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Dave Heaverlo

February 4, 2010

Heaverlo, normally a blithe spirit, who shaves his head and wears rubber noses, was disconsolate.

That sentence, which would make a great first line in a short story, perhaps one about a circus employee with suicidal ideations, was a part of the April 22, 1980, sports page of Washington’s Ellensberg Daily Record. Dave Heaverlo, a native of Ellensberg, dominated the sports page of his hometown paper that day, showing up not only in the recap of the Mariners game he had lost the night before (and which presumably caused the temporary moratorium on the brandishing of rubber noses) but also in a feature story titled “Dave Heaverlo: Glad to Be Out of Oakland” and in a large photograph in which his notoriously clean-shaven dome is being rubbed by an unidentified teammate.

When I was a kid, Dave Heaverlo definitely barged deeper into my consciousness than a journeyman reliever for distant second division teams otherwise might have, mostly due to his last name, which for reasons I can no longer fully access always made me laugh. “Heave” is kind of a funny word already. People heaved up their breakfast sometimes. Grizzled hurlers with spare-tire midriffs heaved easily sluggable meatballs toward the plate. And then you add the “her low” to heave, and, well, I don’t know. I guess you had to be there. My brother would probably understand. In other words, Dave Heaverlo is one of the select Cardboard Gods, an ineffable inside joke between me and my brother and possibly shared, though I can’t say this with any certainty, with other kids who found him in packs of cards and laughed.

I never knew he shaved his head, because he always wore a cap in cards, and I wasn’t observant enough to notice that, as in this 1977 card, the total absence of hair (besides eyebrows and the cop mustache) below the cap suggested that some information on the back of the card (“Nickname is ‘Kojak’”) was not there because Heaverlo enjoyed solving gritty New York City crimes while sucking on lollipops. 

Oh, how I want to pause for a while and talk about Telly Savalas. There was no better decade than the 1970s! When else in the history of humankind could such a man, with a pear-shaped body, sloping shoulders, and liver-spotted, child-frightening head, become a famed sex symbol? But there is no time. I’m already running late for work and want to say a couple more things about Heaverlo.

First, the shaved head. The 1970s were renowned in baseball history for various grooming innovations, most notably for the first appearances of mustaches on major league diamonds since before Ty Cobb started gashing guys’ shins with his sharpened cleats, and for the Afros that began bulging out from under caps, but in both of those cases baseball was trailing behind trends in the wider culture. When Heaverlo shaved off all his hair, no one else was really doing it, except Telly Savalas. Heaverlo deserves some credit for that, I think.

I wonder if his iconoclastic tendencies hurt his career. In the edition of the Ellensberg paper quoted above, it is reported that in the spring Heaverlo “wouldn’t let his hair grow out until [A's owner Charlie] Finley traded him.” The 1970s came full cycle in that situation, as it was Finley who played a huge part in the hair explosion earlier in the decade, when he encouraged players to grow facial hair (first doing it to coax a bearded, attention-seeking Reggie Jackson into losing the beard, then backing the encouragement with monetary rewards when the mustaches proved to be good for publicity). Heaverlo’s bald-man-alone stance did get him out of Oakland, but in the following season, according to another Heaverlo-heavy edition of the Ellensberg Daily Record, he was having trouble finding a team to employ him. This seems odd given Heaverlo’s decent stats and reputation for being able to pitch often and tirelessly. Maybe his head-shaving ways had gotten him a reputation as a troublemaker. I don’t know. But it seems odd to me that a guy who could still get outs had to struggle to find work. He did make a few appearances that season, with Oakland, of all teams, so maybe there wasn’t any attempt to steer clear of him. But his ERA in ‘81 was below 2, and after that season he was restricted to the minors for a couple years and then out of organized ball altogether. I don’t know why, but it seems that major league teams, or big businesses in general, don’t really like the wearers of rubber noses. And now I’m a little disconsolate, too, and late for work besides, me and my conventional hair and humorless nose.

Posted in Dave Heaverlo, San Francisco Giants, by Josh Wilker | 25 Comments »

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Joe Wallis

February 2, 2010

Joe Wallis made his first appearance on Cardboard Gods early on, thirty or so cards into the imposing task of writing about every card that ever came into my hands as a child (and some cards that have found their way to me since then). I often miss those early days of—what should I call it? The project? The compulsion? The flowering of mental illness? Anyway, I miss it, even as I realize that I’m prone to romanticizing anything as long as it belongs to the past. When I was just starting to write regularly about my baseball cards, the touch of childhood was still crackling on the surface of the cardboard.

I’ve been reading J.D. Salinger stories the last few days, and many of them center on the threshold between childhood and adulthood. In Salinger’s fictional worlds, childhood holds life and liveliness and imagination and unaffected sincerity, while adulthood offers nothing but fakery and the keeping up of appearances and the cruelty embedded in social hierarchies. Many of the stories reveal Salinger’s stinging, sardonic masterpiece, The Catcher in the Rye, to be, by comparison, his most hopeful work. In Holden Caulfield, Salinger found a lasting, if compellingly tenuous, bridge between the worlds of childhood and adulthood. In the short stories, on the other hand, there are no lasting bridges, only harrowing gaps. The man (“see more glass”) in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” can’t endure life on the adult side of that gap; Eloise in “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” seems ruined by the gap, too; the narrator in “The Laughing Man” survives, but his childhood on the yonder side of the gap does not. “For Esmé with Love and Squalor” offers a hint of a bittersweet bridge across the gap, in the form of the story itself, which is a loving stretch across the gap by a traumatized veteran to a young girl who stands alone among the uncorrupted entities of the world. Holden is more than the hint of a bittersweet bridge, of course. He’s a living and breathing bad-postured avatar that millions have poured themselves into as if into a second skin, and it’s because he bridges that universally felt gap between childhood and adulthood in a way that feels truer to that element of the human experience than any artistic creation ever has.

When I opened up the box of baseball cards from my childhood and started writing about them, I was trying to follow Holden’s footsteps and bridge that gap, and in those first few weeks, there was an immediate charge in the cards as I held them. But everything gets old, especially rituals, so sometimes, especially if I’m in a writing slump, I get nostalgic about the days when I could pick up a Joe Wallis card and imagine a baseball player who (somewhat like J.D. Salinger, now that I think about it) could not abide in the civilized world and so took to the woods to be wild and malodorous and hairy and free.

