There are some pretty cool auctions that are live or coming up this weekend.

Steiner Sports is hosting auctions that end every day in March, with some pretty cool themes. Check them out at http://auction.steinersports.com. For instance, if you're into Notre Dame or Syracuse collectibles, they are offering Luck of the Irish and Syracuse Auction categories. Lots include signed photos, jerseys and signed helmets.

Steiner has exclusive relationships with a lot of schools, teams and athletes, making for some unique pieces. “We’re not just putting lots up like it’s Hallmark,” Steve Costello at Steiner said. “We’ve put a lot of thought into it. People are able to get that buy of a lifetime.”

Look for some cool "prototypes," too. Steiner is taking some of its pieces, say Joe Namath signed mini helmets, pairing them up with, say, a Don Maynard signed mini helmet, and making a framed shadow box display that can't be found anywhere else and offered at auction before similar products are sold on the site.

Plus, they have collectibles starting with $1 bids. How cool is that these days?

Hunt Auctions
This weekend, March 6-7, Hunt Auctions will conduct its live event in Pennsylvania. The 1,164-lot auction is highlighted by numerous private collections. David Hunt expects the growing interest in Negro League material will fuel demand for the private collection of J. Leonard Mitchell, an outfielder with the Negro Leagues in the 1920s.

“This is a pretty special group. You just don’t find intact archives, if you will, like this,” Hunt said. “Given the rarity of that material in its original form, there’s just not that much of it surviving anywhere, let alone finding an intact group that has never been available to the public is pretty exciting.”

For more highlights from this sale, including many more private collections, visit www.huntauctions.com.

The Sports Museum of America, located in the heart of New York City last just nine months. Today it closed its doors, looking for a new buyer.

The Sports Museum of America billed itself as the “the nation’s first and only all-sports experience” and became home to the Heisman Trophy. It opened last May. Philip Schwalb, the museum’s founder and CEO, had secured $93 million in financing for the project. The museum had items on hand from several amateur and professional halls of fame, other museums from basketball, football, hockey, NASCAR, the Negro Leagues, USA Track & Field, the Women’s Sports Foundation and others. In addtion, rare pieces of memorabilia were on loan from some of the leading collectors in the hobby.

According to news reports, the museum had a lot of Wall Street backers, and well, we all know how well that is working out these days. The museum dropped admission prices recently in hopes that it would draw more people in, but interest just wasn't there to make the museum work.

Perhaps when it comes to trying to feature so many different areas, you're actually keeping people away. The thought is if you're covering so much, then the areas I'm interested in, say Track & Field, will be only a small portion of the who museum.

Museums as a whole have a tough time making a go of it. To attract big audiences, they need big-time exposure exhibits, which cost money to procure, set up and display. If the people don't come (and with all of today's distractions, less are coming) then the museums suffer. Trying to then make a huge museum work in the current climate, and it's an even harder task.

We'll see how the big museum in Los Angeles fares, the Sports Museum of Los Angeles. The museum says on its website that it will be closed until this summer, after opening last fall. Perhaps that's a better move than trying to make it work in lean times.

Either way, it's unfortunate for the hobby and it might say something for the overall appeal of collectibles to the masses.