TOPPS BASEBALL CARDS: 1952 versus 1992

One of my thrills growing up was buying Topps baseball cards, which came in a packet of five with a sheet of bubble gum.  I can still taste that flavor.

Why mostly boys bought them has to do with the culture of the USA and the nature of sports in those days.  Women just did not play sports then.  The most expensive card is said to be the 1909 American Tobacco Company Honus Wagner, which in poor condition still sells for more than a million dollars.  Why so rare?  There are speculations, but it is possible that Wagner didn't want to be involved with promoting tobacco, so most of his cards were pulled from production.  Thus, there are only a few today circulating.  In 2016 this card sold for $3.12 million.

In particular, I remember a Phil Rizzuto card, for no one in my neighborhood had it but me.  Today, a mint condition 1952 Rizzuto sells for $9,000, and even a beaten-up one goes for $175.

Towards the end of the summer, I bought what I thought would be my final pack, and was shocked to see a 5-set that looked different.  I particularly remember Pee Wee Reese, which was so rare in Hawaii that none of my friends had it.  Today, an ordinary copy is worth $500, while a near perfect one sells for $10,000.

If you have a high grade Mickey Mantle from 1952, that could sell for millions.  A cruddy one still goes for $40,000.  Next to that Honus Wagner, this is the second most famous card and could well soon become #1.

The incredible story is that Topps in 1952 released #311-#407 too late in the summer.  When we went back to school, we stopped buying those cards/gum, partly too because the football season took over.  In 1960 the company loaded 300 to 500 cases of those second season 1952 cards unto a barge and dumped them in the Atlantic Ocean.  The world lost several hundred #311, Mickey Mantle.

One empty box is all that is left.  The asking price is $49,995.  For the empty box!

In 1992 I bought a whole Topps baseball set, 792 cards.  They have been kept in a sealed box, so more than a quarter century later they must be priceless, right?  Nope.  The going E-bay price for the whole collection is $50, around 6 cents/card.

Oh, you ask where are my childhood Topps baseball cards?  No normal person in those days kept them.  

They were simply thrown away, probably by my parents.  I don't remember discarding them.  Who had the vision to see a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card being auctioned off today by Heritage Auctions for what is expected to yield, perhaps, $3.5 million.  We won't know for another three weeks.  Who owns this card?  Former Denver Broncos guard Evan Mathis.  He is hoisting the Lombardi Trophy for the team's Super Bowl 50 parade through Denver.  Some experts predict this card will sell for at least $5 million.

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THE FIRST REAL FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH PILL

The Fountain of Youth has historically appeared as the spring to restore youth, going back to Herodotus in the 5th century BC, becoming more prominent when Ponce de Leon, Spanish conquistador, and then Governor of Puerto Rico, in 1513 made his first voyage to La Florida to search for this flowing elixir.  The story has no basis in fact, but remains in the mind of many.  I rarely actually get excited at this stage of writing a blog posting, but today seems different.

Well, Leonard Guarente, who heads MIT's Paul F. Glenn Center for the Science of Aging Research, co-founded Elixir Pharmaceuticals nearly two decades ago.  The path to a Fountain of Youth pill has been full of potholes, for Guarente recently left the company to join a competing firm, Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, co-founded by David Sinclair of Harvard.  The field is dominated by colleagues from those two universities.  In 2014, Guarente co-founded Elysium Health.

But let me step back a bit to those fabled billionaires I seek for the Blue Revolution:

• Paul F. Glenn, an 85-year old venture capitalist, launched an aging-science foundation half a century ago, funding a dozen aging-research centers
• Peter Thiel, who helped start the Seasteading Institute, gave $3 million to Aubrey de Grey of the Methuselah Foundation
• Larry Ellison of Oracle has spent $400 million on aging research
• Larry Page of Alphabet is working on a life-extension project called Calico
• Peter Diamandis, who founded the XPrize, partnerned with J. Craig Venter to create a company called Human Longevity Inc.

You must now get the point that billionaires want to live forever.

