Assembly Line of Dreams

By Tom Callahan

What is the market price of admiration? It can't be intimacy that ballplayers are peddling for $5, $8 and $12 a signature to children lined up at autograph marts. Almost any weekend of the year in school halls and shopping malls, casino hotels and churches, heroes are hired to lure hobbyists to baseball-card shows where memories are for sale.

Sometimes for a flat fee, often for a guarantee plus commission, old and young stars typically stay four hours on a Saturday and Sunday in an assembly line of dreams. Behind their tables, the idols scarcely speak or stir. "No time for personalizing" is the rule of the promoters, who keep the kids moving along like sad-eyed paratroopers. It's said that quick-draw artist Pete Rose averages two seconds a $15 scrawl. According to the Boston Globe, Ted Williams made $100,000 in one weekend.

Icons as regal as Ernie Banks ($12 an autograph), Willie Mays ($12) and Joe DiMaggio ($30) are involved. "It's the free-enterprise system," says ex- Oriole pitcher Jim Palmer, who is capable of modeling underpants on billboards without blushing and is available to sign anyone's shorts for $10. Mostly they sign bubble-gum cards and glossy pictures.

So that's where DiMaggio has gone. Joe looks as cool at 74 as he used to in center field. But the Yankee Clipper knows the value of celebrity and the attraction of having the proof in writing. In the greatest reversal since Serutan, DiMaggio brought a baseball to a White House dinner last year, when Mikhail Gorbachev was visiting President Reagan, and acquired their autographs for free. "Reagan's is very precise," says DiMaggio, who once had to fight a souvenir collector at his bank to retrieve a check made out by Joe and endorsed by his then wife Marilyn Monroe. "Gorbachev signed it the way a doctor writes a prescription. In my whole life, that's the only time I ever asked anybody to sign a ball."

Pope John Paul II signed one once after an outdoor Mass in San Francisco's Candlestick Park. Like Whitey Ford, who writes "Ed Ford" to conserve energy, the Pope went with "JP II." If he knows baseball, he might wonder what ever happened to that era of priceless memories when small boys leaned out over dugout railings and haunted stadium gates. A number of contemporary players, like the Dodgers' Orel Hershiser and Don Mattingly of the Yankees, boycott the cattle calls. "Every kid is looking for a moment or hoping for a word, but no one ever even glances up," Mattingly says. "It's depressing." However, many of the modern stars -- Jose Canseco ($15), Roger Clemens ($9) and Will Clark ($8) among them -- seem to see the same lobby kids at every hotel, and have come to look at all children as Fagin's agents in the burgeoning curios and collectibles racket.

- For old-timers, a slash across a page can be a pensioner's windfall. "In my day, if you turned down an autograph," Bob Feller says, "the kids would spray ink all over you." These days he gets $7. "Why shouldn't I sell my signature? If I'm on the street or at the ballpark and someone asks for an autograph, no problem. But with these shows, there's money to be made. That's where I charge."

Limited editions are in particular demand. Edd Roush, a .323-lifetime hitter with Cincinnati and the Giants during the '20s, died last year at 94. His final days were put to use keeping up with a mail-order frenzy for his trembling signature ($5).

In sports the autograph is fundamentally a province of baseball, though all athletes are besieged in some measure. Football players who are able to write their name often do so. "I won't sign anything flimsy," says golfer Lee Trevino, who recalls autographing a $5 bill once for a persistent woman in a restaurant. " 'I'll treasure it forever,' she told me. Of course, I got it back from the cashier in my change." The only autograph basketball's Tom Van Arsdale ever solicited was from an Indiana high school kid, Oscar Robertson, when Van Arsdale was even younger. "He was eating a hot dog. I'll never forget the way he shoved it in his pocket to free his hands. Mustard and all." They became teammates in the pros.

Certainly not all autograph seekers are innocents. A collector in England nearly kept sprinter Florence Griffith Joyner from a starting line last season. "I told him I would give him an autograph after the race," she said, "but he grabbed hold of me and wouldn't let go." Reggie Jackson often conducted debates of this kind with his public, including a beery brawl in Milwaukee that escalated when a shredded Jackson autograph got sprinkled on his french fries.

During Henry Aaron's 1974 stalk of the lifetime home-run record set by Babe Ruth (who dispensed autographs cheerfully and without charge but never could fathom their allure), Aaron took the alias of Diefendorfer in an attempt to throw off his pursuers. He registered that way in out-of-the-way havens and avoided the company of his Atlanta Braves teammates. But a small boy with a ball-point pen still found him in a cavern of the stadium. "Are you a Brave?" the boy asked. Aaron was charmed. "Sure am, son," he replied with a great laugh. "May I have your autograph?" "Of course."

It would be a better story if he had signed "Henry Diefendorfer," but the truth is he wrote "Hank Aaron." Too bad. Diefendorfers are going through the roof.