Cardboard Gods

Cardboard Gods Has Moved!

2007-03-27T06:19:00.000-05:00

The earth-shakingly urgent matter of assigning textual matter to my childhood baseball cards will continue on at Baseball Toaster. Today's entry begins to consider the majesty of Kurt Bevacqua.

Here is the new URL:

http://cardboardgods.baseballtoaster.com/

Nothing about the blog has changed, except for the address and the appearance of the page. I'll still be the same past-haunted, whiny, rambling, baseball-addled basket case. All the old posts are also availiable on the new site, and soon all the old comments will be imported also, one way or another.

The comments on this Blogger site have collectively been one of my favorite things about this whole strange experiment, so I really hope that whoever has been reading the blog here continues to read it and comment on it over at the new Baseball Toaster location. To comment there, you need to register, but if I remember the process it is about the easiest, least invasive registration I've ever taken part in. I think that there is currently no way to edit your registration info once you've entered it, so your screen name will be the screen name you choose upon registration.

See you there!

Pete Broberg

2007-03-23T13:12:00.000-05:00

I.

"This is not a photograph - no
(This is not a photograph)

And these are not the Elysian Fields
(This is not a photograph)”

–Mission of Burma

And if that’s not enough jagged postmodern abnegation for you, this is not a Seattle Mariner, either. Pete Broberg was drafted by the Mariners with the 35th pick of the 1976 expansion draft, but he was traded to the Cubs for a player to be named later before the Mariners had played (and lost) their first game.

Moreover, at the time this mysterious portrait of Pete Broberg in cheesy Elysium emerged, the Seattle Mariners did not quite fully exist. For example, they did not yet have caps, or even an official cap design. The pitchfork represented here on the crown of the fake cap painted onto Pete Broberg’s head, perhaps the product of an overworked Topps artist’s interpretation of some hurried instructions delivered over the phone by an overworked Seattle Mariners official, is not a bad rendering, especially when compared to other Topps-doctored cap insignias, such as the loopy “NY” on Rudy May’s 1975 card, but it is decidedly smaller than the actual logo that appeared on the Mariners caps when they officially began their existence.

The undersized insignia contributes to the overall impression of unreality, an impression strengthened further by the background, a glue-huffer’s foggy hallucination of paradise. Another even stronger element in the creation of the card’s ersatz bliss, ironically the one part of the picture that seems the most likely to have originated as a photographic representation of reality, is Pete Broberg’s face.

This face, which seems more a part of an oil portrait made to look like a photograph than a part of a photograph, represents the most placid, careless expression I’ve yet come across in my investigations of the Cardboard Gods.

By far.

It’s as if Pete Broberg has left behind all the complications of life. Or perhaps has never been the least bit acquainted with such complications.

II.

“I thought we had another Bob Feller. But he’s a hardhead.”

–pitching coach Sid Hudson on Pete Broberg

Pete Broberg is 27 years old in this picture, and his past to this point has been a series of gleaming futures that never came to pass.

He’d been 18 years old in 1968, which was for most young men in America a bad time to be 18: U.S. troop deployment and casualties in Vietnam had reached their highest levels, and you could expect a letter in the mail at any time, demanding that you come join the carnage.

But Pete Broberg was special, the best high school pitcher in the nation. He was chosen by the Oakland A’s with the second pick in the first round of the 1968 amateur draft (Tim Foli was taken first). As the A’s had just moved from Kansas City that off-season, Pete Broberg had the distinction of being the first pick ever taken by the Oakland A’s. While others his age with fewer options were on their way to Vietnam, Broberg was being offered a $175,000 signing bonus by A’s owner Charlie Finley. Broberg turned him down and instead enrolled in Dartmouth College. (One of the ways of avoiding the military draft back then was to go hide out in college for a while. I don’t know if this figured into Broberg’s decision. In an article on the Oakland A's website the only clue Broberg offers on his turning down of the $175,000 was that he didn’t feel ready yet for the big leagues.)

Three years later, he was the best amateur baseball player in America, bar none, and he did feel he was ready for the majors. This time he was taken first overall in the amateur draft, the last first round draft choice ever taken by the Washington Senators. Broberg signed with the Senators with the stipulation that he never have to spend a moment in the minor leagues. Two weeks after being drafted, he pitched in the majors against the Boston Red Sox. He struck out 7 and allowed two runs in a 6-inning no decision. Most who saw him in his early days were impressed by his talent, as touched on in this Baseball Fever discussion thread.

But the talent, which seemed to surface in glimpses (including the day Broberg was the pitcher of record in the first-ever win by the Texas Rangers), never translated to any kind of sustained major league success: In his entire career, he never once finished the year with a winning record. By the expansion draft of 1976 everyone had long ago ceased waiting around for Pete Broberg to blossom into the next Bob Feller.

But in this 1977 picture Pete Broberg doesn’t seem to give a shit that his early promise has gone unfulfilled. That year he racked up another lousy year with the Cubs, then brought his career full circle, in a raggedy ass way, by going 10 and 12 for the A’s, the team that had tried to throw $175,000 at him right out of high school 10 years before. The Dodgers signed him as a free agent the following year but told him he’d have to go to triple-A or be released.

In the aforementioned article from the Oakland A’s website, Pete Broberg recounts the choice in a way that seems to fit his expression in this card:

“I went home,” Broberg said. “They still had to pay me, and the Dodgers paid my way through law school.”

This sounds like the words of a guy who just doesn't care that much about baseball. But in keeping with the theme that everything connected with this card is not what it seems, Pete Broberg later put his law career on hold in 1989 to play for a pittance while pitching for the West Palm Beach Tropics of the short-lived Senior Baseball League, an act that had to have been, after all those years serenely reclining in the fake Elysian Fields of well-paid apathy, an achy-muscled labor of love.

Bob Gibson

2007-03-21T06:40:00.000-05:00

This card marks Bob Gibson’s first and last appearance in the world of my Cardboard Gods. Like a lot of other 1975 cards, this one is a little off-center, a facet that seems OK, or even somehow appealing, when part of, say, Ed Brinkman’s card, but in this card it just seems wrong, like if Sidney Poitier’s last public appearance involved sitting on a small booby-trapped platform above the rusty hose-water of a county fair dunking booth. The dipping of his right shoulder creates the impression that Bob Gibson is actually teetering slightly to his right with the queasy yawing of the lopsided card. Bob Gibson’s expression, however, makes it clear that even if the whole goddamn world started flopping and flailing like a boated fish, Bob Gibson himself would not go down.

The numbers on the back of the card have a slight wobble to them, too, Gibson’s long unbroken string of winning coming to an end in the final season shown, 1974, when he posted his first losing record since becoming a member of a major league starting rotation 15 years before. All the winning years seem to feed into the confident expression of the man on the front of the card, but the fresh season of losing seems a part of the expression too, making it seem all the stronger. This is not a man whose confidence has been built by happy accident, by being a scarless darling of the gods. He’s done it all himself, the hard way, and so it can’t be undone.

Things just got harder in 1975. By mid-season he’d been bumped out of the starting rotation and demoted to long relief. His final appearance came against the Cubs on September 3, 1975. In the 7th inning, he was called into a 6-6 game. He rose to the occasion of facing that year’s eventual batting champion, Bill Madlock, getting him to fly out, but then he loaded the bases by walking Jose Cardenal, surrendering a single to Champ Summers, and walking Andre Thornton. It still looked like he might get out of the inning, however, when Manny Trillo grounded back to the mound. Gibson, winner of 9 Gold Glove awards, handled the grounder and threw out Cardenal at home. But Gibson then uncorked the 108th and final wild pitch of his career, allowing the go ahead run to score. With first base now open and the pitcher due up next, Gibson intentionally walked the batter, Jerry Morales, once again setting up a force at any base. It seemed he might still get out of the inning with minimal damage. However, a 23-year-old part-time player with the quite possibly distracting name of Peter LaCock was then sent in to pinch hit against the great Bob Gibson. The somehow unseemly moment did not end well.

"When I gave up a grand slam to Pete LaCock," Bob Gibson said later, "I knew it was time to quit."

The end had to come some time, of course. That it came in that particular game was due to the failure of the Cardinals’ starting pitcher that necessitated the appearance of Gibson out of the pen. And, in yet another in a growing series of signals to me from the Cardboard Gods that everything is connected, one way or another, the Cardinals’ starter was that fading echo of The Basketball Kid himself, the pride of LaPorte, Indiana, Ron Reed.

Had some bizarre ruling deemed that the 7th-inning tie be broken not by a progression of pitcher-batter matchups but by a two-on-two basketball game, Bob Gibson would have without question helped bring his team a victory. I say this without having any idea who the Cubs would have sent out to hoop it up (but just to help illustrate the preposterous scenario, I’ll say the Reuschel brothers, Paul and Rick, a couple of 6’3" Rambis-begoggled "widebodies"), because the two men who combined to surrender 11 runs to the Cubs that day were unquestionably the best two basketball players ever to be major league baseball teammates.

I make this claim after spending an inordinate, and I mean inordinate, amount of time today thinking about guys who’ve excelled at both of my primary childhood loves, basketball and baseball. After much deliberation, I have decided that even though Ron Reed may have come the closest of any Cardboard God to walking in the mythic Converse All-Star high-tops of The Basketball Kid, he was not quite the best basketball player ever to play major league baseball. His time in the NBA does put him ahead of some other great college basketball players who went pro only in baseball (Tony Gwynn, Kenny Lofton, and Dave Winfield come to mind), and his promising numbers as a top reserve for two years for the Pistons suggest he may well have been the on-court equal of Gene Conley, a bench player on three Boston Celtic championships teams, Dick Groat, who played one season in the NBA after being a nationally renowned two-time college hoops All-American, and perhaps even Danny Ainge, who was a key player on two NBA championship teams, appeared in the 1988 NBA all-star game, and, most importantly, helped enable the existence of the fact-based headline "Tree Bites Man."

But Ron Reed was not as good a basketball player as the player he backed up on the Pistons, Dave DeBusschere, who happened to have pitched in 36 games for the Chicago White Sox before focusing his attention solely on his hall of fame-bound basketball career. He may not have been as good a basketball player as Bob Gibson, either, who followed up his brilliant college basketball career at Creighton University by playing for a few months with the Harlem Globetrotters. The Globetrotters were by then world famous for their clowning antics, but at that time they also still provided one of a very few ways for an African American basketball star to make a living playing basketball. Only a handful of black players had made their way onto NBA squads by then, so the Globetrotters were still loaded with world-class talent, suggesting that any player who could crack their roster would either have to have been a very talented clown who could also sink a hook shot now and then, such as Goose Tatum, or someone able to play some serious ball. And Bob Gibson was not a clown.

Anyway, there’s no way to accurately judge how good Bob Gibson could have been in the NBA. By the looks of it, the NBA seems to have still been employing an unofficial quota system at the time that Bob Gibson came out of college in 1957. Some teams had a couple of black guys, some had one, some had none. It seems farfetched to think that these roster configurations were built solely on merit. Also a little farfetched is the notion that merit was the sole cause of the lack of black players being featured scorers on any of the NBA teams in 1957. Early black NBA players such as Sweetwater Clifton, Earl Lloyd, and even the incomparable Bill Russell handled the dirty work: rebounding, playing tough defense, setting picks, and passing the ball to the team’s version of The Basketball Kid, the white guy with the perfect jump shot, the beautiful jump shot, the jump shot as pure as the American Dream.

In my previous post on Ron Reed, I mentioned some fictional towns that resembled my own invention of Hartland, hometown of The Basketball Kid, but I neglected to include one that seems obvious to me now, the town from the movie Hoosiers, Hickory, which, like LaPorte and French Lick and John Mellencamp’s "Small Town," just happens to be located in Indiana. It is also located in a glowing, soft-focus version of the past. And it of course is a town that lives and breathes basketball, and at the heart of this basketball life is a boy, Jimmy Chitwood, with a perfect jump shot, a beautiful jump shot, a jump shot as pure as the American Dream.

Oh yeah, one other thing. There ain’t no blacks in Hickory. Not a one.

Hickory, Riverdale, Willoughby, the candy-colored Milwaukee of Richie Cunningham and the Fonz, the generic '80s town in Teen Wolf, The Basketball Kid’s beloved Hartland, all these places make me wonder if imagining a small-town paradise, imagining the whole white picket fence American Dream, requires imagining people of color either into the shadows or beyond the town limits altogether?

"I think being a professional athlete is the finest thing a man can do," Bob Gibson once said. But when Bob Gibson came out of college in 1957, the professional versions of both of the sports he excelled in were still showing signs of an institutional embrace of the deep white longing for Hartland. The few blacks in the NBA were toiling in the shadows, while in baseball many teams were still dragging their heels to fully comply with the integration of the league that had started with Jackie Robinson’s debut in 1947. Gibson’s own team, the Cardinals, had been the most demonstrably opposed of all major league teams to Jackie Robinson's presence on a major league field, and by Gibson’s signing had still yet to have a single full-time black player.

So when you’re being told you don’t belong in Hartland, or that you should stay quietly in the shadows if you’re ever blessed to be allowed into Hartland, what do you do?

If you’re Bob Gibson, you get angry.

"In a world filled with hate, prejudice, and protest," he once said, "I find that I too am filled with hate, prejudice, and protest."

If you're Bob Gibson, you get fearless.

"I guess I was never much in awe of anybody," he once said. "I think you have to have that attitude if you're going to go far in this game."

And if you’re Bob Gibson, you fucking kick ass. By the time he gave up the grand slam to LaCock, he'd racked up one regular season MVP award, two World Series MVP awards, two Cy Young awards, 8 selections to the National League all-star team, and several World Series records that highlight his ability to shine brightest when the pressure was the most intense.

When baseball fans aren't talking about Bob Gibson's willingness to play fearsome chin music with batters leaning in too close to the plate, his plate, they are often choosing him ahead of every other hurler in history as the starting pitcher for the hypothetical one-game playoff against the aliens with the fate of the earth hanging in the balance. He's the one you want out there if you absolutely need a win.

"I had to fight all my life to survive. They were all against me, but I beat the bastards and left them in the ditch."

Though the above quote seems to me as if it could have come from Bob Gibson, it was actually uttered by the most famous racist in the history of baseball, the guy guarding the Hartland town line against invasion with a fifth of moonshine in one hand, a shotgun in the other, and a maniacal gleam in his eyes. If I could see a confrontation between any pitcher and batter from baseball history, I’d choose to see Bob Gibson pitch against the speaker of the above words, Ty Cobb. At the end of that at-bat someone’s down in the ditch and someone else is walking away a winner. I wouldn’t bet against Cobb in any other matchup you could name, but in this one case my money’s on Gibson.

Ron Reed

2007-03-19T11:01:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I watched basketball and wrote some more about The Basketball Kid. I don’t know if I really got anywhere with the writing, but at least I decided on a name of the town where The Basketball Kid lives his eternal teenage moment: Hartland. I named the town after the tiny block-long street I live on at the moment, Hartland Court.

The imaginary Hartland differs considerably from the real Hartland. The real Hartland is a malodorous diorama of modern urban life, an abandoned 20th century warehouse at one end, a rotting 19th century house at the other, and in between those two buildings a discordant mixture of the following: a couple lopsided, dilapidated two-story houses, some flimsy brand-new condos with brick fronts and aluminum-siding sides and backs, one low, ugly brick and cinder-block apartment building, and one vacant lot overgrown with spiny, trash-clogged, rat-friendly brush.

White people live in the condos, black people live in the apartment building, one large Hispanic family occupies one of the dilapidated, lopsided houses, cheerful Korean girls studying to be doctors and lawyers live in the first floor apartment in the other dilapidated house, and my wife and I live above them in the second floor apartment. The roof leaks in several places, and the walls are crumbling, and the floor is so slanted I feel like we're in a bad guy's hideout in the old Batman television show, and there’s an everpresent possibility that the whole place might just keel over at any second.

We will be leaving the place soon; it’s being converted into another flimsy yuppie-trap of a condo. This last detail, that we’re moving away from Hartland just a year after we moved to Hartland, is the one I’d highlight if I was asked to name the single defining aspect of the real Hartland as opposed to the imaginary Hartland of The Basketball Kid.

Transience.

People come and go all the time on the real Hartland. In the short time we’ve been here, our first downstairs neighbor moved out (amid screaming matches with the landlord, which seem often to be part of the soundtrack of transience), replaced by the Korean girls, the building we live in has been sold, a "for sale" sign has appeared outside the Hispanic family’s house across the street, the vacant building next to their house has been demolished, and the vacant lot next to the site of the demolishing has been transformed by Ukrainian construction workers into another generic condo that looks as if it could collapse in a stiff wind, meaning it’s perfect for the real Hartland, where nothing lasts.

But in the imaginary Hartland, home of The Basketball Kid, everything and everyone stays the same. Houses belong to families of people who were born in Hartland, who grew up in Hartland, and (though this seems not to be something the eternal Basketball Kid has to worry about) who, when the time comes, die peacefully and surrounded by all their loved ones in Hartland.

Clearly there are similarities between my imaginary Hartland and other imaginary towns. Jack Berrill’s Milford comes to mind, as does Rod Serling’s Willoughby, as well as Riverdale (the hometown of "America’s typical teenager"), and John Cougar Mellencamp’s "Small Town," which is used to greatest effect on this rousing YouTube clip as the backdrop for the heroics of a man who appears to be a mulleted emissary dispatched from the very center of white America's deepest Hartland dreams.

Of course the hero of the YouTube clip is not from imaginary Hartland, but from French Lick, Indiana, a town often presented in hagiographic sportspage offerings as being a real-life version of the popular myth of the Hartlandesque small town. This painting of actual towns as "Hartlands" is common. Many of us seem to be looking for Hartland. Sometimes this search results in fictional versions, and sometimes this search results in the willful softening of reality. Indiana, home state of Larry Bird, John Cougar Mellancamp, and the man pictured in the 1980 baseball card at the top of the page, Ron Reed, seems to be something of a nexus for this popular style of American dreaming.

Ron Reed was born in LaPorte, Indiana, a town recently featured in a book of found photographs that seems to speaks directly to the American quest for Hartland. The book, LaPorte, Indiana, presents a series of black and white portraits taken by long-time LaPorte studio photographer Frank Pease, displaying not only (as John Mellencamp blurbs on the book’s website) "real people . . . [whose] grace and dignity . . . should be a source of hope for us all" but also a kind of nostalgic, idealized American dreamland: The subjects of the pictures seemingly inhabit a town where The Basketball Kid himself might feel very much at home.

This makes sense in terms of the man pictured here, Ron Reed, who may just be the Cardboard God who comes closest to being, or at least having once been, the sunny, mythic figure that is The Basketball Kid. Reed was an athletic superstar in high school in LaPorte, earning a basketball scholarship to nearby Notre Dame, where he was good enough to be selected, in 2004, to the university’s All-Century Men’s Basketball Team. He played professional basketball for two years, averaging 9.4 points and 6.4 rebounds per game for the Detroit Pistons, then switched to baseball, where he had a productive 19-year career that included selection to an all-star team, a World Series championship, and the tying of the modern-day record for fewest home runs allowed in a season (250 innings or more).

According to Ron Reed’s enshrinement page on the Indiana Baseball Hall of Fame, this last accomplishment is the one that gives Reed the most pride. It is mentioned on the back of this card, in a marginal cartoon that features a smiling, generic baseball player reading about the mark in a newspaper. Oddly, the partially obscured newspaper headline seems to read "DOWNING ALLOWS FEWEST HOMERS."

Downing?

Wanting to find the reason for this mistake, I checked to see if the pitcher Reed tied was Al Downing, but Al Downing never allowed that few a number of home runs in that amount of innings. Al Downing did allow the most famous home run of all time, Hank Aaron’s 715th, in a game, ironically enough, won by Ron Reed. Perhaps that thin connective tangle of Reed and Downing and home runs and records led to the mistake on the part of the artist.

I have an alternate theory, however, one that probably comes from my being someone who pays rent by working in the field of mistakes (as a proofreader). It goes like this: The overworked and distracted artist was churning out a ton of cartoons to meet a deadline, and to save time he recycled some previously used cartoons. In this case, it must have been a cartoon for an old Al Downing card in which the caption read something like "Al surrendered Hank Aaron’s record-breaking 715th home run," and the newspaper headline mirrored the caption with something like "DOWNING SURRENDERS AARON’S HOMER." The artist inserted the new caption for Reed, changed the frown on the cartoon character’s face to a smile, changed "AARON’S" to "FEWEST" in the headline, then rushed off to keep himself conscious with some more terrible-tasting Topps coffee, forgetting to change "DOWNING" to "REED."

Mistakes like this happen all the time here outside the town limits of Hartland. In the photo on this card, Ron Reed seems to have come to understand this. He is certainly not someone who gives in easily to mistakes, as both his stern, unwavering gaze and his pride in his record for fewest home runs (which really is a record for fewest mistakes) attest. But life in the big leagues, life in a world of mistakes and transience, has wiped from Ron Reed’s countenance what I imagine to have once been something very much like the bright, friendly smile of Hartland’s favorite son, The Basketball Kid.

The Basketball Kid, Part 2

2007-03-17T09:36:00.000-05:00

So who is The Basketball Kid? Well, on one level he is the persona invented for me by my friend Ramblin’ Pete just a couple days ago, on the eve of our annual hibernation into the jittery sanctuary that is the first two days of the NCAA college basketball tournament. We’re in a pool every year with some other friends, and Pete basically demanded that I enter the pool this year with the moniker The Basketball Kid. On that level, The Basketball Kid is doing OK. After the first two days of the tournament, he’s currently tied for sixth in a field of twenty-four, within striking distance of the top (and also just a couple key losses away from oblivion).

On another level, The Basketball Kid is the young lad pictured here. This is me in the only photo I own, despite all my years playing basketball, in which I’m wearing a basketball uniform. It was photo day for my junior varsity team, and I could not keep a straight face to save my life. The photographer kept directing us to freeze ourselves in poses that harkened back to the days of George Mikan and the two-hand set shot, and I kept bursting out laughing. The photographer began to lose patience with me. Etched into his expression was an unsaid admonishment not at all unfamiliar to me during those years: Jesus Christ, kid. Grow up. On this second level, The Basketball Kid is a skinny fifteen-year-old who is about to let the thing most important to him at that time, basketball, slip away from him, and all he can think do is giggle like a much younger child.

But over the past couple days, as worries and burdens have slipped through the cracks of my self-made NCAA cave, I have begun to imagine a third level of existence for The Basketball Kid. This third level connects to the first level in that the third figure I imagine is an extrapolation of the persona invented by Ramblin’ Pete, and it connects to the second level in that the third figure I imagine is something of a negative image of the kid pictured here. He’s the kid in the photo minus the invisible air quotes.

Once I started thinking about this third version of The Basketball Kid, I couldn't stop. Here's what I've figured out so far:

He represents all that is good and true in the America that may or may not still exist, and that may or may not have ever existed. Teamwork, friendship, strong family ties, an ice cream soda at the corner malt shop, a well-executed two-handed chest pass, holding hands with your steady at the movies, good sportsmanship, politeness, a foul-shot success rate of 85% or better, a warm smile, a clear blue-eyed gaze, optimism, good hygiene, a firm handshake, a strong work ethic, a devotion to selflessly helping the nobly downtrodden, and, of course, a perfect jump shot, a beautiful jump shot, a jump shot as pure as the American Dream.

It has always been this way. In escapade after escapade, handed down in oral tales, in a short-lived Saturday morning television series, and in well-worn library books with such titles as The Basketball Kid Bears Down, The Basketball Kid Drives to the Basket, The Basketball Kid Warms the Bench?, and The Basketball Kid Mysteries XI: The Ghost Under the Bleachers, The Basketball Kid displays his sunny virtues as he solves some school-wide or even town-wide problem while simultaneously leading his ragtag, wisecracking, often injury-hampered squad (Irving "The Professor" Polk, Will "Stretch" Pennington, Chuck "Tubby" Breen, and Joey "The Li’l Dictator" McAvoy generally rounding out the lovable starting five), to a last-second victory over a taller, "more athletic" team from "the city" in The Big Game.

Throughout all the tales the Basketball Kid seems to exist in an unending moment of teenagerhood. He never gets any older, and so is always full of the promise of a bright and boundless future. He also never seems to have a past beyond the obvious implication that at some point previous to the currently unfolding situation he was born and subsequently became acquainted with the members of his family, with "Coach," and with his buddies on the team. The serial nature of the narratives encourage this trait, but so too does the humbly confident nature of the central character. As The Basketball Kid is fond of pointing out (in a gently ribbing tone), "Don’t think too much, you might break something." He senses that in basketball, as in life, you start down the endless one-way, no u-turn road to failure the minute you start worrying too much about your jump shot, or your past, or your present, or your future. Just play the game hard, tackle problems as they come, and then when the final buzzer sounds you can walk off the court with no regrets. It is, for The Basketball Kid, always Right Now.

The Basketball Kid, Part 1

2007-03-16T14:01:00.000-05:00

Here is a photograph of me holding with sarcastic ferocity the two league runner-up trophies my brother won while serving as a benchwarmer on his high school varsity team. I was 16 years old. I had just finished a year in which I’d played junior varsity basketball, not being nearly good enough to be even a benchwarmer on varsity, and I knew that the following year, my last in high school, I would also not be good enough to make varsity. I had quit playing baseball a couple years before (and quit collecting baseball cards a year or two before that), and I didn’t care about school, and was incapable of making even the slightest connection with any of the girls I creepily lusted for, so I think it’s safe to say basketball had become the most important part of my life, and I wasn’t nearly good enough at it to keep playing it in a meaningful context. I was not The Basketball Kid. But if I was not The Basketball Kid, who was I?

And who am I?

I mean, is this the story of my life? I haven’t played basketball in a couple of years, not since a relaxed half-hour game of one-on-one with my Peruvian downstairs neighbor weakened my body to such an extent that I spent the next four months with bronchitis. But I still am finding myself not good enough to play on the team of my choosing: I turned 39 a couple weeks ago, which means I have less than a year before I’m a 40-year-old aspiring novelist who has never had a novel published. No real career to speak of, writing or otherwise, still living paycheck to paycheck, more or less. This dream of mine of becoming a writer, sometimes I fucking despise it. Change the addressee of the famous Brokeback Mountain monologue from "secret gay lover" to "vague, impractical dream of becoming a novelist" and it pretty much sums up the way I feel sometimes:

"It’s because of you that I’m like this! I'm nothin’ . . . I’m nowhere . . . Get the fuck off me! I can't stand being like this no more."

Grant Jackson

2007-03-13T09:12:00.000-05:00

In my current job as a proofreader of educational testing materials, I am often called upon to check the spelling and grammar of math problems that I have no idea how to solve. This is OK; there are other people in the company to check the math. It’s kind of like I work on an assembly line, checking that a particular bolt has been correctly screwed into each of an unending supply of identical gadgets that have a use I do not understand.

One type of math problem that comes down the assembly line from time to time has to do with the figuring of combinations. I don’t know, something like “Billy has four different-colored socks in his drawer. If Billy reaches twice into his drawer at random, how many different combinations of socks can he possibly pull out?”

I mention this because I found myself this morning trying for a moment to figure out how many different looks the Pittsburgh Pirates could display in the late 1970s using their three different mix and match uniforms. Before I could come up with an answer I discovered that they added a fourth uniform to their arsenal in 1980, and also had two different types of caps and two different types of socks. In all, during the short window of time in the late 1970s and early 1980s in which I based a large part of my existence upon the shifting sands of major league baseball, the Pirates had a gold uniform, a black uniform, a pin-striped uniform, and (starting in 1980) a white uniform, and they mixed and matched all of these either randomly or according to a plan which is no clearer to me than the tortuous runes of advanced calculus.

With all the possible collisions of black, gold, and pinstripe, no single card can convey the full impact of the collective ugliness of the Pirates during the coke-addled death throes of the Me decade, but this Grant Jackson card, which shows that a nauseating warm-up jacket was also part of the Pirate wardrobe, can at least suggest something of the impact of that ugliness on the players forced to withstand it.

In other words, Grant Jackson does not look that happy. But, typical of the Pirates of that era, Grant Jackson even more strongly presents the aura of a true professional, resigned to carry on to the best of his abilities even though he’s dressed up like an overripe, blackened-at-the-edges banana.

He has already been in the majors for over a decade by the time of this photo, and part of his resignation may be due to the fact that for most of that time his career has afforded one Dale Murray moment after another, i.e., he’s always seemed to either arrive on a team just after they’ve had success or depart just before they’ve had success. His first stop was in Philadelphia just after they nearly won a pennant in 1964. Hopes must have been high that they could continue rising toward the top the following year, but that didn’t happen, and in fact throughout Grant Jackson’s time with the Phillies they gradually sunk farther and farther away from first place. Later just-misses included his move to Baltimore the year after they’d won the 1970 World Series and his move away from the Yankees just before they won the 1977 World Series. His arrival on the Pirates seemed to have the potential to provide more of the same, as they seemed to have just fallen out of a groove that had garnered them 5 division titles in 6 years.

But Grant Jackson was a pro, and he kept showing up for work in whatever atrocious combination of polyester shirt and pants was called for that day. His persistence paid off: On October 17, 1979, Grant Jackson (clad in the combination of the day, gold shirt and black pants) was called into the game with two on and two out in the fifth inning of the seventh game of the World Series. The Pirates, who had battled back from a 3 games to 1 deficit to tie the series, were down 1 to 0 in the game and were having trouble getting anything going against Orioles starter Scott McGregor. They could not afford to fall farther behind. Grant Jackson did his job. He held them, getting Al Bumbry to pop up.

In the sixth inning Willie Stargell menschishly swatted a two-run homer to give the Pirates the lead. Grant Jackson held the lead while facing the heart of the Orioles order. He pitched 2 2/3 innings of scoreless ball in all before giving way to bespectacled Pirates relief ace Kent Tekulve. When Tekulve got the final out, Grant Jackson officially became not only a champion but also the winning pitcher of game seven of the World Series.

The Cardboard God All-Stars

2007-03-11T10:16:00.000-05:00

Is there a word for the feeling you get when you realize the syndicated sitcom rerun you’ve been hoping to burrow into for a little while, away from the world, turns out to be a clip show? You know, it seems to be a regular episode for a few moments, maybe even one you don’t remember ever seeing before (this dawning, fragile possibility like the fringes of a low-grade miracle since the syndicated sitcom you are hoping to enwomb yourself in with the help of some Pabst Blue Ribbon and a huge bowl of three-for-a-dollar generic macaroni and cheese is one you’ve watched repeatedly, chronically, medicinally, for years), but then one of the characters begins relating the presently unfolding (and noticeably thin) scenario to something that happened in the past. Remember when Fonzie had to start building birdhouses to control his rage? Or when Kramer threw a giant ball of oil out the window? Or when Apu wore a cowboy hat and pretended to be a fan of the Mets, his "favorite squadron." The edges of the screen start to get blurry and wavy, and with that your hole-in-the-ground hiding place is gone. The clip show, that sack of used, thoroughly deflavored pebbles of gum, leaves you nothing to gnaw on but the air of the moment from which you’d been trying to escape. God, I hate that feeling.

So, on that note, here is the First Biannual 100th Episode Cardboard God Clip Show. Actually, here on Cardboard Gods there are no episodes, except of the mental health issue variety, but there have been profiles posted of about 100 guys. It gets a little blurry when you start considering that some of the profiles, such as Mario Guerrero, spread over the course of several separate posts, while other posts, such as the ’78 Checklist or "Mitch Cohen," didn’t profile a particular player at all. Whatever, who cares? I’m deciding to say that today marks the celebration of my first 100 Cardboard Gods, and so I am (with thanks to Jon for getting the ball rolling on this) presenting my choices for the 25-man all-star roster of the first 100 Cardboard Gods. Remember when Bill Lee said the back problems of Americans are caused by sitting in chairs? Or when Kent Tekulve prompted a humiliating authorial anecdote about a workplace lunchroom party? Or when Reggie Jackson was called a fuckhead and implicitly blamed for global warming? Or when Dave Cash sourly pondered the transient nature of identity? Etc., etc. . . .

C: Johnny Bench, Thurman Munson
1B: Willie McCovey, Willie Stargell (OF), Harmon Killebrew (3B)
2B: Dave Cash
SS: Ozzie Smith
3B: Ron Santo
Util: Toby Harrah (3B, SS, 2B)
OF: Jim Rice, Dave Winfield, Fred Lynn, Jim Wynn, Hank Aaron, Reggie Jackson
PR: Herb Washington
SP: Tommy John, J.R. Richard, Vida Blue, Wilbur Wood
SP-RP: Jim Bibby, Bill Lee
RP: Cecil Upshaw, Dan Quisenberry, Kent Tekulve
Manager: Joe Torre

Dale Murray

2007-03-09T06:47:00.000-06:00

For my first few years at the liquor store, I worked mostly evening shifts, usually with a guy named Dave who’d been at the store since his undergraduate days at NYU in the mid-1970s. By the time of my arrival in the early '90s he was also an adjunct philosophy professor in the city college system. On Friday nights Dave gave me a twenty from the register and I went around the corner to get us some Italian takeout. We ate in the back, on Morty’s desk, shoving his adding machine to the side for the food and for a couple chipped coffee cups and a bottle of wine off the rack. Customers weren't much of an issue, even though it was a Friday night in Greenwich Village in the City That Never Sleeps. If one happened to come in, either Dave or I would walk up front to the register, depending on whose turn it was.

The store had been successful for most of Dave’s tenure, but since two large warehouse-style liquor stores had opened nearby business had been waning. Sometimes people stuck their head in the door just to smugly tell us that we were selling something for considerably more than one or the other of the big warehouses. Sometimes just for something to do we took empty individual-sized boxes of Absolut and used them to cover up large gaps in our shelves. This practice of covering up the empty shelves increased as the years went by, until eventually most of the store was empty boxes.

"Wow, you guys really have a lot of Absolut," a customer sometimes observed.

When we weren’t filling in empty spaces, we were filling up empty time. I did a lot of reading. I also watched baseball games on the television up front behind the counter. Both New York teams were out of the running in those years, the games usually meaningless. For the Yankees it was something of a return to the days when I’d first followed baseball, their roster full of latter day versions of Rudy May, Cecil Upshaw, and Alex Johnson, guys who were just passin’ through. Fittingly enough, the defining figure of their previous extended pennantless drought, Bobby Murcer, was often the broadcasting voice bringing me the soothing news of the Yankees’ irrelevance.

Anyway, with the general downturn in business, Dave and I didn’t have to get up very often from our Italian food and red wine. Conversation during the first half of the bottle was generally confined to two subjects, either the wine itself (Dave was a connoisseur) or sports. Dave did most of the talking, and he also took care of the refilling of our chipped coffee cups. Once the bottle passed its halfway point, the conversation turned to memory lane, to Dave’s memories, that is, or to be even more specific to the difference between Dave’s girl-glutted past and my gnawingly lonely present.

Dave spun great expansive tales of romantic adventure and seduction that always seemed to begin with him leaving the liquor store with a bottle of wine in his satchel and always seemed to end with him smoking a joint with some beautiful sensuous she-beatnick on a rooftop below the gentle caress of the 3 A.M. night. I wish I could offer more than a general notion about these stories, because I don’t at all want to sound like I’m mocking them, but I can’t really remember any specifics. But the fact is I loved the stories, loved how he told them, loved feeling a little drunk at work on the free wine, loved the way the whole ritual seemed to beckon for a wider world than the one I was experiencing in most of my waking hours. Later, before we locked up the gates for the night, I dutifully tried to follow Dave’s lead, jamming a bottle of wine into my backpack next to the Dostoevsky and the Meade Wireless notebook filled with my rantings. But my nights, instead of ending on a rooftop with a girl, always seemed to end while waiting alone or with my brother in a stink cloud of homelessness urine for the F Train to Brooklyn after last call at the International.