Now, about Harvard, which also has a Glenn anti-aging center, and MIT, sometimes they work together, as for example in finding a cure for aging skin, and the Fountain of Youth pill, where they have taken opposite paths:

• Sinclair (the guy in front, who is Australian, former post-doc of Guarente, now at Harvard and partner with University of South Wales) discovered a molecule to reverse aging in mice.  Nicotinamide adenine dinocleotide (NAD--NAD+ and NADH) is a coenzyme which appears to repair damaged DNA.  Harvard has decided to take the traditional route and get their pill approved through the long and expensive  Food and Drug Administration process.  Don't look for anything you can purchase for a long time to come.

• Guarente (of MIT) called his pill a supplement and began selling Basis through Elysium Health in 2015.  He got seven Nobel Laureates to sign up as cheerleaders, and they seem to come and go.  Basis is said to optimize your health, nothing much more.  It contains nicotinamide riboside and pterostilbene, both naturally found in common foods you consume, like blueberries and milk.  The former is converted by your body to NAD, while the latter is a more powerful form of resveratrol, found in red wine.  Early findings show the pill is "safe."  Note that the company does not need to confirm their product's safety or validity, this is a departure from companies selling all the supplements that people take.  Guarente indeed has an interesting personality, for, in his mid-sixties, he is on his second wife now with young children, and a son from his first marriage who can't be traced, for he is into encryption.

The public has long been duped about super-pills, but does Basis work?  Those associated with Elysium Health have indicated smoothing of elbow skin, feeling younger, ability to do more push-ups and such.  

However, what convinced me that there might be something to Basis is that I earlier this week had completed walking 18 holes of golf at the Ala Wai Golf Course, when a long time colleague at the University of Hawaii, who is several years older than me, and was chair of my original department, Civil Engineering, and further has three sons who are all doctors, was excited to inform me that I should consider that pill.  He said he and his wife have been taking two Basis tablets for two months and they both feel fabulous.  He does not hurt anymore after walking on a golf course, and I do terribly.  Honestly, he today looks much younger than the last time I saw him earlier this year.

So, what does Basis cost?  From Elysium Health through Amazon, $40 for 60 capsules if you subscribe for a year.  That's only a little more than a buck/day.  I think I'll wait until I get some input from my neighbor doctor and my personal physian, who I'll see when I return from my upcoming Cherry Blossom Adventure.

By the way, one of the primary articles I read to substantiate this posting also mentioned something called Dylar, the black-market pill in Don Delillo's White Noise, which cures the fear of death.  Looks like a future article in the making.  

Then again, maybe not, because this is a fictional drug.  I wonder if there can be such a pill.

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Well, regarding my next trip to the Orient, which begins with a stopover in Guam, Typhoon Jelawat has suddenly strengthened into a Category 4 at 150 MPH and is heading in the general direction of Guam:

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THE SKY IS FALLING

Chicken Little is one of innumerable children's fables associated with the quote, The Sky is Falling.  In the U.S. version, an acorn is the culprit for this looming disaster.

As of five years ago, there were 170 million space debris (mostly very tiny), among 1,419 operational satellites.  There are 12 million pounds of man-made space junk out there and around 300 pieces land back on Earth every year.  I'm not sure if this was a typo, but according to Aerospace, 12 million pounds have survived the return.  Since Sputnik in 1957, there have been more than 5,000 space launches. 

Manned missions generally are placed in relatively low orbits, for space drag helps clear this zone of fragments.  Difficult to imagine that to stay up there, objects need to be moving at 17,000 miles per hour, about ten times the speed of a bullet.  Communication satellites are 22,236 miles away to maintain a constant Earth footprint.

China's first space station, Tiangong-1 at 19,000 pounds, was launched in 2011 into an orbit between 118 and 128 miles out, as a prototype for a larger system to be sent out in 2023.  In 2016 China lost control of this station, which will fall from the sky some time this weekend, probably on Easter Sunday.  

