Selling Autographs: A Foul Blow by Baseball

I’ve been vaguely aware for some time that high-salaried professional athletes are selling their autographs to kids, but given the other problems we deal with today--the world being taken over by homosexuals and dirty pictures and flag burners and all--I haven’t wanted to confront it.

Last weekend I did. And when and if the capitalist system ever comes down, I think we can point to this practice and say, “That’s where it all started.” There may be a better example of institutionalized greed around, but offhand I can’t think of any.

My moment of truth came Saturday afternoon when I was cleaning the garage. My neighbor, Ned Rose, came by with steam coming out of his ears, waving a copy of The Times’ sports section. What set him off was an ad for a baseball card show at UC Irvine’s Bren Center. Ned’s son, Spencer, who was trailing along behind, collects baseball cards, and Ned took him to this same show a year ago where he parted with $15 of his carefully preserved Christmas money to get Willie Mays to autograph a baseball.

“He didn’t even look at me,” Spencer said plaintively. “He was talking to some guy who was sitting beside him, and he didn’t even look up.”

Spencer wanted to go to the show again, but his father was taking a stand. On principle.

“I’ll be damned,” he said, “if I’ll support a system any more that allows Jose Canseco to charge $22 to kids for his autograph.”

Sure enough, there it was in the ad. The Oakland A’s were in town to play the Angels, and Jose Canseco and Rickey Henderson were doing a little morning moonlighting at the card show--at $22 a pop for Canseco and $20 for Henderson. We had gone to the game the night before, and Canseco had taken himself out in the fourth inning because he said he had a bellyache. (He had also been struck out twice by Jim Abbott.) He had apparently recovered enough the next morning to sell his autographs.

I knew that I had to check into this, but it was too late to catch the headliners on Saturday. So my stepson and I went to the show on Sunday for the bargain basement attractions of Steve Garvey and former Green Bay Packer quarterback Bart Starr. Garvey was going for $6 and Starr for $8.50--a reversal of the pecking order that I found mildly surprising.

My two grandsons are deep into baseball cards, but they live in Colorado; my stepson collects comic books, so we hadn’t made the baseball card show scene before. Or witnessed the paid autographs.

First off, it cost us $4 each to get in, which is something like buying your way into K mart or Sears, Roebuck, since the show is a supermarket of card dealers and purveyors of sports memorabilia.

The autographing is done in a far corner of the hall where an alcove had been filled with long tables. When we arrived, Starr had a handful of autograph seekers in front of his table, while a line of perhaps 100 people was waiting patiently for Garvey, who was then 20 minutes late.

We wandered the floor waiting for him to appear. This is a wondrous world with which I am not familiar. The prices resembled a jewelry auction more than a card sale, and the items offered covered the whole spectrum of sports. There was, for example, a Wayne Gretzky jersey for $425, a Kareem Abdul Jabbar commemorative plate for $300, and a 1939 Joe DiMaggio bat for $1,000. (When I asked the merchant--logically, I thought--how I could be sure it was Joe DiMaggio’s bat, he said; “Would I be selling it if it wasn’t? And besides, it has his name on it.”

The highest-priced item I could find was a St. Louis Cardinal uniform worn by James Stewart in a movie called “Strategic Air Command;” it was going for $20,000. I also found it vaguely pleasing that Nolan Ryan’s autographed picture was selling for $300 while Canseco’s brought only $40.

Garvey arrived then, a surprisingly slight man in slacks and sport shirt, handsome enough to warrant the girl waiting in line wearing a blouse labeled “Garvey cheerleader.” He went right to work and to his credit shook hands and chatted briefly with each person in line as he signed his name. Observing this operation is of about the same order of excitement as watching paint dry, so we looked up the head honcho of the show, a heavyset young man in a pencil mustache named Eddie Fernandez.

As might be expected, he stoutly defended the commercial autographs and gate charge. “We’re providing a service here,” he said, “renting a facility and making it possible for all this to happen. These autographs are a collectible, salable item.”

He said that Canseco drew the biggest crowd of the year and admitted he didn’t have much interchange with the people who bought his autograph “but that wasn’t so much that he didn’t want to meet them as just trying to get everybody through the lines.”

He also pointed out a sign saying that Bart Starr had contributed his fee “to his Boy’s Home in Wisconsin.” I asked Eddie if that was unusual, and he said it wasn’t but he couldn’t remember the names of any other athletes who did it. He said there are some players who won’t do the autographing number “but it’s not because they have a moral problem with this, but because they don’t want to put up with the hassle of coming to the shows.”

By this time the line around Garvey had dwindled sufficiently that I was able to ask him if he found it upsetting to be priced $2.50 below an old-timer like Bart Starr--and a football player in the bargain. He said no, he didn’t, because “the prices they charge for autographs are all subjective, depending on the time and place and what the promoter thinks the market will bear.”

When I asked him if he had any problem with selling his signature to sports fans, he said: “I don’t sell autographs. I’m paid an appearance fee, and I appear to support this hobby. I just like seeing and meeting people. I still give away hundreds of autographs every week.”

I was pondering this ethical fine line when we left. On our way to the car, I asked my stepson, who is a quintessential capitalist with holdings a deposed savings and loan mogul would envy, how he felt about athletes selling autographs.

“I don’t think they should do it,” he said, “unless they are giving it to charity. They’re already rich, so why do they need it?” He admitted he doesn’t “feel mad at them. They’re just people. And maybe it’s all right to do this if they’re retired, but not active players who are making all that money.”

When we pulled into our driveway, a bunch of kids were playing ball in the street. I told them where we’d been and asked them collectively how they felt about players who sell their autographs to the people who make it possible for them to be rich in the first place.

A boy named Jeremy answered for the group.

“I think,” he said succinctly, “that they’re cheap.”

That seemed to sum it up pretty well.