Eventually I tried to believe that I had merely arrived in the world too late. Times were different in Dave’s day, I told myself. It was easy enough to believe in this scenario, since even the store itself seemed to support the theory that everything was humming along on all cylinders right up until the time I showed up. Throughout the 1980s business had been booming, girls were constantly sauntering down 8th Street with love in their eyes (Dave had met his future wife while standing in the doorway and enjoying the voluptuous parade), rich guys with mousse in their hair tipped you on liquor deliveries with lines of coke and with the rolled-up fifty through which you snorted the coke. To hear the tales, it was practically the carry-the-table-through-the-Copa scene of Goodfellas just before I’d gotten there. But now the championship days were over. Now came the meaningless years. Now the schedule of late-season games droned like a dusty conveyer belt in a factory about to be closed. Charlie O’Brien grounded out weakly to second. Mel Hall stared off into space.

This seemed about right. After all, I had always related to, or at least heaped inordinate sympathy upon, baseball players who arrived one year too late.

With that in mind, here is Dale Murray, looking in his 1978 card as if he is about to be blamed for something. He came to the Reds in 1977, just after they’d staked their claim as one of the best teams of all time with a dominating two-year reign as World Champions. That reign came to an end when Dale Murray climbed on board. I can sympathize. I mean, I often wonder: Is it me? Am I the reason that the winning is always being done just over the horizon, out of reach?

Willie Stargell

2007-03-07T06:54:00.000-06:00

If one’s employment experiences could be transposed into baseball card statistics, the back of my own card could serve as a polar opposite to the back of Willie Stargell’s. The roots of this difference (which would open into full bloom in the disparity between Stargell’s majestic numbers and the spotty data produced from my mostly half-assed participation in the American workforce) would be found in the litany of transience along the left-hand margin. On the back of this Willie Stargell card, on the left-hand margin, there is one word repeated again and again. Pirates. Willie Stargell signed with the Pirates in 1958, and he retired from baseball as a Pirate in 1982: 24 years with one organization. In my own 24 years of employment (I'm pretty sure I got my first job, stuffing inserts into a woodstove company newsletter, at age 15, and I'm 39 now), I’ve held 24 different jobs. A few of them lasted a day, many for a few months, some for a couple years, and one, my liquor store job, for a period of time that generally seemed no more substantial than a span of aimless weeks but which turned out to be the better part of a decade.

I’ve had a lot of people who were the boss of me, and I guess I’ve been fairly lucky, all in all. No tyrants, a few oddballs, the occasional would-be mentor. There was the ice cream store manager who played bass in a band that sounded, as he once told me while passing me a joint of his pot in the basement, "just like Grand Funk Railroad"; the college maintenance worker who I was assigned to as a helper whose motto for every task was "fuck it; good enough"; the leather store owner with a divot in his arm where a concentration camp tattoo had been who hired me to watch out for shoplifters and who told me, repeatedly, to "be a mensch."

"You know what a mensch is?" this boss would ask. Oskar Adler was his name. His wife had been in the camps, too.

"Yeah, I know," I said. You’ve already told me a million time, I’d think. I thought he had a bad memory.

I was bored out of my mind that summer, 19 years old, leaning on a broom for eight unending hours in the small, hot warehouse amid towering stacks of completely uninteresting cowhide. I ended up quitting before I’d said I was going to, making up some preposterous lie that I was needed early back at college, as if there was some emergency at my obscure state school that only I could solve. This left him short-handed for the last weeks of the summer. Fuck it, I was thinking. Good enough.

Oskar Adler didn’t complain. He even drove me home from the Spring Street warehouse to my Mom’s apartment in Brooklyn on my last day. Before I got out of the car he firmly shook my hand with his Nazi-surviving grip. He held the grip and looked me in the eye.

"Josh, be a mensch," he said. "You know what a mensch is?"

"I know, I know." He gave my hand one last squeeze.

"Be a mensch," he said.

I really thought I knew what a mensch was, too. I mean, he had explained it to me a hundred times. But of course you can’t simply say you know what a mensch is. You have to be a mensch, which is not easy. You have to be solid, stable, reliable. A pillar for others, a constant in a changing world. Someone to lean on and to draw strength from.

You have to be Willie Stargell. Or at least try.

Jeff Burroughs

2007-03-05T16:44:00.000-06:00

I don’t know where the Jeff Burroughs Louisville Slugger we had at the liquor store came from. I also don’t know where it went when the store closed for good in the late 1990s. On the store’s last day, my friend Pete and my brother, Ian, who were both in the employ of the store during the End Times, packed up a rented truck with the remaining inventory. The owner, Morty, oversaw this work and probably ended up zealously pitching in, too, even though he was crowding eighty by then and probably under strict orders from his wife, Goldie, to leave the lifting to the two "boys." Once the truck was loaded and the store empty, my brother and Pete transported the booze upstate to Morty’s son-in-law’s liquor store.

But I don’t know what became of the non-alcoholic odds and ends, such as the Jeff Burroughs Louisville Slugger. There were a fair number of odds and ends. In the store’s two-plus decades of existence it had had one constant, Morty, and a long parade of young men who were either aimless by nature or going through an aimless phase in their lives. None of these aimless guys owned much stuff while they were working at the store, but once in a while a piece of their meager collection of possessions dislodged from their porous grasp and accrued in one of the nooks and crannies of the store. One member of the long parade of aimless young men left behind a crate of scratchy, mediocre records in the basement, another a well-thumbed baseball encyclopedia in the back by the stereo, another a half-empty bottle of saline solution on the shelves by the sink, another a book on origami jammed in among Morty’s collection of Beverage Media Guides. The last aimless guy hired to work at the store, i.e., the anchor of the entire twenty-five-year parade of aimless guys, was a pale young divorced mumbling NYU dropout named Dan who took most of his weekly paycheck in vodka. Dan left a collection of little flickable paper footballs behind the champagne rack, residue of his chosen method of time-killing, flicking paper footballs at the bottles of liqueurs above the champagne, each bottle assigned a unique point value, the stumpy, ornate bottle of Chambourd worth 10 points, the Mrs. Butterworth’s-looking Frangelico worth 7, the large Bailey’s gift box worth 5, etc., etc. Dan bestowed intricately layered personalities to each paper football and kept a running log of their exploits, complete with league statistics and player biographies. When one of the paper footballs fell into the unreachable space behind the champagne rack it meant that the player had, like Duk Koo Kim, Ray Chapman, and Dale Earnhardt, passed in a blaze of glory directly from the field of athletic battle to the Great Beyond. A eulogy was inscribed in the commissioner’s notebook and black armbands were imagined onto the fallen hero’s grieving fellow paper footballs left to carry on bravely in their unforgiving gladiatorial clashes.

Anyway, some aimless guy who had preceded me must have one day brought a Jeff Burroughs Louisville Slugger into the store. Maybe it was his own from earlier days (if memory serves, it was a 28-inch bat, in other words a little league model) or maybe he’d been sent by Morty to buy one from the sporting goods store up near Union Square (I forget the name right now, but the guy who played Tim "Dr. Hook" McCracken in Slap Shot once worked there). Who knows? Maybe that aimless guy or another aimless guy sank the two nails halfway into the strip of wood behind the counter from which the bat hung from the handle. It’s all a mystery to me, really, which is fitting in a way, because Jeff Burroughs himself, represented solely in my childhood by this one unusually early (1974) card, was himself mysterious to me. All the other guys who had been awarded the Most Valuable Player award in the 1970s came to loom in my mind as ever-present, larger-than-life figures. Once or twice a year I was thrilled to find one of their dynamic action-shot baseball cards in a new pack; I read about them in Sports Illustrated; I saw them repeatedly in the All Star game; I thought about them, imagined them, sometimes even imagined being them. Bench, Reggie, Rose, Lynn, Carew . . . Burroughs? Part of the problem was that after getting this card, one of the few 1974 cards I own, I never got a Jeff Burroughs card again. He also never showed up in the All Star Game (his 1974 appearance had preceded my attentions, and while he was chosen to be a part of the 1978 National League squad he didn’t get into the game). There was, to me, an aura around him. He actually seemed sort of scary. His lone MVP win, coming from what seemed to me to be nowhere, struck me as unpredictably explosive. Who was this Jeff Burroughs, and when was he going to strike again?

He did, I now know, have more than just that one good year, and in all fashioned for himself a respectable power-hitting career before becoming, with the help of his son, Sean, a two-time world champion little league coach. He will also be remembered by some for being a key participant in two of the more famous forfeits in baseball history (interestingly enough, he also was later a part of the most famous forfeit in little league history, the team he coached winning the first of their two World Championships after it was discovered that the team from the Philippines that had thumped them in the Little League World Series final had been stocked with deep-voiced over-aged ringers):

Forfeit #1 (September 30, 1971): The final game of the second edition of the Washington Senators

In this game, Burroughs, who would endure long enough in the majors to be the final active former second-edition Washington Senator (I believe Jim Kaat was the last of the original Washington Senators), was in left field when fans poured onto the field in the top of the 9th inning. Who can blame them? Their team was doomed, gone, not only bound for Texas but bound to be stripped of its name, just as the earlier Senators team that moved to Minnesota had been stripped. They stormed the field to rip up and take home anything they could, clods of dirt, the bases, pieces of the scoreboard, clumps of grass. (I wonder if anybody still has their clump of RFK Stadium grass.)

Forfeit #2 (June 4, 1974): 10-Cent Beer Night

Earlier in the 1974 season, at a game between the Indians and Rangers in Texas, Len Randle took out Jack Brohamer with a hard slide, which prompted Milt Wilcox to throw at Len Randle’s head, which prompted Len Randle to drop a bunt down the first base line, which prompted Wilcox to race over to cover first on the play, where Len Randle rammed into him with a forearm. At this point, a melee ensued. During and after the violence Texas fans showered Indians players with beer.

The rematch between these two teams occurred in Cleveland on 10-Cent Beer Night. Many fans came to the park already well-lathered (a detail that offends my instinct for cheapness—why get drunk somewhere else when you can buy thirty beers for three dollars?) and with pockets full of old batteries, golf balls, rocks, and other assorted throwable items. They also brought smokable items, Jeff Burroughs saying afterward, "the marijuana smoke was so thick out there in rightfield, I think I was higher than the fans." In the ninth inning, the game-long fan unruliness reached a point of no return when one in a constant trickle of intruders onto the field swiped Jeff Burroughs’ hat. Burroughs slipped and fell as he moved to get his hat back. In the Texas dugout, Burroughs’ manager, Billy Martin, did not have a full view of Burroughs at that moment, and thought that his star player had been chopped down by one of the fans now pouring onto the field. Martin seized a bat and led his team onto the field to fight the entire ballpark.

Here’s a few moments of the call from Indians broadcasters Joe Tait and Herb Score, courtesy of an excerpt of Cleveland Sports Legends quoted on The Sissybar:

Tait: Hargrove has got some kid on the ground and he is really administering a beating.

Score: Well, that fellow came up and hit him from behind is what happened.

Tait: Boy, Hargrove really wants a piece of him—and I don’t blame him.

Score: Look at Duke Sims down there going at it.

Tait: Yeah, Duke is in on it. Here we go again.

Score: I’m surprised that the police from the city of Cleveland haven’t been called here, because we have the makings of a pretty good riot. We have a pretty good riot.

Tait: Well, the game, I really believe, Herb, now will be called. Slowly but surely the teams are getting back to their dugouts. The field, though, is just mobbed with people. And mob rule has taken over.

Score: They’ve stolen the bases.

Tait: The security people they have here just are totally incapable of handling this crowd. They just—well, short of the National Guard, I’m not sure what would handle this crowd right now. It's just unbelievable. Unbelievable . . .

Dave Kingman

2007-03-04T11:33:00.001-06:00

The Dave Kingman Report: At-Bat #1

I would like to introduce a feature that I plan to revisit periodically here on Cardboard Gods. But first a few words on the feature’s titular player:

Throughout his career, Dave Kingman’s at-bats ended in a strikeout more frequently than anyone who had ever preceded him onto a major league field. (By the time of his retirement, his contemporary Gorman Thomas had edged in front of him for the all-time lead in worst strikeout percentage.) Dave Kingman (unlike Gorman Thomas) was an atrocious fielder, once inspiring Phillies broadcaster Richie Ashburn to remark, during a break in play devoted to the repair of Kingman’s glove, "They should have called a welder." Kingman’s lifetime batting average was .236, and, because he seemed to lack both the ability and the will to draw a walk once in a while, his lifetime on-base percentage was an even more depressing .302, the same mark posted by Fred "Chicken" Stanley and lower than the success rates of, for example, Billy Almon and Shooty Babitt. He also had the reputation of being a detriment to the collective psychological well-being of his teammates, a characteristic most pungently described by one-time fellow Cub Bill Caudill, who said, "Dave Kingman was like a cavity that made your whole mouth sore." Teammates weren’t the only ones subject to his malevolent demeanor: He once gift-wrapped a box with a dead rat inside it and presented it to a female reporter, apparently a Neanderthalic protest to the presence of women in the locker room.

At the time of Dave Kingman’s retirement, however, only four men in baseball history had a higher percentage of home runs per at bat, and their names were Ted Williams, Harmon Killebrew, Ralph Kiner, and Babe Ruth.

He hit home runs, struck out, butchered fielding plays, sowed bad vibes. And then he hit some more home runs. Perhaps it’s not surprising that he was well-traveled player. The team for which he was playing probably grew tired of his many shortcomings, while a team he had yet to play for was able by virtue of desparation and distance to narrow their vision to see only the home runs. This card shows Kingman in the rosiest light possible: the "N.L. ALL-STARS" insignia; the photo of the strapping slugger on one of the rare occasions when he’d just made contact with the ball, which probably meant that he had just sent it on a screaming 500-foot journey toward the windshield of a vehicle in the parking lot; and, perhaps most significantly, the bestowal on the back of the card by Topps of the number 500 in the 1977 series (I’m not sure if Topps still does this, but they used to have a hierarchical numbering system that gave stars numbers on the zeroes). But this is also the card that came out the year Dave Kingman became a member of five different teams (Mets, Angels, Padres, Yankees, Cubs) in a span of five months. Not even Bobby Bonds got hot-potatoed (or rotten-potatoed?) like that.

Suffice it to say that, like all the Cardboard Gods, Dave Kingman had his flaws. But this doesn't mean that there's not something about him that I, a Cardboard Goddite, can find to shine some more light on my shadowy life.

With that in mind, I have decided to create an ongoing feature entitled The Dave Kingman Report, which is intended to draw inspiration from the one thing that Dave Kingman did as well as any human who has ever lived, with the possible exception of the lovable Steve Balboni: swing for the goddamn fences.

I have never liked to strike out, not in baseball, not in softball, not in life, and this has at times prevented me from taking chances. The Dave Kingman Report is my attempt to address this shortcoming. I want to emulate Dave Kingman's willingness to go up to the plate and take his cuts. Strikeouts? So what. Keep swinging. At least that's the plan.

It is my hope that this project can encompass many different aspects of this life. Right now, what it most fully applies to for me is my writing "career," such as it is. A couple weeks ago I began a concerted effort to try to get the novel I’ve been working on for a few years published. I have made some efforts before, mostly through tenuous personal contacts that did not end up panning out. Now I’m sending query letters to people who won’t know me at all. I also sent a shorter piece to a couple magazines. I have done this before but always reluctantly, hesitantly. I am trying to do it more often. Get a bat. Get in there. Swing.

Below is the box score including my first at-bat of this new season.

February 26, 2007

Dear Josh,

Thank you for your submission to Writer’s House. After careful consideration, we must inform you that we are unable to offer you representation at this time.

Sincerely,
Kelly Riley
Assistant to Michael Mejias
Writers House, LLC

Oh for one.

Tom Hutton

2007-03-01T06:18:00.000-06:00

In Donald Honig’s Baseball Between the Lines, 1940s Yankees standout Tommy Henrich is asked about Al Simmons, a fearsome hitter from the late ’20s and ’30s. He relates a story from Bill Dickey about the punishment Simmons used to unleash on the Yankees, then goes on to add his own description of Bucketfoot Al after the A’s Hall of Famer had retired:

"He hung around as a coach after he was through playing. I used to yell to him during batting practice. ‘Hey, Al, get in and hit a few.’ He’d push out his lip and shake his head. ‘Go on, Al,’ I’d yell. ‘Go on and hit a couple.’ The guys would hear it and they’d let him get in. The reason I’d do it was to just watch him step in there. It was something to see. When Al Simmons would grab hold of a ball bat and dig in he’d squeeze the handle of that doggone thing and throw the barrel of that bat toward the pitcher in his warm-up swings, and he would look so bloomin’ mad. In batting practice, years after he’d retired! I’d watch him and say to myself, ‘Tom, old boy, that’s the mood you ought to be in when you go to home plate.’"

With that in mind, here’s Tom Hutton, who amassed 186 RBI in his career, just 21 more than Al Simmons had in 1930 alone. If I was, like Tommy Henrich, a habitual champion seeking to emulate an earlier star’s focused, aggressive attack at the plate—at life itself—I’d probably seek out a seething conqueror such as Al Simmons. But I’m no all-star batsman. Literally speaking, I haven’t even held a baseball bat in my hands since my liquor clerking years in the 1990s when I periodically hefted the Jeff Burroughs Louisville Slugger we kept hanging from two nails behind the counter. Back then I occasionally imagined single-handedly and with much gruesome head-smashing foiling the repeated nerve-jangling, racially-charged shoplifting assaults on the store from gangs of parka-clad teenagers. But anyway, literally speaking, my bat-wielding days, such as they were, are over, and I’m no figurative all-star ballplayer either, and not really a player at all. If anything, maybe I’m a player to be named later, but if so, when is later? When will I be named? And do I even want to be named? Maybe I’d just rather remain nameless. Do I want to even stand in there in the box hesitantly facing down the unknown as Tom Hutton is doing here? Maybe I’ll just continue to lurk in the shadows. Or am I sick of the shadows? O, Tom Hutton, help me! O, Tom Hutton: In the big scheme of things I’m much closer to you than to Towering Immortal Al Simmons or October Hero Tommy "Old Reliable" Henrich, and so I turn to you for guidance in finding my way. You speak to me from your cringing, beady-eyed, mouth-breathing, lank-haired .250-hitting tremulous flinch of a batting stance. So that you might speak to other players-to-be-named-later-or-not-at-all, I have taken the liberty of attempting to translate your ineffable message into the following thick-tongued treatise:

Tom Hutton’s Three-Step Guide to Existing within the Unfathomable Void

Step 1: Get a bat. You don’t have to angrily grab or purposefully seize or heroically commandeer a bat, and once you have your hands on it you don’t have to wave it menacingly or twirl it dashingly or throttle it with murderous ferocity. But you have to get one. I mean, not literally, unless you want to start an urban liquor retail business. But you can’t go up to the figurative plate of life without a bat. So get a fucking bat. You know?

Step 2: Get in there. As shown by the instructional visual aid or holy icon or whatever you want to call Topps 1980 Montreal Expos card #427, "getting in there" can and often will, in most walks of life, fraught with ambiguity as they are, present some difficulties in the sense that there may seem to be no "there" there. Some in life are fortunate enough to be summoned unequivocally to the batter’s box, to have a clearly defined purpose, a path, a calling, but the Tom Hutton Way shows that you can get in there with your bat even if there is no batter’s box anywhere in sight. Look at Tom Hutton. He is most likely no closer than several hundred feet away from the possible flight of a pitched ball. Judging from the complete lack of other human forms in the photograph, Tom Hutton may, in fact, be on an entirely different training complex from that of his teammates, and so may be completely without hope of hitting a baseball while in his current stance. But he’s in there anyway.

Step 3: Wait for the pitch. As suggested in Step 2 above, such waiting may be absurd. But wait you must, for consider the alternative: Without getting a bat, getting in there, and waiting for a pitch, where are you? You are nowhere. You are nowhere even after following the three steps but there is at least some humble dignity in your existence. You do not know if the pitch will ever come. You will begin to suspect, as Tom Hutton seems to be suspecting here, that you have already seen the last pitch you will ever see, and this suspicion will crease your brow and make your posture hunched and unsure. You will take on the look of someone in a cringe, cringing against the infinity embedded in the notion that no pitch will ever come and also against the notion that it will come, but only after your mind has wandered, and it’ll be a bad pitch, up and in, and will hit you in the shoulder blade, and will hurt. But with all that you will also just stand there, waiting for your pitch, maybe cringing, maybe afraid, maybe full of doubt, but still with your tired eyes open and your bat sort of ready. You buck-toothed cipher, you drifting journeyman, you fifth outfielder on a doomed team in a foreign land, you wait.

Ron Santo

2007-02-27T13:48:00.000-06:00

Here’s Ron Santo’s last card, the only Ron Santo card I own. It will probably look a little jarring to Ron Santo fans, who are accustomed to seeing their affable hero in a Cubs uniform. I can’t recall what my thoughts were on looking at this card for the first time as a seven-year-old, but I was probably captivated by the long run of impressive statistics on the back. The numbers weren’t in quite as small a type as those on the 1975 Harmon Killebrew card that so fascinated me, and the numbers didn’t have peaks quite as high as those on Harmon Killebrew’s card, either, but they were incredibly consistent, even more consistent than Killebrew’s, year after year of 30 home runs and 90 to 100 RBI. I’m sure I also noticed the precipitous dropoff in the last season listed on the card (5 home runs, 41 RBI), and maybe I even saw it as a sign that the man’s long career was coming to a close. I don’t know. In later years I came to understand that Santo’s achievements were even more admirable given that they came in an era when "benchmark" numbers such as 30 homers and 100 RBI were inordinately hard to come by, that the offensive prowess was augmented by consistently stellar glovework at third base (attested to by 5 gold glove awards), and that Ron Santo did all this while managing an illness, Type 1 diabetes, that doctors had predicted would put him in the grave by the time he was 25 years old. He is still alive today, though he has lost both his legs to the disease. He works as a Cub broadcaster, and since I live in Chicago now I listen to him from time to time. He is, by his own admission, an incredibly biased homer for the Cubs, but for some reason I don’t find this as grating as I usually do when having to listen to other renowned homers (such as John "Thuuuuuuuuuuuuh Yankees Win!" Sterling of the Yankees or Hawk "He Gone" Harrelson of the White Sox). Though he doesn’t have the eloquence of the old Mets announcer, Bob Murphy, he does share Murphy's relaxed, wide open manner, his voice like Murphy’s telling some part deep inside you "Take it easy, partner, you're safe: It’s summertime." Or maybe it’s just that he seems like a nice man.

Regardless of whether he’s a nice man or not, he is ranked by the foremost expert in such matters, Bill James, as the sixth best third baseman of all time, and the 87th best player of all time at any position, including pitcher. And today, once again, the Veterans Committee of the Hall of Fame neglected to vote him into the Hall of Fame. Today the pompous, arrogant, condescending (why do I keep envisioning the smug visage of Joe Morgan?) Hall of Fame Veterans Committee neglected to vote anybody into their club. Not Luis Tiant. Not Minnie Minoso. Not Gil Hodges. Not Tony Oliva. Not Ron Santo.

Tommyrot. Sheer, unadulterated tommyrot.

Tommy John

2007-02-26T14:55:00.000-06:00

Mes·mer (mĕz'mer), Franz or Friedrich Anton 1734–1815. Austrian physician who sought to treat disease through animal magnetism, an early therapeutic application of hypnotism.

mes·mer·ize (mĕz'me-rīz') tr.v. –ized, -iz·ing, iz·es 1. To spellbind; enthrall: "he could mesmerize an audience by the sheer force of his presence" (Justin Kaplan). 2. To hypnotize.

Wil·ker (wĭl'ker), Josh. Born 1968. American proofreader who rode public transportation a lot.

wil·ker·ize (wĭl'ke-rīz') tr.v. –ized, -iz·ing, iz·es 1. To mar or erode the value of, paradoxically as a result of both neglect and an overly needy sense of attachment: "I have tons of wilkerized [baseball] cards" (Anonymous). 2. To damage by way of ineptitude or overly crude handling: "Too much cursing. The posting was wilkerized" (Earl Fibril). 3. To squander: "But, alas, I had spent the entire evening smoking marijuana resin through a punctured Sprite can and watching old episodes of Kung Fu. My chances of graduating had been wilkerized." (Butch Pixis III)

Of the four definitions listed above, only two of them are actually to be found in either of my two dictionaries, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition. OK, yes, wilkerize has not yet found its way into the official records of language, which I suppose should not be surprising since I only began to push for its wider usage three days ago in this extremely obscure forum while ruminating on the greatness of Harmon Killebrew.

A more surprising exclusion from my two fairly recent dictionaries (both published since the year 2000) is the term Tommy John surgery, which in both tomes should be but isn’t tucked in between tommy gun (or Tommy gun) ("a Thompson submachine gun") and tommyrot ("utter foolishness").

By comparison, Lou Gehrig’s disease is listed in both books, leading me to believe that, even though Gary Cooper, or even Gary Coleman, never starred in a movie about Tommy John, Tommy John surgery has a chance to someday make it into the dictionaries. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the term Tommy John surgery is currently used more often than the term Lou Gehrig’s disease. I don’t know how these things are decided, but maybe there’s a word counter somewhere, a guy with a big blackboard who makes a mark each time a nondictionaried word (such as "nondictionaried") is used, then when the predetermined limit is reached he rings a bell or sends a message via suctioned pneumatic tube to some more influential cog in the high-stakes dictionary racket and the higher-up in turn adds the word to the canon.

It won’t be long for this to happen to the term Tommy John surgery, I think. The annual late-February, early-March spike in the usage of the term has become a herald that winter is on its last legs: every year at this time, news reports on the recovery of hurlers who have recently undergone Tommy John surgery abound. What baseball fan doesn't enjoy such stories? It’s always a pleasant read, because it’s always about guys you sort of forgot about who are coming back. You may have even assumed they were through, but here they are again, possibly even stronger than ever, thanks to good old Tommy John surgery.

Anyway, the inclusion of the term in the dictionaries will of course immortalize the man it is named after, Tommy John, pictured here in 1978 at the very crest of what was at the time a miraculous comeback from arm trouble. In 1974 he had been the first athlete to get the now famous surgery, and he had then sat out the 1975 season with the odds of his ever pitching again placed at a hundred to one by his surgeon, Dr. Frank Jobe. In his early thirties during his recovery, not a young man in terms of athletic life, Tommy John must have had thoughts throughout the long exile that he might never come back. But come back he did, compiling a decent 10-10 record in his first year with a reconstructed arm (at the time, due to the popularity of the Six Million Dollar Man television show, Tommy John’s repaired appendage was often referred to as being "bionic"), then in 1977 helped lead the Dodgers to a pennant with a 20-7 record that would have been a shining accomplishment for anyone and was downright astounding for a man who had just a couple years earlier been basically marked for athletic death.

More amazing still, Tommy John went on to play for a total of 26 seasons in the major leagues, racking up even more post-surgery than pre-surgery victories. He hasn’t yet made it into the Hall of Fame (in the most recent voting he was named on 22.9% of the ballots, far short of the required 75%), but even if he never does his name will certainly live on after him. As befitting a man who had his most, well, mesmerizing moments in sunny, optimistic Dodger blue, Tommy John will soon enough become enshrined in our lexicon as part of a term that has come to signify a kind of all-American nexus of can-do medical acumen, athletic prowess, and never-quit regenerative spirit. Here in America we can do it! We can fix what is broken! We can come up with a solution! We can return from the disabled list! We can heal the sick! We can feed the hungry! We can maybe even purify and renew the seemingly hopelessly wilkerized!

Harmon Killebrew

2007-02-24T15:38:00.000-06:00

I don't know much about baseball card collecting, but I am familiar with the term mint, which is used to describe cards that have been held to the greatest degree possible away from life and its universal slant toward deterioration. I think there are other gradations below this topmost designation, but I doubt there are any so far removed from mint that they could be applied to this 1975 Harmon Killebrew card. My incessant childhood pawings have pushed it beyond the limits of the language of commerce. In a monetary sense, it has been ruined. Handled too much, clung to too tightly. It's now the opposite of mint. I fear leaving nothing behind when I pass from this earth, so please allow me to offer a new term to serve as the baseball card collecting omega to the alpha of mint: Wilkerized. If this term catches on, maybe years from now, after I myself am deteriorating in a potter's field grave, perhaps I will live on in a conversation something like the following:

Young man hoping to sell his baseball cards to buy some weed: So, how much can I get for this Ken Griffey the Fourth (With I-Tunes) card?

Sports Memorabilia Store Owner: Are you shitting me? Look at it. I mean, the fucking thing's been completely wilkerized. (Author's note: I don't even require that the word be initial-capped.)

Young man hoping to sell his baseball cards to buy some weed: God damn it.

Anyway, while the specific contours of most of my long ago baseball card daydreams are lost to me, I do remember the draw this wilkerized 1975 Harmon Killebrew had on me. There were three reasons why I kept going back to it, handling it, memorizing it, gradually making it begin to disappear:

1. The name. Every good religion needs a way to move toward the ecstatic unsayable via the pathways of sound. Chanting, singing, speaking in tongues, rhythmic prayer: all these things help take a person out of their everyday self and into another state of being. Not having a religion of my own, I unknowingly invented certain quasi-religious elements around my fascination with baseball cards. In the case of the Harmon Killebrew card, I not only seized on the fascinatingly unusual name but eventually began chanting it to myself at times, pronouncing it not as Harmon Killebrew himself probably did but in such a way that every syllable was stressed: Har! Mon! Kill!Eh!Brew! Har! Mon! Kill!Eh!Brew! I chanted it again and again in my head, the name like drums going faster and faster.

I was an odd little boy.

2. A sense of greatness. I was just learning the basic language of baseball statistics in 1975, and so took in Harmon Killebrew's long litany of 40-homer, 100-plus RBI years with the pure and enthusiastic fascination of the true beginner. I have an attraction to anonymous players, to failure and ignominy, to the fallen and the wilkerized, but I am as drawn to the players whose feats stand in bold opposition to the general entropy of the universe as any other baseball fan. I am sure that I found this card soothing. There is greatness in the world. There are things that won’t be forgotten.

3. A sense of age. This may have been the most important of all the elements that drew me to this card. The picture on the front of the card hints of what struck my seven-year-old self as great age, in both the gray hair poking out from the cap and in the name that I probably figured must have only existed in a time long before the current era. But it is on the back of the card that this sense of time and history has its most powerful expression. Unlike most other cards, which fill up the empty spaces on the back left by the brief list of years in the major leagues with minor league stats and large-type bullet-item lists containing such information as "Tommy led Eastern League First-Sackers in Putouts," this Harmon Killebrew card only had room to list in unusually small type a line for each of Harmon Killebrew’s many, many seasons in the major leagues. Harmon Killebrew had basically been playing baseball forever. The first few years, which occurred long before I’d even been born, were spent on a team, the Senators, that no longer even existed. They were, like the wooly mammoth and tyrannosaurus rex, long extinct. And yet, here was one of them, an Original Senator, alive and well and still grayly slugging home runs. I was drawn to this not only for its mysteriousness but also for the odd feeling of comfort it gave me. I sensed at times that I was an infinitesimally small speck, inconsequential and frail in an unfathomably large expanse not only of space but of time. The universe went on forever and time stretched forward and backward forever and I was an almost-nothing within it. But Harmon Killebrew was something, and I could hold onto Harmon Killebrew.

Dennis Johnson

2007-02-23T08:49:00.000-06:00

No cards today. Below is a link to a clip of one of the two or three happiest moments of my sports-watching life, and it would have been a non-event if Dennis Johnson hadn't known exactly what to do:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43DrapEn5QA

My favorite part whenever rewatching this clip over the years has been the look of unadulterated happiness on Bill Walton's face. That and Johnny Most's call, of course. But this time I most enjoyed the part when Bird and the man he called the best player he ever played with come together after the play: We're nowhere without each other.

Rest in peace, DJ.

Doc Medich

2007-02-21T06:24:00.000-06:00

On December 11, 1975, Doc Medich was traded for Dock Ellis.

Though I’ve come to understand that these two individuals differed considerably, for a while I couldn’t get straight who was who. Certain obvious facts eluded me, such as that Dock Ellis was a black man, unlike the man pictured here, and beyond that that he was renowned for some unusual and strikingly distinguishing escapades occurring in the years just prior to the beginning of my attention to baseball. All I knew was that two guys who played the exact same position and seemed to me to have basically the same odd, cartoonish, old-timey nickname had been the main figures in what was deemed at the time to be a one-for-one trade with a couple negligible throw-ins. Doc for Dock. It made me happy.

One of those throw-ins in the trade, unfortunately, turned out to be a young second baseman named Willie Randolph. In 1976, while Doc Medich turned in a mediocre season for his new team, Willie Randolph and a resurgent Dock Ellis excelled, helping the New York Yankees end the longest pennant drought they’d ever had, not counting those golden pre-Ruthian years. Luckily the Reds kicked their ass in the 1976 World Series, but in the following season Ellis was dealt to the Oakland A’s for Mike Torrez, who helped the Yankees take the final step back to baseball supremacy with two complete game victories in their 1977 World Series triumph over the Los Angeles Dodgers. The repercussions of the Dock Ellis for Doc Medich deal continued the following year, as the Boston Red Sox, starstruck by Torrez’s post-season heroics, signed the pitcher to a free agent deal, and Torrez served up enough ill-timed meatballs to hand the fateful 1978 one-game playoff to his former team. At the conclusion of that game my brother ripped one of his beloved James Blish Star Trek books in half. I stomped around looking for something to kick, never really found it, and in a certain sense have been looking ever since. Almost thirty years now with that vague, uncentered, I-want-to-kick-something feeling. . .

Anyway, before the Doc Medich for Dock Ellis trade occurred, the Yankees were a bunch of harmless nobodies, and the world itself was harmless, and I was such a happily ignorant young dufus that I was unable and unwilling to distinguish between Dock Ellis and Doc Medich. And by the time the last of the chain of events set in motion by the Doc Medich for Dock Ellis trade had occurred, I was begging my mom to allow me to spend my allowance on a pinstriped shirt with "Yankees" across the chest and the word "Suck" (more of a no-no back then than it is now) blaring in lurid red graffiti across the stomach. My deepest wish by that time, the thing I prayed for whenever tossing a coin into a fountain or pulling on a wishbone, was that the Red Sox win the World Series. But a fairly close second to that wish was that I be able to walk through a divided world in a "Yankees Suck" shirt as the silencing stomach punch of puberty loomed.

I like to think I’m not the only one disturbed by these changes. Maybe Doc Medich himself had some inclination that the Doc for Dock trade was going to unleash some foul cosmic repercussions.

"Aw, dude," the grimacing just-traded Doc Medich seems to be saying here. "Who cut one?"