However, while Hawaii and the rest of the USA are within the latitude band, this is not worth much of your concern, for a similar-sized piece of junk fell earlier this year and the media mostly ignored this event.  But China is a worthy villain these days.  

The calculated odds of you getting hit by debris from space is ONE IN A TRILLION.  Lightning?  One in 1.4 million.  Yet, Lottie Williams from Tulsa, Oklahoma was struck by a 6-inch long piece rocket which hit her on the shoulder on 22 January 1997.  She was not injured.

Yet, if you're paranoid, click on SATVIEW to track the path, so you can anticipate when and the landing footprint, which will extend across several hundred miles.  Here is a second link to further minimize your neurosis.

Next major casualty?  The International Space Station is wandering from 190-250 miles above the surface of Planet Earth and a crash date in the year 2028 is the current expectation.

However, the fall will be controlled, and the impact area should be in the vicinity of the Spacecraft Cemetery, 2000 miles north of Antarctica, where the ocean depth is around 2.5 miles.  More than 263 spacecraft have been purposefully crashed here since 1971.

Russia's MIR space station, all of 265,000 pounds, the largest so far, fell here in 2001.  That is a photo of MIR's remnant over the Pacific.  But the International Space Station at a million pounds will break that record, at an  embarrassing waste of $150 billion, for this is/was the highest cost object ever built, and not one major consumer product was ever manufactured on the craft.

Russia dominates, with 190 objects now resting in this cemetery, with the U.S. #2 (52) and Europe #3 (8):

How does man-made space junk compare to cosmic dust (including meteorites and such)?  It is estimated that 44 million pounds of natural stuff falls annually.  An asteroid is credited with ending the reign of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, with the impact releasing 10 billion times as much energy as the atomic bomb over Hiroshima.  The blast was not the problem.  The darkness cooled the globe, where for two years no light reached the surface and the temperature of the planet fell by 29 degrees Fahrenheit.

But no human has yet been killed by a celestial event, although at least four have been struck by meteorites, a famous one being Ann Hodges, who in 1954 was grazed by a ten pounder while she was sleeping in bed.  While there was no permanent damage, the subsequent notoriety, led to a nervous breakdown and death at the age of 52.

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ARE YOU READY FOR SOME FANTASY BASEBALL?

Probably not, for fewer than 20% of Americans participate in fantasy sports.  Two thirds are male and the average age is 37.  While the concept is said to have gained ground 40 years ago, it was not until the early 90's, when the internet became popular, that competition expanded.  I got addicted when I had to call in my adjustments a very long time ago.  The sponsor keeps track of all the statistics, and automatically adjusts your team in real time.  One week my brother came in second and I third, in the nation!  Overall we have both actually won money while wasting enormous amounts of our life.

A quarter century ago I not only had several fantasy teams in each major sport (baseball, basketball, football), but was into golf, and also once traveled to Las Vegas to participate in a live draft.  My current interest is only baseball, and the Major League Baseball season begins tomorrow.

Alas, my ESPN NCAA Basketball Brackets were dismal:  87%, 71% and tada...6%.  None of the 375,000 employees of Warren Buffet made the Sweet Sixteen.  However, eight winners will split $100,000 for surviving the longest.

It was half a century ago when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated that professional sports in the USA honored a 3-day moratorium.  Thus, on 10 April 1968, every major league baseball team began the season on the same day.  Tomorrow, 29 March 2018, all teams only for the second time ever, perform on Day One.  This is the earliest start in Major League Baseball, to accommodate more days off for teams.  As far as I know, there are no scheduled doubleheaders.  However, rainouts will occur, and sometimes teams make up that game by playing two the next day, or later, many times charging separate admissions.  These doubleheader days can be a bonanza for some leagues, for you can maximize hitters playing in both games.

What are fantasy sports, anyway?  Simply, this is an online game where participants usually form leagues (organized by the sponsor--although friends can create their own league with adjusted rules), assembling virtual teams of real players.  You lose total loyalty to teams and only root for your players.  Every game becomes important, and you want your player to do well, and hope anyone not on your team does poorly, with some wishing they get injured.  The game is brutal.