But anyway, here I am again, and here I’ll be. In religion, there’s the thrilling moment of epiphany or conversion or enlightenment or whatever, I guess. You “see the light.” After that: well, you try to be sincere with your prayers. You try to find ways to connect to the mystery.

The first mystery of this Joe Wallis card is his batting stance. On first glance, I thought this card might be a strange mistake, for the Joe Wallis card I am more familiar with shows him in a right-handed batting stance, while this card shows him bemusedly following through on a left-handed swing. When I looked at the back of this card, I thought that a piece of information included there—“Bats: Left”—proved that the card here was correct and that the later and hairier Joe Wallis card from 1980 was a mistake. But on baseball-reference.com Joe Wallis is listed as being a switch-hitter. I’m not sure why he is listed on the back of this card as only hitting left-handed, but it may have something to do with his career .199 batting average against left-handed pitchers (compared to his .263 average versus right-handers). Maybe before this card came out the Topps people called him to confirm his status as a switch-hitter, and at that point he was considering forgetting about being a switch-hitter and just sticking to being a lefty. In that light, it’s interesting that his later card with the A’s, the one I am more familiar with and that is his last card, shows him from his weaker side. He was determined, I guess, to prove that a debilitating dooming weakness could be turned into a strength.

The second mystery was pointed out some time ago on the original Joe Wallis post by a commenter who goes by the name Champ Summers. Champ linked to an article that describes a minor league baseball game in which Joe Wallis hit a fly ball that never came down.

How do you survive a mysterious and beautiful event such as that? How do you not slowly unravel and grow increasingly less able to exist in the mystery-stripped world of adulthood? How do you not take to the hills? A ball went up and never came down. People will tell you that only a child would think that such a thing was possible, but you were there. You hit the ball that never came down. Don’t let anyone ever tell you differently. 

Posted in Chicago Cubs, Joe Wallis (Chi.), by Josh Wilker | 9 Comments »

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Sparky Lyle

January 28, 2010

Somebody check on Sparky Lyle. All the writers that helped lead me to writing are dying off, so I’m starting to get worried about the author of The Bronx Zoo, Lyle’s hilarious recounting of the 1978 season in diary form that inspired me, at the age of 11, to first start writing down words to describe my life. After Lyle got me started, the next two writers to take me by the hand were Jim Carroll, author of The Basketball Diaries, who died this past September, and J.D. Salinger, who died today.

I first read Salinger’s book in 10th grade, for school. Our assignment was to read a book and produce a book cover for it, with jacket copy that described the story. I hadn’t done shit for the class all year, so when I turned in a semi-coherent assignment the teacher ended her speech to the class about the evils of plagiarism by saying, “Yours was one of them,” and handing me back my book cover with an F on it. I stammered some kind of a denial (I was on the verge of tears), and she snapped, “Oh yeah? Then define the word ‘prestigious.’” I knew what the word meant but I couldn’t explain it to her. I think she eventually changed the F to a C because of the suicidal look on my face. At around the same time, in my French class, I was also accused of plagiarism for an assignment in which we were asked to translate the English words on a music album of our choice. I translated Rush’s Moving Pictures. The teacher believed I’d gotten my hands on a French-Canadian version of the album. Anyway, by then teachers didn’t believe I was capable of much except cheating, I guess. The next year I went off to boarding school and within a year and three-quarters was tossed out, just like ol’ Holden getting the heave ho from Pencey Prep, and that summer, with GED in hand and no clue what to do with myself, I reread The Catcher in the Rye and decided I wanted, when not smoking bong hits, masturbating, watching television, and staring off  into the distance, to try to make something as beautiful as that book. It’s an impossible aspiration, in my opinion, especially for a lazy person like me. (The closest anyone has ever come is Peter J. Smith in his great and underappreciated novel Highlights of the Offseason.) But I wouldn’t have wanted any other life than one at least half-assedly dedicated to chasing after that book.

As for Sparky Lyle: may he live for many more years. I choose to hold it as a good omen that even as early as 1975, as attested to by this 1976 card, he was wearing the ridiculously high-waisted pants of a nonagenarian.

And as for J.D. Salinger, I suggest avoiding the obituaries, which will spend an inordinate amount of time pointing past the work he did as a young man to revel in the odder details of his later life as an unrelenting recluse. In lieu of that, here’s a thoughtful 2001 article on his greatest creation.

Posted in New York Yankees, Sparky Lyle, by Josh Wilker | 30 Comments »

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Jim Dwyer

January 25, 2010

Jim Dwyer spent most of the 1970s bouncing around the National League, never really getting the hang of things in any one place before being swapped for Larry Lintz or shipped across the border with Pepe Mangual or, in his most pornographic-sounding transaction, clustered into a three-way featuring Peter LaCock. By 1978, when this card came out, Jim Dwyer would have been a very unlikely candidate for lasting 18 seasons in the major leagues. If you go on the evidence provided by this card, he was dangerously close to disappearing altogether. Since entering the league in 1973, he had produced just one passable season, and that was in very limited action (a .279 average in 86 at-bats in 1974), and other than that had as many seasons below the Mendoza Line as above it. His existence in cardboard form at this stage was, in fact, bordering on the inexplicable. He was not a slick-fielding infielder or a squat, cannon-armed backup catcher, the two most likely species of position players to persist in the majors despite being unable to hit. Dwyer logged innings in centerfield, but he was basically a corner outfielder, a would-be left-handed hitting specialist, at least until the inevitable moment when someone connected with whatever team he was on noticed his anemic batting stats and wondered why this guy was on the payroll. At that point, Dwyer was then swapped or, as in the case of the late-season transaction that led to this hasty, nausea-inducing job of card-doctoring, simply released.

And isn’t this everyone’s fear? That one day someone will tap you on the shoulder, you will turn, and the question you’ve long been dreading will be asked of you. So, uh, why are you here? And that the stammering answer to this question will be followed by your release?

But Jim Dwyer seems unmarked by any such dread in his 1978 card. Let the world go through its changes, morphing from one thing to the next. What can you do but smile beneath your droopy caterpillar of a mustache and keep swinging?