Alex Johnson

2007-02-19T13:28:00.000-06:00

Here is the third 1975 Yankee card in a row to be featured on Cardboard Gods, the fourth if you include the upper-left section of the Bobby Bonds Man of Constant Sorrow collage. Prior to this current streak, I’ve posted images of Yankee players just twice, once to hurl obscenities at Reggie Jackson and the other time to admit (not without some guilt and shame) that as a young child I reacted gleefully to the news of Thurman Munson’s death. It may then seem strange that I have been spending the last week or so meditating on Yankee players to such a level of autohypnosis that I eventually went so far as to imagine the infamous Yankee cap insignia as being a doomed couple’s last perfect dance. In general, the interlocking NY insignia has an effect on me akin to that of Beethoven on Alex DeLarge after he undergoes his "treatment" in A Clockwork Orange. But the truth is I wasn’t born with this revulsion. Not until 1976, when Graig Nettles and Mickey Rivers ganged up on Bill Lee and maimed his pitching arm during a Piniella-the-Gorilla-instigated bench-clearing war with my team, the Red Sox, did I begin to hate the New York Yankees. This hatred grew exponentially over the next couple years, and, on October 2, 1978, became just about as permanent a part of the much-doctored Josh Wilker baseball card as anything can be.

But I am rediscovering that there was a brief time when the Yankees were just another team to me. I was seven years old when I obtained this Alex Johnson card, just beginning to get into baseball, and had not even been alive the last time they’d won anything. I had begun perusing a baseball encyclopedia given to me and my brother by my uncle, but, too young even to know about the Fisk-Munson melee in 1973, I hadn’t yet been driven by any wounding or enraging current event to meticulously study the long history of Yankee domination over the Red Sox. I didn’t hate the Yankees. I didn’t hate anybody.

I certainly didn’t hate Alex Johnson. Why would I? He was just some guy on some team. Everything about Alex Johnson’s 1975 card, from his sloppily doctored uniform and cap to the background of blurry inconsequentiality to his expression of slightly bemused resignation, seems to sigh the words "just passin’ through." Like Rudy May and Cecil Upshaw, Alex Johnson had come to the Yankees in the middle of the previous season, and, like his two just passin’ through teammates, he’d move on to another team by the time the Yankees started winning pennants again. For the Yankees he’d make no impact, leave no mark.

I wonder who will remember Alex Johnson. Though he won a batting title, in 1970, he may have been the most anonymous player ever to have done so. The year-by-year statistics on the back of his card show that batting title year as well as a handful of other good and even very good years, but they also reveal constant movement—two seasons with the Phillies, two with the Cardinals, two with the Reds, two with the Angels, one with the Indians, one season and most of the second with the Rangers, then 28 at-bats with the Yankees. After this card came out, he lasted one more season with the Yankees then spent his final year in Detroit.

I envision baseball nostalgia as something like a baggage claim carousel. At the baggage claim carousel of baseball nostalgia for the years in which Alex Johnson was just passin’ through, Phillies fans grab Johnny Callison, Cardinals fans snag Dal Maxvill, Reds fans snap up Vada Pinson, Angels fans corral Jim Fregosi, Indians fans and Rangers fans fight over Buddy Bell and Toby Harrah, Yankee fans deposit Bobby Bonds in the lost-and-found while looking for Bobby Murcer, and Tigers fans gleefully snare The Bird.

Meanwhile, a sturdy, duct-taped, well-traveled Hefty bag keeps going round and round on the conveyer belt untouched. Who will claim Alex Johnson, right-handed line-drive-smasher-for-hire?

Cecil Upshaw

2007-02-17T09:44:00.000-06:00

As drink gave way to drink, the slow
Unfathomable voices of luncheon made
A window of ultraviolet light in the mind,
Through which one at last saw the skeleton
Of everything . . .
– Denis Johnson, "The Veil"

When last we left off, a drunkard suggested by the listing, woozy N on Rudy May’s cap had just had a door slammed in his face. Let’s call this man Mr. N.

Mr. N stares at the door that he once had a key for before the locks were changed. He sways a little. His face feels raw from shaving with cold water and a Bic in a gas station bathroom. He’s still holding the decaying flowers up by his chest. He looks down at them and notices that he’s buttoned his shirt wrong. His fingers are shaking. He can smell his own sweat. He starts thinking about where he can get a quart of vodka. He’s looking down at the carpet the flowers will soon fall to. He says "please" one more time, but softly.

Though I wasn’t there to witness this moment, which I believe to have happened in 1975, I have decided that I know this man, having had repeated interactions with him years later, throughout the early- to mid-1990s. He was a man known to me and my fellow employees at 8th Street Wine and Liquor as Mr. Nikoff, so named by us for his consistent and prodigious consumption of Nikoff Vodka, the cheapest brand we sold in the liter and half-gallon size. He didn’t seem to have very good hearing, but even so we didn’t want him to know that he had been named after his booze. It’s possible, though I can’t recall for sure, that we referred to him at times as Mr. N for short and by way of a code while he was in the store.

Through the doors of that store shuffled a steady string of the alcohol-destroyed, dirty-faced men who signaled their desire for a 9 A.M. half-pint of blackberry brandy or vodka with voices like metal scraping on stone, who paid with sticky, greasy nickels tapped out onto the counter from a styrofoam cup, who exited mumbling or cackling or cursing, who left livid ghosts of stink in their wake. But among this parade of ruination Mr. N stood out as the man who had not only fallen most completely into putrefaction but who had also fallen from the greatest height. Though you could barely understand what he was saying through his rotted teeth and tangled beard and through the tears in your own eyes that his piercingly awful stench produced, you knew that he was intelligent and educated, or he had been at one time. Sometimes all we could do after he staggered away with the help of a metal cane, his new liter of vodka secreted in his filthy trench coat, was repeatedly wave the door open and closed, spray the entire place with Lysol, breathe through our mouths, and gasp obscenities. But sometimes after all this we also wondered how he’d gotten to his current state. He knew arcane facts about the history of the labor movement, had informed opinions on the mayoral record of Abe Beame, lauded the abilities of the Gashouse Gang, seemed at times to speak with the trace of an English accent, even hinted once or twice that he’d been involved in some significant way with the University of Chicago. And he smelled like the aftermath of a funeral home fire extinguished with urine. And his fingers shook so badly that even on the days when he said nothing it took him several minutes to complete a transaction that took even our second-most ruined client a half a minute at most.

For the last few days I have been thinking about Mr. N as I knew him and Mr. N as I imagine him as a younger man, outside the slammed door of his former one and only. With the help of this 1975 Cecil Upshaw card, which I have been looking at for days, studying it on the commuter train to work, on my lunch breaks, on the train ride back home, and during commercial breaks in my evening ingestions of foodstuff and television, I have also begun trying to imagine Mr. N’s last perfect moment, long before I ever knew him but not that long before he stood staring down at the hallway carpet holding flowers and whispering the word please.

If I was a religious person, I might define a perfect moment as one in which the individual is in total harmony with the divine. So let’s say the Cardboard Gods comprise my religion. Let’s say this photograph of Cecil Upshaw was taken before the doctoring of Rudy May’s card from the same year, and let’s say the much more graceful N and the Y on Cecil Upshaw’s dark cap are Mr. N and his beloved dancing together in an unlit room in the middle of the night. It’s a few weeks before Mr. N will have the door slammed in his face.

The room is not lit because earlier that day the electric company shut off the power. Mr. N’s beloved was first to discover that the electricity had been shut off and she took the flicking of the impotent light switch as a sign, even decided that she would end things with Mr. N, that it was just too hard, that it seemed too often that she was carrying him, dragging him, rather than that they were walking together. But he had come home that day with news of a new job, only temporary but with possibilities to become more than that. He was substitute teaching, a high school English class, and the regular teacher would be out for a while, so he would, he explained with his contagious excitement, not merely be babysitting but would actually be teaching great books. Mr. N’s beloved, who had earlier resolved to tell him it was over, softened not at the news that he would finally once again have an income but with the light in his eyes, the optimism, the hope. Before long he would be discovered at the school with alcohol on his breath and be dismissed. He just had a little, he explained to his beloved, to calm his nerves before facing those animals. I can’t, Mr. N’s beloved said to herself. I just can’t anymore. But before that there was this one perfect night, when both of them believed for the last time in a future together, and so their dark room changed from a curse to a blessing, for it showed that the light in the world came from the two of them together, dancing, in love, not even any music, and fuck everything else.

In a perfect moment you won’t even know the divine except to sense that beneath you and above you and all around you is an invisible world of infinite wonder and absurdity. You won’t know the pinched bespectacled expression of the fading god of decent to mediocre relief pitching below you, nor the harmonious union of his tired arms above you in a gesture that paradoxically seems at once one of victory and surrender. You will not know that the intimations of triumph embedded in the uniform he wears will elude him, his time with the most successful branch of the Cardboard Gods brief and forgettable, nor will you know that the enmity-provoking aspects of this uniform are at this time dormant, the Yankees just another team to any creator of the divine under the age of 11 in 1975, your moment bathed in an innocence before hate. You will sense that there are worlds within worlds, that everything is connected and so everything is divine, but you won’t know the particulars, such as, as the back of this Cecil Upshaw card states, the faltering pitcher pictured here, who will pitch just one more year, and not for the team named in this card, is the cousin of another faltering pitcher, George Stone, who is also on the cusp of his last go-round. You won’t know that Cecil Upshaw came to the Yankees for, among others, the visionary alternative marriage experimenter Fritz Peterson, nor that Cecil Upshaw would leave the Yankees in a straight-up one-for-one trade for the most inspiringly accessible Cardboard God of them all, Eddie Leon.

Or maybe you will know, but it will be beyond words. Beyond saving. As Denis Johnson puts it in "The Veil":

. . . you’d know. You would know goddamn it. And never be able to say.

Rudy May

2007-02-14T06:19:00.000-06:00

Like Bobby Murcer, Rudy May had two tours of duty with the Yankees that lucklessly came just before and just after the team’s 1977 and 1978 World Series triumphs. This perplexing card signals Rudy May’s initial arrival in New York, though it actually came out after he’d already played half a season for the Yankees. The fact that he’d already appeared in games with the Yankees, wearing a real Yankee uniform and a real Yankee cap, makes it difficult to understand why Topps had to resort to what may be the poorest bit of card doctoring I’ve ever seen. The uniform shirt looks like a piece of college-ruled notebook paper that sat out in the Topps parking lot all through a snowy winter and sun-drenched spring, and the interlocking NY on the cap appears to have been rendered by a distracted gorilla brandishing a tube of Crest toothpaste. The N in particular seems to have a sordid, malodorous life all its own, the part of the letter on our left like the staggering in-buckling leg of a drunkard, the letter-ending flourish on the right like the drunkard’s wilted flowers, offered in an ill-fated attempt to gain reentry to the apartment of his beleaguered erstwhile mate who hurled him out onto the street after ten or twelve too many booze-related fuckups.

"Puh-pleaz . . . sweedard," the drunken N begs, wheezing, his drooping crocuses clutched to his chest. "I. I loveyou and. And I can change. I swear. I . . . I broughtcha these . . . Honey?"

Slam.

(Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody!)

Bobby Bonds

2007-02-13T09:17:00.000-06:00

"For six long years I’ve been in trouble
No pleasure here on earth I’ve found
For in this world I’m bound to travel
I have no friends to help me now"
– "Man of Constant Sorrow" (traditional)

On October 22, 1974, the San Francisco Giants sent the greatest of all the Next Willie Mayses to the New York Yankees for the greatest of all the Next Mickey Mantles. Beyond being perhaps the most even high-profile trade in baseball history (the players involved have been ranked by Bill James as the 15th and 17th best players ever to play their position), it also put an end once and for all to the hopes of each team’s hometown fans that the hype might actually come true. Most overinflated expectations of this kind fizzle quickly, laughably, but in each of these cases they had persisted for years, their lofty realization seeming many times to be just around the next bend. Each player kept verging on greatness. The greatest of all the Next Willie Mayses was fast and strong, the most exciting mix of power and speed to come into the game since the First Willie Mays, and the graceful, explosive batting swing of the greatest of all the Next Mickey Mantles made it too easy to dream that the Mick had yet to limp off the field for the last time. But by 1974, with neither team winning, I guess each franchise just decided they had waited long enough for immortal lightning to strike twice.

The trade broke the spell. Though Bobby Murcer and Bobby Bonds both continued to be among the best players in the game for a few more years, nobody persisted in thinking they were on the brink of becoming iconic, inimitable superstars. Murcer’s post-trade career had a slight air of ennobled melancholy to it, Murcer the Yankee-at-heart in cold, windy exile in San Francisco and Chicago, Murcer the aging part-time slugger returning home to the Yankees in 1979, once again too late for a recent string of championships, just as he had been when his first tour with the Yankees had begun in 1965. As for Bobby Bonds, his post-trade career can be summarized by the collage of cards shown here. In this world he's bound to travel. He lasted in New York for one season, many Yankee fans belittling him not because he wasn’t Willie Mays but because he wasn’t Bobby Murcer. In 1975 he was traded to the California Angels, who then traded him to the Chicago White Sox, who then traded him to the Texas Rangers, who then traded him to the Cleveland Indians, who then traded him to the St. Louis Cardinals, who released him, allowing him to sign with the Texas Rangers, who then sold him to the Chicago Cubs, who released him, which allowed him to sign with the New York Yankees, who released him a month later, on July 21, 1982, without using him once, the wayfaring slugger's ninth and last major upheaval in seven and a half years since the sad and beautiful trade of the two Almost Greats.

Bobby Murcer

2007-02-12T13:41:00.000-06:00

I was working a full-time job last year when I decided to cut back on my hours. I wanted to spend more time on my writing. Since then I have tried unsuccessfully to sell a novel that I spent the last several years writing (and not writing). I have tried to find an agent for the book by utilizing a small list of personal connections. So far the agents I have contacted have said thanks but no thanks. I am now going to send it out to 20 people whose names I will pick out of listings in a book I bought at a Barnes and Noble. The way I feel about the novel right now, it seems as if I'm about to send 20 people a manilla envelope full of dried rabbit turds. It is a slow jerky trip to nowhere, my supposed book. It is a pretentious and flimsy shield against life and death. But what the fuck, I might as well go take a trip to the post office and send out 20 copies of my novel to a bunch of assholes who I will surely come to bitterly hate soon enough. It will get me out of the house at least.

Meanwhile, as I lose money on a weekly basis by not working full time the only writing I have been able to do has been about these fucking baseball cards I grew up with. And lately I have only barely been able to do that. Some people build houses or feed the hungry. I spend days on end trying to say something meaningful about Toby Harrah. Who the fuck cares?

Yesterday when my wife was done studying for her grad school classes in social work we went to a bar for some dinner and we started talking about how we have to move out of our shitty apartment when the lease is up. There aren't any apartments out there anymore. Everything is now condos that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and are the size of a van. Maybe we can find some shithole to rent for a lot of money. Cross your fingers! We will have to find something. I started thinking about going back full-time to my job. It's not a bad job. I've certainly had worse. But the thought of going back while still a failure as a writer made me want to take the glass of beer in my hand and smash it into my forehead. (Employer: this is a completely fictional first-person narrative. Its author is excited about the prospect of expanding his role in the organization.) Our food came. We ate it and talked and drank our beers. My wife calmed me down a little. Eventually my urge to smash a glass of beer against my forehead lessened slightly.

Anyway, today I got up and for fucking six hours I have been trying and failing to write about Bobby Murcer. I tried writing about the odd picture on this card, an opposing player taking up more of the picture than Murcer. I played a couple hands of solitaire, you know, to "loosen up." I wandered around on the Internet and discovered that this photo must have been taken during the second game of a doubleheader on July 18, 1976, because that is the only time Joe Ferguson caught for the St. Louis Cardinals in a road game against the San Franscisco Giants. I also found out that on that very same day, at the 1976 Summer Olympics, Nadia Comaneci's performance on the uneven bars garnered the very first perfect 10 ever awarded. I tried to write about perfection but the writing was atrocious. I took a break and ate a sandwich. Halfway through the sandwich I took a digital photo of our cats, who were lying together in a cute way on the couch. While finishing up the sandwich I bit my tongue pretty badly and stomped around for a few moments feeling sorry for myself. I went to the bathroom and stuck my tongue out at my reflection. My tongue was bleeding a little. Why me? Then I went back to the computer and tried again to write about Bobby Murcer, who seems to strike most people as a very nice man. I got nowhere.

Anyway, here's the deal: Bobby Murcer is currently receiving chemotherapy after having a malignant tumor removed from his brain. He found out about the tumor this past Christmas Eve after going to the hospital for a bad headache. He is hoping to be in the broadcast booth by opening day. I'm rooting for him. I don't know what else to say. I can't imagine what it must be like to be in his shoes. I'm sure I would be cowering. Bobby Murcer seems to be facing the facts bravely.

So here I am, several hours after the cold day began, still with nothing of any shape. Another unpaid day down the tubes. Everyone always says to not waste your life. Don't waste your life! You never know when it could all end! That type of shit. A headache could be a tumor. Live each day to the fullest! What the fuck does that mean? I don't know how not to waste my life. Anyway I'm calling it quits on this Bobby Murcer entry. I already deleted pages of shitty writing on Bobby Murcer and I am tempted to do it again but instead I'm going to say here I am in all my ugliness. Maybe that's better than hiding, maybe it's just as useless. Probably what I should have done is just wish Bobby Murcer well. If it's not too late that's what I want to do. I am rooting for him. I don't know how to do much but I do know how to do that, to root for somebody. Kick some ass, Bobby Murcer. This strange Joe-Ferguson-clogged 1977 card aside, the Bobby Murcer cards of my childhood always seemed to be festooned with the exciting "N.L. ALL STAR" insignia. For that reason I always have and always will think of Bobby Murcer as a star.

U.L. Washington

2007-02-08T05:59:00.000-06:00

At the time Ozzie Smith and Garry Templeton were exchanging teams and destinies, I was probably more aware of a third young speedy promising African American switch-hitting shortstop, U.L. Washington. This idiosyncratic focus stems partly from the fact that I didn’t know as much about the National League in general, especially the teams (besides the Joe Torre Mets) that never got into the playoffs, such as the Cardinals and Padres. By the same token (whatever that means), I knew U.L. Washington in part because his team practically lived in the playoffs, but also because his name was U.L. Washington and U.L. stood for U.L. Of course, the main reason U.L. Washington had imprinted his name and image on my adolescent mind was that U.L. Washington played every inning while chewing on a toothpick.

A major leaguer playing baseball with a toothpick in his mouth is just the kind of thing that fascinates a child. At least this child. And since I was edging my way out of childhood when he came along, U.L. Washington seemed something like a parting gift from the Cardboard Gods to me, the last miniature Krackle bar at the last house the last time trick-or-treating. Fittingly enough, I took my last candy-gathering round as a 12-year-old wearing the laziest of all costumes, a sheet with eyeholes, in 1980, just a couple weeks after watching U.L. Washington gnaw on his toothpick while playing in the World Series. I liked him instantly and rooted for him and, like thousands of other American boys, I walked around with a toothpick in my mouth for a little while.

Unlike his two young speedy promising African American switch-hitting shortstop National League counterparts, U.L. Washington was not traded in his early years. I’m not sure who he could have been traded for, since there weren’t any other young speedy promising African American switch-hitting shortstops in the American League. Maybe the Royals could have worked out a deal with the Toronto Blue Jays for switch-hitting shortstop Alfredo Griffin (who was not African American but who was a young switch-hitting shortstop and who more importantly would have enabled the Kansas City newspaper to print the headline "Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Griffin!") with weak-hitting Danny Ainge as a throw-in who would in turn bring them speedy African American Terry Duerod from the Celtics. When, four years after the Ozzie Smith-Garry Templeton trade, U.L. Washington finally did make his debut on the transaction page, he was swapped for a 27-year-old pitcher, Mike Kinnunen, whose sole brief and ineffective stint in the majors to that point had occurred back when Garry Templeton was still an All-Star for the Cardinals. U.L. Washington was in decline by then, but even so, the question must be asked: Mike Kinnunen? It seems an unnecessarily cruel mirror to hold up to the fading toothpick-gnawing infielder who’d brought so much joy to the youth of America. The Royals, who never once made use of Mike Kinnunen nor ever made it back to the playoffs after parting with U.L. Washington, should be ashamed of themselves, but not as ashamed as the Topps baseball card company should be for this blatantly toothpickless photo. It’s like depicting Paul Bunyan without an axe.

Garry Templeton

2007-02-06T07:28:00.000-06:00

The aesthetically pleasing evenness and soothing inconsequentiality of the Toby Harrah for Buddy Bell trade seemed at first to also grace the 1981 swap of two talented young shortstops by teams that had, like the Indians and Rangers, passed through the 1970s in various stages of obscure ineptitude. The more well known of the two budding stars was Garry Templeton, shown here in 1978 just after a spectacular first season as a major league regular in which he hit .322 with 200 hits, 18 triples, and 28 stolen bases. He was only 22 years old when this photo was snapped, and he seemed among the most promising young players in all of baseball. In 1978 he slid back a little, hitting .280, which was still better than most shortstops in the league, then in 1979 and 1980 racked up two more .300-plus seasons while lashing doubles and triples all over the Busch Stadium carpet. Though he averaged over 30 errors a season, he had good range and was considered among the better defensive shortstops in the game. By the end of the 1981 season he owned a .305 lifetime batting average. You’d need only one hand to count the number of Hall of Fame shortstops with a better mark.

In December 1981 Templeton was traded for a light-hitting San Diego Padre shortstop who had just won his second consecutive Gold Glove. Though several other players were thrown into the deal, perhaps foreshadowing that the transaction would not work out as cleanly as the perfect Harrah-Bell trade, the trade boiled down to what seemed to be a classic exchange of young talent for young talent, on one hand the National League’s best-hitting shortstop, on the other the National League’s best-fielding shortstop. I wasn’t monitoring reaction to the trade at the time or anything, but I suspect that the apparently abundant gifts of both players removed the possibility of a great outcry from either team’s followers. I would also guess that if there had been a poll taken asking which of the players involved in the trade would someday end up in the Hall of Fame, the majority would have gone with Garry Templeton, whose lifetime batting average was at that moment over 70 points higher than his counterpart's.

This is not a Bostockian or Richardian tragedy, for Garry Templeton went on to play for 16 major league seasons in all, and he was a member of the Padres first-ever pennant winner in 1984. But after being traded to the Padres, he never batted .300 again, never gathered more than 154 hits in a season again, never reached double figures in triples again, and only once hit as many as 30 doubles. Meanwhile, the player he was traded for not only continued playing the best defense ever played at baseball’s most important defensive position, racking up 13 consecutive Gold Glove awards in all, he also eventually became a more useful offensive player than Garry Templeton. His Cardinals won the World Series in his first year on the team (or, to put it another way, in Garry Templeton’s first year off the team) and would soon win two more National League pennants. Throughout a 19-year career of consistently astonishing glovework, Templeton’s beloved and unassumingly charismatic counterpart became famous even to non-baseball fans for the joyous cartwheel-into-a-back-flip he performed on the way to his position in the first inning of Cardinals home games. I don’t know exactly how Garry Templeton took the field in the first inning of games at his home stadium, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t do a cartwheel-into-a-back-flip. I like to imagine that at some point during the twilight years of his career Garry Templeton began games by loping onto the field and then dropping arthritically to the ground near the pitcher’s rosin bag to do a slow, lopsided somersault. But he probably just jogged out there like everybody else. Anyway, whatever he did, after a while nobody really paid attention, except for the occasional prick who pointed at him, as I am doing now, and said, "Hey, there’s Garry Templeton. He was once traded for the Wizard of Oz."

Toby Harrah

2007-02-05T09:47:00.000-06:00

Nobody ever discusses the most equal trades of all time. Conversely, the awful trades come up periodically: Jeff Bagwell for Larry Andersen, Nolan Ryan for Jim Fregosi, Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas, Derek Lowe and Jason Varitek for Heathcliff Slocumb, Sparky Lyle for Danny Cater (and a player to be named later, Mario Guerrero, who evened out the deal a little, at least to me), Lou Brock for Ernie Broglio, Babe Ruth for No No Nanette. I guess the even trades seem to have a way of dissolving in collective memory. No scars are produced. I could only think of one equal trade without Googling "equal trades" and "baseball," a search which turned up even less than the trade I’d thought of on my own the moment I looked at this card: Toby Harrah for Buddy Bell. No minor league throw-ins, no cash, no players to be named later. One guy for another guy. Perfect.

In retrospect, some might be tempted to give an edge in the trade to the Texas Rangers, who received Bell from the Indians while parting with Harrah. In most expert opinions, Bell seems to rank a few guys ahead of Harrah on the list of all-time best third basemen. In the 2001 edition of his Historical Baseball Abstract, Bill James ranked Bell 19th and Harrah 32nd. Though I’m not qualified to argue with Bill James about anything even remotely connected with baseball, I still am tempted to stick up for Toby Harrah a little on the basis that Harrah matched Bell in the ability to drive in runs and surpassed him in the ability to get on base and, once on base, advance. He had good power, good speed, he drew a lot of walks, and he is probably the best palindrome-surnamed baseballer of all time. Also, a recent study by Baseball Prospectus revealed him to be, statistically speaking, the second-best clutch hitter of the last 35 years (behind Mark Grace). Bell’s career lasted a little longer than Harrah’s, and he also was one of the all-time best defensive third basemen, whereas Harrah in the field was merely like he was at every other aspect of the game: pretty good. James mentions how nice a guy Bell was several times throughout his book, so maybe that helped Bell move up a little versus Harrah in his estimation, especially considering that his entry on Harrah consists of an anecdote about how as a very young player Harrah was among those on the Washington Senators secretly lobbying for a mutiny on manager Ted Williams. But anyway, as trades went, the 1978 exchange of Bell and Harrah struck me at the time as perfectly balanced, and I still see it that way, each team getting a good but not great third baseman in his prime. Beyond that, the trade seems perfect to me because of the teams involved. The players changed teams but nothing really changed, good or bad, not for the Rangers, nor the Indians, nor Harrah, nor Bell. First place remained a rumor, decent personal statistics were compiled, empty seats bore witness, and history continued to unfold elsewhere.

J.R. Richard, 1978

2007-01-30T06:43:00.000-06:00

Ode to The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training

Conclusion

I don’t remember this part, but my friend Bill estimates that I dropped twenty-five or thirty feet before hitting the steep embankment, then I bounced and tumbled another hundred feet or so. When I stopped somersaulting I was in a forward-swaying seated position, a thin ribbon of blood pulsing in what seemed to be slow motion from my head out onto the scree, an image which reminded me, even in the moment, of the way guys bled from mortal bullet wounds in Sam Peckinpah movies.

No clouds in the sky. Some dry desert brush here and there. Bill seemed to arrive at my side almost instantly, more scared than anyone I’ve ever seen.

"Holy shit, Josh! Holy fucking shit!"

A couple had pulled into the rest area just before I’d flown over the cliff, and the woman drove off to find a telephone so she could call an ambulance while the man made his way down to us to see if he could help. Based on the small number of other cars on the desert highway we’d been on, I’d guess that the rest area we’d stopped at generally went hours or even days without having a visitor. I asked small-talk questions of the man who’d come to my aid as he and Bill each took one of my arms and gently half-lifted, half-dragged me toward the highway. He was an air traffic controller. He and his wife were on their way to Colorado where he was starting a new job.

"Colorado’s beautiful," I said.

Bill and the air traffic controller set me down on the ground by a shallow roadside ditch and as we waited for the ambulance I started to go into shock. Unfortunately, I didn’t know that I was going into shock. All I knew was that I was beginning to feel very cold on a warm sunny day, and my vision was going white and grainy, like a television tuned to a station losing its signal. I thought I might be dying.

After his failed comeback, J.R. Richard’s sizable baseball earnings gradually dwindled closer and closer to zero, eroded by two divorce settlements and some bad business decisions, including an oil-well scam that cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars. Looking for a job, he approached the team whose cap he would have worn on a plaque in Cooperstown. "I went to [the Astros] to see if I could do some public relations for them," Richard said in a 2004 Houston Press interview with Dave Hollander. "They said, ‘Okay, we’ll get back to you,’ and time passed and passed and passed. Nothing."

The paramedics strapped me on a gurney and carried me into the ambulance, where they hooked me to IVs. According to Bill, who was, against their strong recommendations, tailing them the whole way, we went 100 miles an hour for forty miles or so, which was how far away the closest hospital was. At the hospital, I felt okay with Bill by my side as a kind nurse filled me with painkillers and removed rocks embedded in my knees, knuckles, and head, then sewed up the large rock-eructing gashes. But that quiet fear that I’d felt when I’d been going into shock returned when an orderly wheeled me away from Bill so I could have x-rays taken of my head.

I lay on the stretcher alone in a shadowy metallic room for a while. My thoughts started to wander. Maybe there was hidden internal bleeding. Maybe a massive secret blood clot had formed and was just waiting for the right moment to fatally clog some vital artery. It happened all the time. One minute you’re tossing the ball around in the outfield with Wilbur Howard and the next minute men in dark suits are walking toward you to escort you off the Astroturf forever.

Finally a couple x-ray technicians came in. I wanted them to talk to me, to talk me through it, but they were busy bitching about some work-related problem.

"He thinks his crap don’t stink," one of them said.

"I pulled enough overtime the last month," the other said, seeming to talk past him. "I got what’s known as a life."

"And that big smile on his face all the time?" the first one said. "Lord."

They never acknowledged me at all, even when they were inches away, repositioning the stretcher. It was a chilling little preview. The world is going to keep on going right along just fine when you die. As they x-rayed me, a shred of "Pancho and Lefty" was still echoing around in what I considered at that moment to be my possibly hemorrhaging brain, the haunting part near the end of the song where a ghostly chorus joins in to help tell the doom-limned tale.

All the federales say
They could have had him any day

Those federales, those men in dark suits approaching with orders to remove. Yes, they could have had me that day. Broken neck, shattered skull, subject of a phone call to the next of kin. As it turned out, every inch of my body hurt and I was stitched up like Frankenstein and I could barely move, but I hadn’t even broken a single bone, and the x-rays found nothing. I was free to limp out of the hospital, leaning on Bill. Everything seemed to glow. I called people close to me and told them I loved them. I tried to write postcards to say the same thing but it hurt too much to hold a pen.

The next day Bill and I bought flowers for the nurse who’d derocked me. I don’t remember the details of the flower transaction, but I have since discovered that there is a possibility, however slight, that we bought the flowers from Chris Barnes, the actor who played Tanner Boyle. According to a Bad News Bears fan site, as the years went by Barnes became extremely uncomfortable with the constricting renown caused by his generation-defining portrayal. Probably every two seconds someone had come up to him and yelled "Let them play!" in his face, causing him ultimately to take it on the melancholy lam like Bill Bixby in the television version of The Incredible Hulk. In a 1998 Los Angeles Times article quoted on the above-mentioned site, Ann O’Neill reported that Barnes had moved to Utah and gotten a job in a flower shop. Though the article didn’t specify the exact location of the flower shop, it’s easy enough to imagine him gravitating toward a place far from everything except quiet rocky desert and the occasional desert-chewed nurse-thanking dufus.

We headed back toward California, where my plane home to the liquor store and Saturday nights at the International was leaving from, and after several hours of driving we ran out of daylight on the outskirts of Las Vegas. We got a room near the strip at a Motel 6 and decided despite my condition that it would be ludicrous to pass through that city and not gamble a little. I loaded up on codeine and we made our way slowly to Circus Circus.

Inside the casino, I gently lowered my bandaged body down in front of a slot machine. Bill found a spot farther down the row. Trapeze artists and tightrope walkers occupied the spaces high above all the random flashing and chiming and low-lit humans solemnly trying to be lucky. Once in a while you see how singular life is, how virtually impossible, how blessed and inane. "And yet we were always being found innocent for ridiculous reasons," writes Denis Johnson in Jesus’ Son. It was a spring night in 1995 in Vegas. I looked as if I’d fallen into a dumpster-sized blender. I started feeding the machine and pulling the lever. It was a spring night in 1995 in Houston. J.R. Richard was homeless, taking shelter under a bridge. Within moments bells were ringing and hundreds of coins were spilling onto my lap.

Bob Watson

2007-01-28T06:53:00.000-06:00

Ode to The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training

Part 3

"We’re not finished," Tanner Boyle says.

It’s 1977. The sequel to The Bad News Bears appears to be coming to an abrupt close. The Bears have traveled by customized van, unchaperoned, their 12-year-old chain-smoking left-fielder Kelly Leak at the wheel, from their home in California to the Astrodome in Houston to participate in a four-inning exhibition against the best Little League team in Texas. The winner of the exhibition, which is taking place between games of an Astros’ doubleheader, will be awarded a trip to Japan to play in an All-World Little League Championship game.

By the top of the third inning, the Texas team has built a seemingly insurmountable five-run lead. As they ready to add to their lead (unaccountably, the Texas squad is being treated as the visiting team in Houston), a man in a dark suit comes onto the field and informs the umpire that time has run out for the exhibition; the second half of the Astros’ doubleheader needs to begin. The stunned Bears are reluctant to leave the field. But eventually, perhaps dispirited by the shellacking at the hands of the gigantic Texas players, they begin to abandon their positions.

All except for their shortstop, Tanner Boyle.

Not yet.

In that slim moment, with the rocky world about to vanish from beneath me, was there room in my mind for a thought? I don’t know. I don’t remember. But if there was, the thought would be a wordless version of that two-word plea.

Not yet.

"Hey, you guys," Tanner Boyle says. All his teammates, even Kelly Leak, are passing him on their way off the field. "Where are you going?"

The Bears’ new coach, Kelly Leak’s long-estranged father, Mike, argues futilely with the man in the dark suit who declared the game over. The umpire confirms that the Texas team was ahead at the time the game was called, and the man in the dark suit officially declares them the winner. Two more men in dark suits materialize to hover ominously around the now irate Mike Leak, who glares past them for a while at the first dark-suited man before retreating to the dugout. The line score for the game has been wiped from the stadium scoreboard. There’s only one obstacle remaining. Tanner Boyle stands alone on the carpeted diamond. His glove has been thrown to the turf in anger.

"We’re not finished!" he yells again. "The game isn’t over!"

Two men in dark suits walk toward him.

I hadn’t done anything yet. I hadn’t found love yet, not really. I hadn’t written The Novel yet. I hadn’t made witty appearances on talk shows yet. I hadn’t acquired groupies yet. I hadn’t dunked a basketball yet. At least not on a regulation-height rim.

The Astros emerge from the clubhouse, entering the dugout the Bears have been borrowing from them: Bill Virdon, Enos Cabell, Joe Ferguson, Roger Metzger, Bob Watson. The Bears have been watching the men in dark suits advance toward their shortstop but now they cluster around the Astros with a mixture of awe and supplication. The Bears’ centerfielder, Ahmad, explains the situation to Bob Watson. Cesar Cedeno has also entered the scene, as has Ken Forsch. In the background, wearing the long-sleeved windbreaker of a man who will soon be taking the mound as a starting pitcher, is J.R. Richard.

Out on the field, Tanner Boyle backpedals away from the two men in dark suits. They close in and he jukes away from them, eliciting laughter from the crowd.

"Hey, look at Tanner," exclaims Toby, the Bears’ first baseman.

The Bears’ savvy, bespectacled Sabermetrician, Ogilvie, played by the legendary Alfred Lutter, is the first to join Toby at the dugout railing to watch Tanner dart away from the grasping, stumbling men in dark suits. In the short interim between the first Bad News Bears movie and The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, Alfred Lutter has been, more than any of his cast-mates, Pearl-Harbored by puberty. He stands a head taller than Toby at the rail, elongated and pasty, his aviator glasses a little crooked. After The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training Alfred Lutter will never again appear in another movie. His last and greatest character, Ogilvie, pumps a pointy, poorly-formed fist and cheers with a cracking voice for Tanner Boyle to stay alive out there. Everything is ending. Stay alive!

