ODDS & ENDS

Watch Tom Izzo play 'Jingle Bells' on the accordion

By: Nate Scott 19 hours ago

USA TODAY

 

Michigan State head coach & NMU Grad Tom Izzo is an accomplished accordion player, and he gathered his players and friends on Monday night to join him on The Tom Izzo Radio Show to play them some accordion. He knocked “Jingle Bells” out of the park.


This is one man’s opinion, but I am a big fan of Izzo’s accordion style. Understated. Methodical. Not a lot of attention-grabbing gesticulations, like you see with too many other accordion players out there.

Izzo is there to do a job, and that job is to play “Jingle Bells” on the accordion while his players sing along mostly out-of-tune.

Sy Berger, Who Turned Baseball Heroes Into Brilliant Rectangles, Dies at 91

By RICHARD GOLDSTEINDEC. 14, 2014

NY Times                        

 

Sy Berger, who transformed a boys’ hobby into a high-stakes pop culture niche as the father of the modern-day baseball trading card, died on Sunday at his home in Rockville Centre, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 91.

 

 

Baseball cards date to the 19th century, but for Mr. Berger, the decade after World War II was the perfect time to revitalize them. The Yankees, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants dominated baseball, providing a fertile marketing climate aimed at youngsters in the New York metropolitan area who had been born in the immediate postwar years. And throughout the United States, the arrival of television made it possible for youngsters to watch their baseball heroes in action. 

 

 

In the 1950s, Mr. Berger turned the Brooklyn-based Topps company into a name synonymous with those pieces of cardboard that children could flip (calling out “front” or “back”), pitch (nearest to a wall wins), trade, or simply admire and store in a shoe box.

 

Mr. Berger introduced Topps cards in 1951. They came with taffy, rather than chewing gum, because a competitor seemed to have exclusive rights to market baseball cards with gum. But the taffy wound up picking up the flavor of the varnish on the cards.

 

“You wouldn’t dare put that taffy near your mouth,” Mr. Berger said, adding, “that ’51 series was really a disaster.” 

 

 

A year later, after switching to gum, he conceived the prototype for the modern baseball card, supplanting the unimaginative, smallish and often black-and-white offerings of the existing card companies.

 

“We came out in 1952 with a card in color, beautiful color, and a card that was large,” Mr. Berger told the Society for American Baseball Research in 2004. “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 cards also had facsimiles of the players’ autographs below their images, another innovation.

“The design elements of the 1952 Topps set would kindle not only the imaginations of baseball-loving children, but also their collector’s instincts,” Dave Jamieson wrote in “Mint Condition” (2010), a history of baseball trading cards. “Topps was on its way to dominating the field of baseball cards for the next 40 years.”

 

Mr. Berger did more than conceive the layout of his cards. As vice president for sports and licensing at the Topps Chewing Gum Company, he had to persuade players to sign contracts allowing Topps to use their images.

Photo

Topps baseball cards throughout the decades. By adding color, statistics and facsimiles of stars’ signatures in the early 1950s, Mr. Berger became the father of a modern, and beloved, collectible.

Becoming a familiar face in major league clubhouses, out-hustling the sales forces of his competitors, Mr. Berger offered ballplayers annual payments of $125 to sign exclusive deals with Topps, and he appealed to their vanity by giving them dozens of cards printed with their likenesses. In 1956, Topps absorbed its chief competitor, the Bowman company, to seal its dominance of the baseball-card market.

 

Seymour Perry Berger was born on July 12, 1923, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, one of three children. His father, Louis, a furrier, and his mother, Rebecca, moved the family to the Bronx when he was young.

 

Mr. Berger joined Topps in 1947 and was soon marketing cards featuring figures like Hopalong Cassidy before taking Topps into the baseball-card market in 1951.

 

Designing cards with the help of Woody Gelman, the creative director for Topps, Mr. Berger used photos the players had posed for during spring training — except for the 1953 set, with its images derived from oil paintings.

 

“We had a guy doing those paintings a mile a minute,” Mr. Berger once told Sports Collectors Digest. “A little off-the-wall guy named Moishe.”

 

When the boys of the 1950s reached adulthood, nostalgia merged with speculation to make baseball cards a commodity, bought and sold for prices inconceivable in their youth. Mickey Mantle’s 1952 Topps card was selling for about $3,000 in the early 1980s.

 

Most of the early Topps cards were presumably thrown out by mothers cleaning their sons’ closets, and Mr. Berger dumped dozens of cases of unsold 1952 cards into the Atlantic Ocean. But Topps and latter-day competitors were selling millions of baseball cards annually by the time of the pricing boom of the late 1980s and early ’90s. And ballplayers were sharing in Topps’s success. In 1968, the players’ union reached an agreement with Topps to receive a percentage of its revenue, to be distributed among its members.

 

Mr. Berger retired as a Topps vice president in 1997, becoming a consultant to the company.