Also, Jim Dwyer must have believed that, contrary to the evidence on his baseball card, he had what it took to stick in the majors. His itinerant journey through the 1970s had taken him to several minor league towns, too, and in those towns he had been The Man (career minor league average: .334).

But I wonder if his smile finally started to falter in 1978. Halfway through that season, while struggling once again (his batting average at .215), his litany of transactions hit a new low as he became, for the first time, The Player to be Named Later. Thusly completing an earlier deal for someone named Frank Ricelli (who by then had already been dumped by the Cardinals for the immortal Bob Coluccio), Dwyer joined the Giants for their improbable 1978 pennant drive and “hit” .225 as they faded from contention.

By that point I had not paid a moment of attention to Jim Dwyer, except for possibly being briefly hypnotized by the blobs of colors that comprised the cap in this 1978 card. I wasn’t even aware that the Giants were in a pennant race that season, focusing instead on the dire collapse of my own team, the Red Sox, who died at the hands of the Yankees in a one-game playoff at year’s end for many, many reasons, including the absence of both God and Bernie Carbo. Late in the game, when someone needed to come off the bench and get a hit off of Goose Gossage, the best the Red Sox had to offer was a corroded right-handed-hitting statue named Bob Bailey. Nothing against Bob Bailey, who definitely had some fine moments in a long career, but at that place and time he was never going to get a hit off of Goose Gossage. No, what the Red Sox needed at that moment was Bernie Carbo, left-handed hitting specialist and undying hero of just such a moment three years earlier, when his three-run homer had revived the cemetery-bound Red Sox in the 8th inning of Game Six of the 1975 World Series; unfortunately, Carbo had been sold midway through the season by the geniuses running the team. (In case you’re wondering, Goose fanned Bob Bailey on three pitches, ending the latter’s career.)

Perhaps reacting to this need for a left-handed hitting replacement for Bernie Carbo, the Red Sox purchased Jim Dwyer for the 1979 season. His arrival and two-year stay with the team could not stem a descent into relative irrelevancy by the franchise. That descent coincided for me with the first notes of that disorienting atonal symphony, puberty, and I associate my entry into the world of frustration and loneliness with Red Sox teams that carried an autumnal aura of trauma and doom. They were haunted. But despite that, or maybe because of it, I formed an attachment to Jim Dwyer. He was new to the team and so had not been a part of the failures I wanted to think as little about as possible, and also he was, suddenly, a pretty good hitter.

Back then I loved studying the Red Sox stats in the Sunday Boston Globe. Jim Dwyer’s name was always somehow comforting to me in that context. He wasn’t ever right at the top of the list of names that were ranked according to batting average, but he was always far from the bottom. He hit .265 in 1979 and .285 in 1980. I don’t know why, but I loved that latter mark. It wasn’t volatile and rare like, say, .337, and it wasn’t a stinker like .229. It was right there in the B+ range. Solid. If .285 was a person it would be someone you could rely on to come over and help you move a couch. Though I didn’t think it through to this extent at the time, this kind of unassuming .285 steadiness was just what I needed as I turned 12 and started noticing how distant I was from that which I desired. Without even really realizing I was doing it, I leaned on Jim Dwyer.   

And then he was gone, off to Baltimore. But everyone else was gone, too. Fisk, Lynn, Hobson, Burleson. I’m sure it was several weeks into the 1981 season before I even noticed that the stinging mist of absence hovering over the team included the lack of my old reliable .285-hitting pal Jim Dwyer, and then before I could form any thoughts about this development the lengthy 1981 strike occurred, and puberty really took over, and baseball suddenly didn’t seem to mean as much.

As it turned out, Dwyer’s two seasons with Boston proved to be a turning point not just for me but for Jim Dwyer, too, the moment he changed from subpar 1970s National League wanderer to capable 1980s American League left-handed hitting specialist. From the Red Sox he went to the platoon-crazy Baltimore Orioles, peaking with a Lowensteinian effort (.286/.382/.505 in 229 at-bats) for the 1983 champions. He posted his career high in homers (15) four years later, at the age of 37, and avoided his final release all the way until 1990.

***

(Love versus Hate update: Jim Dwyer’s back-of-the-card “Play Ball” result has been added to the ongoing contest.)

Posted in Jim Dwyer, St. Louis Cardinals, by Josh Wilker | 13 Comments »

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Cecil Fielder

January 21, 2010

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of short stories by Raymond Carver. I always circle back around to his stuff, usually when I’m feeling like I can barely get out of bed, and he helps me get out of bed. This latest Carver jag grew out of my reading of a new biography of Carver by Carol Sklenicka. I learned a lot of new stuff about Carver in the bio, including that as a boy he was fat. Maybe that information helped me notice, after all these times reading his stories, that many of them include descriptions of eating, and that these descriptions, in the often harrowing context of a given Carver story, turn the act of eating into something sacramental. Carver’s fictional world is rife with uncertainty, disconnection, loneliness, loss. The concrete act of eating, in relief against these immeasurable hungers, takes on a power that borders on holiness. It’s something to hold onto, an affirmation. One of his most famous stories, “A Small, Good Thing,” ends with a baker offering food to parents whose son has died. Another of his well-known stories, and one that helped launch his career, is simply called “Fat” and centers on a waitress trying and failing and continuing to try to get at what it felt like to serve a man who was enormously obese.

***

“A big fat guy who hit home runs for a few years.” – Bill James’ entry, in its entirety, on Cecil Fielder in James’ Historical Baseball Abstract

“He is fat . . . but that is not the whole story.” – Raymond Carver, “Fat”

***

In “Fat,” there is a muted element of wonder in the waitress’ description of the prodigious amount of food she kept bringing to her customer. Reading it, I was reminded me of a book I’d read as a child.