I hadn’t learned to touch-type yet. I hadn’t learned to drive yet. I hadn’t given a tearful acceptance speech yet. I hadn’t had ecstatic sex in some beautiful meadow somewhere, or something, yet. I’d barely had any sex at all. I hadn’t even taken enough naps. I hadn’t been discovered. I hadn’t enrolled in a drawing class or studied yoga, mostly because it reminded me of the word yogurt, which I considered repulsive, but still it would have been nice to improve my flexibility and be one of those glowing yoga types who can enjoy the wide bountiful treasures of each moment and also last longer than fourteen seconds while humping. I hadn’t fended off child pickpockets in Rome or cheered for the Ham Fighters in Japan or purchased Elvis Presley toenail clippers in Memphis.

"Come on, Tanner!" Ogilvie shouts. Tanner picks up second base and hurls it at the groin of the younger of the two men in dark suits. The man groans and crumples to the ground.

"Go, Tanner, go!" yells the Bears’ third baseman, Jimmy Feldman, played by Brett Marx, grandson of Gummo Marx.

The man who crumpled to the ground gets back on his feet but both he and the other man are starting to tire.

"Come back here," the older of the two men in dark suits says, standing and pointing at the Astroturf by his dress shoes. "Come back here right now!"

"No!" Tanner says.

Bob Watson steps forward, smiling but apparently also roused by Tanner Boyle’s Last Stand. J.R. Richard is visible in the background. He has risen from the bench. Standing, he’s enormous, a rainbow-striped skyscraper. Bob Watson sort of feebly punches his arm in the air, as if he’s been taking air-punching lessons from Ogilvie.

"Hey, come on," Bob Watson calls out toward the field. "Let the kids play."

I hadn’t gotten roaringly drunk in Dublin, nor attained zen enlightenment while carrying a pail of water or whatever, nor aided the indigent, nor learned Cantonese, nor buoyed the hopeless, nor whipped through War and Peace during some vacation during which I also took long bracing swims in the Atlantic, nor taught convicted felons how to write gritty, redemptive poetry, nor foiled a mugging with nary but my bare fists and perhaps a couple Spidermanly wisecracks, nor had one more really great chocolate chip cookie, nor run weeping with joy up and down confettied avenues hugging strangers because the Red Sox had won the World Series, because the Red Sox had not won the World Series, not in my lifetime, not yet. It was 1995 and I was 27 years old and I hadn’t had that feeling yet. I had longed for the feeling abstractly and daydreamed about the feeling in alarmingly intricate detail. In some ways I had even built it into my own personal impotent religion. But I hadn’t ever found out what it actually felt like, you know, to win.

Upon hearing Bob Watson’s plea to let the kids play, Mike Leak stalks back onto the field and, facing the stands, begins the chant for which The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training is known.

"Let them play!" he chants. "Let them play!"

His son, with whom he has fought throughout the movie, is the first to join him. For the first time, father and son stand side by side, chanting and gaveling the air with their right fists with each syllable. Eventually the rest of the Bears surge out onto the field to lend their reedy voices. Rudi. Engelberg. Jose and Miguel. Carmen Ronzonni.

The men in dark suits still can’t catch Tanner Boyle.

"Let them play! Let them play!"

Soon the entire stadium is chanting.

I careened aboard my friend’s sister’s slightly too small white bicycle off the edge of a Utah cliff. I didn’t know what was going to happen next, but if I had had time to pray, I would have prayed for the angelic intervention of Tanner Boyle and Bob Watson and the homely, forlornly Matthauless, Jimmy Baio-ified, sequelized Bad News Bears. Not yet, I would have prayed to The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training. Please, you lumpy heroes. Not yet.

(Next up: The Synapse-Mangling, Soul-Butchering, Spirit-Disemboweling Conclusion.)

J.R. Richard, 1979

2007-01-26T06:25:00.000-06:00

Ode to The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training

Part 2

Back in those years that included my brother’s attempt to learn to play the cello, I often fantasized about lucking into the creation of the perfect opening sentence of a novel. I imagined this sentence would have the power to cause an entire book-length fictional world to gush from my pen like water from the widening hole in a sabotaged dam. By the time the 1990s were half over I had filled up a cello-high stack of notebooks with jagged scribbling, more than a thousand pages blackened and blued with self-lacerating complaints that the magical dam-breaking First Sentence had yet to come and deliver me from my life. On particularly frustrating days I ended up Hulking it up a little, flying into private nearsighted ectomorphic rages that metamorphosed me from a timid high-strung liquor store clerk into a rampaging cat-scaring beast with the gamma-ray-infused strength to rip the Meade "Wireless" college-ruled notebooks I favored into tiny terrified shreds. Then I’d clean up the shreds and go find the cats in their hiding places to apologize profusely for the monster within.

In 1980, at the age of 30 and in the midst of his best season yet, J.R. Richard began noticing stiffness in his back, shoulder, and arm. He mentioned it to team trainers and in June as the problem worsened he began begging out of games early. Nobody could find anything wrong, but judging by the occasional grumblings in Houston that Richard (who hadn’t missed a single start in years) was either purposefully dogging it or suffering from some mental phantasm, nobody was really looking very hard.

Besides waiting around in vain for literary genius to strike, I also daydreamed, as did my brother and at least one of my friends, of escaping with violent abruptness from New York City. My brother envisioned only the first step of his escape: driving without the slightest warning to anyone through the Holland Tunnel, away from every last problem, never to return. A friend’s more detailed vision of escape involved reversing the path taken by Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy: Instead of leaving a small, scorpion-infested Texas border town to come to New York City, my friend, a lifelong New Yorker, dreamed of leaving New York City for a small, scorpion-infested Texas border town, where he’d get a job washing dishes in a diner, shack up with a divorced, embittered, chain-smoking waitress, and read a lot. My own vision of escape involved taking a map of the U.S., plunking my finger down on it randomly, and then taking a Greyhound to the random spot to get a job somewhere "sweeping up," as the wistfully forlorn Bill Bixby managed to do at the beginning of every episode of the television version of The Incredible Hulk.

J.R. Richard’s second to last start in the major leagues was in the 1980 all-star game. He deserved to start the game: he had by then become the best pitcher in baseball. He pitched two scoreless innings, striking out Carlton Fisk, Reggie Jackson, and Steve Stone. His last start was six days later. July 14, 1980. He sailed through the first three innings, giving up no runs and just one hit while striking out four, and in the bottom of the third, in his final major league at-bat, he drilled a double off future Hall of Famer Phil Niekro. But with one out in the top of the fourth inning he walked off the mound and into the clubhouse, complaining of dizziness.

He was replaced by Gordy Pladson.

In actuality, I rarely left the city. There was no such thing as vacation time at the liquor store where I worked, but I occasionally took a few unpaid days off every once in a while, usually to go lie around on a parental couch eating cheese and crackers. In earlier years I’d hoped for a life of adventure such as the one featured in the pages of On the Road, but things weren’t really working out quite like that. A few years into my long stint selling liquor, and not long after my brother turned in his rented cello, I told the owner of the store that I needed a week to go out west. I met up with my fellow Kerouac-loving former roommate from boarding school, Bill, in Santa Barbara, and the two of us drove to Utah with two mountain bikes on the roof of Bill’s car.

We spent a couple days camping and hiking in Zion National Park and then set out across the state, heading for the mountain-biking mecca of Moab. I had never actually mountain-biked before, but I figured it couldn’t be that hard. After driving for hours across a desert, and with several more car-bound hours still ahead of us, we seized the chance to stop at a rest area that turned out to be nothing more than a tin outhouse perched at the edge of a long rocky ridge. There was not so much as a telephone there. After I took a leak I came out of the outhouse and saw that Bill was unhitching his bike from the rack.

"Let’s take a break from all the driving," Bill said.

"Sounds good to me," I said. I didn’t yet know how to drive a car at that time and so Bill had been doing the whole job himself while I performed such vital tasks as unscrewing the cap on the bottle of water for him and manning the volume on the tape player. For the past couple hours we’d fallen into a silence that in retrospect seems a little haunted to me, the unending barren wilderness outside the windows taking away our words. I still had a song stuck in my head from the tape that had been playing when we’d pulled in, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard singing Townes Van Zandt's "Pancho and Lefty."

From BaseballLibrary.com:

"By the end of [July 1980] Richard was back at the Astrodome, playing catch with former Astro Wilbur Howard under the observation of trainer Doc Ewell. After a 10-minute rest in the dugout, Richard returned to the field to try some more throwing—and collapsed.

"Emergency surgery at Houston's Methodist Hospital uncovered the root of Richard's struggles. The branch of his carotid artery that supplied blood to the right shoulder was completely clotted, resulting in a near-fatal stroke. When asked by a reporter if Richard would lose the use of his arm, one doctor replied: ‘Hell, they weren’t worried about his arm; they were worried about his life.’"

Bill set out first on his bike and I followed behind as soon as I got his sister’s bike off the roof. Neither of us bothered to put on our helmets. The ridge was about fifteen feet wide, maybe narrower in parts. It appeared to be relatively flat.

It wasn’t.

"The stroke had nearly paralyzed the entire left side of Richard’s body. A second operation returned much of his strength and speech, but the fearsome right-hander never pitched in the big leagues again. A brief comeback ended in March 1984 after Richard had gone 0-2 with a 13.68 ERA in six starts for Triple-A Tucson. The Astros gave him his release."

By the time I began hurtling down the bumpy, deceptively steep incline, Bill had wrenched his own bike to a skidding halt and was running toward me and shouting at me to try to do the same. I didn’t see him, and anyway it was too late. The handlebars had turned into those of a jackhammer. I was going too fast to think. Ten seconds into my mountain-biking career I flew off a cliff.

(To be Hulkinued.)

J.R. Richard, 1977

2007-01-24T06:22:00.000-06:00

Ode to The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training

Part 1

J.R. Richard spent his twenties taking long loping strides toward Cooperstown. He was 6’8", threw blazingly hard, wore the dazzling colors of the distant, exciting, up and coming Astros, had a cool, mysterious name, and always seemed to be featured by Topps in one of their rare action shots, the photos always making him seem even bigger and more electrifying than the impressive numbers on the back of his card suggested. Back then I sometimes passed entire afternoons wondering who could beat up whom in the Marvel superhero universe, and though I understood that baseball and comics, the two fantasy-infused realms where I spent the bulk of my childhood, did not in actuality overlap, J.R. Richard (last name virtually identical to Reed Richards, leader of the Fantastic Four) was an exception, and I thought of him as if he could be placed somewhere in the penultimate tier of the Marvel rankings, able to trade skyscraper-rocking blows with the likes of Spiderman, Iron Man, or Luke Cage: Power Man. And even the three top Marvel strongmen—The Thing, Thor, and The Incredible Hulk—though perhaps too powerful for J.R. Richard to hold off in a fistfight without the help of some lesser masked functionary such as Hawkeye or The Falcon, could not, if the situation were ever to arise, touch one of the lightning-bolt fastballs that sprang from J.R. Richards’s giant superpowered hand.

My older brother was even more mesmerized with J.R. Richard than I was, and modeled his pitching motion on the one shown in this 1977 card: high bent-kneed leg kick, hands held tight to the chest, scowling eyes locked on the catcher’s target. He perfected the motion while hurling a tennis ball at the strike zone he’d duct-taped onto our wooden garage door. The sound the tennis ball made when hitting the door got louder as the years passed, my brother amid the seismic epicenter of his puberty seeming to get bigger by the day: 6’1", 6’2", 6’3". By the time he had reached his full height of 6’4" and no longer played organized baseball and was openly longing to leave home for good, the scowling bent-kneed windup and gunshot report of the garage door had become the primary elements in a ritual of imagined escape, each pitch a prayer for an impossible transformation from cornered rural teenager into the pure violent beauty of J.R. Richard throwing heat.

Years later, I meandered through my own twenties as a clerk at 8th Street Wine and Liquor in Manhattan. It was easy enough to imagine I’d be in my twenties forever. I worked the evening shift Monday through Friday and a nine-hour shift on Saturday, earning enough to chip in on the rent for the apartment I shared with my brother and to get drunk on Saturday nights at the International Bar a few blocks east of the store.

My brother and I and our friends generally loitered at the International until last call at 4 a.m., the favorite part of the night occurring near that time, after we’d all released the burden of hoping that someone would walk through the grimy door and change our lives. Some song on the jukebox would hit like novocaine and it no longer mattered that life was sliding past like scenery in a cheap cartoon. In fact it felt pretty fucking good. In an earlier comment on this site, my brother described the feeling:

"Numberless nights at the International Bar began their stretch run thusly: it’s 3:52am, I’ve got a headful of static from drinking cheap swill, and Peggy Lee starts teetering through ‘Is That All There Is?’ on the ol’ Wurlitzer. And through all those painful years, I was comforted each time; I’d feel a crooked, fallen smile take shape, ‘Yessir, that’s all what she wrote.’ Various harpies would leave me be and I’d relax into appreciation of what was. McKenna gesticulating wildly, maybe. Or ‘That Guy.’ Or just Rose behind the bar, humane and beautiful and flatly real. Who needs the transcendent greener grass, when opening to What Is is so rewarding? (Of course, I’d forget that five seconds later, or at least by the next morning, and shoulder the misery again.)"

A few years into our routine of balancing that thin 3:52 a.m. feeling against the shipwrecked drifting of our lives in general, my brother decided he was going to learn how to play the cello. We were all looking for some detritus to cling to, I guess, and he liked the melancholy sound of the instrument, so he rented one from a music store and signed up for lessons with a recent Julliard grad, a young, stern Asian woman who was openly incredulous about his intentions. He wanted to use the cello to wrest some beauty from his life, but unfortunately he rarely got around to taking the thing out of its case. Eventually another entry was added into the endlessly rich lexicon of euphemisms for masturbation (e.g., Question: "Where’s your brother?" Answer: "He’s ‘practicing the cello.’"). Nonetheless, he lugged his burden to and from work whenever he had a lesson, shoehorning himself and the obese case into the jammed F train at rush hour all the way from our neighborhood in Brooklyn to his job editing travel books on the Upper West Side. This went on for a couple months. One Sunday very near the time when he finally admitted defeat, he roused himself from an "Is That All There Is?" hangover to practice his assigned homework, another lesson and its accompanying scolding from the Asian woman looming. The apartment looked, as usual, as if it had been ransacked. It may have been around the time when we had a rotting jack-o-lantern with carved-out drunken X’s for eyes collapsing into itself next to a bottle of Jim Beam on our "dining room" table. Bleary-eyed, unshaven, wearing only his boxer shorts and a wife-beater dotted with Ragu stains, my brother performed his first and last opus, a halting, truncated, off-key rendition of Mary Had a Little Lamb.

(To be Hulkinued.)

Jim Wynn

2007-01-22T09:55:00.000-06:00

I love baseball statistics in so far as they are able to separate me from reality. This renders me useless both to baseball analysts and to people who have no need for baseball statistics whatsoever. I dissolve into baseball statistics, hide in them. Sometimes I emerge with half-baked notions and outright distortions. More often I return to my life with nothing at all, the numbers I vanished into themselves vanishing from my mind like the sugary flavor of the gum that used to come with these cards. It’s been this way for more than three decades, since even before this 1976 Jim Wynn card came into my 8-year-old hands. That said, I would like to disappear into some numbers for a while so as to explore the notion that Jim Wynn was, as he appears here to be, so very, very tired in 1976.

Yes, Jim Wynn looks like he’s just about had enough, doesn't he? In fact, he’d make it through the coming season and then play another season, too, his last exhausted go-round coming in 1977 when he struggled half a season with the title-bound Yankees, was released, and then struggled some more with the 6th-place Brewers. It’s his penultimate year I’m interested in, however, which came directly on the heels of this portrait of a man who seems to be, in the oft-uttered words of Danny Glover's character in the Lethal Weapon movies, "gettin’ too old for this shit."

I like to think of Wynn wearing this expression throughout the 1976 season. I also try to imagine that he wore the cap pictured here. I know that this is impossible, since this headgear is most likely a Los Angeles Dodger cap subjected to another rushed doctoring job performed by the Topps art department (for more on this process and its existential ramifications, see Dave Cash ), yet I still prefer to think of Jim Wynn wearing a cap that looks as if it has been decorated by first graders just learning to write cursive lowercase letters and color between the lines.

Thusly attired, Jim Wynn authored a season that somehow perfectly expresses the utter exhaustion of a still-talented baseball slugger. His batting average was a mere .207, but in his 148 games played he managed to hit 17 home runs and also amassed a league-leading 127 walks, not that far from a walk a game. Wynn had always had a preternatural knack for drawing the walk (in fact he may have been the greatest right-handed walk-obtainer ever, not quite at the level of lefties Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, and Barry Bonds but as good or perhaps even slightly better than righties Frank Thomas, Rickey Henderson, and the Three Walkin’ Eddies: Yost, Joost, and Stanky), but though he had often approached his 1976 rate of obtaining them, he had only surpassed it once before, in 1969, and in that year he had hit for a much higher batting average than in 1976 while also pounding out nearly twice as many home runs. In other words, in 1969 opposing pitchers had much more reason to pitch carefully to Jim Wynn, which makes his comparable 1976 walk numbers even more astounding. Even though he seemed no longer able or willing to consistently make contact with the ball, he still drew the free pass.

Including his walks, he had 576 trips to the batter’s box in 1976. As noted previously, he enabled himself, through his great eye and perhaps through sheer force of will, to exit the batter’s box at a relaxed saunter by obtaining a base on balls on 127 occasions. He also followed 111 other at-bats with an even shorter stroll back to the dugout after striking out. Add the 17 short jogs around the bases resulting from his 17 home runs, and you are left with precious few moments when Jim Wynn had to exert himself while his team was on offense. He only had 76 non-homer basehits, about 13 percent of his total plate appearances. There have surely been other guys with a similarly small ratio of non-homer basehits to plate appearance, but I bet none of those other guys led their teams in on-base percentage, home runs, and RBIs, as Jim Wynn did in 1976. Jim Wynn may have been tired (perhaps worn out from years of trying to muscle home runs out of the Astrodome and Dodger Stadium, his previous home ballparks, which so favored the pitcher that they may have cost Jim Wynn a spot in the Hall of Fame), but he still found a way to help his team. In fact, I believe that Jim Wynn in 1976 produced the highest ever positive ratio of offensive production versus physical energy exerted. As a person who intends, one of these days, to do good things in life but who is also, on a much more concrete level, always on the eagle-eyed lookout for his next nap, I view Jim Wynn’s 1976 season as a beacon flickering dimly through the haze, suggesting that my limited exertions may amount to something yet.

Sammy Stewart

2007-01-20T08:18:00.000-06:00

"I went to a party [in 1988] and there were some girls moving around a little funny after going into the bathroom. I said, ‘What are they doing?’ and they said they were smoking crack. And I said, ‘Won't that bust your heart?’ They said, ‘No, no, try it.’ The high was euphoric, super. It took away the absence of baseball."
– Sammy Stewart

Sammy Stewart had some euphoric highs. In 1978, in the very first game of his rookie season, he struck out seven Chicago White Sox batters in a row to set a record that still stands: most consecutive strikeouts in a major league debut. Stewart also owns an admirable string of scoreless innings pitched in the World Series, a mark that he did not get the chance to extend late in his career, despite being on the playoff roster of the 1986 Boston Red Sox.

My sole memory of him being on the Red Sox that year involved seeing his name on a disheartening list of available pitchers that flashed on the TV screen as the Red Sox bullpen unraveled in Game 6 of the World Series. Either just before or just after that list flashed, the tragicomedy team of pearshaped Bob Stanley and nearsighted Rich Gedman combined to allow a sloppy sinker free passage to the backstop, which allowed the tying run to score, which allowed Shea Stadium to erupt into a sound that, had I myself been an available reliever in the Boston bullpen, would have caused me to lose control of my bladder.

Before the hobbling, mustachioed man playing first base ever got involved, Game 6 of the 1986 World Series was over. Like every other Red Sox fan, I’d already been feeling pretty doomed the moment that the camera swung away from the image of undone would-be closer and future icon of the notion of "failure face," Calvin Schiraldi, to the image of the bullpen door swinging open to reveal that our fate lay in the hands of Bob Stanley. And once the tying run actually did cross the plate, forget it. I knew there was no way things could possibly end well. Not with that crowd roaring like 50,000 Roman spectators greeting the arrival into the arena of hunger-enraged lions. Not with the ghost of Enos Slaughter leading off first, the ghost of Bucky Dent in the batter’s box. Not with our only hope resting on Bob Stanley, Steve Crawford, Joe Sambito, and . . . Sammy Stewart? Since when did we have Sammy Stewart?

The Red Sox had used Crawford and Sambito sparingly in the playoffs, and both had still found ways to hemorrhage runs. The fact that the Red Sox hadn’t used Stewart at all suggested to me that he must have been an even worse option than his fellow last resorts. I remembered him in previous years as part of the effective army of relievers the Orioles deployed in their quietly ass-kicking manner, but I figured that he must have lost it, that he was washed up, a has-been. To use a metaphor that at that very moment was yet in its embryonic stage, I just assumed Stewart must have already taken that slow malodorous Greyhound to Schiraldiville.

Sammy Stewart claims that this is not so. He had hurt his arm earlier in the season, but by the World Series he was feeling strong. He believes Red Sox manager John McNamara had it in for him and so avoided using him. There’s no telling what would have happened if he had come in with the game still in question, but it’s probably safe to say that the man who had not allowed a run in 7 2/3 innings of World Series work with the Orioles would not be overwhelmed by the spotlight.

As the above quote from Sammy Stewart suggests, being away from the spotlight was another story. He lasted one more year in the majors and then, according to "Rock Bottom," a harrowing October 25, 2006, Boston Globe story by Stan Grossfeld, he began compiling a different set of stats: 26 arrests, 43 criminal charges, 6 prison stints. Stewart is currently incarcerated at the Piedmont Correctional Institution in North Carolina for being a habitual felon, felony drug possession, and failure to appear in court on a felony charge.

The baseball card above is from 1980, just after Sammy Stewart’s first full season in the majors, during which he helped the Orioles win the 1979 pennant. He led the strong Oriole bullpen in innings pitched, won 8 games, and posted a 3.56 ERA, then added 2 2/3 scoreless innings of work in the World Series. The Orioles lost in seven games to the Pirates that year, but Stewart’s expression seems to show that he’s not too worried about the defeat. Why should he be? He’s got years and years of baseball still to play.

The Orioles returned to the World Series in 1983, and Stewart again took the ball in key spots and again pitched flawlessly, and this time the Orioles won. The following season Stewart received his World Champion ring, which he subsequently relinquished while suffering the absence of baseball.

Lyman Bostock

2007-01-18T07:13:00.000-06:00

To me, Lyman Bostock was the first person who ever died. This may explain why I’ve been trying and failing to write about Lyman Bostock for days. Whenever I can’t write I get morose, withdrawn, and self-pitying. Well, I’m always sort of morose, withdrawn, and self-pitying, but when I can’t write it’s like a slightly enchanting fog around a run-down rustbelt city full of abandoned factories lifts. Yesterday I tried and failed to write about Lyman Bostock, took a subway to a bus to my job, proofread an old version of a test book written in Chinese against the new version of the same test book written in Chinese (I found one error in 60 pages of Chinese text, a leg-like stroke missing on a man-shaped character), took a bus to a subway home, fed the cats, fiddled with my online “Back to the 80’s” Strat-O-Matic lineup, Googled the name of an old boarding school friend and found out he now sold real estate in Jersey City for Remax, which alarmed and depressed me, partly because he was a funny, athletic, and charismatic guy seemingly destined for stardom as an action hero and more so because he had become an adult (the only other Google listing for his full name besides his Remax listing was an article from 20 years ago mentioning that he’d played the lead in a summer production of a Shakespeare play, the gap in years between those two Google listings suggesting a transition out of a life of “what if,” a transition I have yet to make) and here I was riding public transportation to a building along a strip in the suburbs to my part-time job to proofread a language I couldn’t understand. Also, there was a picture of him and he looked like a middle-aged guy, which I’m sure I look like, too, but since I’ve seen me the whole time I haven’t noticed the change as much.

And today I’m back at it, trying to write about Lyman Bostock. In previous days of failing to write about Lyman Bostock I have discovered a lot of stuff on the Internet about Lyman Bostock. There are in fact entire tribute websites devoted to him, or at least one tribute website, plus many other articles and columns, most of them mentioning that his father was a Negro League standout, that he himself became a major league standout with the Minnesota Twins before signing as a free agent for the Angels in 1978, that he tried to return his first month’s salary to the Angels’ owner, Gene Autry, for getting off to a poor start with his new team, that this humble, selfless act was par for the course for Lyman Bostock, about whom stories of being extremely helpful and of going out of his way to be nice to strangers abounded, that after trying to give his salary back he subsequently rallied to bring his batting average by mid-September of that year to a fine .296, that while riding in the back seat of a car in mid-September he was shot and killed by a man who was apparently aiming for his ex-wife, a woman seated next to Bostock whom Bostock had met 20 minutes earlier, and that the shooter avoided prison time with an insanity plea and was subsequently released from a psychiatric hospital, a free man, seven months after he’d been admitted.

I was 10 when Lyman Bostock was murdered, and prior to that time knew him solely as a name near the top of the list of batting averages printed in the Sunday sports section. I studied those averages religiously, as religiously as I've ever studied anything. I loved the exactness of them. I loved that there was a hierarchy, an order, Singleton and Brett near the top, Kingman and Belanger near the bottom, and I loved even more that at times certain previously unknown players moved into the upper echelon of that hierarchy, sometimes creeping up the list past the sturdy .280 Amos Otis types, sometimes materializing out of nowhere, as Bob Watson did for the Red Sox in 1979 as soon as he had amassed the minimum number of at bats. I don’t know which route Lyman Bostock first took, because I don’t clearly remember a time before Lyman Bostock was among the batting average leaders and yet I also do recall thinking of him as a new guy, a youngster storming the rarified realm lorded over benevolently by his wondrous teammate Rod Carew. In general, I thought about him this way: Lyman Bostock was rising, each year a little higher. His move to the Angels provided a temporary hiccup in his career’s rising motion, but within that last season there was a microcosm of his career, a smaller rising, his batting average going up and up after the first bad month. I looked for Lyman Bostock’s name throughout 1978 and was happy to see him rising, a little higher each week.

Cy Acosta

2007-01-14T10:56:00.000-06:00

The first Cy in major league history was a pitcher whose full name was Clytus George Bentley. In 1872, Cy Bentley debuted at the age of 21 with the Middletown Mansfields of the National Association, a forerunner of the National League. He started 17 of their 24 games and finished the season with 2 wins, 15 losses, and a 6.14 ERA. At bat, he hit .235 with 2 triples. It is not known from which side of the plate he batted, nor which arm he threw with. The handedness of almost all of his teammates is similarly obscure, the only members of the Mansfields escaping the obfuscation of that most basic baseball player information being team batting champ Tim Murnane (Bats: left; Throws: right), manager and catcher John Clapp (Bats: right; Throws: right), and future Hall of Famer Orator Jim O’Rourke (Bats: right; Throws: right).

O’Rourke, who made his professional debut with the Mansfields, fled Middletown after the franchise folded at the conclusion of their one and only season as a professional club (the team, named after a Civil War general, had existed since 1866 as a topflight amateur squad), the gregarious shortstop moving to the league champion Boston Red Stockings who became the Boston Red Caps who became the Boston Beaneaters who became the Boston Doves who became the Boston Rustlers who became the Boston Bees who became the Boston Braves who became the Milwaukee Braves who became the Atlanta Braves. Murnane and Clapp hitched on with the Philadelphia Athletics, who folded in 1876 during their first season as a National League franchise only to be resurrected in 1901, at least in name, by the Philadelphia franchise of the new American League, who eventually moved to Kansas City and then to Oakland, where in 1972, exactly one century after the sole professional campaign of the Middletown Mansfields, the Athletics won the first of three straight World Series with certain key players sporting flamboyant 19th century moustaches.

The only other Mansfields to last beyond the extinction of their team were second baseman Eddie Booth, who kicked around for a few years with the Brooklyn Atlantics, Elizabeth Resolutes, and New York Mutuals, aging pitcher Asa Brainard, who hitched on with the Baltimore Canaries, for whom he went 5-22 in 1874, probably not coincidentally his last season, and outfielder Jim Tipper, who followed up his stint with the 5-19 Mansfields by toiling with the soon-to-be-defunct 16-37 Hartford Dark Blues in 1873 before bottoming out with the soon-to-be defunct 7-40 New Haven Elm Citys. Little is known of the fates of Ham Allen, Frank Buttery, and the rest of the Mansfields who disappeared from the record books after their one season together. Perhaps some continued playing semi-pro or amateur ball while others found different lines of work altogether. As for the first Cy, Cy Bentley, he died on February 26, 1873, at the age of 22.

It would be 18 years before another Cy reached the majors, but that second Cy, born Denton True Young, would retire 21 years later with 509 more major league wins than his predecessor, a deluge of namesakes in his wake. In chronological order depending on their first year in the majors, they are

Cy Bowen, Cy Seymour, Cy Swaim, Cy Vorhees, Cy Morgan (not to be confused with Cy Morgan, below), Cy Falkenberg, Cy Ferry, Irv "Cy the Second" Young (career record: 63 wins, 95 losses), Cy Barger, Cy Neighbors, Harley "Cy the Third" Young (career record 0 wins, 3 losses), Cy Alberts, Cy Slapnicka, Cy Williams, Rube "Cy" Marshall (it is taking all my might not to go off on a tangent right now about that other once common but now extinct ballplayer name of yesteryear, Rube; let me just leave it for now with these three points: 1. There have been nearly as many Rubes as Cys in major league history [33 Rubes to 35 Cys, not counting 19th century journeyman Sy Sutcliffe]. 2. There have been no Rubes since Rube Walker retired in 1958. 3. Roy De Verne "Rube" "Cy" Marshall [career record: 8 wins, 10 losses], the sole improbable intersection in baseball of these two peerless monikers, needs to have some kind of mention somewhere in the Hall of Fame, even if it’s embedded within a bathroom stall limerick. And if you think that these parenthetical [and parenthetical within parenthetical] remarks are hardly resisting the urge to go off on a tangent, or tangents, please know that it is taking a Herculean effort to avoid broaching the subject of Rube Waddell at this time), Cy Pieh, Al "Cy" Cypert, Cy Rheam, Charlie "Cy" Young (career record: 2 wins, 3 losses), Orie Milton "Cy" Kerlin, Cy Perkins, Cy Warmoth, Cy Wright, Cy Fried, Cy Twombly (whose one year in the majors predated the birth of the famous painter with the same name by 7 years), Cy Morgan (not to be confused with Cy Morgan, above), Cy Moore, Ed "Cy" Cihocki, Cy Blanton, Cy Malis, Cy Block, Cy Buker, and, finally, Cy Acosta.

The gap between the sad passing of Cy Bentley and the arrival of Cy Young was 18 years, which is the third biggest Cyless gap in baseball history. The second biggest gap is the 27 years between the last pitch of Cy Bukor, who played for one year for the Brooklyn Dodgers during World War II, and the first pitch of the man pictured here, Cy Acosta. The longest Cyless span is the one we are currently suffering through. It’s now 31 years and counting since Cy Acosta wrapped up his brief and forgettable career with two scoreless innings in an 11-3 loss.

Sigh.

Dan Quisenberry

2007-01-12T06:04:00.000-06:00

"He didn't look like a professional athlete, and didn't carry himself like one. He was kind of wide-eyed every day about everything. He was always surprised, maybe even amused, by his success. He didn't think he was that good." – Paul Splitorff, teammate of Dan Quisenberry (from an article by Heather Henderson)

"I have seen the future, and it is like the present, only longer."
– Dan Quisenberry

In the last full year of my baseball card collecting, 1980, Topps featured a series of cards touting "Future Stars." There was one card for each team, three players per card, seventy-eight can’t-miss talents in all. I don’t have all the cards in that one-year-only series, but I’m pretty sure that seventy-seven of the seventy-eight can’t-misses missed. Here is the sole "Future Stars" card that I know of that didn’t turn out to be wildly inaccurate. Whoever it was at Topps who was taking perverse pleasure listing guys such as Ted Wilborn, Dave Geisel, and Joel Finch as Future Stars probably believed that a 27-year-old soft-tossing sidearmer with a name seemingly immune to sporting renown could not possibly endanger the thudding irony of the series. But to paraphrase the great Dan Quisenberry, Dan Quisenberry found a delivery in their flaw. I’m sure that if at the time I got this card I had had to guess the one real star to emerge from among all the Future Stars, I wouldn’t have guessed Dan Quisenberry. Even after Quisenberry began grabbing headlines, winning pennants, and breaking records, I had trouble believing in his existence. I was moving away from my pure, single-minded love of baseball, moving away from childhood itself, becoming less wide-eyed about everything, becoming less like Dan Quisenberry, so I guess it’s no wonder I had trouble believing he existed. And now, even though it's been almost a decade since his death, I still can’t believe he’s gone. Anyway, here's the Quiz himself, who published a book of poems just before passing away from cancer in 1998. . . .

BASEBALL CARDS
By Dan Quisenberry

that first baseball card I saw myself
in a triage of rookies
atop the bodies
that made the hill
we played king of
I am the older one
the one on the right
game-face sincere
long red hair unkempt
a symbol of the '70s
somehow a sign of manhood
you don't see
how my knees shook on my debut
or my desperation to make it

the second one I look boyish with a gap-toothed smile
the smile of a guy who has it his way
expects it
I rode the wave's crest
of pennant and trophies
I sat relaxed with one thought
"I can do this"
you don't see
me stay up till two reining in nerves
or post-game hands that shook involuntarily

glory years catch action shots
arm whips and body contortions
a human catapult
the backs of those cards
cite numbers
that tell stories of saves, wins, flags, records
handshakes, butt slaps, celebration mobs
you can't see
the cost of winning
lines on my forehead under the hat
trench line between my eyes
you don't see my wife, daughter and son left behind

the last few cards
I do not smile
I grim-face the camera
tight lipped
no more forced poses to win fans
eyes squint
scanning distance
crow's-feet turn into eagle's claws
you don't see
the quiver in my heart
knowledge that it is over
just playing out the end

I look back
at who I thought I was
or used to be
now, trying to be funny
I tell folks
I used to be famous
I used to be good
they say
we thought you were bigger
I say
I was

Jim Rice

2007-01-10T06:24:00.000-06:00

At the time this picture was taken, Jim Rice had just surpassed his excellent first two full seasons in the major leagues with a third season that established him as the scariest hitter in baseball, bar none. Some players of his day could match his ability to hit for power and some could match his ability to hit for a high average, but nobody in the Cardboard God era could produce in both areas the way James Edward Rice produced. Jim Rice didn’t just hit, he mangled. He punished. He destroyed.

In the 1977 season, which perhaps produced the good feelings evident in this photo, Rice led the American League in home runs and slugging percentage, hit .320, drove in 114 runs, and just for good measure ripped 15 triples. And in the season to follow he authored numbers that taken together comprise one of the best single season offensive explosions ever produced: a .315 batting average, 46 home runs, 15 triples, 139 RBI, and 406 total bases, the latter total the best mark in the category in 41 years. He kept at it in 1979, hitting .325 with 39 homers and 130 RBI, and continued producing at a high level throughout the early and mid-’80s. By the time he called it quits, he had compiled, in all, eight all-star appearances, six top-five finishes in MVP voting, and eight seasons with 100-plus RBI.