For those with an interest in joining a baseball league for the first time, here are the steps, and I'll simplify the competition to ESPN baseball, which is free:

• Sign up with ESPN:  Read ESPN Fantasy Baseball 101
• Through a series of clicks, you will eventually be sent to the Live Draft Lobby,  where you can join a league.
• Your first decision is to select which type of live draft
• auction:  where bidding by team owners determines player value:
• you need to be smart about trying get Mike Trout and not pay too much or you won't have much left to add others (he is usually the first person selected in drafts)
• you are provided $260 to choose your entire team, but don't worry about running out of money, for the computer will make sure you end up with a full team, but perhaps mostly of marginal $1 players
• snake:  where no player has a value, but the computer has everyone ranked (so that if you miss your draft, you will get the highest rated player when your turn comes) by random the first team will have selection #1, and if there are eight teams in that league, the last team will have selections #8 and #9, with the first team then selecting #16 until all 25 players are selected
• The TYPE will be Free and the RESTRICTION will be None
• There are two ways to score (for your first time, best to choose rotisserie):
• rotisserie
• head to head points
• Choose among 8, 10 or 12 team in your league
• an 8-team league allows you to be more creative
• when you have 12 teams, there will be few marginally good players left as free agents to make adjustments 
• Pick a time.  You need to be immediately available.  If the time comes and there are not enough teams, there is a process by which teams will be added.  The odds are high that within minutes your draft will begin.  The first time you do this, you will invariably somehow screw up.  
• However, as everything is free, you can abandon this team (to the ire of other team members--but you don't know them, so there are no repercussions), try again until you get it about right.
• The draft will take around an hour.
• Be careful not to select anyone who is injured.  There are numerous sources to check for injuries, such as this one from ESPN.
• Go to your team page, where you will see your roster:
• select a team name, etc.
• you might find an injured player, so will need to replace him
• this process is simple once you figure out how to do it
• in rotisserie leagues, you will need to adjust your team every day before the first game of the day
• in head to head leagues, while you keep your team for the whole week, beginning with the Monday game, ending on Sunday--you can adjust the team to accommodate days off and such, but you can't add another player from the free agent list until the next period of one week
• if you win your league, you don't win anything, but gain a huge sense of pride
• this game is addictive, and you will waste a lot of time watching baseball games to see how your players are doing

I drafted two ESPN roto and two ESPN head to head teams this year.  I also have two CDM teams, but only because I had a National Football League football playoff team this past season, where I paid around $40, came in sixth in the nation and won almost $275.  Is this gambling?  Is this legal?

Anyway, the CDM leagues are expensive and charge several hundred dollars to join, so I got two teams mostly from my winnings.  If you win the overall competition, you get $25,000 or $15,000.  I joined a throwback league of 20 teams, for those who are new to this, and I need to place at least fourth to get back my investment, with first place being worth $1500 or $1000.  

The rotisserie league offers the higher amount and the points league the lower winnings.  Not much actual involvement, as you set your starting team once/week and that's it.

You can, of course, still join by clicking on CDM Sports.  There are four cheaper types of competition:  Draft & Play, Budget Baseball, Super Challenge and King of the Mound (three teams for $30 or one for $15--pick two pitchers each weekend)

Here are the best fantasy baseball sites for this year:

• MLB.com
• ESPN
• Yahoo! Sports
• CBS Sports
• TG Fantasy Baseball
• Fox Sports
• Fan Duel:  play until you win and get a 20% bonus with your first deposit
• Draft Kings:  get a free entry to a daily fantasy baseball contest when you make your first deposit

REMEMBER, THE MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL SEASON STARTS TOMORROW, THURSDAY, MARCH 29.

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Tropical Storm Jelawat has formed south of Japan, and seems headed in the general direction of Guam.  Wonder if I'll be threatened when I fly from Honolulu to Guam in a week?

