The Baseball Card Conspiracy (#117)

Plot: Counterfeit baseball cards start popping up at shows in the New York / Bayport area; when Biff gets burned, Frank and Joe are on the case.

“Borrowing” from the past: For dramatic purposes, Shore Road is considered to be “dangerous,” even to the point of washing out in very wet weather. Frank and Joe take the road to Southport. In The Tower Treasure, the road is rutted and rough, and in 1931’s What Happened at Midnight (#10), Shore Road “doesn’t lead anywhere in particular” (pg. 196). It became the main road to the new airport by The Great Airport Mystery (#9). In Danger on Vampire Trail (#50), it merges with a superhighway several miles from Bayport. By The Blackwing Puzzle (#82), much of its rush-hour traffic was diverted by expressways, completing its evolution from a back road to main artery and back to secondary road. Perhaps Conspiracy is implying it is about to fade back into back road status.

Biff Hooper’s home is said to be in one of Bayport’s “newer” housing developments. Given that the city hasn’t grown in population in 70 years, that may not be very new. The only time the Hoopers’ house was mentioned in the original canon was to place it within walking distance of the boys’ boathouses in The Shore Road Mystery (#6).

Frank and Joe — mostly Frank — identify a symbol used in geometry: parallel lines with a backslash is called a transversal. Frank and Joe were last seen in geometry class in 1930, in The Great Airport Mystery.

At one point, Joe claims to have collected stamps in the past; that’s never been stated before, although Hurd Applegate’s stamp collection was a plot point in While the Clock Ticked (#11).

Bayport’s baseball team — semipro? minor league? Heaven forbid, major league? — is nicknamed the Blues. Frank mentions the team was founded in the 1890s. In The Wailing Siren Mystery (#30), Bayport’s nine is named the Bears. This may not be a mistake since many teams have switched their names over the years, even switching back to previous names.

Biff trails one of the thugs down to the Bayport Mall. For those of you who are interested in how American consumerism is portrayed in popular culture, the mall just barely managed to show up during the Stratemeyer Syndicate’s ownership of the books — 1984’s The Blackwing Puzzle was the mall’s first appearance.

On the cover of the Hardy Boys: I don’t say this often — I can’t imagine why — but I really like the cover to Baseball Card Conspiracy. Frank and Joe look like plausible teenagers, albeit ones who are a little too buff. The criminal, who looks like a red-haired James Dean or Luke Perry, is literally escaping the illustration, with his foot and hand outside the border. Frank is running onto the illustration, with his foot cut off by the cover’s edge. There’s a lot of details, like the strewn cards and the bystander’s barely greeked Pirates’ cap (the Pirates’ “P” is replaced with a “K”), the pennants, the baseball equipment. The two bystanders look like the same person, unfortunately, but that’s a minor quibble.

For those who are curious, the jersey in the background — a #8 in the Pittsburgh Pirates’ colors — is probably meant to be that of Hall of Famer Willie Stargell, who played his entire career for Pittsburg. Although this book was published in 1992, when the Pirates won their third straight National League East title, I think we have to consider the cover artist — “Daniel R. Ho????” (it’s cut off by the cover’s cropping, but it’s almost certainly Daniel R. Horne) — is a Pirates fan. According to his bio, he was born in Pittsburgh in 1960, which would have made him 19 when the Pirates last won a World Series. (CAUTION: The link to Horne’s site has an audio file, and many of the prints in his store are NSFW.)

Talkin’ baseball: The counterfeited cards are those of Don Mattingly, Daryl Strawberry, and Ken Griffey, Jr. The manufacturer and year of the cards are never mentioned, but unless the Strawberry and Mattingly cards were rookies, they probably wouldn’t be worth much today. Mattingly’s 1984 Topps rookie card goes for about $5 on eBay, half the $10 it was trading for in Conspiracy. His Fleer rookie card goes for about the same, although for some reason his Donruss rookie card is at about $20. You can get Strawberry’s 1984 Topps rookie for about $1; Griffey Jr.’s 1989 Topps rookie goes for $5-$10. Some more obscure variants can go for a lot more, but overall, the value of baseball cards have crashed since their early ‘90s peaks. Joe’s assertion that “there’s a ton of money to be made in baseball cards” shows that Joe is not only not a lawyer but is also not an economist.