As newly-minted Hall of Fame inductee Cal Ripken put it yesterday, suggesting that a third player besides himself and fellow inductee Tony Gwynn belonged on the podium in Cooperstown this summer, "Jim Rice was the man."

Some point out that Jim Rice’s numbers were inflated by playing in hitter-friendly Fenway Park, an argument aided by the discrepancy between Jim Rice’s incredible home numbers and his merely very good road totals. I have to acknowledge this argument, but I also feel inclined to give Rice credit for putting up his outstanding totals in an era that by and large favored the pitchers, especially when compared to the more recent epoch involving baseballs with superballs inside them, a proliferation of homer-friendly ballparks, and, of course, thick-necked pimple-backed men sinking syringes into the asses of other thick-necked pimple-backed men.

Jim Rice played his position well, if not spectacularly, and Jim Rice, named captain of the Red Sox upon Carl Yastrzemski’s retirement, was a quiet but powerful leader of a team that for most of his time in the majors was among the best in baseball. His work ethic was exemplary and his physical strength—most often attested to in stories of him breaking his bat merely by checking his swing—was the kind of legendary attribute that instills confidence in teammates and fear in the opposition. For several seasons, the Boston Red Sox knew they were going to contend if for no other reason than that they had Jim Ed Rice and nobody else did.

I’m biased, of course. I was nine years old at the time I got this card, and if there’s any better age to be worshipful, I’m not sure what it is. A year later, on a school trip to Boston, I saw Jim Rice get out of a car inside the cramped Fenway Park player parking area. I pressed my face against the chain link fence that separated us. He was no more than twenty feet away.

"Jim Ed!" I shouted.

He turned toward me. I was too shocked to say anything. I could not believe that a God would be able to hear me, that a God could look me straight in the eye. Moreover, I sensed that there was in Jim Rice’s quick, almost flinching, squint-eyed glance toward the caller of his name a suggestion that he was haunted by a nervous, even paranoid unease with the world around him. This may have contributed to my silence as well, the possibility that Jim Rice not only was able to hear us mortals but was mortal himself. I could not think of a single thing to say. Words had been uninvented. I stood there gulping at the changed air. Jim Rice turned away and continued on into the ballpark.

Life got more complicated after that. The school trip to Boston occurred during my last days of elementary school. The following year I’d be starting junior high. On the ride home from Boston to Vermont I sat with two other boys and three girls in the roofed back of a pickup truck and refused to participate in a game of Truth or Dare that mostly amounted to taking turns kissing. I couldn’t do it, could not kiss a girl. I don’t know why I was so terrified of it, but I was. In fact, it would be many long years before I kissed a girl, the threshold not crossed until my freshman year in college, when grain-alcohol-spiked punch enabled me to drunkenly mash faces with and grope the right boob of a plastered coed majoring in hotel and hospitality management. Thank god for alcohol. But I digress from my digression, so allow me to return to the back of the truck in 1978, where my terror at being kissed actually drove the three girls crazy, and by the time we got back to our town all three of them were begging to "go" with me. It was a moment of popularity which I would neither capitalize on ("Go" where? I screamed in abject terror to myself) nor ever come even the slightest bit close to matching.

Several years later, in 1986, when grain alcohol finally enabled me to kiss the hotel and hospitality management major, Jim Rice put up one last ass-kicking season, batting .324 with 110 RBIs, totals good enough to place him third in MVP voting for the year. The Red Sox of course made it to the World Series that October. By then the girl I’d kissed had responded to my clumsy sex-wanting pawings by telling me that her ex-boyfriend, a rugby player named Neil, was probably going to rip me limb from limb when he found out about us. She might have been saying that to gauge my willingness to stick with her through thick and thin, i.e., even after she allowed me to release myself from the crushing bonds of virginity. I didn’t want to be ripped limb from limb, however, and so I gave up trying to get her clothes off and in fact began avoiding her altogether.

I retreated to the fetid comfort of the bongwater-scented room I shared with my friend John. The two of us had plastered our pale yellow cinderblock walls with crooked posters of Boston sports legends, the biggest poster being one of Jim Rice smashing a baseball into the stratosphere. There he was, big as life, towering above our flimsy entropic fortress against encroaching adulthood. We rarely left our room, but did go next door to watch Game Six of the World Series with two fellow Red Sox fans who had a television. All four of us had different reactions to the infamous events that concluded that awful evening. Steve from Peterborough, New Hampshire, wept and swore. His roommate, Tom, from Marblehead, Massachusetts, who when the second out of the 10th inning was recorded had wondered aloud where we could get our hands on champagne, smashed empty beer bottle after empty beer bottle against the concrete wall in our suite. John returned to our room and climbed under his covers, where he remained, corpselike, for several days. As for me, I had this painful, utterly joyless, skeletal grin on my face that I couldn’t get rid of. God exists, I had realized, and he hates me.

John, Tom, and Steve all dropped out of that college within the year. I stuck around and eventually spent my second-to-last semester before graduation in China, where I finally lost my virginity to a Chinese student who was looking to better her English. Jim Rice played his final game that year. By then Fenway fans had taken to mockingly chanting "6-4-3" whenever he came to the plate, a reference to the scorecard shorthand for the most common variety of a double play, which Rice had, near the end of his career, begun hitting into at league-leading rates. I’d joined in the chant myself once or twice. We mortals seem to enjoy welcoming former Gods down into the familiar muck.

Dick Bosman

2007-01-09T06:27:00.000-06:00

Here is a sepulchral Dick Bosman on the brink of the last of 11 years in the major leagues. The year before, after toiling for several years on cellar-dwellers, Bosman had been traded to the reigning three-time World Champion Oakland A’s, who promptly relinquished their hold on league supremacy. It would perhaps make a better story if Dick Bosman had played a significant role in the A’s fall, as if he’d become some kind of carrier of the virus of defeat from all his years with the Senators, Rangers, and Indians, but in fact he performed well for the division-winning A’s throughout the 1975 regular season, going 11 and 4, and he was an insignificant factor in their playoff defeat at the hands of the Boston Red Sox. His third of an inning pitched in the 1975 playoffs turned out to be a harbinger of things to come, a fact perhaps sensed on some level by Dick Bosman as he posed forlornly for this picture. After this card was shipped, the insignificance of Dick Bosman grew, the former ERA champ and no-hitter hurler reduced to spot-starting and mopup duty for the slowly sinking former champs.

And here is Dick Bosman the following spring, on the brink of a life beyond baseball. He has of course grown a mustache and permed his hair. He stares directly at the viewer instead of, as in the previous year, off into some nauseatingly empty expanse, but there is something in the permed stare that has a hint of the fragility that accompanies the desperate uttering of self-help mantras. Also, there is the placement of the glove. Where the year before Dick Bosman had held his glove to his gut as if stoically applying pressure to a wound, now Dick Bosman is holding his glove up in a defensive posture, betraying his knowledge that all of his pitches, even hypothetical ones in the presence of a Topps photographer, are going to be hammered, possibly right back in the direction of the new and improved Dick Bosman, who was cast out of the world of the Cardboard Gods by the A’s on March 29, 1977, presumably before even a single strand of his new artificially curled hair had had a chance to wilt.

Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson

2007-01-08T10:58:00.000-06:00

In September of 1985, when I was seventeen, I moved in with my aunt and uncle in Boston. It was the first autumn since I’d been four years old in which my name wasn’t on any roll-call sheet. I wasn’t expected anywhere. I’d been kicked out of boarding school the previous spring and after getting my GED had spent the summer with my grandfather on Cape Cod, working as a gas station attendant. That fall in Boston I got through a lot of the hours playing solitaire Strat-O-Matic in my room. I don’t know what my aunt and uncle thought about the sounds of dice clattering deep into the night from behind my closed door.

Sometimes in the daylight I left the house to supposedly go look for a job. In truth I mostly just wandered around. One day in particular that has always stayed with me for some reason was the day I smoked pot from my little metal one-hitter in Boston Commons, went to a matinee of Teen Wolf, then came home and lied to my aunt that I’d applied for several jobs all over the city. I’m not really sure why I lied, as my aunt and uncle never put any pressure on me to get a job. They may have started doing so eventually, but as it turned out I somehow did finally walk into an ice cream parlor in Harvard Square that had a "Now Hiring" sign. I worked part-time there for a couple months, then quit and went to stay with my father in New York City.

My brother was going to NYU at that time, living in a dorm just a short walk away from my father’s apartment. I went over there most evenings and got high with him and his roommate, Eric, while the two of them took turns trying to blow the other’s mind with selections from their ridiculously large and ever-growing collection of Jamaican dub music. As the current song was coming to an end, my brother or Eric (depending on whose turn it was) rose in the dim blue light of the room and selected another song, shielding the album from the other so that the song would be a surprise. Not much in the way of conversation occurred, but occasionally my brother or Eric uttered a complementary, drawling, long-voweled "dude" when the other’s song choice was exceptionally pleasing to the dude-utterer’s bass-hungry senses. After many bong hits and offerings from the likes of Augustus Pablo, Scientist, and King Fatty, I stumbled back to my dad’s place, where he would already be asleep, all the lights off. The studio apartment had only one separate room, the bathroom, and since I often came home too high to sleep I spent many a night sitting on the shut lid of the toilet, reading On the Road. I wanted my life to be like the one in the pages of that book, exciting, adventurous, everything hallowed.

The holidays came and went, and in January I applied to a small state college situated on top of a mountain in northern Vermont. It wasn’t a hard school to get into, so I got in, and within a few days was there for the start of the spring semester, which began the day the Patriots got annihilated by the Bears in the Super Bowl. I got stoned and drunk that day with a couple fellow new students, and as it turns out one of them was named Fritz. Fritz was gone by the following semester, as were some of my other new partying buddies, and the rest of them were gone within the next couple semesters. It was a college where people who had fucked up elsewhere came and hung out for a little while before moving on.

I stayed, however. Eventually my drug usage tapered off. The last time I tripped on acid was on Halloween 1987, at a Phish show at Goddard College. It was a bad trip, narrow, jittery, alienating, laced with the smell of my own burning synapses, and I spent most of it crashing around alone through limb-scraping brush in the dark woods behind the art building where everyone was having a fantastic time dancing and laughing together, everyone singing about Halley’s Comet and the land of lizards, everyone wrapped in colorful costumes, the guitarist and bass player hopping up and down in jester hats, the drummer in a matronly dress. All I had on was my Josh Wilker suit—ripped jeans, T-shirt, army jacket, Converse all-stars, skin—and if I could have I probably would have taken it all off and set it on fire.

What I’m trying to get at here is that I’m haunted by boundless possibilities, and I always have been. My earliest years, the early 1970s, came in a time and place bubbling with the idea that anything was possible. The ecstatic visions of Jack Kerouac seemed less an elegiac psalm to an evaporating world than a prelude to a world yet to come. You could be whoever you wanted to be and each day was going to be a new transformation, the promising light of the present moment giving way to even brighter, warmer, wider light. In the early 1970s, the number of my parents went from the traditional two to three, my mom’s new boyfriend Tom coming aboard. It may sound strange, I realize, but this was far from the only commune-like free love experimentation of the time. At least for some, that kind of thing was just sort of in the air.

For example, right around the same time, just before the start of the 1973 baseball season, Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson traded entire families. Much has been written about this swap, most of it in a mocking tone, so I’m not going to say much beyond pointing out that when they did it they meant it. Maybe it was in large part an extension of the fun they were all having together, but they must have believed they weren’t merely pulling a pleasurable stunt. Beyond the pleasure of the moment, there must have been a hope for some as yet uninvented republic of joy.

I don’t even really want to talk about how they both had career-worst years that season, or that in general they never really were the same as players again, or that Kekich decided after a few weeks that the experiment wasn’t working out, a decision that came too late—his wife and Fritz Peterson already having decided they wanted to make the swap permanent. I really just want to shine a light on that slim brilliant moment in time when the world seemed to some to be clay in their hands, moldable to any shape they desired. I chased that moment for a long time. I wanted the sky to crack open and spill all its secrets. I never did see any such thing. I saw Teen Wolf. I saw William "The Refrigerator" Perry score a touchdown. And one day while tripping on low-grade LSD I watched some mountains turn into a pair of old basketball sneakers.

Gorman Thomas

2007-01-05T06:28:00.000-06:00

Can someone please tell me what the fuck the Brewers are doing in the National League? When I last looked, I mean really looked, back before I got distracted in the early ’80s by the snares of high puberty and the ensuing ceaseless slide down into the ever-increasing ambiguities, ephemera, and obfuscations of adulthood, there was no clearer representative of the American League than the Brewers. They did not steal bases. They did not bunt. They did not send their keg-bellied hungover hurlers to the plate. They did not swat turf-aided fleet-footed triples ’neath the ceiling of the Astrodome. No. They had the beards and long greasy hair of motorcycle thugs. They guzzled beer and slugged long home runs. They gnawed bulging wads of tobacco and struck out swinging. They listened to Waylon Jennings and Hank Williams Jr. on their way to discharge shotguns at wildlife. They smashed into outfield fences and bought mescaline from hippies before pounding them with tire irons. Didn’t they? I mean, now that they are in something called the Central Division of the National Fucking League I’m not so sure of anything. But I do know I can at least say this: as much as any team was ever one guy, the Milwaukee Brewers in the late ’70s and early ’80s were Gorman Thomas. And Gorman Thomas did not ever play in the National League. Until October 1982, that is, and that was only because by then the Brewers had laid waste to all the American League teams in their path and the only thing left for them to conquer was the St. Louis Cardinals of the National League, which they probably would have done if the majority of games in the 1982 World Series were played in an American League park and not upon the artificial National League turf of Busch Stadium. After those four National League games, Gorman Thomas was never the same, and neither were the Brewers, and come to think of it neither was I.

Joe Torre

2007-01-03T10:34:00.000-06:00

Here are a few more of my all-time most memorable personally witnessed ballpark moments, all but the first occurring within the span of one particular so-called meaningless game and all with Joe Torre lurking heavy-browed and dyspeptic on the periphery:

You Don’t Belong Here
As noted elsewhere on this site (see Len Randle), my father usually took my brother and me to one Mets game during each of our yearly visits to see him in New York City. These visits to Shea Stadium all occurred during the Joe Torre era, a string of years in the late ’70s and early ’80s in which the Mets never finished above 5th place in the NL East. Needless to say, the word “crowd” was an inaccurate way to describe the sparse scattering of torpid bodies we always found ourselves among in the stands in Flushing. One day, my dad, spotting wide swaths of unoccupied seats in the levels below where our cheap tickets had placed us, led us down closer to the field.

Whatever that feeling is of moving down closer to the field, into seats you could never afford, close enough to speak without raising your voice to the right fielder or hear the slap of the third baseman’s fist hitting the pocket of his mitt, that excitement of being close to the world that has always been built up in your mind as a kind of heaven, gleaming and unreachable, that great expectant feeling mixed with feelings of guilt and shame, a cringing premonition that you are about to be caught, found out, asked not only to leave the close-to-heaven area but leave the whole arena, whatever that whole complicated feeling is, it’s kind of how I feel in general in life. I think I’m probably not the only one. Whenever some guy leaps the railing and runs onto the field the broadcasters always go on at great length in profoundly condescending tones about the idiocy of the maniac, but to me it’s just an example of a guy who couldn’t take the weight of that feeling anymore, the feeling of wanting so close he was a part of it, and of simultaneously being ashamed of wanting it, and so he just gets drunk enough to try to smash through all barriers for one shining moment of maniacal sprinting across the impossibly green grass.

But anyway, this is not about maniacs on the field but about the day my dad led my brother and me down to the good seats. They weren’t even the best seats, but just some empty spaces in an almost completely empty row near the back of a largely vacant box along the right field line. We sat there just long enough for my dad to reopen his New York Times and resume reading about something that had nothing to do with baseball, at which point an usher came over and tapped him on the shoulder and asked to see our tickets. My dad snapped his paper shut and motioned angrily and, as it turned out, impotently at the empty seats all around us. The usher shrugged, perhaps waiting for a bribe, a hint my dad probably missed (or if he didn’t miss it he rejected it on grounds of his Marxist leanings). As he led us back up to the cheap sets I felt ashamed and wished we’d never even tried.

The Upper Deck At The Last Game Ever
Many years later, in 1993, I went with my brother and a couple of our friends to a game we had dubbed The Last Baseball Game Ever. I can’t quite reenter the mindset that led us to come up with that title, but I think we laid most of the impetus for it at the feet of our disenchantment with Major League Baseball. The fact that there was something deeper beneath that idea is attested to by the fact that all four of us have attended baseball games since then, even though in that time MLB has had a World-Series-canceling strike, the ever-widening taint of steroid use, and a level of mercenary behavior among players and owners alike that exceeds or at least equals whatever it was we were so bitter about in 1993. The real truth of the matter probably lies in the fact that we were all in our late twenties and our lives had as yet not shown any promise whatsoever. We were all suffering through varying degrees of loneliness and either unemployed or lashed to repetitive menial jobs of one stripe or another (I can’t remember in which of those two sinking boats I was at that time) and so I suppose were trying to kill off the haunting, painful hopes of childhood by declaring that centerpiece of our younger years, baseball, forever null and void.

Anyway, we went to the last Mets home game of the 1993 season, a season that outstripped even the worst of the campaigns from the Joe Torre years. (Joe Torre, though long gone from the Mets, had done his part in ensuring the meaningless nature of the game by piloting the visiting St. Louis Cardinals to a middle-of-the-pack, and thus long-eliminated, finish.) Even though I’m sure there were tickets available all over the stadium, we bought the cheapest seats we could get, upper deck, behind home plate, a few rows in from the chain-link fence keeping would-be self-maimers from throwing themselves down onto the parking lot concrete below.

In hopes of further limiting the amount of money we’d give to the condemned beast of baseball, we’d smuggled in our own booze, a pint of Wild Turkey, I think, and passed it around to cut the damp chill of the foggy late September evening. A black guy in a hooded sweatshirt appeared from nowhere and asked if we wanted to buy some hash. One of the more assertive members of our foursome bartered “a couple swigs” of Wild Turkey for a little round ball of hash, a deal which sounded good on paper but which resulted in the guy in the sweatshirt chugging down with almost supernatural speed all but a couple sips of the whiskey and leaving us with something that looked like hash but that had no more ability to get us out of our present disenchanted reality than the fog, which seemed to swallow up the fake-hash dealer as quickly as it had spit him out.

The Man Who Yelled At Bucky Dent
Hashless, Wild Turkeyless, we ventured on into what turned out to be the longest and most uneventful game I’ve ever seen. Not even a single run was scored for 16 innings, and while 16 innings of scoreless ball might seem a likely home for one after another of pressure-packed clutch pitching performances, game-saving fielding gems, and fascinating managerial moves, it was in fact a game in which nothing whatsoever seemed to happen. Batters grounded softly to second and popped out to left field a lot, maybe. I’m not sure. But it went on and on.

After the 8th inning, they closed the concession stands. Sobriety really set in, coupled with gnawing hunger. The zeroes kept growing across the digital scoreboard. I began to hope that they’d stretch on forever.

This hope combined with our ever-increasing mobility throughout the stadium to make me feel as if some sort of state of damp, cold, mediocre grace had descended upon our sorry asses. At some point late within the regulation nine innings we’d ventured down from the upper deck to tentatively test out the empty seats in the loge boxes. Nobody said anything, the ushers apparently too deadened by the abject misery of the Mets’ season to even try for bribes anymore. And as the game edged into extra time we moved even closer, until by the 12th or 13th inning we were mere rows from the home dugout on the third base side.

We were surrounded for the first time all night by other fans, and there was mixed into the hundred-loss malaise a feeling of giddy excitement—none of us belonged here, and yet, here we were! The people who usually sat in these seats were rich fucks who were far, far away that night, at soirees or something, and we finally had our chance to See What It Was Like.

Perhaps emboldened by that feeling, one of the people in that crowd half-stood from his fog-dampened seat and loudly and clearly addressed the St. Louis Cardinal third base coach, a figure, judging from the fan’s pronouncement, from the fan’s tormented past.

“Bucky Dent!” the fan yelled. “You ruined my life!”

And that fan, ladies and gentlemen, grew up to be President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The Guy Who Appeared Out Of Nowhere
OK. OK. The fan who yelled at Bucky Dent was me.

I like to believe that Bucky Dent’s shoulders tensed a little at the clearly audible mention of his name, but I don’t know if that’s true. I also like to tell myself people around me laughed at the outburst, but that’s not true either. How can you laugh at something so pathetic? It was a terrible thing to yell out, really, as it so completely diverged from the general thrust of fan taunts and imprecations.

Well, it turned out we didn’t really belong on the third base side anyway. Not long after I yelled at Bucky Dent a statement that suggested we’d been homosexual lovers and he’d shattered my heart irreparably by leaving me for, say, Dick Tidrow, we morphed over to a sparser gathering of fans on the first base side. It was at this point that the game really seemed to begin verging on infinity, and I stopped shivering in the damp fog as a kind of calm came over me, as if I was about to drift into fatal hypothermial slumber. The zeroes kept mitosising across the scoreboard. I was happy.

Unlike my brother and me, the two friends who had come along with us were Mets fans, and so they couldn’t as easily embrace my vision of an everlasting game without a winner. Because of that, they eventually struck up a rendition of the old Mets song that starts out

Meet the Mets, meet the Mets,
step right up and greet the Mets.

When I was a kid I misunderstood the words to the song. It seemed impossible to me, perhaps, that the songwriters could be so lazy as to rhyme “Meet” with “meet” in the very first line of the song, and so whenever I heard the song being sung on telecasts of Mets games viewed in my father’s apartment I sang along thusly:

Meet the Mets, greet the Mets,
step right up and beat the Mets.

I wasn’t attempting to lampoon the song; I really thought that’s how it went, and I couldn’t understand why a team would invite other teams to beat them, especially considering their capabilities or lack thereof in the Joe Torre years.

Anyway, by the time of the Last Baseball Game Ever, I knew that my version of the song was incorrect, but I still didn’t have a handle on the correct version. So I couldn’t join in, but I was able to more fully listen to the song as it was sung with tuneless gusto by first two voices by my two friends and then, suddenly, by a third shaky voice that seemed to be coming from the thin damp fog itself. For a brief moment, there seemed to be no one connected to that other voice, but then this thin gray-pallored guy in a dirty Atlanta Braves cap appeared on the fringes of our ragged congregation.

He spent the last moments of the game in our company, a guy about our age with lank dirty hair down almost to his shoulders and an aura about him of either being someone who lived in his parents’ basement or, perhaps more likely, someone who had recently been evicted from his parents’ basement, leaving with a broken-zippered duffel bag containing a couple changes of clothing and the tattered edition of the baseball encyclopedia from his childhood.

This guy faded back into the ether moments after the Mets finally pushed across a run in the bottom of the 17th inning. (Eddie Murray was the winning run, but I recall that he stopped his trot home a step in front of home plate, fucking with both weary teams, and the on-deck hitter, Joe Orsulak, actually ended up having to shove him across the plate.) I think we would have remembered this third Meet the Mets singer even if we didn’t see him again periodically around the city in the months and years following the almost endless game. He always appeared as if from nowhere and remembered us from the game and acted briefly like he was part of our group before wandering off. He always materialized on nights when the directionlessness of our lives seemed even more pervasive than usual. The last time I saw him was years ago, but I’m still not sure I won’t see him again. He briefly wandered into a bar on 2nd Avenue near Houston Street dressed in a replica of Michael Jordan’s short-lived number 45 Bulls jersey and matching Bulls shorts, vaguely acknowledged us, and then wandered back out into a night that was way too cold to be dressed in a remaindered basketball uniform.

Bud Harrelson

2007-01-02T08:41:00.000-06:00

In no particular order, here are a few of my favorite all-time personally witnessed instances of baseball fan behavior:

Yankee Stadium opening day brawls
I attended this early 1990s opening day game between the Yankees and the Red Sox with my brother (a fellow Red Sox fan) and our friends, the Yankee-loving Dolan brothers. I wore my brother’s grimy, decade-old Yaz painter’s cap into the stadium but by the second or third inning had quietly wadded it up and slipped it into my pocket after witnessing huge roiling brawls all around us in the vertiginous Yankee Stadium upper deck.

The biggest brawl, which seemed to last for several innings and which featured bodies periodically tumbling down the steep concrete aisle steps, climaxed, I swear to Yaz, in the draping of a gigantic blood-stained United States flag across the entire expanse of the brawl-infested section. OK, it’s possible that it wasn’t blood-stained, but I believe my brother and the Dolans, who were, along with me, stunned into silence for all but the first few moments of the game, would concur that the flag was in almost all respects not a hallucination.

The only other memories I have from the game are that the Yankees won, that Randy Velarde somehow contributed significantly to the win, and that just before the eighth or ninth inning I ventured from my cringing position in my seat to the bathroom. I was badly in need of a urinal, but when I got to a urinal I found that something in the surrounding drunken violent simian throng in the bathroom made me unable to release even the tiniest sprinkle from my bladder. I ended up mimicking "the shake" and returning to my seat, irreparable urethral damage undoubtedly ensuing.

Fathers and Sons and Baseball
In one of my mid-80s trips to the Fenway Park bleachers, I ended up sitting next to a friendly guy who’d driven up from Baltimore with his young son to see the Red Sox home field for the first time. Before the game began, the guy went on at some length about how much he was enjoying the classic old ballyard. Meanwhile, right behind him, a fat sunburned teenager in matching bruise-purple Hawaiian shirt and shorts drunkenly screamed Jim Rice’s name over and over. This teenager grew ominously silent just moments before the first pitch. He swayed back and forth a little, as if he was silently praying, and his sunburned face grew at first even redder before abruptly draining of all color but a pasty newspaper-gray. Then he of course spewed bruise-purple Fenway puke all over the Baltimore dad and son and was escorted from the grounds before seeing a single pitch.

The Sacred Green Cathedral
At another Yankee-Red Sox tilt at Yankee Stadium in the '90s, my brother and I went down close to the field to watch batting practice and were within earshot of a guy in a Red Sox hat, round glasses, and a long, ex-hippieish, philosophy-teacherish gray-flecked beard going on at length to his luckless companion about the eternal verities of the sacred green cathedral of the baseball diamond and, worse, about the classic Aristotelian arc of the glorious tragedy that was the Red Sox continuous failure to capture the golden chalice of baseball immortality. I can't remember if my brother and I were able to remark on the fact that assholes like this gave Red Sox fans a bad name or if we just stared on in mute shock at the appearance of such a pure example of a pretentious baseball blowhard. I do however remember that Mo Vaughn was taking his rips in the batting cage and, as if he were equipped with bionic hearing and a bionic bullshit-detector, pulled a screaming line drive into the stands that struck the bearded philosopher right in the head. Still talking and gesticulating, albeit with some added slowness of speech and limb and albeit confined to a stretcher, the bearded man was escorted from the grounds before seeing a single pitch.

Mike Flanagan, UMASS!
When I was a little kid, eight or nine, a group of beer-lathered louts stood on the walkway at the back of the stands a few rows behind us in Fenway Park and shouted "Mike Flanagan, UMASS!" over and over again, all game long. Mike Flanagan was the opposing pitcher for the visiting Baltimore Orioles and he had attended the University of Massachusetts. The missing piece in the preceding explanatory sentence, of course, is information illuminating why several grown men would take time out of their limited stay on the mortal plane to attend a sporting contest and yell "Mike Flanagan, UMASS!" over and over, but it’s exactly that missing piece that prompted my brother and I, and even my mom, to repeat their chant for days and weeks and even years after we’d first heard it emanate from the mysterious Flanaganites. Sometimes I still say it out loud for no apparent reason. It’s quite possible it has become embedded in my synapses, and when I finally do perish my last words may well be something about a dimly remembered Baltimore southpaw and the institution at which he metriculated.

Budddeeeeeee!!!!
Bud Harrelson only played in 53 games for the Phillies in 1979, but I happened to attend one of them. I remember this because a nearby fan at the game in Veterans Stadium screamed his name all game long, even during pregame warmups and even after the game started with Harrelson in his customary position on the bench. This went on inning after inning. Miraculously, as if Bud Harrelson’s biggest, loudest, lone remaining fan had willed it, Bud Harrelson actually came into the game, for some now obscure reason replacing Phillies star Mike Schmidt at third base. I don’t actually remember that (the info comes courtesy of Retrosheet.com, a site lauded most eloquently for its memory-aiding capabilities in a great essay by Darren Viola), but I do have a hazy recollection of the screams of his fan increasing both when Bud Harrelson entered the game and when, later, Bud Harrelson reached base and then with his wiry, hustling antics began drawing the attention of the opposing pitcher. If I were asked the specifics of what happened without virtue of access via Retrosheet to the box score of the game, I would have guessed that the scrappy former Gold Glove shortstop had used his cagy veteran smarts to swipe second, reach third on a throwing error by the catcher, and scamper home on a sacrifice fly by Greg Luzinski. It’s a little disillusioning to see the actual facts:

"PHILLIES 7TH: Harrelson walked; Harrelson was caught stealing second (pitcher to first)"

I like my version better. But maybe it's even better to know that Bud Harrelson's biggest fan did not let something as ignominious as being picked off of first by Stan Bahnsen get in the way of his relentless adulation. He kept on yelling forever for Buddy Harrelson.

Rowland Office

2006-12-22T05:49:00.000-06:00

"When I see a head from a great distance, it ceases to be a sphere and becomes an extreme confusion falling down into the abyss."
– Alberto Giacometti

The most surprising discovery I have made while sifting meticulously through my baseball card collection over the last few months is that I do not have a single Rowland Office card. I don’t have a Rowland Office card from when Rowland Office was on the Braves, nor do I have a Rowland Office card from when Rowland Office was on the Expos.

I would have bet a lot of money otherwise, since I have a distinct memory of gleefully charting the narrowing of Rowland Office’s already narrow face on each new year’s card. In fact, if I had to boil my baseball card collecting down to a single personage, I would probably pick Rowland Office who, because of his odd name and face and, most especially, because of the year-to-year serial drama that was his face-narrowing, was a source of constant fascination for my brother and me.

After all, the login password I chose when I first started this blog (since changed) was "Rowland." I envisioned that somewhere along the line, as a centerpiece to the whole ridiculous endeavor of writing essays about decades-old rectangles of cardboard, I’d write a multi-installment Rowland Office epic, using a succession of his cards to show his strange narrowing and the narrowing but never completely disappearing and always increasingly strange sliver of my childhood, my childhood as it was when I lived through it, my childhood as it existed in the first years after its demise, my childhood as an abrasive fleck in the eye of my early adult years, my childhood as a box of old baseball cards haunting my first reluctant achy-kneed steps into middle age, narrower and narrower all the time, always changing but never gone, Rowland Office the slim indestructible muse of those slim indestructible years.

So imagine my shock when I sorted every last card I own and found myself Rowland Officeless. I cannot explain it. Did I just imagine all the Rowland Offices of my youth? Did all of the Rowland Office cards always only belong to my brother? Did some of my cards get mixed in with my brother’s cards in storage before my brother removed his cards to parley them into a used pair of Rossignols? Did someone break into our storage unit and remove all the Rowland Office cards from my collection, replacing them with seven 1975 cards of a Tiger player named Dick Sharon, like Indiana Jones switching out the golden idol in the booby-trapped cave with a bag of sand?

Beats me. But here is the only card I own that features, at least in a minor way, Rowland Office. It’s also one of the very few Braves cards I own. Perhaps the Rowland Office thief worked backwards through my collection, removing Rowland Offices carefully from my pack of Montreal Expos (where Rowland Office played in the latter years of my collecting), but then when the thief heard a car coming up the dirt road toward the storage barn he just grabbed as many Braves as possible to try to get the rest of the Rowland Offices before fleeing. So not only do I not have any Rowland Offices, I don’t even have any Biff Pocorobas, which renders my long-held vision of expounding at great length about an imagined pitcher-batter matchup between Bob Apodaca and Biff Pocoroba null and void.

But what can you do? A couple days ago I saw a message in plastic letters on the message board outside a church that read "Count your blessings, not your problems." The blessing here is that I do have a card with Rowland Office on it. (At the risk of counting a problem, not a blessing, the back of the card has a filled-in box next to Rowland Office’s name, providing evidence that I was indeed at one time in possession of Rowland Office’s 1975 card at least, god damn it.) I am pretty sure that Rowland Office is in the center of this picture, in the middle row with five guys to his right and five guys to his left. This was my first guess upon looking at the photo, and I eliminated the one other possibility, the man in the row behind him, by virtue of the visibility of that man’s uniform number, 19, which was worn that year by Rod Gilbreath.

There are a couple of other items of interest in this photo. In the upper row, second from the right, is Hank Aaron in his last Topps image as a Brave. Having been traded to Milwaukee just after the 1974 season, he is not included in the checklist on the back of this card and is featured elsewhere in a doctored photo as a Brewer. Opposite the second-from-right, top-row position in the photo of Hank Aaron’s ghost is a small well-dressed man in the second-from-left, bottom-row position. This may be the smallest person associated with major league baseball since 3’7" all-time on-base-percentage leader Eddie Gaedel worked a walk in his only pinch-hit appearance for Bill Veeck’s St. Louis Browns in 1951.

Rowland Office, roughly centered between the giant ghost of Hank Aaron and this tiny mystery man, wears an expression that is impossible to read, a narrow Giacometti figure reduced to little more than a shadow but refusing to completely disappear.

Johnny Bench

2006-12-21T06:17:00.000-06:00

Johnny Bench may be the best catcher who ever lived. If I was asked to assemble an all-time team I might end up leaning toward Negro League slugger Josh Gibson as my catcher, partly because of his first name and partly because he was regarded as the best hitter in the history of the Negro Leagues and is by many estimations among the top five power hitters of any league, anywhere, ever. But I could make just as strong an argument for Johnny Bench, whose defensive skills were superior to those of Gibson or any other catcher before or since (with the possible exception of Ivan Rodriguez), and whose offensive prowess enabled him to be the hub of The Big Red Machine, perhaps the greatest offensive lineup ever assembled. And not for nothing, but how cool is this picture? With dust rising all around him, Bench is the gunslinger who has just downed one challenger and who is now eyeing the next as if to say, "You really think that’s a good idea? Really?"

Mike Parrott

2006-12-19T07:30:00.000-06:00

I don’t know how things stand now, but in the late 1970s the corrective eyeware industry had not really mastered the operational aspects of eyeglasses that, theoretically at least, got darker in the sunlight and lighter indoors. There was this one kid in my grade, Craig, who had tinted aviator glasses very similar to the ones partially masking Mike Parrott’s apprehensive expression, and Craig’s glasses were never tinted enough outside or untinted enough inside. I sort of hated Craig because both he and I had curly hair and glasses and braces and played small forward on our constantly defeated junior high basketball team. I hated my curly hair and glasses and braces and losing and hated Craig because I guess I needed in some way to put all that self-hatred onto somebody else, especially a someone who didn’t seem to mind all the things that seemed like curses to me. In fact, I am pretty sure he permed his fucking hair to make it curlier, and somehow the fact that his glasses were tinted, that they featured this new, attention-grabbing technology, made his glasses the same as the perm, an embrace of his cursed status as a four-eyed brillo-head. By the time we were in tenth grade and putting in our fourth straight season of getting our brains beaten in on the basketball court, Craig’s refusal to realize that he was cursed had resulted in him even having a girlfriend that he seemed likely to be having sex with, which was something like the Apollo Space Program to my Caveman Banging Rocks Together And Thinking About The Moon. But even so, in my mind Craig was still the douchebag with the stupid tinted glasses. He had to be.