I don’t know if it’s still around, but RIF, which stood for “reading is fundamental,” was a program that visited schools and allowed each kid to choose a book to bring home. I always went for a sports book, something like Basketball’s Big Men or Baseball’s Best Catchers. One of my choices was a dual biography of Nolan Ryan and Reggie Jackson (it had no back cover but two front covers, one featuring Ryan in an Angels uniform and one showing Reggie in his Oakland garb), and in the Reggie bio there was a description of what he ate for breakfast every day. It was like several meals all rolled into one. Eggs and pancakes and sausage and bacon; orange juice and milk and coffee; potatoes and grits and oatmeal and big hunks of bread slathered with butter; and steak, always a big thick slab of steak. I think there might have even been a milkshake. But it was the huge steak that always floored me. For breakfast! I imagined Reggie hunkering down every morning and shoveling it in, and in this vision I was both an amazed watcher of the strapping slugger and the slugger himself, feeding every last alley of hunger inside. Reggie seemed superhuman in many ways, not least because of his ability to devour so much food and turn it into power.

***

Eating was a big deal for me back then. I loved Saturdays for the day-long ritual of eating it offered. I started out with several bowls of cereal, each spiked with heaping spoonfulls of sugar and backed with glasses of milk and buttered toast, all of this downed in front of cartoons: Bugs, Scooby-Doo, Goober and the Ghost Chasers, Fat Albert, Thundarr the Barbarian. At noon I’d switch to lunch and eat Spaghettios, which I’d chase with a tower of Chips Ahoy and more milk as the television programming edged into sports. All these years later, I’m still coming to terms with that first ritualized response of mine to empty time. Now whenever Saturday rolls around I feel that same pull—television to numb and food to provide the illusion of fullness. It’s chiefly a quirk of genetics (along with the limiting of Saturdays to once a week and my eccentric, outdated love of pedestrianism) that I’m not the size of a sofa.

***

If you had to choose a last meal, what would it be? I think this question came up back on Baseball Toaster, though I can’t recall where. I know Scott Long sometimes delved into food on his blog, The Juice, so maybe it was there, but I’m not sure. But I think I joined into the conversation and said I’d choose a Fenway Frank, the implication being that I’d be in Fenway watching the Red Sox as I ate it. I understand now that the hot dogs there are nothing particularly special, but when I was a kid I honestly thought they were the greatest-tasting food I’d ever eaten. I was being fed on every level. I was surrounded by my family, sitting next to my brother, wolfing down a hot dog, talking about baseball statistics, and watching the real-live versions of the Cardboard Gods, right there below me. It was worship.

***

Back then I dreamed of being a season-ticket holder at Fenway, but instead my connection to that place has always remained one that retains a kind of mystical distance. I return when I can. One of my most memorable adult returns came in the early 1990s, when my brother and I traveled up from New York to Boston to stay with our aunt and uncle and catch a couple games in a series against Detroit. Early in one of the games, Roger Clemens gave up back-to-back homers and then drilled the next batter, John Shelby, who charged the mound. Before Shelby could get to the ace, the late, great John Marzano, a backup catcher getting a rare start, made a flying tackle of the charging Tiger. Both benches emptied. My brother and I had never seen a brawl in person before, and this was a pretty good one, even though it didn’t take that long for it to calm down to the usual shoving and holding waltz where everyone on one team partners up with someone of roughly similar size and weight on the other team. This partnering was actually the best part of the brawl, because it offered everyone in attendance a joyous testimonial to the singular sensation that was Cecil Fielder. Since there was no one of equal size on the Red Sox’ roster (or on anyone’s roster), Mo Vaughn and Carlos Quintana, themselves both hefty specimens, combined to form the equivalent of Cecil Fielder, each holding one of his leg-sized arms and looking hilariously tiny as they did so, as if Cecil could send them sprawling with a chuckle and a shrug if he felt like it.

I loved Cecil Fielder that day, and every day of his career thereafter, save for when I had to avert my eyes when he donned pinstripes for a couple years near the end. He was a big fat guy who hit home runs. What’s not to love? And now that the uncertainty of the world has revealed itself to be every bit a part of that one thing I had always held in stark opposition to uncertainty—baseball statistics—I love Cecil Fielder even more. Who knows what the numbers in the single-season home run record list mean anymore? Since Cecil Fielder became, in 1990, the first player since George Foster in 1977 to hit over 50 home runs in a season, the once-rare feat has been achieved at just over a once-a-season rate. When Fielder did it, it seemed to me a thing of wonder, as if it hadn’t been done in a lifetime. I had been a kid when Foster had done it, and by 1990 I was, at least biologically, an adult. Since things are different when you’re an adult, Fielder topping 50 taters didn’t shine as brightly on my life as Foster’s feat, but it was amazing nonetheless. The devaluation of the mark since then has shrunken the significance it might otherwise have, but to me it remains something special. From the big, fat man: a small, good thing. 

Posted in Cecil Fielder, Detroit Tigers, by Josh Wilker | 18 Comments »

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Guest author: Ben Henry of The Baseball Card Blog

January 20, 2010

From Josh: Please enjoy the following rare respite from (as Travis Bickle would call it) “morbid self-attention” here at Cardboard Gods and welcome guest author Ben Henry, who after a hiatus has recently resurrected The Baseball Card Blog. Nobody knows baseball cards like he does, and today he turns his keen attention to the 1978 set as a whole. (Note: This card, which is from Ben’s collection, not mine, will note “count” in the still-ongoing “Love versus Hate” battle being played out using the Play Ball game on the back of all 1978 cards.) (Further note: please pardon my one editorial intrusion in Ben’s fine piece; I am addicted to morbid self-attention and can’t help myself. If you notice that I’ve befriended a young Jodie Foster and bought a Kris Kristofferson album for Cybil Shephard, you’ll know I’ve gone too far.)  

Ellis Valentine

By Ben Henry

A few years back I put the finishing touches on the 1978 Topps set. It was a labor of love, and not because it was my birth year (I was born in 1979) or because 1978 was a year of any real significance to my childhood (see the aside about me not yet being born)—I went all out and put this set together because Eddie Murray was my favorite player as a kid. Let me clarify. Eddie Murray was my favorite non-Red Sox player. Dwight Evans was my favorite Red Sock.

I had got Murray’s rookie at a card show at the Watertown Mall when I was 12 or 13, purchased in a dealer-assembled pack of rookies. Murray was smirking on one side and Mark McGwire’s awesome 1987 Donruss Rated Rookie was on the other. I remember I paid $14 for it, dumped the other cards in a box at home and sat mesmerized by Murray’s glare.