Of course, Franklin W. Dixon isn’t an economist either. The counterfeiters in Conspiracy are selling the fake Mattinglys for $10 a pop. Biff buys his from a dealer for … $10. Obviously, in this case the dealer won’t be making any money. Dixon is making the classic collector mistake: the price-guide price is retail price. If you sell to a dealer, he will give you much less than that amount; the dealer has to make a profit, and the seller doesn’t have the customer base to sell the collectible (or didn’t, until eBay). The counterfeiters would have been selling the fakes for somewhere between a quarter and three-quarters of the price-guide price.

Police employment: Frank and Joe drop off a screwdriver used to commit sabotage at the police station, with Frank blithely commenting that he’ll see if the police can match the fingerprints for them. Do the police work for Frank and Joe? It usually seems so, but at one point, Con Riley and an officer confront Frank and Joe after a tip-off and find them with a bunch of (planted) counterfeit cards. Con explains how he has observed their civil liberties — it figures the first time anyone’s civil liberties are respected, it would be the Hardys — but despite being caught redhanded, Frank and Joe weasel their way out of an arrest and avoid being treated like regular folks. This is especially ironic since they later marvel at two crooks exercising their right to remain silent just before they break into an innocent man’s mansion to prove he’s guilty. They also leave the scene of an accident (admittedly, no Hardy was driving) without giving those at the scene a way to contact them to help with the accident report.

Fortune favors the prepared: On their trip to Southport, Frank and Joe’s vans get two flat tires, courtesy of a sniper. Frank and Joe have learned from their adventures, and the van actually comes stocked with two spare tires. Each also carries a spare packed overnight bag in their van.

Even the prepared mind can be baffled: Fenton is working on a case involving a stolen duplicating machine / printer of uncanny resolution. Frank and Joe are working on a case that involves many copies of excellent forgeries of baseball cards. The boys see a connection between the cases … and that connection is that maybe the person who Fenton is helping can inform them about printing technologies. So close!

Time catches up with all of us: Fenton seems to be in a bit of a decline. He literally is unable to escape from a cardboard box at one point. Near the end of Conspiracy, he goes to the police to get them to search for Frank and Joe after only a single night’s absence. Either that’s too much time or too little, and I can’t figure out which.

Ami d’hypocrite!: In Panic on Gull Island (#107), Joe absolves Iola for looking at guys while she’s on Spring Break with a friend. (He doesn’t do it to her face, of course, since she’d probably hit him and make him cry for saying it.) In Conspiracy, Joe flirts with and even asks for the phone number of a woman who was bilked by a counterfeiter. Sure, he says it’s to notify her if her money is recovered, but I think we all know what’s going on here.

March of technology: The Hardys recover a 3 ½-inch diskette that helps them figure out what’s going on. This is amusing from a modern perspective for two reasons: one, the diskette is an outmoded form of data storage, and two, Dixon had to distinguish it from the even more outmoded 5 ¼-inch diskette. Someday, people will be saying, “Remember CD-ROMs? Man, I haven’t seen one of those in forever!”

On a similar note, Frank and Joe have to go to a public library to search through old telephone directories. Although those directories are still useful to many people, a lot of libraries have thrown them out, and any real private investigator would have purchased a subscription to a database that would do the same thing.

Nothing half-hearted about this guy: Usually, you wonder why the villains don’t just kill the Hardys and be done with it. That’s not the case with the main thug in Conspiracy, who tries to throw Frank from a train, shoots out their tires while they are driving on Shore Road, attempts to firebomb their van, and hits both boys in the head with fastballs before clubbing Joe in the skull with a baseball bat. (That probably should have been debilitating, if not fatal.)

Double Entendre Theater, where we like what we see, if you know what we mean: One morning, Frank goes to the breakfast table and finds his parents “lingering over breakfast.” They had been up late the night before … “discussing the case.” So that’s what the kids call it these days.

Yes, I know it’s juvenile. I don’t care.

Opinions: I was surprised by this one. I had low expectations, but this book managed to function on two levels for me: a time capsule of the time when collecting baseball cards was a craze and as a solid digest. As I mentioned, economics is not this book’s long suit, but there are a few touches that show the author knows the Hardys, and the plot is simple enough, with just enough good suspects, to keep the reader guessing.

Grade: B+. A superior digest, although if you don't have fond memories of collecting baseball cards, it might not get much above average for you.