Anyway, Mike Parrott seems here to be on the brink of a humiliating discovery, his eyes fixed on the horizon as if an airplane skywriter is spelling out the last letters of a message that Mike Parrott’s wife has run away with some other Mariner that Mike Parrott has always fervently believed to be a douchebag. In the season to come, Mike Parrott will valiantly battle the creeping self-doubt apparent in this picture, going 14-12 with a respectable 3.77 ERA. He will even begin the following year with a win, but then he will lose every single other game that year, 16 games in a row, to finish 1-16. I don’t know if Mike Parrott’s tinted glasses contributed to the monumental losing streak, but one has to wonder why a guy whose home games were in the roofed Kingdome would be drawn to glasses that were always a little too dark when the wearer of them was inside.

Eddie Leon

2006-12-18T08:57:00.000-06:00

If I’m going to have gods in my life—that is, if I’m going to try to draw strength and a sense of wonder and mystery and the infinite beyond my everyday existence in this concrete, finite, gonna-die world, the gods are going to have to be capable of a wider embrace than the constricting, suffocating girdle of perfection. I’m not praying to perfection. I’ve tried that before in many different half-assed ways and it doesn’t work for me. I need hundreds of gods, not just one perfect god glaring down on each of my mistake-filled days, turning them into guilt-ridden cringes. I need gods that are fallible, even at times forgettable, nothing and no one outside their embrace.

I need, among others, Eddie Leon, posing in a Chicago White Sox uniform while the crooked, cut-off, erroneous card he is posing on identifies him as a member of the St. Louis Cardinals and the back of the card declares he is neither a White Sox nor a Cardinal but a New York Yankee. The back of the card scripture also points out that this fallible (lifetime average: .236), forgettable (Eduardo Antonio Leon?) god "has been among Chisox’ leaders in Sacrifices in ’73 & ’74."

Among the leaders? On a single team? In bunts? I don’t know how you could say any less about a guy without saying nothing at all. It suggests that when the White Sox really needed some bench guy of slight build and twitchy middle infielder reflexes to go up there and lay down a bunt, they looked first to somebody other than Eddie Leon, but if their top bunting specialist was for some reason otherwise occupied (perhaps he’d been entrusted with the more important task of going into the clubhouse to fetch a cold drink for one of the RBI guys such as Dick Allen or Beltin’ Bill Melton), well, then it was Eddie Leon’s time to go up there and intentionally make an out by tapping the ball as softly as possible.

Or, to put it another way, using the capitalization style of the holy back-of-the-card texts, then it was time for Eddie Leon to Sacrifice. To Make Sacred. And if a fallible, forgettable guy like Eddie Leon in the wrong uniform on a defective card is capable of not only being sacred but making sacred, then who in our own damaged world is beyond the reach of hope?

Derrel Thomas

2006-12-16T06:06:00.000-06:00

From 1975 through 1980, the years of my heaviest interest in baseball, i.e., my childhood, the San Diego Padres always finished just behind the San Francisco Giants:

1975: The Giants finished third and the Padres fourth.
1976: The Giants finished fourth and the Padres fifth.
1977: The Giants finished fourth and the Padres fifth.
1978: The Giants surged back up to third, the Padres barnicled to their hull in fourth.
1979: The Giants fell back into fourth, shoving the Padres into fifth.
1980: The Giants plummeted to fifth, using the sixth-place Padres to cushion their fall.

(Incidentally, the Padres did not break out of the pattern of having their view of the upper reaches of the N.L. West blocked by the Giants’ ass until the arrival of Tony Gwynn.)

I figure this season-in, season-out, caste-system clumping of the two mediocre teams is one reason why I have always associated them, others lesser reasons probably including the fact that they were both about as far away from me as possible and both began with the word "San." Because of this association, I have long had the belief that players were constantly shuttling back and forth between the two teams. This belief gained strength in the late 1980s, when, because of hallucinogenic drugs, literary pretensions, and certain painful events occuring in Shea Stadium in October of 1986, I was at a particularly pronounced remove from my former childhood religion of baseball, and so had trouble keeping track of whether Craig Lefferts was a Padre or a Giant. One minute he seemed to be on the Padres, the next the Giants, and the next back where he’d seemed to have been in the first place, my confusion based in part on the actual trade that brought him from one team to the other but also because I was mixing him up at various times with Scott Garrelts, Greg Harris, the other Greg Harris, or Greg Minton.

Anyway, despite whatever the actually reality of the situation was, I have for many years dimly pictured a glum brown and yellow bus with orange stripes dedicated primarily to the constant plodding movement of players up and down the California coastline from one fairly desolate N.L. West situation to another slightly less desolate N.L. West situation, or vice versa. This conceit may have been given fuel by the unfolding story in my baseball card collecting days of Derrel Thomas, who was among my earliest cards as a Padre, then was a Giant for some years, then was a Padre again before briefly disappearing from view. In truth I had just failed to get his card in any of the packs I bought that disappeared year, but if I’d thought about the absence, which I probably didn’t, I might have hypothesized that Derrel Thomas had opted to retire rather than take yet another ride on the brown and yellow and orange bus. Instead, he had found an even better way to free himself from being the square blip drifting back and forth across an otherwise blank screen in the Sisyphusian Padre-Giant game of Pong. I imagine that such a scenario of escape as his—to the sky blue Dodgers, perennial chisel-jawed contenders for the N.L. West crown—had been spoken of often but without much hope on the brown and yellow and orange bus, like Ratso Rizzo wheezing and coughing and dying as he impotently dreams aloud of someday making it to Florida.

Well, Ratso Rizzo may have never made it to his land of milk and honey, but Derrel Thomas did. Here he is in one of the last cards of my collecting days, on the brink of being a 1981 strike-year (hence at least partially asterisked) champion. He seems alert, slightly apprehensive, and a bit haggard, as if he’s spent most of the last decade sleeping lightly on long, seedy busrides with his duffel bag on his lap and a boxcutter gripped in his fist. This expression and the odd combination of positions listed on his card—"OF-2B"—suggests to me that part of the reason he was able to escape the brown and yellow and orange abyss was that he made absolutely sure the Dodgers knew he’d do whatever it took for them to give him a chance. If Derrel Thomas’s escape from the Padres-Giants suggest an alternate, happy ending to Midnight Cowboy, the events that must have enabled that escape suggest the beginning of another film from Hollywood’s golden age, a film I for some reason keep returning to whenever I meditate for long on the Padres and Giants of the 1970s . . .

Personnel Officer: Wanna work uptown nights? South Bronx? Harlem?

Travis Bickle: I'll work anytime, anywhere.

Personnel Officer: Will you work Jewish holidays?

Travis Bickle: Anytime, anywhere.

In his first two seasons on the Dodgers, Derrel "Anytime Anywhere" Thomas proved he was a man of his word, logging hours at every position on the field except pitcher, including five games as a catcher. As Travis Bickle put it, "It’s a long hustle, but it keeps me real busy."

Ozzie Smith

2006-12-15T06:31:00.000-06:00

I’m guessing that it wasn’t long before Ozzie Smith became The Wizard. The greatest fielding shortstop ever is featured here in his 1979 rookie card (which I have taken my usual exemplary care of, judging from the prominent crease running diagonally through his quizzical, slightly mournful expression), and I’m thinking that even by the time this card came out his Padre teammates were looking up to him. There was undoubtedly something about him—related but not wholly confined to his spectacular defensive play—that suggested his future greatness. I imagine his Padre teammates gravitating to him for support, for here was a man who, though only 5'10", was able to stand up tall in the sinking quicksand of Padreness.

The below excerpt from Taxi Driver features a conversation between Travis Bickle, played by Robert DeNiro, and The Wizard, played by the great Peter Boyle, who, sadly, passed away a couple days ago. But it's fairly easy to imagine a somewhat similar conversation occurring between The Wizard of the Padres and any of a number of his struggling teammates, such as, oh, Derrel Thomas, whose utilityman career at the point of his chat with Ozzie had consisted entirely of being repeatedly shuttled back and forth, positionless, between the vague, ill-defined Giants and the vague, ill-defined Padres.

Wizard: Things uh, things got ya down?

Travis: Yeah.

Wizard: Yeah, it happens to the best of us.

Travis: Yeah, it’s got me a real down, real...I just wanna go out and, and you know like really, really, really do somethin’.

Wizard: The taxi life you mean?

Travis: Yeah, well. Naw, I don't know. I just wanna go out. I really, you know, I really wanna, I got some bad ideas in my head, I just...

Wizard: Look, look at it this way, you know uh, a man, a man takes a job, you know, and that job, I mean like that, and that it becomes what he is. You know like uh, you do a thing and that’s what you are. Like I’ve been a, I've been a cabbie for seventeen years, ten years at night and I still don't own my own cab. You know why? 'Cause I don't want to. It must be what I, what I want. You know, to be on the night shift drivin' somebody else's cab. Understand? You, you, you become, you get a job, you you become the job. One guy lives in Brooklyn, one guy lives in Sutton Place, you get a lawyer, another guy's a doctor, another guy dies, another guy gets well, and you know, people are born. I envy you your youth. Go out and get laid. Get drunk, you know, do anything. 'Cause you got no choice anyway. I mean we're all fucked, more or less you know.

Travis: Yeah, I don't know. That's about the dumbest thing I ever heard.

Wizard: I'm not Bertrand Russell. Well what do ya want. I'm a cabbie you know. What do I know? I mean, I don't even know what the fuck you're talkin' about.

Travis: Yeah I don't know. Maybe I don't know either.

Wizard: Don't worry so much. Relax Killer, you're gonna be all right. I know. I seen a lot of people and uh, I know.

Dave Winfield

2006-12-13T13:47:00.000-06:00

The company I work as a proofreader for recently moved its headquarters from one suburban highwayside location to another. The old location was in what was termed a Corporate Campus, a collection of low brick buildings with some paved walkways and a couple man-made ponds thrown in. At the edge of this Corporate Campus was a McDonald’s. I walked there for lunch once every couple weeks, stepping around the droppings from Corporate Campus geese. I bought a cheapskate lunch, the dollar double-cheeseburger and dollar fries, no drink. Sometimes if I happened to be feeling sort of hollow about the manner in which my life was unfolding, however, I also sprung for a small chocolate shake. Because, you know, I deserved it.

The new location of my company is in a gigantic building located in a snarl of crowded, high-speed roadways that are approximately as welcoming to pedestrian traffic as is the surface of Jupiter. In other words, there will be no more hollow-souled milkshake-longing strolls to McDonald’s. There is a Starbucks within the square-mile building, however, so maybe I can cultivate a new affinity for that relative newcomer to the brand-name malignancy game.

Let’s say just to make myself feel better that I am rambling in large part now out of sheer anti-capitalist spite, as if my incoherent flimsy associative style could be a stinging reply to the worldwide trend toward branding and sameness and cancerous, capitalist, pointed endeavors. Let’s say I want to be different. Let’s say I want to no longer weep with nostalgia for the pure loneliness and longing of childhood when I see McDonaldland images of white bags of French fries growing from green stalks like ears of corn (see yesterday’s digressions loosely centering on poor Willie McCovey). Just as my parents tried to walk away from that trend in the early 1970s, I am trying to walk away from it now, at least in this moment, by digressing ever further from any semblance of a point.

When I was in my early 30s, nearly the age of my mother when she tried to lead us away from McDonaldland, I spent a year in a cabin in the woods in northern Vermont with no electricity and no running water. As I have mentioned previously, this year was not nearly as Thoreauvian as it might seem on first mention. I did love it there, most of the time, but often I felt a gnawing longing for a point. My year at the cabin had been an attempt, in part accidental or merely an extension of the aimlessness that preceded it, to refuse to go from point A to point B, to refuse to acknowledge that there was a point at all, and the moments that gnawed at me were those in which I found myself wishing for someplace to go. A destination. A point.

Once in a while this undefined ache got so bad I had to leave the cabin. On one of these days I drove around aimlessly for quite a while, then finally stopped to buy a newspaper to read box scores. If I had acted immediately on the information that I found on the sports page—that a couple hours north of me, in Montreal, the Padres were going to play the Expos and, more importantly, that Padre great Tony Gwynn was one measly hit away from the majestic immortal plateau of 3,000—things might have turned out differently, but as I remember it I sat with the information for a while, unable to decide a course of action, unable despite the gnawing inside me to incorporate the idea of a point into my generally pointless mode of existence. But slowly the idea grew. “The days go on and on . . . they don’t end,” observed Travis Bickle. “All my life needed was a sense of someplace to go.”

Goddamnit, I thought, someplace to go. I had let several precious minutes slip away, but I decided that I still had time to drive up to Montreal to see . . . history. For once I was going to be at a historical game! Until that time, probably my biggest claim to being witness to a notable baseball event was that I’d been at a game in Fenway when the legendary Seaver racked up win number 308, which allowed him to pull into a tie on the all-time list with some old-timer named Mickey Welch. But nobody talks about that game—I mean, Seaver won three more games that year anyway. So this was my first real chance to for once be at one of those games that cannot be paved over, a game to be protected in the collective memory. A historical landmark.

My sense of having someplace to go infused most of my solitary charge north on I-89 and across the border into Quebec with a feeling that resembled in many ways the jittery breathless excitement of falling in love. Insipid pop songs on the radio made me laugh out loud with happiness, the road seemed downright Kerouacian, and the sky kept getting bigger and bluer as I left the claustrophobic green mountains for the wide flat plains of Canada. Tony Gwynn was coming to town, 2,999 hits to his name!

Above and beyond any numerical accomplishments, Tony Gwynn had already done the seemingly impossible. Willie McCovey had arrived too late in his career to do it. Ozzie Smith had left too soon to do it, as had Dave Winfield, pictured here in the nauseating late-’70s uniform of Ray Kroc’s McDonaldland warriors. But Tony Gwynn had stuck around, year after year, the greatest hitter for batting average since San Diego native Ted Williams, and in doing so had turned what seemed like a lifetime sentence on the Padres into an inspirational tale of triumph for these ignoble times. He had brought dignity to the Padres. In other words, he had brought dignity to McDonaldland. In other words, he had brought dignity to this carcinogenic drive-thru monotony we all call home sweet home.

But I got hung up in traffic on the outskirts of Montreal. As my progress slowed to a jerking crawl, I found the pregame show on the radio. When the game started with me still miles from the stadium I gripped tightly to the steering wheel and to the knowledge that even the greatest hitters, such as Tony Gwynn, only reach base via a hit roughly three times out of ten. I also recalled that the only other time I’d been intimately interested in a player’s 3,000th hit was back in the Cardboard God era with my thoroughly fallible, popping-out-to-Nettles hero, Yaz, who, as soon as he reached 2,999, seemed to begin aging at the same alarming rate as beleaguered President Jimmy “Malaise” Carter while going hitless game after game after game. Gwynn was due up in the first inning, but I figured he’d likely make an out, or draw a walk, or get hit by a pitch, or reach on an error, and then it would be a couple more innings before he came to the plate again, by which time I’d be seated in the clattering echo chamber of Olympic Stadium with a big plastic cup of 5 % Molson in my hands.

When the broadcaster described Gwynn lacing a clean first-inning single to centerfield, I turned off the radio, guided my car down the closest exit ramp, and pulled into a shopping center parking lot. I sat in silence in my car in the parking lot for a while. Eventually I steered out of the lot and found the onramp for the highway heading back south.

The border guard didn’t really understand why the duration of my stay in Canada had been so brief. I kept trying to explain, but after a while his eyes just kind of glazed over, and he waved me back into my country.

Willie McCovey

2006-12-12T05:52:00.000-06:00

Drinkin’ man listens to the voice he hears
In a crowded room full of covered up mirrors
Lookin’ into the lost forgotten years
For dignity

–Bob Dylan

Oddly enough, while the departure of the great Willie McCovey from San Francisco ushered in the aura of vagueness that engulfed the Giants for years to come (at least as I perceived it from my distortingly distant perch), his arrival in San Diego did nothing to pull the Padres out of a similarly obscure miasma. A few years later, McCovey returned to the Giants, but it was too late. They remained to me as they had been in his absence, a kind of grayness in which, as Travis Bickle might describe it, "one day [is] indistinguishable from the next, a long continuous chain."

Nonetheless, the Giants always seemed to retain some semblance of dignity in their trudge from nowhere to nowhere, something that could not really be said for the Padres. A lot of this has to do with the fact that the Padres were an expansion team, unlike the legend-rich Giants, and did not have a history to draw on beyond the futile muttonchopped one-man RBI barrages of slugger Nate Colbert. The rest of it has to do with the uniforms. Although I can’t find confirmation of this anywhere, it’s probably no accident that Willie McCovey is dressed here in colors that resemble those worn by McDonald’s wage slaves of that era. The year McCovey came to the Padres, 1974, was the same year they were bought by Ray Kroc, who’d made hundreds of millions of dollars developing McDonald’s from a small southern California restaurant chain into a shiny nationwide yellow and red clown-haunted malignancy.

Strangely enough, 1974 was also the year my family moved from the McDonald’s-heavy suburbs of New Jersey to rural Vermont, in large part to escape the encroaching paved-over sameness of strip-malling America. My mother and stepfather, high on the back-to-the-land visions in books such as Living on the Earth ("When we depend less on industrially produced consumer goods, we can live in quiet places. Our bodies become vigorous; we discover the serenity of living with the rhythms of the earth. We cease oppressing one another."), were, symbolically speaking, fleeing from the Golden Arches. Ironically, if either I or my brother had been asked in the following years to provide an example of our agonized belief that we had been moved against our will by soy-loving hippies away from actual America to the middle of an unreachable nowhere, I feel pretty certain that we would have whiningly replied that there wasn’t even a McDonald’s within 40 miles of our house.

While drifting around the Internet with a vague hope that I could latch onto something that would lend coherence to this rambling tribute to Willie McCovey, I happened upon an article that includes links to and comments on McDonald’s commercials through the ages. The first ad features Ronald McDonald leading children through a wonderland where hamburgers and white bags of French fries grow in special hamburger and French fry patches. I had seen the ad years before, many times, and had longed to be one of those children, free to harvest bags of French fries at will. Seeing the ad again, especially the moment when the French fry patch comes into the view and then the reach of the smiling, skipping, throroughly untroubled children, actually made me emotional. People say stuff like "stay true to the dreams of your youth," but the dreams of my youth were all about imagining weeping with joy at the discovery in my otherwise boring rustic surroundings of a thriving McDonald's French fry patch.

In other words, yes, Willie McCovey. Yes, I want fries with that. Hold the dignity.

John D'Acquisto

2006-12-11T07:46:00.000-06:00

From my remote vantage point as a daydreaming child collecting cards in Central Vermont, the San Francisco Giants of the mid-to-late 1970s were something more than a baseball team. They were also something less than a baseball team, in that they never seemed even remotely involved in the battle between the Reds and the Dodgers (and even, eventually, the Astros) for the N.L. West title. This lack of prominence lent them an air of mystery (if mystery can be sort of drab). They were like an old, obscure, slow-paced black-and-white television drama that comes on during a long rain delay between star-studded teams wrestling for a division crown. Disappointed by the rainout and by the plodding, gray replacement program, you switch around the dial for a while but then come back because beneath the tedious dialogue and uninspired staging and nondescript casting there is something weird going on that you can’t put your finger on, something that's probably going to seep under your skin and cause you to end up staring at the ceiling at 3:00 in the morning.

Metaphors aside, I never actually saw the Giants on television. Even in the all-star game their presence was so meager that their yearly lone representative was no more noticeable than the half-second blip in the corner of the screen made by a white-shirted extra fleeing ruin in a disaster film. They were not so much a team to me as a state of being, or somehow a lack of a state of being. More specifically, they seemed to be comprised of guys who were not quite whole. They were all somewhat insubstantial guys who were also other somewhat insubstantial guys.

In the bullpen, lefthander Gary Lucas was also lefthander Gary Lavelle. In the outfield, Gary Maddox was also Gary Matthews, and then when Gary Maddox was traded to the Phillies, leaving the blurring haze of San Francisco to become a distinct personality, Gary Thomassen and Gary Alexander drifted in to fill, or rather to expand, the Garying San Francisco void. I confused Mike Ivie with Mike Lum (and also to a lesser extent Mike Vail), confused Steve Barr with Doug Bair, confused Dave Rader with Doug Rader, confused Mike Sadek with Ray Sadecki, and for reasons that I cannot explain thought of Von Joshua as the fourth Alou brother. In the coming years the fog of the mid-to-late ’70s Giants would also come to encompass blurrings of identities across the years, Bob Knepper merging into Bob Kipper, Tim Foli merging into Tom Foley, Ed Halicki merging into Mike Bielecki who then merged into Bob Milacki.

At the very center of the mystery was the man pictured here. I really can’t make many unequivocal statements about the shape-shifting mist of my childhood, but I do at least know that John D’Acquisto was John Montefusco, at least until he was traded to the Cardinals for Butch Metzger, who I then began confusing with Roger Metzger.

Fred Lynn

2006-12-08T06:48:00.000-06:00

This Fred Lynn card is from 1980, just after the second and final of his great seasons. He was still a young man, just 28 years old, seemingly about to hit the prime of his career. He had already won three Gold Glove awards for his spectacular work in centerfield, had been the first player ever to win the Rookie of the Year award and Most Valuable Player award in the same season, and had in his most recent season come as close to winning the Triple Crown as anyone had since his aging teammate Yaz actually accomplished the legendary feat in 1967.

In 1980 he slipped back into the groove of pretty-goodness that had defined his seasons between the great seasons of 1975 and 1979. In 1981 he was traded to the California Angels and hit .219, perhaps trying to once and for all signal his fallibility to his adoring, overly needy fans who kept voting him onto all-star team after all-star team (even while he was hitting .219) and staring at him expectantly as if he was about to blossom for good into some incredible combination of Joe Dimaggio and Ted Williams.

In 1982 he began the second stage of his career for real, posting seasons of remarkable sameness and pretty-goodness. His home run totals told the story of this stage of his career the best. He hit 21 homers that first year, 22 the next, then hit 23, 23, 23, and 23 homers the next four years before wrenching himself into hitting 25 homers in 1988. If he hadn’t strained himself and had instead stuck with the usual 23 home runs, maybe he could have stuck around a little longer, but apparently the push for 25 took most of the fight out of Fred Lynn. In 1989 he only managed 11 home runs, and in 1990, long after everyone had finally stopped hoping for the golden Cooperstown version of Fred Lynn to return, Fred Lynn hit his last 6 dingers while clad in a brown and yellow San Diego Padres uniform. I have never seen an image of him in that uniform. I hope I never do.

Herb Washington

2006-12-07T06:35:00.000-06:00

Herb Washington was the only pure designated runner in the history of baseball. Though the A’s also used other players primarily as pinch-runners during the mid-’70s, such as Matt Alexander and Don Hopkins, Washington was the only specialist to never once bat or take the field as a defender, and so was the only player ever to have "Pinch Run." as his listed position on the front of a baseball card.

A’s owner Charles O. Finley, a wealthy, blustering, delusional madman or visionary who in some ways epitomized and even defined the sublime and ridiculous era I have been trying for a long time to describe, envisioned Washington, a former college sprinter, as yet another advantage for the formidable Oakland squad. But instead of being a fortification of the already high-powered engine that carried the A’s to league supremacy throughout the early- to mid-1970s, Washington ended up being the most superfluous (hence greatest) hood ornament on the biggest, baddest, Blue Moon Odomest Cadillac in the league.

As recounted on the back of this card, Washington entered 91 games in 1974, his first season in the majors. He scored 29 runs, stole 28 bases, and was caught stealing 16 times. This is not a great stolen base to caught stealing ratio, and in fact would be identified by present day baseball numbers crunchers as counterproductive, Washington’s jittery unpolished improvisations on the basepaths killing too many possible rallies to justify the occasional extra base. He only lasted until May of the following year, adding two more stolen bases and one more caught stealing to his all-time record.

I did not scrutinize the stolen base to caught stealing ratio but was instead mesmerized by the fact that these statistics were included at all, for at that time and throughout the 1970s stolen bases were not included among the statistics on any other card. I also completely believed the overheated back-of-the-card space-filling prose created by a nameless Topps functionary, who wrote, among other things, that Washington was "personally responsible for winning 9 games for the A’s in 1974."

My guess is that in a couple of these 9 games, Washington merely trotted across the plate in front of a home run by one of the actual baseball players on the team, that in a few more of the 9 games he scored after a series of events not of his own doing that would have led just as easily to a score by the actual baseball player he replaced, and that the game or two where his speed actually seemed to provide the winning edge were more than cancelled out by his inexperienced baserunning gaffes in other games and by the fact that he took the place on the roster of someone who could, say, field a ground ball or dump a pinch-hit single into rightfield once in a while. But then again, his mere presence may have inflicted psychic damage on other teams. By carrying a guy on their roster who could not hit, pitch, or field, the A’s were in essence declaring to their opponent that they could kick their ass with one hand tied behind their back.

Wilbur Wood

2006-12-05T07:00:00.000-06:00

What drew me into the world of the Cardboard Gods as much as anything else was its clean, well-defined system of statistical landmarks. You knew where you stood with the numbers on the back of a baseball player’s card. If a guy hit 30 home runs and drove in 100 runs, he was a star slugger. If another guy turned in a sub-3.00 ERA, he was a top pitcher. It was as simple as that, no gray areas, no confusion. This is part of why people become religious, I think. They’re looking for clear guidelines on what’s good and what isn’t.

For starting pitchers, it’s all about wins. If you win 20 games, you’re an ace. Conversely, if you lose 20 games, you’re kind of a rag arm, a luckless mushballer (though probably not utterly incompetent; after all, your team must have seen reason to keep running you out to the hill to take all those beatings).

These seemingly mutually exclusive starting pitcher landmarks were well-known to me by the time I started inspecting the baffling statistics on the back of Wilbur Wood’s card. In a five-year span, the aging knuckleballer with the 19th century name won 20 games four times, but he also lost 20 games twice, 19 games once, and 17 games once. The most confusing year of all was 1973, when Wilbur Wood achieved both plateaus in the same year, racking up 24 wins while also suffering 20 losses.

I couldn’t figure out right away if Wilbur Wood was bad or good, but eventually I came to see him as being in both name and deed some kind of a throwback to the rugged spike-gashing dawn of major league baseball, when hurlers started both ends of a doubleheader and then came on in relief despite massive corn liquor hangovers the next day at dusk to strand the go-ahead and winning runs in scoring position. Wilbur Wood was beyond Old School. He was Old Testament. He was the last vestige of a time when men named Rube and Mordecai and Smokey Joe and Grover strode as giants upon the land, their won-loss records both gleaming and gory, good and bad entangled.

When Wilbur Wood hung it up, it left no one to stop the meek 5-inning starters and 4-pitch bullpen specialists from inheriting the earth.

Mark Belanger

2006-12-04T13:02:00.000-06:00

My life has three stages.

Stage One: the years when I was not yet aware of Mark Belanger

Stage Two: the years when Mark Belanger was a constant if barely noticed presence in my life

Stage Three: the Mark Belangerless years

This card is from the second year of Stage Two, 1976, and it oozes comforting sameness from every pore. He is the same height and weight, 6’2" and 175 pounds, as he was the year before; he was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and lives in Pittsfield, Massachusetts; he is an Oriole and has always been an Oriole, even before I was born; his batting averages for the three most recent seasons are .226, .225, and .226; and the highlight note underneath his statistics—"Mark hit a Homer in 1969 AL Playoffs"—is just a shorter version of the same highlight note at the bottom of his card for the previous year ("Mark hit a Homer in 1st A.L. Playoff game ever, for O’s vs. Twins in 1969.").

Stage Two seemed as if it would last forever. I guess I knew on some level I’d get older. I knew, even if I didn’t fully believe it, that eventually I’d be too old to play little league baseball. I vaguely understood that there would come a day when my baseball cards would be a collection of artifacts gathered in the past rather than a living, breathing community that was growing in the present. I even had a hazy idea of adulthood (in my mind it meant living in a house and having everything figured out; I estimated that by age 30 I’d have the pain of life banished). I knew all these things, yet I also never really believed that it would end. How could there be a world without Mark Belanger?

Very near the beginning of Stage Three, I took my first foreign language class, 9th grade French. The teacher was new to the school, and his name was Cormier. He was of French-Canadian descent but grew up in Western Massachusetts, where many French-Canadians had migrated in the days of yore to labor in textile mills. I don’t know Mark Belanger’s heritage, but his last name (was it once pronounced "Behlanjay"?) and his Western Massachusetts birthplace suggest that he and Cormier had similar backgrounds. The twosome also shared a slightly haunted, nervous demeanor. In Mark Belanger’s case this seemed to be the price paid for such enduring competence and steadiness and sanity, the 9-time Gold Glove shortstop unblinkingly scanning the horizon for the bad hops of life, the high-strung chain-smoking sentinel of my childhood. On the other hand, Cormier’s jittery mannerisms turned out to be the trebly upper register of a year-long symphony of chaos.

We never learned any French. Cormier spent each day giving us detentions, allowing us to dare Randy Bradley to eat wads of paper, and telling us about his life. Most of his stories concerned his immediate past—he had until that year been an IRS agent and had just fled Washington, D.C., because he was convinced the angry recipient of an audit was trying to detonate his house with explosives—or his present-day battle with the state of Vermont to prevent the completion of a mental hospital under construction across the street from his new house. Cormier believed he was beset on all sides by wackos. He probably thought we were wackos, too, judging by the way he reacted whenever we turned our attention away from his monologues to talk amongst ourselves. He stopped rambling and fixed whoever was talking with a squinty malevolent stare. His finger would come up and point in the manner of an Invasion of the Body Snatchers pod person identifying someone who had yet to be replaced by an alien facsimile.

"2:30," he’d say, naming the time he expected you to show up for your detention. Sometimes class was just a long series of 2:30s flung at us by Cormier. As far as I know, nobody ever paid any attention to any of it. I know I never showed up for one of his detentions. I’d never blatantly disobeyed that kind of order before from an authority figure, but the thought of being alone in a room with the guy in an otherwise emptied building was enough to push me into disobedience.

The next year, there was no sign of Cormier. I was in a class with Cormier veterans when a new French teacher came into the room, strange language coming out of her. We just sat there looking at her blankly. She spoke her gibberish more and more slowly, becoming increasingly exasperated at the lack of response. Finally she gave up.

"Isn’t this French II?" she asked, in English. I wasn't among the few students who nodded. I wasn't really sure of anything anymore.

Mike Easler

2006-12-01T07:28:00.000-06:00

This 1981 Mike Easler card, the last gasp of my baseball card collection, the enfeebled limping night janitor of the Cardboard Gods who flicked off the lights of heaven’s emptied hall, came in a package of cards produced by a company other than Topps. In 1981, both Fleer and another company, Donruss, won a long-fought legal battle to topple the monopoly Topps had on producing the cards of major league baseball players. While I applaud this in retrospect from an economic and political standpoint, at the time I hated that such a foundational element of what had been the most stable aspect of my life was changing. I guess I was probably going to be through collecting cards in 1981 anyway, but I do vaguely remember the feeling of disorientation that came with the news that there were now three complete sets to collect cards from. It was as if I had been going to the same church for years and all of the sudden one morning I arrive to find three churches instead of one, each one promising ease and comfort and rejuvenation and a place in the afterlife, but imbedded in each of the promises was the threat that if I chose wrong I’d be isolated and alone in a spiritually impotent unsanctified shack disconnected from even the illusion of community.

Besides the sheer fact that there was such a thing as Fleer cards, the thing I liked least about Fleer cards was that the backs of them were upside down. On Topps cards, the top of the back corresponded to the left side of the front. For six years, I had been looking at the photo on the front of Topps cards, and then flipping and turning the Topps cards so that the front left became the top of the back. Fleer decided they could improve on that system, matching the top of the back to the right side of the front. This may not sound like a big deal but consider this: it’s now twenty-five years later and I’m still flipping over this Mike Easler card in such a way that his statistics are upside down. This has become merely annoying but it was downright anomic when I first tried to see who the hell this Mike Easler character was.

And that’s another thing. When I finally did get the statistics on the back of the card in a readable position, I discovered that Mike Easler had been in and out of the major leagues for as long as I’d been collecting cards, and he’d been in professional baseball almost as long as I’d been alive. I can see now that for all his major league seasons previous to 1980 he was a little-used late season call-up, but I’m sure at first glance the long-time presence in the majors of a guy I'd never heard of must have added to the existential dizziness of my initial moments with the card. At that time, the spring of 1981, I was in 8th grade and had learned that I was terrible at school, that I no longer had close friends, that my brother was going away to some boarding school the next year, that I sucked at basketball and baseball, and that the focus of my new all-encompassing interest, girls with breasts, was as hopelessly untouchable to me as a distant alien planet populated entirely by girls with breasts. And now Mike Easler and his stunning .338 batting average was here to inform me that I no longer even knew anything about baseball cards.

Mario Guerrero, 1980

2006-11-30T06:13:00.000-06:00

This 1980 card is probably not the last Mario Guerrero card ever produced, since he was officially a major leaguer until April 1981, when the Seattle Mariners released him, but it’s the last Mario Guerrero card I own. My card buying dropped off precipitously in 1981, a fact I rediscovered a couple weeks ago when I spent several of my limited hours here on earth sorting my entire collection into alphabetically ordered players within years within teams. Some teams had a couple cards from 1981, some had one, some had none. From the looks of it, I bought two or three packs of cards for the whole year, a buying rate that I often approached on a weekly basis in the preceding years. Suddenly what had for years been of central importance to me was no longer the least bit important. Maybe someday in the not too distant future I’ll talk at greater length about the neutron bomb of puberty, but for now I’m going to set aside any discussions on why I suddenly had no interest in baseball cards. Today the focus is on the baseball player whose major league career spanned almost exactly the fully conscious (i.e., aware of baseball) years of my childhood. When Mario Guerrero was released, so was my childhood. While I can’t verify this, I believe it’s very possible that April 1, 1981, the day the Mariners traded Mario Guerrero for the absence of Mario Guerrero, was the first warm day of spring in Central Vermont, and as such provided the opportunity for a certain bespectacled, increasingly awkward 8th grade soon-to-be former collector of baseball cards to notice for the first time that all the girls in his grade had suddenly grown breasts.