In the course of putting together the set, I spent money on about 50 commons it turned out I already had, and many fruitless hours trying to pry my beat-up Murray rookie out of its seal-tight plastic case so that it could take its rightful place in the binder next to Sparky Lyle. I also remained two cards shy of a complete set for a long time because I couldn’t find either the Royals or the Dodgers team cards for under 50 cents apiece (turns out I wasn’t looking hard enough in the right places).

The set’s really a beauty (for some reason that scripty letterman’s jacket team name font gets me somewhere between the throat and the gut), full of comically bad portraits, atrocious airbrushing, multiple cards of Hall of Famers, and, like all the other late Seventies sets, chock a block with stars history has somehow forgot (like Ellis Valentine).

If you have no idea who Valentine is, you’re not alone. I had to read “The Year the Expos Finally Won Something!”, a horrible clip job by Brodie Snyder about the star-crossed Expos of 1981 to find anything out about him. Valentine was a power-hitting All-Star, a fan favorite, and most importantly, a shadow of himself after injuries in his prime. That the Expos were able to pluck Jeff Reardon from the Mets in a trade for Valentine is a testament to his talent on the field. What’s also interesting about Valentine is that he and Andre Dawson were the same age, came up through the same organization, and were both incredibly and similarly talented. If you compare their stats from 1978 and 1979, they’re practically identical (Dawson had more speed, while Valentine had more plate discipline). Had he not been repeatedly injured, the Expos of the early 1980s could have fielded one of the best outfields of the last 30 years in Dawson, Raines, and Valentine.

There are other overlooked stars who shine in the 1978 set. Ray Knight’s rookie floats in there somewhere, as do Warren Cromartie’s and Bob Stanley’s, and practically the entire roster of the 1984 Detroit Tigers. Ron Guidry is in full effect on card #135, en route to one of the best post-Koufax/pre-Pedro years of pitching dominance. Ruppert Jones, coming off his All-Star season in 1977, looks pensive on card #141, and Dwight Evans—perhaps the most-overlooked star of the 1970s and 1980s—quietly stands pre-mustache in the far corner of the set at card #695.

Could 1978 Topps itself be overlooked? Could that be why I like it so much? Well, for one thing it’s hardly unpopular. It’s a low-priced mecca for cards of Hall of Famers and other timeless superstars (the Pete Rose was double-printed, for crying out loud). For another, you can find these cards everywhere, so it’s not as if it were somehow erased and forgotten like that betamax tape collecting dust in your storage unit. No, I like it because it’s a talisman, an inroad to learn about the game during a forgotten, overlooked time. Seriously, can you name an important feat that occurred between Reggie Jackson’s three World Series home runs in 1977 and George Brett’s pine-tar incident in 1983? [Editor’s note: Yes!] I consider myself something of an amateur baseball historian, and only two things immediately come to mind: Bucky Dent’s homer in the playoff game between the Yankees and Red Sox in 1978; and the Pirates winning the World Series in 1979. Oh, and the short-lived brilliance of Ellis Valentine.

Posted in Montreal Expos | 11 Comments »

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Mike Willis

January 19, 2010

Mike Willis spent three seasons climbing the lower rungs of the Baltimore Orioles minor league system, and then he spent three more seasons stuck at the team’s Triple A affiliate in Rochester. He was a good minor league pitcher. The textual highlights on the back of this 1979 card point out that he notched a no-hitter during his first professional season, in 1972 at Bluefield, and that he led the International League in shutouts in 1974. His best season came the following year, when he went 14-8 with a 2.57 ERA for a Rochester squad that finished nearly 30 games above .500.

The success of that Rochester squad suggests the major reason for Mike Willis’ extended minor league limbo: the Orioles of that era were loaded with talent above, below, and beside him, especially in the pitching department. On the big club from 1974 through 1976, when the team finished second, first, and fourth in the A.L. in team ERA, the Orioles featured 20-game-winners Jim Palmer, Mike Cuellar, Wayne Garland, and Mike Torrez as well as long-time star Dave McNally and 18-game-winner Ross Grimsley. All of those pitchers save for Palmer were on their way out with the Orioles, but unfortunately for Mike Willis the Orioles’ system was stocked with potential replacements. As he continued to win games in front of the Rochester faithful, he was passed over for promotion to the big club by three fellow (and younger) starting pitchers who would, with Palmer, form the core of a rejuvenated Orioles staff in the late 1970s and early 1980s: Mike Flanagan, Dennis Martinez, and Scott McGregor. Willis’ numbers at Rochester were good enough that you have to think that he began to wonder what those guys had that he didn’t have.

Perhaps doubt began to creep in. In 1976, for the first time in his professional career, his ERA edged above 4, though he still managed to win twice as many games as he lost (12-6). In November of that year, the Orioles left him unprotected for the Blue Jays/Mariners expansion draft. In this draft of guys that other teams could live without, Mike Willis went 55th, right before Puchy Delgado.

He lasted a handful of seasons with the Jays, splitting time between the majors and the minors. On the big club, he racked up three times as many losses as wins, which isn’t surprising given that the Blue Jays’ winning percentages during the Mike Willis Era were .335, 366, .327, .414, and .349. This 1979 card captures him in the midst of these years of constant defeat. His contorted face and body do not give off an aura of power or confidence (unlike, say, a similar moment in a Nolan Ryan card from a year later) but rather of great effort and limitations and a gnarled and irreducible cyst of hope. The world passes you by. The world lambasts your ineffective junk. You wind and twist and try again, your stuff thin smoke and fractured mirrors, magic and luck all but gone. You keep throwing. As long as they put a ball in your hand, you throw.

In 1982, Mike Willis, apparently no longer wanted by the Blue Jays, got work with the Oklahoma City 89ers, a Phillies affiliate. His ERA that season was an even 7.00, and the 89ers, a collection of fading veterans surrounding prospect Julio Franco, went 43-91. Astoundingly—considering the ERA and the help around him, or lack thereof—Mike Willis finished the season with a winning record of 7-6. This last morsel of luck proved to be of little use: It was over. As several of his former Rochester teammates were rolling to the 1983 World Series title in Baltimore, Mike Willis was beginning life out here with the rest of us, empty-handed.

