07/18/2007
A Memorable, Valid Ticket
Last Saturday night was a big one for Old Bortrum, who was taken back to his youth attending Pittsburgh Pirate games at the late Forbes Field from 1946 to 1950. As discussed at some length in Bar Chat (7/16/2007), it was Ralph Kiner Night at Shea Stadium. I must thank our Editor Brian Trumbore for his generosity in taking me, Harry Trumbore and my grandson to this memorable event. I was shocked that, when I mentioned to a half dozen or so fellow mall walkers that I was going to this event, they had never heard of Kiner! This despite the fact that for over four decades he’s been a New York Mets broadcaster, not to mention a Hall of Fame homerun hitter with awesome slugging statistics in a 10-year career shortened by a severe back problem.
Kiner averaged 7.1 homeruns for every 100 times at bat, second only to Babe Ruth and Mark McQwire in the retired player category. And I’m not sure we even knew the word “steroid” in those days! At the ceremonies honoring Kiner, I enjoyed seeing players such as Tom Seaver, Rusty Staub, Ed Kranepool, Bob Friend, Bud Harrelson, Jerry Koosman, Keith Hernandez and Yogi Berra in attendance. However, I was blown away when it was announced that walking onto the field with his wife was “Rapid Robert”. I thought, “Surely, this can’t be.” But it was indeed 88-year-old Bob Feller and his wife all the way from Iowa!
Seeing him brought back one of the stupidest things I’d ever done – turn down an opportunity to meet and talk with Feller! In 1966, I was at a meeting of The Electrochemical Society in Cleveland and Feller was at the hotel in some sort of public relations capacity. I saw in the hotel gift shop that one could buy a baseball autographed by Feller and decided to buy one for Brian. The clerk asked me if I wanted to meet Feller when he signed it. I refused, saying I didn’t want to miss some of the talks at the meeting. I don’t have the foggiest idea as to the content of those talks but I surely do remember my stupidity!
Prior to that, I had seen Feller up close at an event I’ve mentioned in an earlier column. In April 1951, when I was employed in Cleveland at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), General Douglas MacArthur was on his way back to Washington from the Korean conflict after being fired by President Harry Truman. MacArthur, with his wife and son, stopped briefly at the Cleveland airport, which borders NACA (now NASA). We heard MacArthur would stop and went over to see him. Cleveland’s mayor was there, as was Bob Feller, who presented MacArthur’s son with an autographed ball and/or a glove. I was surprised to see that MacArthur’s hands were shaking quite noticeably during his brief remarks. I believe it was the next day that he gave his eloquent “Old soldiers never die” speech before Congress.
In retrospect, I am surprised that I only went to one baseball game in the two years I was in Cleveland and never saw Feller pitch. This was in contrast to my preceding 4 years (1946-1950) in Pittsburgh, when I attended well over a hundred games at Forbes Field and got to see Kiner hit many of the home runs that were his trademark. Kiner spent his last year as a player in Cleveland, where I presume he met and became friends with Feller, which would explain Feller’s appearance at Shea Stadium last Saturday.
So much for reminiscing. I should bring in something related to science or technology. At Shea Stadium, in addition to be wanded by security as we entered, there were announcements to the effect that anyone attempting to enter the stadium using tickets not obtained through legitimate sources would be denied entrance if the tickets were counterfeit. I noticed that, instead of tearing off stubs, the ticket person lasered the tickets’ bar codes as on checking out items at a supermarket. (I also noted that Brian paid at least $48 per ticket. If memory serves correctly, I paid 50 cents for my bleacher seats at Forbes Field!)
But what about those counterfeit tickets? Or for that matter, counterfeit currency? With the sophisticated copiers available today, it’s not easy to combat the dedicated counterfeiter. In an article in the July 9 Chemical and Engineering News, Alexander Tullo discusses progress in the field of RFID tags. RFID stands for radio-frequency identification. If you have E-ZPass, the gizmo I have mounted on my car’s windshield, the RFID tag allows one to go through toll plazas without reaching for change or picking up tickets and paying tolls on turnpikes.
According to Tullo, RFID tags based on silicon chips today cost about 15 cents each. RFID tags have small circuits and antennae and can be powered either by a battery, as in my E-ZPass or by the electromagnetic pulses emitted by the device that reads the data encoded in the tag. The tags are becoming more prevalent, attached to all kinds of products for tracking and inventory control. Wal-Mart, for example, plays a big role in determining the specs for RFID tags. With silicon, the eventual cost of a tag can be envisioned in the vicinity of 5 cents a tag. However, even that cheap a tag is too much for low cost products. To truly dominate the market, a penny a tag is a goal and much effort is being spent trying to come up with alternatives to silicon.
To cut the cost down to a penny a tag will require a mass production manufacturing process analogous to printing a newspaper. In printing RFID tags, the presses will print RFID circuits on long rolls of flexible polymers in a process that would yield zillions of cheap tags, analogous to the cheap transistors of the Moore’s Law era of the silicon chip. These printed tags are barely in their infancy and aren’t yet ready for primetime. However, one proposed applications is to foil counterfeiting of tickets and currency. In such an application, the detection of a counterfeit ticket might involve simply the determination as to whether a tag is present or not.
I understand that some rock concert tickets actually are selling on the scalping market for ridiculous prices into the thousand-dollar range. I should think that for a dedicated fan even the 15-cent RFID tag embedded in the ticket would be well worth the cost to ensure not being turned away at the door.
As for me, I’ll take a Ralph Kiner Night any day (or night)!
Allen F. Bortrum
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