So this card is really the last hurrah for better or worse of a breastless world. It’s possible that this may be why I find some aspects of the card a little strange. For example, Mario Guerrero doesn’t really look like Mario Guerrero. Besides being bearded, he also appears to have a puffier face, lighter skin, less distinct features, and cloudier eyes than the dark, rugged-featured man beaming with eagle-vision from the earlier Mario Guerrero cards. If not for the matching statistics on the back, I might have thought that another Mario Guerrero had infiltrated the league. Another discordant note sounded by the card is in the fact that Mario Guerrero is on the A’s. I had always resisted evidence contrary to the idea that he was still and forever a member of the Red Sox, but somehow his previous appearances on the Cardinals and especially the Angels (where Red Sox players were constantly ending up or coming from) were not as injurious to this fantasy as seeing him clad in the bright white shoes and seasick green and yellow piping of the A’s. Possibly a part of the unease at seeing Mario Guerrero as an A derived from the perception of that franchise that I got from the collecting of baseball cards throughout the latter half of the 1970s, a period of dismal decline for the A’s, as pointed out recently in a comment by Pete Millerman. I regained this perspective on the A’s recently while sorting my A’s cards into years. In 1975, many of the players were still around that had formed, in terms of consecutive World Series titles, the greatest non-Yankee dynasty ever. Rudi, Jackson, Hunter, Bando, Blue. Even in 1976, there are still vestiges of the dynasty in my collection. Fingers, Holtzman, Campaneris. By 1977 Bill North was the only one left, and in 1978 and 1979 the last place A’s were a wasteland of Jim Tyrones and Jerry Tabbs. The 1980 set of A’s seems, in retrospect, split between members of the scrapheap A’s and members of the young Billy Martin-led A’s squad that would end up playing exciting, winning baseball throughout 1980 and 1981. If I sensed this split at the time between the promising young players, such as Tony Armas, Mike Norris, and Rickey Henderson, and the has-beens and never-weres, such as Dave Chalk, Craig Minetto, and Larry Murray, I would have had no choice but to rank the aging reserve Mario Guerrero, with his 5 career home runs and his 39 career sacrifice bunts, among the latter. In other words, the once-proud A’s were about to make the climb back toward respectability, and Mario Guerrero would only be symbolic of the swamp of mediocrity they were climbing up out of.

With all that said, let us now praise Mario Guerrero. In his eight-year career he belonged to seven major league franchises, three of whom he never played for while the rest never seemed to care much whether he played for them or not. He was, due to circumstances beyond his control, a major league drifter, and as such could have been forgiven for allowing a drifting, degenerative quality into his professional habits. This appears not to be the case, however. He was consistent, and by most accounts a reliable fielder at second and short, and, at least as utility infielders go, not a terrible hitter either. He did his job as best he could. I know this because of all my Mario Guerrero baseball cards, especially this one. In this 1980 card, even though he does not even look like himself anymore, Mario Guerrero shows perfect form in completing what may be the most difficult common play in baseball, the double-play relay. The runner has barreled into him, trying to break his concentration, but it seems even death personified could not jar the focus of this unflappable journeyman. And here comes Mario Guerrero’s throw, straight as an arrow, right on target. Right at anybody with eyes to see.

Mario Guerrero, 1979

2006-11-29T06:19:00.000-06:00

I don’t have a 1979 Mario Guerrero card. To address this gap, I’ve decided to insert a painting my wife and I just received as a wedding present from the painter, a family friend named Barbara who also happened to be my guidance counselor when I was in grade school. My most memorable moment of her as my guidance counselor occurred in the Mario Guerreroless year of 1979, when she plucked me and the other older kids out of my multiage class and walked us down to Mr. Stewart’s big sixth grade class of regular kids, then took all the multiage girls and Mr. Stewart girls with her while all the boys stayed and watched a movie about how hair was soon going to start exploding out of our bodies in unusual places. Mr. Stewart flicked on the lights when it was over and asked if there were any questions. We all just sat there blinking.

This is not to say that I associate that troubling, confusing day with Barbara. Actually, when I think of the liveliest times in the house I grew up in, parties in which the house filled up with my parents’ longhaired back-to-the-land friends, I usually think first of Barbara’s whooping laughter. She was practically a party unto herself. Her painting is of that house she lit up with her laughter. I don’t think the photo reproduction fully does justice to the painting. It is a beautiful piece of work. It makes me realize that I am often full of shit when I write about the past.

I’ve always been wary of lapsing into nostalgic fantasies of a joyful past that never existed, but the fact is I’ve often leaned on anti-reveries that are every bit as artificial and misleading, the past in my timid hands a succession of ritualistically humiliating failures set in a landscape of rusted car parts and athletic fields riddled with drunken longing and omens of imminent pederasty. I make East Randolph, the town of the house pictured here, into a grimy hollow of bullies and barbed wire and deer carcasses and sighing aging hippies and winters without end and mangy growling Dobermans chained to sagging aluminum trailers. And maybe East Randolph did have all those elements, but it was also, when viewed in a different way, a small, quiet village cradled within rolling green mountains, capable of receiving the tender light seen in this painting.

It’s always been harder for me to remember joy. Maybe this is because joy is something you can’t appreciate, or even name, until it’s fading. In the 1800s, the spectacular nature paintings of the Hudson River School celebrated the American landscape when that landscape was starting to vanish. The painters wanted to remember what had until that point always been taken for granted. My personal moment of seeing the parts of East Randolph that I would miss when they were out of my life came just after I’d been expelled from boarding school. I came home for what would turn out to be my last extended stay—soon the house would be sold and all its less essential but not completely disposable contents, such as my baseball card collection, would be packed into a storage unit. I’d been kicked out with very little time left in my senior year, and after an unsuccessful trip with my mom to the local high school to beg for admittance in time to graduate with the local seniors, the only thing that remained for me in Vermont was to wait for the next administration of the general equivalency diploma (GED) exam in the state capital.

This waiting period benefited from the aftermath of a weekend visit by some of my boarding school buddies. At one point I’d taken them down to the swimming hole that I’d always thought of as dismally small and boring, and one of my friends, a Kenyan-born Muslim kid who had in typically incongruous boarding school fashion been tagged with the nickname of Buddha, planted himself in the middle of the waist-high stream for a long time, glowing buddhistically, ignoring the defunct gravel pit on his right, the car skeleton on his left.

"Man, if I lived in this town," he finally declared, "I’d be here every day."

I filled the gnawing absence created by the departure of my friends with the ritual of not just going to the swimming hole every day but staying there until I convinced myself that I was actually hearing and seeing what the Buddha heard and saw. And the trip to the swimming hole was just one element of a larger effort on my part to drink in for the first (and last) time the bucolic splendor of my surroundings. The day I finally took the GED was probably the first day I’d worn shoes in weeks. Too late, my franchise already long eliminated from contention, I’d caught fire as the hippie nature boy the whole move to rural Vermont by my parents had been intended to create.

The test took place in a room in the courthouse building in Montpelier. There was only one other test-taker besides me, a 16-year-old kid hoping to join the air force. He chewed on his lip while we were waiting to get underway.

"Shit, you think there’s gonna be algebra on this fucker?" he asked me.

"I don’t know," I said.

I don’t remember if there was algebra, but the test in general turned out to be pretty easy. I finished while the air force kid was still laboring away. I went out and stood on the steps of the courthouse, waiting for my mom to pick me up and pretending not to notice the guy on the other side of the steps who was pretending not to notice me.

His name was Mike and he was the son of the man who owned the general store in East Randolph where I bought all my baseball cards. He’d been the Coolest Kid for a while, his charisma peaking in grade school when he was the only local youngster to pepper his speech with the word "whore." We’d been friends, sort of, in grade school, Mike hanging out with me when there wasn’t anything better to do, luckily for me a fairly frequent occurrence in our small town, but I hadn’t spoken to him in years. The silence between us had grown out of the general silence of victimhood that gradually engulfed all the members of our terrible 7th and 8th grade basketball teams as the losses continued to mount. By 9th grade, Mike had had enough of basketball. I kept playing and losing. We took different classes. Mike probably spent his Friday nights getting wasted and fornicating in cars while I was home watching The Incredible Hulk. If I hadn’t gone away to boarding school for my junior and senior years I probably would have finally had some contact with him again, either buying shitty brown pot from him or handing him the dribbling spout of a beer keg at a cold, drizzly party in the woods.

Anyway, by the time I took my GED test, Mike had become a fat glowering man smoking a cigarette outside a courthouse. I’d heard that he’d been arrested for some drug charge, and probably his presence at the courthouse had something to do with that. I stared down for what seemed like hours at the boarding school in-joke phrases I’d scrawled with a magic marker all over my Converse All-Stars. Finally my mom pulled up.

Her expression was still the weary stone-face she’d worn when she’d picked me up from boarding school the day of my expulsion. On the way home on that earlier day, I’d broken the first of many long, painful silences by saying "I’ll make you proud someday, Mom!" Believe it or not, it sounded even more overwrought and overdramatic at the time than it seems in the retelling, and my mom, who would be saddled for years to come with the large loan she’d taken out to send me to the school, let my bombastic vow hang in the air for a while before replying in a flat monotone, "That’s not the point." I’d backed off any further pronouncements in the following weeks, but the moment after the GED test seemed to demand at least some sort of stab at ceremonial verbiage. I thought about the test itself, and then about the lip-gnawing air force kid, who was probably still flailing away at "the fucker."

"Well, looks like I’m gonna be the valedictorian of my class," I said. My mom wasn’t in a big laughing mood, but she did later pass on the line to her friend Barbara, the creator of the painting shown here, and Barbara filled our home for perhaps the last time with whooping laughter.

Mario Guerrero, 1978

2006-11-28T06:39:00.000-06:00

Mario Guerrero has suddenly begun to look a little old. He is no longer a guy who could be mistaken as a promising youngster. The dissolving of the faint aura of potential around Mario Guerrero strikes me as the flip side of the solidity he gained by carving out a niche for himself as a decent utility infielder. He chose a path and made his way down the path as best he could. The years have gone by and now here he is, a veteran bench guy, no more, no less.

I am several years older than Mario Guerrero was at the time of this picture, but I still find myself trying with all my meager might to hold onto some sense that my life is yet to come, that I still have some yet unrealized potential. If I had a baseball card, it wouldn’t have much on the back. A remote birth date, height and weight suggesting the expanding midsection of middle age, a birthplace unrelated to the listed residence, a space-filling cartoon with a caption reading "Josh wants to be a writer some day." The years reserved for my official record would be blank. I’ve mostly avoided an actual life, always hoping for some impossible call-up to the big leagues and instant all-star status. The picture on the front of the card would show a 38-year-old guy who has never really gotten his hands dirty with life, never really thrown himself fully into anything, never really chosen a path, a look on his face like a few seconds and rigid steps earlier he’d set off the hidden security system alarm at the front of a mall store. Even though he’s guilty of swiping something small and juvenile—a chocolate bar, a pack of baseball cards—it appears he might not be apprehended, he might get away free this time, once again, but he’s not quite sure. He’s still bracing for the clap of a hand on his shoulder.

Anyway, I don’t know why Mario Guerrero is shown as an Angel in this 1978 card. In December of 1977 he left the Angels to sign as a free agent with the San Francisco Giants. If Mario Guerrero felt good to be in control, for once, of yet another changing of teams, the feeling must not have lasted very long. Before he reported to spring training for his new team, the Giants sent Gary Alexander, Gary Thomasson, Dave Heaverlo, Alan Wirth, John Henry Johnson, Phil Huffman, and $300,000 (which at the time was a fairly prodigious sum of money to be thrown into a deal already including several players) to the Oakland A’s for ace pitcher Vida Blue. As you will notice, Mario Guerrero’s name is not listed in the battalion dispatched to fetch Vida Blue, but the Giants did agree to include in the deal a promise to also send the A’s a player to be named later. Certainly Mario Guerrero must have been particularly attuned to the possibility of intimate change suggested by the addition of this clause. Having been a player to be named later and also traded twice in part or in whole for a player to be named later, Mario Guerrero surely sensed that his life might once again be about to change. I guess everybody’s bracing for the clap of a hand on their shoulder, one way or another. On April 7, 1978, the Giants completed the Vida Blue deal by adding Mario Guerrero to the pile of bodies they’d already shipped across the bay to Oakland.

I don’t know what Mario Guerrero’s expression was when informed of this deal. I doubt he was smiling, as he is here, but if the numbers he put up after the deal are any indication, the tough, weathered resolve beneath this smile remained: in 1978, Mario Guerrero posted career highs in games, at bats, runs, hits, doubles, triples, home runs, and RBI.

Mario Guerrero, 1977

2006-11-27T07:59:00.000-06:00

This 1977 card signals the passing of the halfway point of both my childhood and Mario Guerrero's itinerant career. Early in the preceding season, Mario Guerrero was traded by the St. Louis Cardinals to the California Angels for a minor leaguer named Ed Jordan and a player to be named later. The player to be named later turned out to be another minor leaguer named Ed Kurpiel. So by the time he posed for this picture, Mario Guerrero had been a player to be named later, had been traded for a player to be named later ultimately named Willoughby, and had been traded for two minor leaguers, one named Ed right at the start, the other also named Ed, but later. Still, Mario Guerrero seems happy and hopeful here. This makes sense, in a way. Despite his constant involvement in trades seemingly designed to highlight his insignificance, he had proven himself to be a useful major leaguer, averaging well over 200 at bats a year while playing ably at second base and shortstop, arguably the two most important defensive positions on the field. He had, in fact, just completed his best season to date, leading the anemic, league-worst offense of the Angels in batting average with an admirable .284 mark while also somehow swatting his first major league home run.

This hopeful card first lit up my collection right in the middle of my years in the hippie multiage class I mentioned in the last post. When writing of that class I often resort to cheap satire, probably due to a lack of imagination. But the truth is I mostly loved that class, especially the middle years, the Mario Guerrero as an Angel years. All day long, more or less, I was encouraged to make up stories. It occurs to me now that most if not all of the stories—told in the form of comic books, scrolls made to unfurl inside television-like cardboard boxes, animated movies of crash-marred car races, theatrical sequels to Star Wars featuring light sabers made of colored plastic sheets and flashlights, even my autobiography—were about wisecracking ectomorphs surviving disaster. The prototype for all these stories was an early crudely rendered serial drama about a character named Ribad the Rabbit, who was constantly having trees fall on him and other woodland creatures open fire in his direction with automatic weaponry as he tried to go about his day. Why me? asked Ribad the Rabbit again and again. There was never an answer, but on he went, inexplicably indestructable.

Mario Guerrero, 1976

2006-11-22T07:34:00.000-06:00

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
– Mark Strand, "Keeping Things Whole"

So who is the all-time greatest player to be named later? That is, who most fully embodies the disembodied nameless faceless procrastinating essence of human driftwood embedded in the term player to be named later? The Harry Chiti transaction pointed out by my esteemed colleague, Pete Millerman, in the comments section attached to yesterday’s post certainly bears repeating in any attempt to determine the answer to this question. The Harry Chiti page on Baseball-Reference.com (sponsored, somehow touchingly, by someone named Jo Chiti) summarizes the infamous boomeranging of Harry Chiti with brutal brevity:

April 26, 1962: Purchased by the New York Mets from the Cleveland Indians.
June 15, 1962: Returned to the Cleveland Indians by the New York Mets following previous purchase.

Man. That’s tough to beat, especially since the team, the 1962 New York Mets, that preferred the absence of Harry Chiti to the presence of Harry Chiti is often celebrated as the worst team in the history of major league baseball. Add to that the fact that Harry Chiti had earlier in his career been a player to be named later in a deal to a team, the New York Yankees, that stashed him like a stack of old magazines in the cellar of the minor leagues for a couple years before allowing him to be scavenged in the Rule V draft by the awful 1957 Kansas City A’s, and I think we may be talking about the Babe Ruth of players to be named later.

However, I believe Mario Guerrero also deserves consideration. I realize I have a personal bias in this matter, as I derived comfort throughout my often solitary childhood from the near-continuous, albeit transitory, presence of Mario Guerrero. But it has become clear to me in retrospect that Mario Guerrero’s continuous presence at my side was haunted every step of the way by the specter of the player to be named later. Guerrero, shown here in his 1976 card, had been traded from the Red Sox to the Cardinals before the previously considered Mario Guerrero card, from 1975, ever reached my hands. He did not come to the Cardinals as the player to be named later, but was instead traded straight up for a player to be named later.

I find this somewhat chilling. You see, the player to be named later clause is generally added to a deal with other principles, other named players going back and forth between teams, but in this case there were no other principles. There was only Mario Guerrero, who though seemingly a useful, spirited reserve was offered to the Cardinals for nobody. Here, take him, the Red Sox said. Just take him. Maybe later sometime you can send us somebody. Or not. Whatever. We don’t really care.

By the time this card came into my possession, my family had made another move, which I’ve described in further detail elsewhere, from bucolic Randolph Center, Vermont, to the bully-glutted unofficial northeastern United States’ capital of defunct gravel pits, East Randolph, Vermont, and I had begun attending a hippie-run multiage class based on the experimental free-school philosophy of learning what you want to learn when you want to learn (but only if you want to learn). Right now I don’t feel like getting into who broke whose glasses and who called who a pansy, a faggot, a tard, a pussy, a queerbate, and, somehow worst of all, a dufus, but suffice it say that the regular kids in the school, the ones with their desks in straight rows, did not lend full support to our utopian experiment.

Anyway, in the summer after that first school year, the Cardinals completed the Mario Guerrero deal. There was the possibility, of course, that Mario Guerrero could have joined Harry Chiti at the very pinnacle of dubious transactions by being the player the Cardinals sent to the Red Sox to complete their acquisition of Mario Guerrero. This did not occur; instead, the player to be named later turned out to be a man named Willoughby.

As anyone who has ever gotten a new year off to a roaring start by staring at hour after hungover hour of a New Year’s Day Twilight Zone Marathon knows, the word Willoughby carries an especially disquieting resonance, particularly when used in terms of some sort of tradeoff. In the episode entitled "A Stop at Willoughby," a town with the same name as the player to be named later in the 1976 Mario Guerrero deal shimmers into existence as the final impossible refuge of a man who, according to Rod Serling (who would understand as well as anyone the existential implications of the concept of the player to be named later), is "protected by a suit of armor held together by one bolt.

"Just a moment ago," Serling continues, "someone removed the bolt, and [his] protection fell away from him and left him a naked target. He’s been cannonaded this afternoon by all the enemies of his life. His insecurity has shelled him, his sensitivity has straddled him with humiliation, his deep-rooted disquiet about his own worth has zeroed in on him, landed on target, and blown him apart."

This man, who at thirty-eight happens to be exactly my age, ends up becoming more and more enamored of exchanging everything he has for what seems to be the long-sought completion of a trade he actually made long ago, subconsciously, pummeled by the slings and arrows of this world, for a yearning to be named later, a wondrous refuge of "sunlight and serenity," a town of kindness and calm. Willoughby.

I won’t spoil the ending of the episode, but I do want to point out Mario Guerrero’s expression of unsinkable cheer in the photograph on this 1976 card. Here is the man who was traded for either nothing or for the inhabited malignant phantasm of nothing known as Willoughby. The position on his card—third base—is not even really his position. But he’s not throwing in the towel. Let others give up and get off the train at Willoughby. Mario Guerrero still has some more years to appear on baseball cards to comfort the solitary bespectacled youth of America. Mario Guerrero endures.

Mario Guerrero, 1975

2006-11-21T06:46:00.000-06:00

I have always been drawn to the concept, in baseball transactions, of the "player to be named later," but the truth is I’ve never really understood it. How much later is later? Are there parameters set in place for the quality (or, as anecdotal evidence suggests, the lack thereof) of the player? Does the giving team or the receiving team name the player? If it’s the giving team, why wouldn’t they just throw a baseball uniform on the crotchety one-legged Korean War veteran who folds their towels and give him train fare to get to the receiving team, and if it’s the receiving team, why wouldn’t they just name the guy leading the giving team in slugging percentage? Or is there some specialist in the employ of the league commissioner whose sole job is to fairly and justly assess each trade involving the "player to be named later" clause and to then balance the scale of each deal by aptly identifying and, yes, naming the player to be named later? And if so, how can I get this job?

I don’t have the answer to any of these questions, but perhaps some progress toward illumination on this matter can be made in further consideration of my cardboard childhood companion Mario Guerrero, shown here in his 1975 card in the ol’ Topps hold the bat straight out in front of you and gaze with wistful regret into the middle distance pose.

Mario Guerrero slipped quietly into the major leagues a couple years after coming to the Red Sox organization as a player to be named later. Specifically, he was the player to be named later in one of the worst deals in Red Sox’ history. So "later" in this case turned out to mean a couple of things. In a strictly literal sense, later meant 100 days, from March 22, 1972, when the first players involved in the deal were exchanged, to June 30, 1972, when the identity of the player to be named later was finally revealed. But in this particular deal, which prior to the involvement of Mario Guerrero featured the Red Sox sending future Cy Young award-winner Sparky Lyle to the Yankees for fading mediocrity Danny Cater, "later" also (and more accurately) meant "too late." Mario Guerrero’s arrival to the Red Sox in the context of this deal was akin to the arrival at a thoroughly burglarized home of a somewhat interesting seashell sent from the private beach connected to the brand new Caribbean retirement mansion of the burglar. Under other circumstances, perhaps the recipients would have appreciated the quiet, unassuming beauty of the seashell, but in this case they could only hold the seashell to their ear and listen to a facsimile of the ol’ Matthew Arnold unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.

Mario Guerrero, 1974

2006-11-20T10:21:00.000-06:00

This weekend I went on a 13-mile run, kayaked the length of the Chicago river while sighting and cataloging four rare species of birds, wrote eleven new songs for my forthcoming album, incorporated my many investment and charitable interests into a robust crossplatform transnational web of proactive revenue-generating synergies, kept up a constant string of brilliant witticisms, cobbled my own shoes, performed life-saving CPR not once, not twice, but thrice, punched a guy, weighed a run for public office, rebuilt the engine of an automobile, aided the bereft, oozed rugged, manly charisma, won a javelin-hurling competition, translated a volume of ancient Sanskrit poetry, and took out the garbage.

Actually, all but one of the above things may be an exaggeration. What I really spent most of my time doing this weekend was thoroughly organizing my baseball cards and then searching through them ceaselessly (to the point where I actually began to develop some sort of dust- and obsession-related migraine) for a single set of six cards of the same guy (any guy) from the six years, from 1975 to 1980, in which I spent all my allowance on baseball cards. Why did I do this? What did I hope to gain? In the end I didn’t succeed in my "quest"; I kept getting close but ultimately all I found were gaps.

(I’ve also just been informed on this early Monday morning after my weekend of futile searching that I do not smell very good.)

I do have a few cards from the border years of 1974 and 1981, and eventually I responded to my failure to find a complete set of six by idiotically expanding my hopes to that of finding a miraculous run of eight cards of the same guy. This just led to even more gaps. But it also led me to Mario Guerrero. Mario Guerrero was a presence for much, if not all, of my childhood.

This 1974 Mario Guerrero is among the first cards I ever owned. The year I got it my father moved to a small apartment in New York City and the rest of my family moved from New Jersey to Vermont. That was also the year I got a baseball encyclopedia from my uncle for Christmas and the year I began having what we called nightmares at the time but which I found out many years later are known as night terrors. When I learned what night terrors were I did a little research on them and discovered that they most often occurred to children from ages six to twelve (exactly the range of my baseball card collecting years), and though they haven’t been identified as being caused by any particular psychological trauma they often seem to occur to children involved in significant familial changes.

I’ve tried and failed for years to describe these night terrors from a first-person point of view (contrary to the claims in some of the research books on the subject, which state that the child experiencing night terrors will not recall them in the morning, I remembered all but one or two of these nights in vivid detail). Here’s the third-person view: the boy wakes up in the middle of the night and runs through the dark house wide-eyed and screaming at the top of his lungs. Nobody can do anything to help him.

I just spent the last several minutes trying to augment the above third-person view with yet another in my endless stabs at a first-person account of the experience. I deleted the text because as usual it didn’t get anywhere near it. But I’m sure I’ll try again some other time. All I can say now is that the world looked wrong and this terrified me. Part of the fear was that I was never going to get back to seeing things "normally," that the wrongness was infinite.

It’s probably not a coincidence that I began filling my days more and more with the memorizing of concrete, finite statistical information from my brand new baseball encyclopedia and with the collection and perusal of cards such as this 1974 Mario Guerrero. Topps placed Mario Guerrero (I mispronounced his name—unintentionally at first but then intentionally as well, then as ever after grasping at the shreds of the infantile—as a rhyme: "Mario Guh-rario") in a classic middle infielder pose. Topps often seemed to enjoy humiliating the light-hitting utility infielder types by making them pose this way, as if the subjects were in the woods trying to take a dump while simultaneously preparing to ward off the advances of a porcupine or a wild boar.

Bill Hands (correction)

2006-11-19T07:47:00.000-06:00

In the last post I claimed the ’75 Bill Hands that I was never able to acquire was the last Bill Hands card ever produced. I wasn’t sure about this but I figured I’d just say it anyway. Turns out I was wrong, and here’s the proof, a 1976 Bill Hands. I also claimed that the guy Bill Hands was traded for, George Stone, didn’t have a 1976 card, but he did. I don’t have the 1976 George Stone card, but I see the name next to a blank box on the Mets’ 1976 team card checklist.

I know all this now because yesterday I turned a corner in my ongoing departure from sanity by taking several hours to sort my entire scrambled collection back into teams, in part so I could begin to investigate the veracity of claims such as that George Stone and Bill Hands, who by then had both played their last major league games, did not have 1976 cards ghosting their respective vanishings. My wife, who as a very young child once organized her grandma’s sprawling "miscellaneous" drawer into neat piles of paperclips and rubber bands, helped me sort for a few minutes before losing interest. When she later saw me sorting the cards of individual teams into different years, she withheld comment, but when still later she looked up from her social-work textbook and saw me subjecting cards for an individual team and individual year to even more sorting, she fixed me with an incredulous stare.

"Are you putting those into alphabetical order?"

"What? No. Of course not," I said. I forced out a snort of laughter meant to sound dismissive. "Please."

"Mm hm," she said. She’d already turned back to her book.

Anyway, I don’t know how I didn’t remember this card. It must have made an impression when I found it in a pack. Finally, I’d acquired a Bill Hands, but it was the wrong Bill Hands, a year too late.

Bill Hands

2006-11-17T06:18:00.000-06:00

Here’s the closest I ever got to Cardboard God nirvana. In 1975, my first year of baseball card obsession, I nearly gathered every player for an entire team. From Bibby, Jim to Tovar, Cesar, I slowly but steadily accrued every Texas Ranger except one.

Topps card number 412. Hands, Bill/P

My brother owned this card. I can't remember clearly, but he may have even had doubles. However, it was not at all customary to simply hand over surplus cards. I understood this and was in a strange way even glad about it. The game had rules, and rules helped create a world with meaning. He proposed to trade me Bill Hands for my one and only 1975 Carl Yastrzemski. I was tempted, but somehow even at age seven I knew that if I made such a deal I’d feel as if I’d been punched in the stomach for months afterward.

I gripped tight to Yaz and decided to take my chances with the random gatherings within each new pack of cards. Probably the first time I ever prayed was in my silent pack-opening pleas for Bill Hands. Bill Hands never did show up, obviously. At some point I did get doubles of Yaz but by then my brother had Yaz, too, so that deal was no longer on the table. Eventually the general store in town stopped carrying the 1975 cards.

Hands, a former 20-game winner, went 6–7 for the Rangers that year and was traded in the offseason to the Mets for George Stone. Neither he nor Stone ever appeared in another major league game or on another baseball card. Many years later my brother sold his Bill Hands or Bill Handses along with all his other cards for money to buy a used pair of downhill skis. He was in his mid-twenties, broke, fleeing the wreckage of a failed relationship. He staved off starvation by getting a job selling lift tickets at a ski area and in his off hours either partied with others in the migrant ski area work force or flung himself at great speeds down the mountain on his baseball card skis.

'78 Checklist

2006-11-16T07:09:00.000-06:00

"Thus the power of souls is increased by all that men attribute to them, and in the end men find themselves the prisoners of this imaginary world of which they are, however, the authors and the models." – Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

My father was raised as an Orthodox Jew but traded religion for sociology as soon as he was old enough to live on his own. And only the faintest traces of the childhood Protestantism of my mother and stepfather survived the 1960s, Jesus showing up once a year in some Christmas carols sung by my Mom’s extended family while my brother and I played Mattel electronic football and wolfed down holiday peanut brittle.

So for me there was no church, no temple, no formal rites of passage, no fables of the afterlife, no prayers to the enrobed and sandal-clad Bee Gee. I was left to make it all up on my own. So here’s what I came up with, I guess: a half-assed worship of the names and statistics and mostly imagined capabilities of baseball players that I turned into deities. To fill in a box next to a name on a checklist such as the one pictured here was to take a tiny step out of this world and into the other world I was creating.

Some names were more important than others (as can be seen here, Topps had a numbering system that reflected a hierarchy of importance, the better players commanding the tens and the best players—such as number 400, Nolan Ryan—placed at the hundreds) but ultimately they were all of equal importance because they all were part of the Complete Set that I hoped to someday assemble. As suggested by the scant number of crudely filled-in boxes on this checklist, I never got anywhere near that imagined promised land, every box filled in, every name possessed, my own flimsy name gone, dissolved into gods.

Bucky Dent

2006-11-15T07:01:00.000-06:00

Here is the tragic figure of Bucky Dent, the mildly promising albeit light-hitting young Chicago White Sox shortstop who after being named to the Topps all-rookie team in 1975 was killed in a horrific wood chipper accident. Though some are of the opinion that this accident is a myth, and that Bucky Dent actually went on to play for several more years in the American League, at times even excelling as a power-hitter in key late season moments (a preposterous claim given his slight frame and complete lack of power-hitting skills), I offer as primary countering evidence the fact that this is the only Bucky Dent card in my entire collection, and if he had indeed played beyond this year the only way to explain his absence from my collection would be to say that I assiduously removed and destroyed any later Bucky Dent cards, as if for some reason the very sight of them caused me revulsion. But why on earth would I or anyone waste time doing something like that? Clearly, the stronger Bucky Dent theory is the one in which, tragically, Bucky Dent was thoroughly minced or possibly even pureed by a wood chipper before he was ever able to make any significant impact on major league baseball history or on the innocence of, say, a 10-year-old Red Sox fan in East Randolph, Vermont, on October 2, 1978.

Ed Herrmann

2006-11-14T08:11:00.000-06:00

Ed Herrmann looks to have just hit one into the gap. He will now toss the bat away and run with all his might. In his 11-year career, Ed Herrmann stole six bases and hit four triples, but even these meager testaments to the ability to move fast enough to capitalize on occasional freakish circumstances were far in the past at the time of this snapshot. All his might will still not make Ed Herrmann move very fast.

As I understand it, the type of baseball card that is generally worth the most money is the one in which a future superstar makes his first appearance: the rookie card. This 1979 Ed Herrmann card is from a set at the opposite end of that spectrum: a card showing a well-traveled, forgettable part-timer who has already played his last game. (Other examples of this shown previously on this site include, among others, thousand-yard-staring David Clyde and off-the-grid yeti Joe Wallis.) These would seem to me to be the more rare, hence more valuable, hobbyist specimens. They are, in a certain light, mistakes, in that a baseball card is not meant as a tribute to the season just past but rather as a companion for the current season. The proof of this principle is in the doctoring of the cards of players (such as Dave Cash and Reggie Jackson) who have switched to new teams just before the start of the season. If Topps went to such lengths to underscore the fact that Dave Cash, for example, was no longer a Phillie, you would think that they would also take similar pains to try to doctor Ed Herrmann out of the picture altogether.

But somehow, even though Ed Herrmann was released at the end of 1978, giving Topps plenty of time to stop the presses on the 1979 Ed Herrmann card, the 1979 Ed Herrmann card slipped through. Maybe only a few made it to the stores before quality control realized the error. Maybe the card is as rare as the 1952 Mickey Mantle card or even the 1909 Honus Wagner card. If so, the scarcity of the card has done nothing for its value among collectors—a cursory glance on Google shows the 1979 Ed Herrmann card selling for between 25 and 50 cents (compared to the Honus Wagner card, which is worth over a million dollars).

But I value this rare card, this beautiful mistake, for it has allowed Ed Herrmann one more moment of baseball life, that ball bounding into the gap with double written all over it for anyone with even below average speed. Unfortunately, as noted earlier, Ed Herrmann has speed even below below average. His expression here shows doubt, concern, even regret in the placement of his well-struck hit. He knows that he will be expected to end up on second base, and he knows that this is going to be a difficult if not impossible feat. He’ll probably get thrown out and have to lumber back to the dugout beneath the wilting gaze of incredulous fans and teammates alike. How could you have turned that success into failure, Ed Herrmann?

But then again, maybe he has a chance. That’s what this card that shouldn’t even exist in the first place says to me. If this card can exist, maybe the lumbering picture of doom upon it has a chance to beat the throw to second.

Maybe there’s hope for all us mathematically eliminated.

Haul ass, Ed Herrmann, haul ass.

Vicente Romo

2006-11-13T08:31:00.000-06:00

I have been staring at this Vicente Romo card for over an hour and I still don’t know where to start. With his giant head? With his puzzling pose, which seems to suggest any number of scenarios such as that he’s playing air piano or putting a hex on the opposition or leeringly blocking a ball girl from exiting the field? With the fact that by the time this card made its way to my 7-year-old hands in East Randolph, Vermont, Vicente Romo had already been released from the San Diego Padres?

The release is puzzling, due to the fact that Romo had been a fairly effective relief pitcher for some time—as the back of the card puts it in the customary caveman syntax of baseball card text, Romo was "one of club’s top firemen." I guess the lesson here is that no one really knows what’s going to happen from one day to the next. One minute you could be horsing around during one in a seemingly endless succession of yearly Topps photo shoots, and the next minute you could be packing up your locker.

When Romo was released, he had a perfectly even won-loss record of 31 and 31. He wasn’t that great, but he wasn’t that bad either. He had just completed a season in which he had gone 5 and 5, proving that he had mastered this kind of reliable albeit somewhat dubious consistency. But is there not a place for us Vicente Romo types who maybe don’t continuously find innovative ways to widen the profit streams of our employers a hundredfold but who also don’t accidentally burn company headquarters down after a negligently concluded cigarette break?

Well, apparently not. Romo did not latch on with another major league club in 1975. Perhaps word had gotten around that his best days were behind him. After all, he was 31 years old (a year for each win and for each loss), no longer young enough to be counted among the developing guys who might suddenly blossom into something better than what they were. He did not play in the majors in 1976, either, or in 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, or in the strike-marred season of 1981.

But in 1982 Vicente Romo returned. The incredible, improbable comeback of a man who had been out of the majors for exactly as long as he’d been in the majors was only slightly overshadowed by the fact that Romo finished the season with a 1 and 2 record. He vanished from whence he came when the season ended, and did not reappear on a major league roster in the next year, or the one after that, or the one after that, or ever. But even to this day there are those of us who believe that Vicente Romo will return once again to even his record and to prove that anything that is gone can return.

Vic Harris

2006-11-10T09:40:00.000-06:00

The first time I ever got drunk was in the very same dugout I’d staggered back to in a mob of my teammates at the tail end of the happiest moment of my childhood. It was three years later, the first spring I’d spent without playing baseball—without eating, drinking, and breathing baseball, without wearing the green cap of my little league team to bed and waking up thinking about baseball—since I’d been old enough for little league. In fact, it was my first spring without baseball since even before I’d entered little league, baseball becoming the center of my life when we’d moved to Vermont in 1974 and my brother had started little league and we’d both started collecting cards such as this one of the apparently good-natured baseball temp worker Vic Harris.

After four years of little league I’d played Babe Ruth league for a year and a half. The first year I rode the bench and once in a while during blowouts batted against what suddenly seemed to be grown men throwing a hundred miles an hour when they weren’t terrifying me with curveballs that hurtled toward my head before dropping harmlessly over the plate. After a while I just started bailing out of the batter’s box as soon as the pitch was thrown, even if it ended up being a soft, fluttering changeup two feet outside, tossed by the chuckling Larry-Bird-mustached fifteen-year-old on the mound who was wasting a pitch solely to highlight my abject cowardice.