Posted in Mike Willis, Toronto Blue Jays, by Josh Wilker | 11 Comments »

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Mark McGwire

January 13, 2010

In the summer of 1989, I got a job with the maintenance crew at my college. Most of the other students I worked with were sent out every morning with dirty plastic goggles and a weed whacker, but I got assigned, with two other guys, George and John, to work with a long-time permanent member of the maintenance staff, a middle-aged man named Lynny. Unlike us, Lynny had a uniform: gray pants and a tan button-down shirt that had a patch over the heart that said “Lynny.”

Lynny’s job was to move stuff around if it needed moving, and every once in a while to drive broken things to the dump. Lynny had a flat-top crewcut and chain-smoked Lucky Strikes. He took his time doing everything. There wasn’t much to do. How to get through a day?

We spent a lot of time riding around in his truck, Lynny at the wheel and the three of us lounging around in the back, the wind rushing through our hair, etc. Whenever we coasted by a sweaty team of fellow student workers hacking away at the roadside weeds like a chain gang, we laid it on extra thick, kicking back as if we were contestants in a tanning competition. We all had mirrored sunglasses.

Once in a while we got called to move a desk or something from one office to another. Lynny would stand off to the side gripping an unlit Lucky as the three of us shoved the thing through a doorway and down the hall and through another doorway. Lynny followed us into the new room, sticking the Lucky into his mouth. He squinted for a couple seconds at the desk sitting cockeyed in the middle of the room.

“Fuck it. Good enough,” he grumbled around his cigarette. Every task ended with these words.

One day Lynny drove us out to a storage barn a mile or so off of campus. He took a long time finding the right key for the padlock on the barn door, leafing through a huge bulge of keys. Lynny had a key for everything on his giant keychain. The trouble was finding the right one.

“By Jesus,” he hissed, starting to sweat.

Finally he found the one that did the trick. We walked through the barn door and stood around for a while in the dark. Gradually we saw that the room was mostly filled with old classroom chairs.

“Shit,” Lynny said, “I guess they want us to take the backs off all these goddamn chairs.”

There was a wooden loading dock type of thing outside the barn door, and we pulled a bunch of the old chairs made of metal and plastic out there as Lynny got a toolbox from his truck. He stuck around for a little while, smoking and watching us sit there and yank on rusty bolts with pliers and wrenches.  

“I’ll be back,” he finally mumbled. We kept wrestling with the chairs for a minute or so after his truck disappeared, but then we stopped and started wandering around the barn. We weren’t looking for anything in particular, but after a while we found a broken-off broom handle and a ragged tennis ball.

There was a pasture next to the barn, and we went out there and took turns at bat. We had a good view of the long curving driveway up to the barn, so when Lynny’s truck appeared at the foot of the drive we hustled back to the barn. By the time he pulled up we were working on the same chairs we’d been working on when he left.

“All right, boys, we got some other thing now,” Lynny said. We left the chairs out on the dock but took the broomstick and tennis ball with us as we piled into his truck.

I don’t remember what the other thing was. It doesn’t matter. In truth, there was hardly ever anything to do.

We began using the broom handle and the tennis ball to fill up all the gaps in the day. A lot of these gaps occurred at the maintenance building, where Lynny returned to periodically.

“Got to check on something,” he said, then he’d disappear into the building.

We set up a diamond in between the maintenance building and the garage that housed all the tractors and back hoes, etc. If you hit the tennis ball in fair territory onto the roof of either the maintenance building or the garage, it was a basehit (either a single, double, or triple, depending on how far away from home plate the ball hit the roof). If you hit it beyond the end of the roofs, it was a home run. Anything else was an out.

We played the game elsewhere, including in the field by the barn with the chairs (where we returned every once in a while to yank at the rusty bolts until Lynny drove away), but it was never as good as at the maintenance building. This is because a home run was a home run there. Everywhere else we argued with each other if a particular long hit was a home run or not, but at the maintenance building it was clear: if that yellow ball disappeared beyond a roof, it was gone.

We all had our hot streaks. I still remember mine, which seemed to go on for days. Every time we got back to the maintenance building it would still be my at-bat and I’d pick up where I left off: drilling the ball far beyond the roof on the left. By then I had developed a straight-backed batting stance and a short, quick stroke, both modeled after a young American League slugger named Mark McGwire. Every time I bashed another moon shot I felt the image of that triumphant green and gold giant coursing through me.

It was all completely meaningless, of course. But how beautiful it was anyway. It was my first great summer in a while. It was my last great summer. By the next summer I had graduated, but I still returned to the maintenance crew. I had no other prospects and wanted to save up money for a trip back to China, where I’d studied for a semester in the fall of ’89. George and John were gone, so instead of being a mirrored-shades-wearing member of “Lynny’s Boys” I was now just the weird already graduated dude who rode around with Lynny. I no longer rode in the back but sat in the passenger seat, beside Lynny. We didn’t have much to talk about. Most days, we sat out the last hour in a parking lot overlooking the soccer fields with the engine of Lynny’s truck ticking. With a few minutes to go before quitting time, Lynny started the truck back up.

“Fuck it. Good enough,” he said.

Once in a while, if something had to be moved, Lynny grabbed a couple guys from the lawn crew, Steve and Geno. They were in between their freshman and sophomore years. Both had played on the college’s baseball team, which somehow added a new note of silliness into my attempts to resurrect the summer waiting-for-Lynny broom-ball league. The game had been meaningless the summer before, but there’s meaningless and then there’s meaningless. During one of my at-bats that second summer, Steve unleashed a real pitch, a fastball that blurred by me in a bolt of yellow. I stood there with the broom handle on my shoulder. I had gotten a Dear John letter from my Chinese girlfriend by then. She’d met someone else. Don’t come back here for me, she said. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life.

“Sorry,” Steve snickered. “Just felt the need for a little speed.”

No way am I ever going to cut it, I thought.

But I didn’t even mean to start talking about that second summer. I’m hesitant to even bring up a particular moment from that summer of 1990. But what the hell. Steve and Geno and I were standing around and waiting for Lynny to find out what needed to be moved where. In addition to being the catcher on the school baseball team, Geno was a body-builder and he wanted to show us his “guns” so he did a few pushups in the grass and then ripped off his shirt and pulled a few muscle-man poses. This sounds ridiculous, but Geno was a good-natured kid, and it was all done with at least a hint of self-parody. But he was serious about it, too.