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ONE WEEK OF RELATIVELY CHEAP EATS

It's been fully two weeks since I last featured a posting on food, but I haven't exactly been starving.  Let me start with lunch yesterday at Teruya Andagi, one of the 12 Hottest New Restaurants in Honolulu, according to Eater.  Others on that list are Senia and Yauatcha. 

Ever wonder what happens to the middle of donuts?  They ship them off to Okinawa, where they become sata andagi.  It was 25 years ago that Mrs. Teruya started this shop (left) as one of the first ones at the now defunct Shirokiya eating area on the second floor next to Macy's at the Ala Moana Shopping Center.  When the whole place moved to the west end of the center, the Teruya family just about a year ago re-opened between Von's Chicken and Subway on Pensacola.  

I know all that history, for it was told to me by her son, who now runs the place:

This is mostly a takeout bento place.  Don't know where they parked, but people came streaming in.    I ordered their specialty, sukiyaki donburi, which was freshly made.  I sat in one of the three stools (see my ice tea?) with a panoramic view of the First Hawaiian Bank and Walgreens parking lot, with cars whizzing by on Pensacola.

The sukiyaki was acceptable.  However, in deference to the name of this eatery, I waited 15 minutes while they made the next batch of andagi:

It was lighter than the norm and okay.  The whole cost with no tip (not necessary) was around $10.

On the way back to 15 Craigside, I noticed that the Jacarandas were in bloom.  The purple flower from this tree has a very pleasant fragrance, and could well be my favorite tree flower.  Yes, more so than the Gold Tree, which, of course, is my most memorable.

On Sunday I went to Sushi King and ordered a combination lunch of Zaru Soba and Misoyaki Salmon, with hot sake and cold Draft Kirin Beer, which came with salad, miso soup, rice and tea.  Whenever I go to a day University of Hawaii baseball game, I try to begin by first having lunch here.  I have a campus parking sticker, so I find a spot close to the stadium and in the vicinity of this restaurant.  This lunch was absolutely fabulous and only solidified the prospects for my returning soon.

The baseball game was most satisfying in that the Rainbow Warriors fell behind 5-1 to Seton Hall, which had won the first two games and showed an unexpected talent for hitting.  Slowly, we returned to lead 6-5 in the ninth inning.  It was two outs, followed by a simple grounder to Shortstop Maaki Yamazaki, an excellent fielder, who promptly threw the ball away, allowing the runner to reach second base.  The next batter hit a single, scoring the tying run.  

So in the bottom of the ninth, Yamazaki appropriately started with a single, followed by a Johnny Weeks' home run.  He is a senior and I don't believe ever hit one before.  The relieving pitcher, freshman Jeremy Yelland, struck out ten batters in his four + innings of work.  Last night Hawaii again prevailed, 3-2.

One of my other meals last week was to Vintage Cave Cafe (Italian), where I get a free lunch because of my membership in Vintage Cave (French).  I started with a French Onion Soup / Prosecco and went on to Caesar Salad and Asparagus/Scallop Pizza.

I took a photo of my lanai meals over the past few days.  Saba (mackerel) and eggs/natto/rice, with sashimi and tsukemono:

To enhance the corned beef cabbage provided by 15 Craigside, I first fried some wagyu (Japanese wagyu fat is sold for $10/pound at Marukai), added some white onions, and provide the photo below of the end of my meal (mostly to show the great day and papaya plant):

I fried eight cloves of sliced garlic in butter and wagyu fat, tossed in the spaghetti mixture (from 15C kitchen), topped with sliced white onions and basil from my herb collection, to accompany the 15C salad and garlic bread:

Clams linguini with bone marrow:

This qualifies as "cheap eats" because the linguini, garlic bread and salad came from the 15C kitchen and the marrows are from two beef shanks, with a total cost of $2.63.  To keep the marrow from melting out of the bone, you need to quickly sear one end, which I did with six cloves of sliced garlic in olive oil.  If you cut the meaty part outside of the shank by eliminating the tendons, the resultant pieces are edible, if not actually tasty.  Unfortunately, the Conundrum Meritage with alcohol content north of 15% threw the cost out of line.

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