The second year wasn’t much better, my only decent day at the plate during the entire season coming against the co-ed team of a Central Vermont town so infested by aging hippies and their sexually ambiguous offspring that we couldn’t tell which soft-tossing longhairs were the boys and which were the girls. Our coach that year was a minister of some sort of small, vaguely cultish church that he’d founded after becoming ordained through the mail. He had also been my coach my last two years of little league (his son Steve was on both teams), but since little league the church had grown into an entity capable of having constant small, vaguely cultish crises that demanded the coach’s immediate attention. In his absence we were "led" by a loud, easily distracted member of his congregation who had a huge black mountain-man beard and wore a railroad engineer’s cap, overalls, and mud-caked shitkickers to our games. He seemed to know very little about baseball.

I guess one of the things I liked about playing organized baseball was that it was organized. In a world of 1970s-colored uncertainty and blurred borders—the nucleus of which was the three-year experiment in open marriage by my parents and the guy who basically became my second father, Tom, which gave way to a prolonged period where my dad no longer lived with us but was still for reasons unknown to me married to my mom—I suppose I found solace in the fact that games started at a certain time on certain days and lasted a certain amount of innings, barring rain, snow, darkness, or ties, and that everything that happened during the game was theoretically marked down in a scorecard to become part of the comfortingly concrete world of statistics. In my second year of Babe Ruth this illusion of organization disintegrated, practices either cancelled or sparsely attended, games featuring several guys on my team dressed in jeans or even corduroys instead of baseball uniform pants, the bearded guy not only not marking anything down in a scorecard but most often not even sitting on the bench as we came undone in a shambling tornado of errors and strikeouts, instead in the parking lot working on one problem or another with his ancient piece-of-shit truck, which always seemed in danger of coughing up its last lung and leaving us stranded at the site of awful, unrelenting away-game losses. I don’t remember quitting halfway through the season but somehow I did. I guess somewhere during that last spring of baseball I had purchased that nonrefundable entropic realization that in life it’s frighteningly easy to just not show up.

Anyway, one night during my first spring without baseball, I ended up drinking from a two-liter jug of rum-spiked coke with a couple of friends in the little league dugout where I’d spent my first and only moments as a Home Run King. The brief, inexplicable triumph of that day seemed farther away to me when I was fifteen than it does to me now. Shocked by the smallness of the field, and particularly by the closeness of the outfield fence, I ached with the knowledge that I could never go back, that I couldn’t somehow transport my fifteen-year-old body and fifteen-year-old brain, which were both proving useless in their current milieu, into the past to rule a simpler, easier twelve-year-old world.

The ache dissolved into the feelings of my very first drunk, which began to announce itself as a slow motion floatiness while I was running with my friends from the dugout toward an older kid’s truck in the parking lot. We ended up riding around shitfaced and laughing and talking about girls’ tits for the rest of the night in the covered back of the truck, the bumps in the road seeming to lift me up into the air like I was an astronaut in zero gravity. It was one of the best feelings I’ve ever felt.

Yesterday, after writing about the happiest day of my childhood, I went to work and spent most of the day verifying that the written script for the audio directions of an online educational test matched the actual audio directions word for word. I found a handful of discrepancies—a word missing here, a sentence repeated there—and noted them with a date and my initials in an Excel spreadsheet. When I got home I drank a couple beers and watched some TV. This morning on my way to doing the same thing all over again I noticed some text on the back of this Vic Harris card that reads, among other things, "Vic is most comfortable at second base." As you can see by the "OF" (signifying "outfielder") in the upper right-hand corner of the card, the San Francisco Giants did not seem to care about providing Vic Harris with his maximum comfort. If I had a baseball card I guess the front-of-card identifier would read "PR" (for proofreader) while the back-of-the-card text would report that "Josh is most comfortable droning on at great length about the past and then going on long aimless walks." I doubt I would be able to muster the same good-natured albeit weary expression that Vic Harris is displaying. Having a job, for most of us anyway, means having your life split into two sides of a baseball card, hints of our deeper wishes on the back.

The first kid I knew who had a job was one of the friends I got drunk with that night at the little league dugout. He was a quiet, good-natured Vic Harris type, and for that and for another reason that I’ll get to in a second I’m going to call him Vic instead of his real name. Vic was not only the first kid I knew who had a job but also the first kid I knew who seemed to have his life split into a front side and back side, and the job seemed to have something to do with the split. He was a shy, soft-spoken, skinny kid who loved to draw and paint. I’d met him two years earlier while working on my one and only school play. I had a small role as Dr. Furbalow, a blowhard psychiatrist brought in by a family to talk to their daughter, who had been claiming to be friends with a Martian, and Vic had been cast as the sweet, wide-eyed, friendly Martian. Vic lived with his mother in a small apartment near the high school, his father nowhere around. He had a watch that he loved: when you pressed a button, it played "Hey Jude." And he had a job at a small advertising company in town run by a man named Fred Hill. Years after it would have done Vic any good, Fred Hill was imprisoned on charges (if memory serves) of child molestation and child pornography. He got boys to have sex with one another and filmed it.

The night I discovered drunkenness, I asked Vic what he did at his job. The booze was making us spill all sorts of secrets all over the back of the truck, but to this question Vic grew even more reticent than he usually was.

"Oh, you know. I sweep up and stuff," was all he would say.

We kept drinking and watching the road unspool behind us and floating up into the air with the bumps.

Hank Aaron

2006-11-09T06:40:00.000-06:00

The happiest moment of my childhood came during a game between my little league team, the Mets, and the usually dominant Yankees, coached by aforementioned future convicted pederast Mick Lewis. Mick’s Yankees had won the league title the first three years I’d been in little league while my team had gone 9–6, 6–9, and 6–9, two of the losses each year horrific blowouts at the hands of the Yankees. There was no such thing as a mercy rule back then, so they beat the shit out of us until it got too dark to see, final scores usually somewhere in the neighborhood of 37–2.

Mick was revered as a great teacher of the game. His team was always getting the jump on everybody else, having preseason training camps inside gymnasiums during those neverending weeks in Vermont when the calendar says spring but snow and freezing rain keep pounding down. Mick was dedicated, even umpiring all the games his team wasn’t playing in, which probably also allowed him to probe for weaknesses among the opposition. Contrary to the cliched image of the dominant, red-faced, win-at-all-costs little league dictator, Mick was actually quite soft-spoken and mild, though he also was able to carry an air of authority about him. All the kids who weren’t on his team wished they were.

But the real key to his success, at least in the commonly held view, which mixed admiration with envy, was that unlike other little league managers who just picked names out of a hat when it came time to draft new 8-year-olds every year, Mick "scouted." I was never exactly sure what this scouting entailed, but of course it creeps me out to recall my vague conception of it: Mick pulling up to playgrounds and parking, his car idling as he looked out from beneath his cool flip-down sunglasses in hopes of spotting some "natural talent." And of course it creeps me out even further to remember that on numerous occasions I'd wished that I’d been one of his "finds."

Anyway, in my fourth year, which would turn out to be another 6–9 trudge for the Mets, Mick’s team suddenly got terrible, though somehow even this got framed in professional-seeming terms, the Yankees "rebuilding" instead of just sucking. I guess Mick’s scouting had temporarily failed him. Who knows, maybe he had tried to break certain habits for a while, vowing to himself to stay away from playgrounds. All I know is we finally got our chance to kick their ass. The happiest moment of my childhood occurred during the first of these whuppings.

I hit a ball over the leftfield fence.

In my little league, to hit a home run was to become a made man. Every year, only a handful of guys managed it, each of them instantly becoming little league famous. My hallowed older brother had hit two in his final year on the Mets two years earlier, but since he was a lot bigger and better than me at sports and since I wore glasses (nobody who hit home runs wore glasses) I always assumed such a thing was beyond my reach. Though I was an OK hitter for batting average, I’d never even hit a ball off the fence. But I guess that at-bat against the sucking Yankees provided the perfect storm—a straight medium-fast pitch right down the middle from a talented but spindly 8-year-old, Mike LaRoque, a good swing by me, and about an inch clearance both over the chain-link leftfield fence and to the right of the short metal foul pole. The more mythic little league heroes pounded their homers into the river a hundred feet beyond the centerfield fence, but so what? If I knew anything from my baseball cards it was that a home run was a home run.

I remember not really understanding what had happened until I saw the first-base ump circling his finger in the air, the sign for the runner to "touch them all." I staggered around the bases with a huge dumb grin on my face, and at home plate all my teammates mobbed me.

We pounded the Yankees so badly that I came up again that same inning. As I was about to dig in for the first pitch I heard someone calling to me from the shadows behind the chicken wire covering the opposing dugout. It was Mick.

"Josh," Mick said. "Hey, Josh." I turned toward the Yankee dugout.

"No batter here, right, Josh?" Mick said, showing me his in-joke, only-for-the-made-guys smile.

I promptly popped out to the second baseman, ending the inning.

In Pagan Kennedy’s new novel, Confessions of a Memory Eater, a disgruntled 40-year-old history professor experiments with a new drug that allows him to return with total clarity to any moment in his past. I have no doubt that if I ever got a chance to use this drug my first stop would be the day I hit a home run. I'd start the memory as I was walking to the plate and end it before my next at-bat, before my name was on Mick Lewis's tongue, before my life of mostly popping out to second base resumed. I'd end it with me stomping on home plate as my teammates laughed and screamed and pummeled me.

In other words, I'd go back to the one slim beautiful moment when I was somehow miraculously Hank Fucking Aaron.

Bob Davis: Part 4 of 4

2006-11-07T05:58:00.000-06:00

"People are gonna tell you you’re no good. Don’t listen." – Jack Kelson to Nick Kelson, American Heart (dir. Martin Bell)

I laughed off Basheer’s advice, politely took my institutional ass-reaming at the judicial, waited a day or two, then when summoned went to see the campus dean, Jacqueline Smethurst, to hear the verdict. She told me I was expelled. I stood up to leave.

"Where do you think you’re going?" Jacqueline Smethurst exclaimed incredulously. "I’m not done with you.

"Sit down," she ordered.

I sat down.

I wish I didn’t but I did. I hesitated a little, I think, but basically when she said sit down I sat down. Bruce Springsteen’s "Growin’ Up" this isn’t.

Many years of sitting down when asked to sit down went by. In 1999, I moved into a cabin in the woods of northern Vermont. The cabin had no electricity, no running water, a small woodstove for heat, and a big plastic lime-coated barrel for my excrement. I’d found an ad for the cabin-for-rent in a laundromat just as I was realizing that the living situation that I’d recently arranged was going to entail sharing space in a very narrow house with a friendless, jobless man who believed a local health food restaurant was trying to poison him and who began to glare at me with the same vengeful resentment he reserved for his suspected poisoners after I declined his creepily doe-eyed offer to take me to a dowsing convention. In other words, I didn’t enter into My Year in the Woods with quite the same idealistic purposefulness as Thoreau.

But it did appeal to me. I was a fan of Thoreau, after all, and also I guess I hoped the move might stem the slow erosion of meaning in my life. I wanted to live within an adventure. I wanted to once and for all finally figure out The Answer, to have it crashingly bloom in my mind in a spectacular epiphany, and like all addicts of this illusion of future enlightenment I was drawn to the idea that if I could just get away from all the snares of the world I might be able to finally understand the sound of one hand clapping. Or, to switch koans, when that fucking tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it, I’d be there to hear it. I’d be no one, nothing but light, and so I would know whether or not that falling tree makes a sound, and the answer would free me finally to a life of calm, clear-eyed bliss.

My friend Charles sent me off to my year of solitary purity with a gag gift of a battery-powered television about the size of two decks of cards. I ended up going through a lot of batteries that year, the television one of my links to the life I could not let go of. I’m not talking about not being able to let go of a connection to the news of the world or to pop culture, but rather not being able to let go of my vices, those little tics and repetitions and brain-numbings that allow me to cross the expanse of a day.

Another vice I cultivated had to do with a small orange plastic propeller toy, also a gift from Charles. You use both your hands to spin the stem of the propeller and it flies through the air for fifteen or twenty feet. It’s the type of thing that a normal person might try a couple times before moving on with their lives, but during my year in the woods I created a golf-like game that involved trying to hit a series of trees around the cabin with the flying propeller in the fewest "strokes" possible. Then, reverting to a practice that devoured huge tracts of empty time in my childhood, I populated the game with an ever-growing catalog of intricately conceived imaginary personalities revered by millions of imaginary fans for their prowess in the hallowed, physically taxing, mentally punishing, spiritually grueling sport of Twirly Propeller.

Instead of writing the novel that ulcerously festered inside me unsaid, or taking assiduous egoless note of the natural phenomena all around me, or resolving to pretzel my stiff, inflexible body into a straight-spined lotus position and chant sutras until the top of my head split open to guzzle nirvana, I enacted Twirly Propeller tournament after Twirly Propeller tournament, each a grueling marathon with several elimination rounds that gradually built to the breathless white-knuckle tension of the Championship Match. I kept in my head the entire history of the sport, all the single-match, yearly, and lifetime records, all the famous rises and falls, all the improbable limping heroic Comebacks from Complete Oblivion. It’s all gone now, of course, that world I Godded. I left that cabin a year after I’d arrived, packing out everything I’d packed in except a very full barrel of shit.

But anyway, finally, here is Bob Davis with a big wad of tobacco in his right cheek. My final time-wasting pursuit in the cabin was to occasionally randomly select and study a baseball card from the collection of mine that had been recently unearthed during the emptying of my family’s storage unit. This card was one of the first and for some reason among the most haunting of my random selections. I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe it’s because Bob Davis’s expression seems like that of a man who’s trying to remain cheerful in spite of the tiny constant ringing noise that’s made his sanity into a thin, fraying, tightly stretched rubber band. Or maybe it’s because of the clammy gray catacomb-like background, such a stark contrast to the overwhelmingly predominate baseball card backdrop of blue sky as to suggest something about Bob Davis’s extremely peripheral, ogre-like isolation on the far fringes of major league baseball. Or maybe it’s because of the discovery I made that Bob Davis shares my birthday.

The impact of that last discovery was initially jarring because of the implication that I was in some deep, psychic way connected to the man shown here clinging to the thin pleasure of his tobacco cyst as if the faint buzz it provides is a small fragment of a shipwreck on the wide sea. Such a connection made sense in a lot of ways, really, especially in light of the fact that I probably followed the discovery of Bob Davis’s birthday by clinging to one of my own jagged shards of driftwood, maybe authoring some third round Greater Omaha Open Twirly Propeller action, maybe watching insect-sized Jennifer Aniston and insect-sized David Schimmer cavort across my tiny TV screen until that horrible, inevitable moment when the batteries died.

But a secondary impact of the discovery has crept up on me in the following years. I wonder more and more why it took me until I was a thirty-two-old man shitting in a barrel in the woods to find out that there was a Cardboard God who shared my birthday. I’d always believed that as a child I’d spent hour upon hour scrutinizing every detail of every card. But this is obviously not so. Even my baseball cards are strangers. Even my childhood is expelling me.

Maybe life is just a series of expulsions. You get expelled, you start to rise and move onto the next thing, and then something like doubt starts in, a voice aiming to corrode, to diminish.

Where do you think you’re going?

Sit down.

I’m not done telling you all the things you don’t know, all the many ways you’re powerless.

For 38 years I’ve sat back down. From here on out I say Suck my fucking dick.

I’m standing up.

Larry Milbourne: Part 3 of 4

2006-11-06T06:58:00.000-06:00

Here is Larry Milbourne with a big wad of tobacco in his left cheek. Larry Milbourne had the first game-winning hit in Seattle Mariners history, doubling home pinch-runner Jose Baez in the bottom of the ninth of the team’s second game ever.

This career highlight found an oddly discordant, bittersweet echo several years later when Milbourne’s career as an itinerant switch-hitting utility infielder came to a close. In the last game of the 1984 season, the aging Milbourne, called on to pinch hit with no outs in the 7th inning of a game the Mariners were losing 4–2, came through just as he had when he’d been younger, lacing a double to centerfield.

Unfortunately, the pinch-runner this time, Darnell Coles, was gunned down at home on the play. Having pinch-hit for the catcher, Milbourne must have known as he stood out there at 2nd base that this was it for him for the year. No taking the field the next inning, no more at-bats later in the game. But I wonder if it occurred to him, loitering with one foot up on the bag between pitches, Spike Owen and Jack Perconte his only hope for prolonging his present moment of baseball life (which is like having a sheet of notebook paper and a mesh tank-top as your only hope against stopping a bullet), that this might be it for good. Not only for the inning, not only for the game, not only for the season, but forever.

My guess is probably not. Though he never did play in another game, the date of an item from the transaction section of Larry Milbourne’s page on baseball-reference.com—"August 2, 1985: Released by the Seattle Mariners."—suggests that at the end of 1984 Milbourne probably still had hopes of living a while longer in the blue sky realm of the Cardboard Gods.

I guess it’s hard to know when you’re doomed. In the spring of 1985, as a new season was getting underway, Milbourne probably still thought he’d get the call one more time. Likewise, during that very same spring, I was thinking I still had a chance to avoid expulsion going into that judicial hearing I mentioned a couple days ago in extremely loose conjunction with Gordy Pladson. I even thought I had a chance after listening politely to the red-faced math teacher’s enraged litany of my transgressions. But it was directly before the hearing that it would have really behooved me to realize I was doomed, so as to open myself up to the possibilities that such a realization would have created.

My character witness/stoner friend Matt and I arrived early to the judicial and were standing outside the building in the dark, I guess waiting for the weasel-faced faculty member who had caught me smoking bong hits to finish giving his testimony, and this hulking pock-faced Middle Eastern student, Basheer, whose nickname was Bashit, shambled out of the shadows. I remember thinking that it was a strange time for a student to be walking around. Probably it was "study hours," where you’re either supposed to be quietly studying in your room or quietly studying at the library, with no movement from one to the other allowed.

It was not unheard of, of course, to break these rules (in fact it was during study hours that the bong session leading to my bust had occurred), but it was customary to accompany any rule-breaking with a tense, giggly, whispering, hunted sense that rules were being broken, that risks were being taken. If I and not Basheer had been the one to emerge out of the shadows, for example, I would have been moving quickly, shiftily, my eyes darting around and nervous snickering leaking from my clenched teeth like steam from a cracked radiator. But the big foreigner had an air of complete nonchalance as he walked halfway past us and then, noticing with mild pleasure that there were others out and about, sauntered over to us.

"What the fuck are you two shitheads doing here?" he bellowed. He had an accent that made "the" and "shitheads" sound like "thee" and "sheetheads." I probably cringed, rabbit-like, at the volume of his voice. He pulled out and lit a cigarette (another rule broken) as I gravely murmured to him what was going on, that I was about to go into a hearing that would decide my future. He took a long drag, eyeing me, before finally replying.

"Listen to me," he said, his voice still booming. "You must fucking do as I say. You must go in there. You must go in there and tell them. " He took another long drag, his eyes boring into mine.

As I waited to hear more, a nervous prep-school snicker escaped me.

"Tell them what?" I finally asked.

He exhaled slowly and flicked his cigarette butt off into the darkness. He knew Spike Owen and Jack Perconte were not going to keep the inning alive. He knew 1985 wasn’t my year. He drew closer.

"You must go in there," he said quietly. "And you must tell them.

"To suck. Your fucking. Dick."

Mitch Cohen: Intermission

2006-11-04T08:06:00.000-06:00

I will return soon to my hard-hitting four-part exposé on wads of chewing tobacco in the right or left cheeks of journeymen baseballers and the morose tangents of remembered adolescent alienation the images of these brown-spitting baseballers inexplicably inspire, but an email from a friend convinced me that it might not be a bad idea if I take a day or two to . . . "rest." In honor of this decision, I am posting a photo of the harrowing Mitch Cohen album that carries the same title as my friend's email to me. The contents of said email are as follows:

"I must say, Joshua, that your blog is making me a bit uncomfortable lately.

"No, no, it's very interesting. No, the writing is uniformly excellent, and it's quite funny, and consistently entertaining as well.

"We're just all a little worried about y....well, what ever happened to that nice therapist you were starting to go see?

"I never even heard of Grady Paulson [sic]. But this multi-installment updating of 'A Seperate Peace,' or 'Lord of The Flies' or 'Take your pick of ANY disturbing piece of fiction dealing with savage, remorseless, entitled, boarding school students, the institutions themselves, the employees, the "traditions," the behavior of the students, and their travails' (huff-puff) has been leaving me with a nausea-inducing taste of vomit caking the inside of my gullet.

"I think you maybe, uh, could, uh, benefit from maybe, uh, speaking with someone.

"After rambling on about this hellish prep school you also never got back to Grady Paulson [sic], though I guess that's not really such a loss."

"Just a little worried is all, pal."

Gordy Pladson: Part 2 of 4

2006-11-03T05:33:00.000-06:00

Here is Gordy Pladson with a big wad of tobacco in his right cheek. The wad may be contributing to his genial mouth-breather facial expression, which seems to combine with the slightly capitulatory set of his shoulders and the somehow flaccid, Edselesque sound of the words "Gordy Pladson" to create a portrait of a guy born to placidly groove fat pitches and surrender leads.

All I can tell you besides that about Gordy Pladson is that he was Canadian. The first Canadian I met was at the boarding school I started telling you about in conjunction with Bob Bailor. It was this kid in my dorm who told everyone his name was Jason but whose real name, it turned out, was Dirk. Since he’d hidden the real name, it immediately became a means of derision. Hey, Dirk. What’s up, Dirk. His Canadianness was also fair game. I wish I could say that since I was primarily an awkward failure at that school that I refrained from making fun of other people’s shortcomings and weak spots but in fact it seems the opposite was true. There was a tradition in my dorm, Wilson Hall, of giving good-natured gag gifts to one another at a ceremony near Christmas. The dorm parents, the Schwingles, talked glowingly of past examples of gifts that perfectly fit this bill, such as when the proud Wilson Hallite Buster Olney presented Saul Bellow’s son, Dan, with a gift of an elaborate mock "Wide World of Sports" recap, complete with stirring music, simulated crowd noises, and apoplectic fake broadcasters (Buster providing the screams of both the play-by-play announcer and color commentator), of the eccentric Dan’s spastic performance at the start of the annual school-wide distance run known as the Pie Race. Sweet gentle teasing from a future nationally known baseball columnist to the son of a world famous author. Perfect. But though this gift only predated my arrival at the school by three years, it seemed to have come from a different time when Wilson Hall was full of famous offspring and bright young men with excellent posture and clear-eyed visions of useful, exciting futures. By contrast, the dorm in my senior year primarily became a place where drug busts occurred. Anyway, one year for the Christmas gift exchange I drew Jason-Dirk and responded by creating a mean-spirited, humorless "Dumb Canadian" joke book, which I read aloud in front of everybody while Jason-Dirk’s stiff grin gradually eroded from interior structural damage.

But we were friends, Jason-Dirk and I. I mean, I wasn’t always an asshole. We talked, laughed together. I don’t know, I guess there was a compulsion at that place to look for weakness and seize on it. It was especially good if the mockery could be done anonymously. There was this one prank invented by two cooler kids in our dorm that my friend Bill and I took over when one of them dropped out of school and the other lost interest. It involved kneeling by the window of our dorm room and waiting for a girl from the neighboring dorm to walk by below. We’d shout at them—"Hey! Hey!!!"—and then as they started to look up, a half-smile of expectation on their face, we’d dive down out of sight and unpause the boombox that we’d set up in the window and Elvis Presley would scream down "You ain’t nuthin’ but a hound dog!" Jesus Christ, imagine if your daughter had to hear something like that while crossing that intimidating campus? But we screamed with laughter, spasming on the floor like boated fish. Jason-Dirk was a big fan of this prank, I remember.

As it turned out, both Jason-Dirk and one of the hound-dog girls—by coincidence, she actually was sort of pooch-faced—were members of what they called the "judicial" that heard my case after I, while on probation for being plastered on rum at a dance, got caught smoking bong hits in my dorm room. It was up to the judicial to decide if I deserved to stick around a few more weeks until graduation. I’d actually asked Jason-Dirk to be my character witness, and he’d declined, saying he could help more "on the inside," but during the judicial he didn’t say a word and didn’t ever even look me in the eye. Most of the proceeding was comprised of one of the judicial’s faculty members, a red-faced math teacher who was sitting directly to my right, angrily berating me for being a pathetic fuckup, an embarrassment to the school.

"My friends like me," I replied at one point, lamely, as if my relationship with the small group of guys I smoked pot with was going to contribute to the greater glory of the school. I think I also noted that I briefly had a radio show on the campus station.

Bob Bailor: Part 1 of 4

2006-11-02T06:41:00.000-06:00

Here is Bob Bailor with a big wad of tobacco in his left cheek. Bailor was acquired by the Blue Jays in the glorious ritual of detritus-sifting known as the expansion draft. Just prior to an expansion draft, the established teams in a league reserve all the players they want and haul a couple peripheral guys out to the curb like one of them is a milk crate full of burnt-out Christmas lights and the other’s a knobless television with a "FREE" sign taped to the screen.

In fact, Bailor was the very first pick of the Blue Jays in the 1976 expansion draft, the best of the entire flea market heap except for Ruppert Jones, who was the first pick of the other expansion team, the coin-flip-winning Seattle Mariners. This photo, adorned with the rookie-team trophy, shows Bailor just after he has ridden the slow, low-tide, styrofoam boogie-board wave of expansion draft acceptance to a mildly successful season, the utility man somehow amassing enough bloop singles to hit .310, a mark he would never again come close to. The faintly troubled expression on his face seems to imply that he may on some level understand that his best days are already behind him.

He did stick around for several more years, however. Not that I noticed at the time, having loosened my grip on the Cardboard Gods, but by 1983 he was still barnicled to the leaky hull of some lousy team or other when I followed in the footsteps of my brother and went away at age 15 to Northfield Mount Hermon, a boarding school in western Massachusetts. This change for me was severe. One day I was the sole inhabitant of a rural, socially retarded kingdom of daydreams, solitaire Strat-o-matic baseball, and WKRP in Cincinnati-based masturbation, and the next day I was stiffly traversing a rolling green campus of solemn ivied buildings and sharp-witted upper-middle-class Izod-clad sophisticates in Spandau Ballet haircuts who had long ago lost their virginity on the sunsplashed decks of Nantucket sailboats. Initially, my only way of dealing with the terror of the situation was to seize hold of the strong resemblance I had at that time to my brother. You’re just like your brother, I was told repeatedly, often as a filler for the uncomfortable silences that seemed to follow me around like a force field.

I wasn’t crazy about being an echo, but I think I realized that being an echo was better than being nothing at all, especially if it was the echo of the brother I had always idolized. He had done well at the school, or so I thought, playing on the varsity basketball team, acing English papers, serving as an official Student Leader of his dorm. Years later, I found out he carried an ineffably deep loathing of the memory of himself at that school. During his two years there, he had forced his unruly collection of adolescent hurt, yearning, and anger inside the borders of a desperate impersonation of a well-adjusted high-achieving paragon of old-money virtue. So it turns out I was impersonating an impersonation, and probably the thinness of such an endeavor is part of whatever gnawed at me from the inside out at that school.

I gradually moved from mimicking a mimic to my second and final way of dealing with my identity or lack thereof at the boarding school: inebriation. It’s tempting to identify the first step along this path (which ultimately led to my expulsion) as the night some 18-year-old classmate got a ride with a day student across the border into Vermont to buy booze and some friends and I all got ecstatically smashed. But actually my first experience with a substance-caused rush at the school was earlier than that, and it was with Bob Bailor’s drug of choice, chewing tobacco. My friend Bill and I tried some Copenhagen one night at the library during "study hours" and it made us stumble around and giggle and nearly vomit. Bill, perhaps with an eye toward one day bridging the wide chasm that seemed to divide us from the hundreds of dazzlingly pretty girls of the campus, didn’t cultivate the nauseating habit, but for some reason I did, at least for a couple years. That first year of the lip-bulging, cup-full-of-brown-spit vice must have been the most disgusting to onlookers, in large part because I still wore braces.

Bill Lee

2006-10-31T11:22:00.000-06:00

Unlike most Red Sox hurlers, Bill Lee was good at beating the Yankees. Keenly aware of this, Mickey Rivers and Graig Nettles conspired during a wild 1976 Red Sox-Yankees bench-clearing brawl to ambush Lee and rip his pitching arm out of its shoulder socket. He struggled the next couple of years for the Red Sox and in December 1978 the team, with the blessing of manager Don Zimmer, who hated and was hated by the nonconformist lefty, shipped Lee to the Expos for Stan "Little Papi" Papi, who proceeded to hit a Stan Papiesque .188 for the Red Sox while Lee turned in a classic "fuck you, Red Sox" year, going 16–10 with a 3.04 ERA. His major league career came to an end in 1982 when his one-game walkout to protest the release of teammate Rodney Scott resulted in the Expos showing him the same door they showed Rodney Scott.

My Vermont childhood was coming toward a close around that time. My brother was away at boarding school (rooming with our friend from the Randolph Center days, Buster Olney), and the house adults, Mom and Tom, had both long-since given up on their dream of hippie grow-your-own-food self-sufficiency and had gotten regular full-time jobs, which made the house feel even emptier than it already might have in the glaring absence of my brother. In a couple years we three remainders would all go our separate ways, and maybe on some level we all knew the separation was coming. Maybe that’s why we took our only trip as a threesome around then, a gray weekend visit to Montreal. I can only remember that there didn’t seem to be very much to do on that trip. It was like life in general for me during that twilight time, as if the distractions that had wallpapered over the void for most of my childhood were dissolving.

We wandered the streets, ate in a restaurant where you ordered in French, sat around the hotel, and, in the one gleaming highlight, went to a documentary, which as far as I know was never released in the U.S., about Bill Lee. Here he was in all his glory, talking about sprinkling marijuana on his pancakes, cursing Don Zimmer for his beady-eyed, self-righteous, slow-witted devotion to traditional thinking, lauding meditation as a way to take a snapshot of your mind at any moment, and blaming the chronic back problems that besieged Americans on the fact that we, unlike the more enlightened Japanese, were slavishly devoted to the con game of chairs. With his bushy Expos-era beard and his good-natured motormouth communist rantings, he seemed like one of Mom and Tom’s friends from the old days of the hippie pot-luck suppers and the moonlight brandy-sipping cross-country ski outings.

It makes sense to me that Bill Lee ended up settling post-career in Vermont, maybe the only major leaguer to ever have done so. Not only was it the midpoint between his two major league stops, it was also a land where a bearded iconoclastic weirdo could chairlessly sprinkle marijuana on his pancakes in rustic peace. It makes even more sense that when the Red Sox finally ended their sufferings in 2004 they did so in part by creating a reverse image of their dubious treatment of Lee, acquiring a certain pitcher from Montreal, who though otherwise extremely effective was generally undone by the Yankees, and who in a wild 2003 Yankees-Red Sox brawl deftly hoisted Yankee bench coach Don Zimmer on his own foolish petard. Lee, as usual, was not at a loss for words when asked to comment on Pedro Martinez’s terse deflection of the onrushing Zimmer: "Maybe it knocked some sense into him. It’s pretty hard to grab a bowling ball by the ears. What amazes me is that he didn’t bounce. I would have been sure he was full of helium." One short year later, my brother and I were screaming our voices raw at the happiest parade since VJ Day.

In closing, and apropos of nothing except maybe as a tribute to the way William Francis Spaceman Lee was always spilling over with raw irrational illogical life, I’d just like to add that the back of this card features a space-filling cartoon with a caption that reads as follows: "Pete LaCock is a son of television personality Peter Marshall." It is not the first instance of a major leaguer changing a surname from something potentially offensive, such as Marshall, to something completely immune to mockery, such as LaCock. In the late-1930s a man who had been born John Oscar Dicksus played under the name Johnny Dickshot. If you don't believe me, you can view his "stage name" and career numbers by clicking here. You'll also find a listing of his given name and be able to see that Johnny Dickshot’s nickname was "Ugly."

Gerald Henderson

2006-10-30T15:01:00.000-06:00

"Reckon no man happy till you see the day he crosses the river that severs life from death, unscathed by woe."
– Sophocles, Oedipus the King

The general store in East Randolph didn’t sell basketball cards, so I’m not sure where I got this 1981 Gerald Henderson card that I’m posting in honor of the passing of Henderson’s onetime boss, the great Red Auerbach. I do know that 1981 was the year I first experienced what it was like to root for a championship team. I had been only vaguely aware of the Celtics championship in 1976, but by 1981 I had started playing "organized" (explanation for the quotation marks below) basketball myself and listening late into the night through heavy static to Johnny Most’s shovel-on-concrete voice turn Celtics games into battles of tough and beleaguered good versus filthy cheating evil.

In 1981 my own 8th grade basketball team was horrifically bad. Most of our pummelings at the hands of other Central Vermont squads were punctuated by my glasses getting raked off my face by somebody’s swinging elbow. After a few of these incidents my frames inevitably broke and from then on each spectacles-related game-stoppage entailed both of my lenses dislodging from the frames and skittering across the floor. The ref eventually blew his whistle and members of both teams got down on their knees to locate the frame and lenses for me, at which point I’d then go to the bench and wrap some more nerdifying adhesive tape around them while my coach, the much-beloved community icon Mick Lewis, who would years later be imprisoned for molesting players on his consistently dominant little league team, rubbed his eye sockets with the heels of his hand in the manner of someone with a migraine.

(Luckily, I was never a victim of his molestations, which I attribute in part to my ineptitude. I say this because the kid in my grade who claimed that he went camping with Mick and woke up to find the coach fellating him—a claim we all dismissed as impossible, the creation of a bald-faced liar—was an excellent athlete, and also because the one time Mick did do something to me that felt a little odd was right after I’d somehow miraculously scored two baskets in a row. Mick subbed for me after the second of these baskets, sat down next to me on the bench, and as play resumed told me what a good job I’d done and gave my thigh two unusually long and, well, ardent squeezes. Fortunately, I never came close to repeating my unprecedented scoring rampage.)

Anyway, when I wasn’t continuing my lifelong study of how it feels to lose, I was rooting for the Celtics, and they were winning. Let me tell you, it felt pretty fucking good to back a winner for once. So here’s to Red Auerbach, who sagely snatched Gerald Henderson out of the oblivion of something called the Western League (there’s a cartoon on the back of this card of, for some reason, some generic white guy who’s supposed to be Henderson holding a trophy that says "MVP WEST. LEAG") in 1979 to back up the aging wizard Tiny Archibald. With Henderson’s help, the Celtics nabbed the 1981 title. Three years later in a Finals matchup against a favored Lakers team that just seemed too fast and too good for the Celtics, Henderson executed the most important play in the history of his storied franchise—a last-second steal and layup—to help the Celts begin to turn the tide against the Lakers and win another title. That offseason Auerbach traded Henderson for a draft pick that the Celtics would, in 1986, after yet another championship, use to draft the apparent can’t-miss superstar Lenny Bias. It looked to be one more in a long line of sweet deals orchestrated by the maestro of 16 NBA crowns, but of course Bias overdosed while freebasing cocaine on his very first night as a Celtic. Auerbach wept when he heard the news. This past Saturday as the greatest team builder who ever lived was taking his last breaths, I was at a Bob Dylan concert, and some words I heard sung that night in a Sophoclean Johnny Most growl occur to me now: "No man, no woman knows/the hour that sorrow will come."

Rest in peace, Red. I guess losing is inevitable. But thank you for letting me know what it felt like, at least vicariously, at least temporarily, to be a winner.