“I want to be huge,” he said. “I want to be as big as I possibly can. I’d do anything.”

“No you wouldn’t. Don’t be an idiot,” I said.

“Why not?” he said. “Why not do anything you can to go as far as you possibly can?”

“Because your balls will shrivel up, maybe? Because you’ll grow tits?”

“That’s all myth,” Geno said. He made a muscle and looked down at it, his lips pursed, like he wanted to kiss it. “You just got to be smart.”

“I don’t know, man,” I said.

“How could you know?” Geno snapped. (Translation: You are a 98-pound weakling.)

“Look, man,” Geno said, softly. “I just mean I’d totally do it.”

But forget about the summer of 1990 and all the summers that came after it. I just wanted to talk about the summer of ‘89. Me and John and George and Lynny. Those chairs that we worked on again and again and never did anything with. Riding around in the back of a truck with our mirrored shades on. That broom-stick. That tennis ball. That hot streak! Home run after home run after home run disappearing beyond the aluminum roof shining in the sun. I came back the next year, trying to hold on, and it was gone. Locked away in some room somewhere. If someone had offered me a key to unlock that room, I would have taken it.

Posted in Mark McGwire, Oakland A's, by Josh Wilker | 14 Comments »

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Mike Beard

January 11, 2010

There’s one thing you can’t lose, it’s that feel.
Your hat, your shirt, your shoes, but not that feel.
–Tom Waits and Keith Richards

Mike Beard lasted parts of four seasons in the majors. This card may be his high-water mark. After being drafted in the first round of the secondary phase of the 1971 June amateur draft (I don’t really understand the “secondary phase” part of it, but it definitely didn’t translate to dregs: several other players drafted in that phase that year went on to the majors), Beard had reached the majors during a September call-up in 1974 and then had spent most of the season with the Braves in 1975, compiling a 3.21 ERA out of the bullpen, a performance that led to text on the back of this card proclaiming, in perhaps a bit of a stretch, that Beard was “one of NL’s top rookies.” His ERA jumped just over a full run in 1976, and his innings were chopped in half, and in 1977 he lost it altogether, allowing 14 hits and three home runs in just 4.2 innings of work. In his last appearance, he came on in the fifth inning with two outs and the Braves losing 6-1. He allowed a stolen base and a run-scoring single before retiring Al Oliver to end the inning. It was the last major league out he would record. In the sixth inning, before he was sent to the showers, he gave up a leadoff home run to Willie Stargell, singles to Rennie Stennett and Phil Garner, and a run-scoring double to Frank Taveras.  

I never pitched much in my brief but all-consuming childhood baseball career, but I got to try it a couple times. One time, against the bottom of the order of the worst team in the league, I struck out the side to end a game. A tough kid from my school who was watching the game told me the next day, sneering, “You got lucky.” In a later game, as if to prove his point, I surrendered hit after hit. By the time the coach came out to the mound I was crying and begging to go back to a less central and humiliating position. I wish this weren’t true, but that’s what happened. I mention this only to try to use my tiny sliver of experience of getting knocked around on the mound as a way to understand what it might have been like to have been Mike Beard at the very end. But pitching was not my life. Pitching was not something that got me attention in the world and made me feel like I knew what I was doing. I imagine that someone such as Mike Beard who was good enough to get drafted in the first round by a major league team and good enough to make it to the majors and even good enough to retire major league batters for a while has a completely different experience of that moment when outs suddenly seem impossible to come by. For most of his life, for as long as he could remember, the ball felt good in his hand, like something alive and connected to him, an extension of him, something he could make jump and dance. Mike Beard had devoted his life to that feeling. That feeling abandoned him, left him right out there in the middle of everything all alone.

He looks in this card like he was probably able to handle that devastating abandonment when it came. He looks tough. He looks mature too, appearing older than 25, the age he must have been when the photo was snapped. The set of his jaw and the Clint Eastwood squint in his eyes make the goofy 1970s Braves cap on his head seem much more provisional than the man wearing it. (How could anyone have been expected to stomp the competition with that cartoonish and somehow apologetically meek lower-case “a” on the crown of their heads?) The recurring Cardboard God-era theme of players wearing warmup jackets beneath their uniforms is also present here, and in this context it makes the Braves uniform shirt also seem particularly temporary, as if Mike Beard has just pulled the jersey on for a moment before ripping it and the cap off to go to a job interview in an industry that offers more stable employment.

But we never know how stable any situation is. We never know when our pitches will disobey our wishes, or when the ball will be taken from our hands, or when the cap and shirt will be taken from our body, leaving us without any particular allegiance as we enter some new unknown. I have been writing about my baseball cards for about a decade, starting with some handwritten journal entries scrawled by kerosene lantern light in the primitive cabin I lived in for a year back in 1999 and 2000. In 2006 I started writing about the cards consistently and posting the writing on the first location of this site. I don’t know how many cards I’ve written about, a few hundred anyway, but I’ve still only scratched the surface in terms of profiling all the cards in my shoebox. I still have a lot of baseball cards to write about.

But I only have a couple Atlanta Braves left from my childhood. Besides this Mike Beard card, I’ve got a team card from 1980, a 1976 Darrell Evans card, and a 1978 Dick Ruthven card. I think that’s it. I’m sure I had more Braves as a kid than I do now, and I don’t know what happened to them, or to my similarly decimated store of Phillies and Dodgers cards. It doesn’t really matter. I’m coming to the first of many ends.

From very early on in this experiment, within the first week of posts, I began worrying that I’d said all I could possibly say about my cards, about 1970s baseball, and about my own timid, monotonous life. But writing is about as close as I’ll get to being a pitcher, I mean in terms of doing something I love and want to always do and hope never to be stripped of, and it’s also about as close as I’ll get to something like a religion.

As one of the high priests of that religion, Samuel Beckett, once said, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” The sky is clearing this morning, and the cold snap is easing off just a little. In a little while I’ll start work, my job, grateful I’ve got one, always wary that the corporation’s cubicle-emptying sweep that happened a few months ago might happen again and send me to the street. Everything is always ending. So before I let go of the keyboard for the day I want to imagine Mike Beard in the summer this card came out, June 15, 1976, to be exact, a Braves’ lead evaporating as starter Dick Ruthven falters and relievers Adrian Devine and Max Leon prove incapable of stopping the bleeding. In the ninth inning the tying run reaches first. In comes Mike Beard. He gets the outs. He gets his one and only major league save. I imagine that the ball gets back to him, the ball that perennial all-star Ted Simmons was unable to make good contact with. Mike Beard holds this ball in his hands, the game ball, and feels something he can’t lose.

