector’s world had it not been for the efforts of Sy Berger.
Berger passed away late last year, and I was unaware of his passing until I
received an article in that regard from my sister.
Berger was born in
1923 on Manhattan ’s Lower East Side, and moved
to the Bronx at a young age. He was a
passionate baseball fan, naturally siding with the Bronx Bombers, the New York Boston
Sy Berger collected
cards as a kid. There were baseball and hockey cards prior to the 1950s. They
were not terribly popular, but were collected by a few stalwart fans. Berger
had all of the cards in the set, with the exception of a Jesse Petty card. One
of his pals had the card, and would not part with it. Berger challenged him to
a game of “Flips” for the card. Cards were flipped towards a wall, and closest
to the wall won the cards that were thrown. The other game kids played was
called “Topsies”. Cards were held against the wall, and allowed to flutter to
the ground. Once a card landed on top of an opponent’s card, the winner
gathered all of the cards.
Berger managed to win
not only the Jesse Patty card, but also his pal’s entire collection. It took
him four or five hours, he remembered. “The last card I won was his Jesse Petty
card.”
In the 1950s, Berger
drove the sports card hobby to its greatest heights. The 1952 Topps Baseball
Series was his pride and joy. In 2004, Berger told the Society for American
Baseball research: “We came out in 1952 with a card in colour, beautiful
colour, and a card that was large. For the first time we had a team logo. We
had the 1951 line statistics and their lifetime statistics. No one else did it.”
The card that really
captured the imagination of baseball fans was the Mickey Mantle card. It became
the most sought-after card at that time, and still is the most important
baseball card in the hobby today. Ralph Branca’s Brooklyn
Dodger card was also in the set.
Branca was a pitcher
for the Dodgers in the 1950s, and was warming up in the bullpen in the final
game of the season between the Dodgers and the New York
Thompson drove the
ball over the fence in the hit forever known as “The Shot Heard ‘round the
World”. The Dodgers had lost the pennant. It was not long after that occasion
that the team was moved from Ebbets Field to the West Coast, as were the
Giants.
Great memories from
the world of sport.
And yes, by the way,
the Chicago Black Hawks are the 2015 Stanley
# posted by James Hurst @ 10:14 AM 