Posted in Atlanta Braves, Mike Beard, by Josh Wilker | 11 Comments »

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Mickey Scott

January 8, 2010

I don’t publicly ogle very much anymore. In the privacy of my apartment I ogle my wife quite a bit, but it’s different from the old days, when I was a youthful rapscallion who did my daring, swashbuckling ogling out on the lawless streets. I’m still out on the streets a lot, and on public transportation a lot, both favorite locales for avid oglers, but on the streets I find myself staring at the ground looking for old, discarded baseball cards, and in buses and subways I’m usually reading something or other or staring out the window and thinking about death or Kevin Youkilis.

It’s not as if I’ve evolved into some more mature being who has transcended ogling. Really, I’m as creepy as ever, believe me, and if a comely oglee happens to enter the path of my thousand-yard commute-stare, I will revert instantaneously to the mode of behavior that has been with me since just about the time when I loosened my grasp on my childhood baseball cards, such as this one of Mickey Scott. Perhaps to amuse myself, or perhaps as a way to diminish the inherent and profound loneliness of ogling, that practice which defines itself as something beyond mere looking by the establishment of an ache rooted in the unbridgeable distance between subject and object, I at some point developed the habit of talking silently to myself as I ogle. Like Mickey Scott appears to be doing in this 1976 card, I imagine myself remarking to a fellow ogler something along the lines of “oooo-weee” or, lingering over each word, “not . . . too . . . shabby” or, if I’m feeling nostalgic for a time that I never lived through, “hey mac, how ya like the gams on that dame?”

I doubt I realized when I got this 1976 card that Mickey Scott was clearly, lecherously reacting to the sudden appearance at the fringe of the field of a scantily clad blonde spilling over all the edges of her skimpy ensemble. Back then I was still three or four years away from my life of ogling. I ogled through junior high, high school, and college, then in my first job of any length, as a clerk at a liquor store on 8th Street in Manhattan, I went pro in terms of ogling. The store had seen better days, business-wise, so a fairly large amount of time-killing was necessary to survive each shift without guzzling from the inventory out of sheer boredom. One of the primary time-killers was to stand in the doorway of the store and ogle. There were two display windows that jutted out into the street at an angle from the doorway, and you and whoever you were working with (except if it was the owner, Morty, who preferred to remain in the back of the store and pound ferociously on the keys of his adding machine and yell) could each lean against one of the slanted display windows with your arms crossed, casually, like you had all the time in the world to ogle. And then you ogled. And you commented on your ogling, in murmurs, after the oglees had passed beyond range of hearing.

Men are slime. If I had a daughter I’d want to strangle creeps hanging around in doorways staring and murmuring. I didn’t really see things that way back then, however. Back then I was just lonely and angry about it. Women wanted nothing to do with me—why would they? I was a silent, glowering leerer—and I reacted to this gulf between my solitary island and their magical realm where all pain and suffering ceases by fiercely, greedily ogling.

If it’s any consolation to anyone repulsed by ogling and its practitioners, I was once kicked in the nuts. No, it didn’t happen while I was ogling, but before I’d ever started ogling, but perhaps we can imagine that it was proactive punishment of one who clearly showed all signs of becoming a world-class ogler. It was when I was in fifth grade, a couple years after I got this Mickey Scott card but still within the span of that safe uncreepy sanctuary of the Cardboard Gods. A girl named Lara liked me, I guess, but my ignorance and disinterest in that fact hurt and angered her until, finally, she lashed out in reaction to my uttering of some kind of a sarcastic comment directed her way. I can’t remember what I said, but I remember her face darkening, and then the quick upward bolt of her sneaker. And oh my god I remember the pain, which sent me to the ground and made tears roll down my face. By the time I’d risen to my feet, shakily, Lara had disappeared.

I saw her around here and there over the next few years, but she never truly reappeared to me until the day, in tenth grade, when she showed up in English class in a tight cotton dress that revealed that she had suddenly grown big boobs. She had liked me, long before, and now I liked her, if “liked” can also have the following meaning: looking at her filled me with a desire that made me want to smash my head against concrete or chew through metal. Oh my lord did I ogle. But she who had once kicked me in the nuts from hurt was now far beyond me. By then she had gotten a boyfriend who drove a Camaro. The last time I remember seeing her was before I went away to a boarding school for eleventh and most of twelfth grade. It was outside the town movie theater, and she was sitting in the passenger seat of the Camaro with a cool, lidded-eyed look on her face. I was pierced to the heart, as a 19th-Century Romantic ogler might put it.

I’ll never own a Camaro, I thought. I’ll never, ever touch those boobs.

Posted in California Angels, Mickey Scott, by Josh Wilker | 10 Comments »

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Bert Blyleven

January 6, 2010

I have to admit, I was happy to see the rouge, blanc, et bleu of Les Expos popping from the picture of a smiling Andre Dawson in the following article, hot off the presses, so to speak:

BBWAA Elects “Hawk” to the Hall of Fame 

But my next thought was pity for the ol’ Dutchman shown here, in a 1991 card, late in his long career of sending bamboozled batters back to the dugout. Apparently, he missed Cooperstown enshrinement this time by just five votes. As the only players who missed by a smaller margin (Pie Traynor, Billy Williams, and Jim Bunning) went on to later get enough votes, you’ve got to think that Blyleven’s long wait will be over next year, but who knows? Still, it’s looking more like Blyleven will get his moment in the immortal sun. Also looking good is Roberto Alomar, who got 73.7% of the vote and will probably breeze in next year. Barry Larkin also had a strong first year on the ballot, hinting that he’ll have a plaque before too long. So kudos to all of them.

But let’s face it, today for baseball fans is a day set aside for outrage, more or less. It’s the day when the game itself is in some ways defined, and those who didn’t get to participate in the defining (and plenty who did) get to rail against the parts of the definition that veer so widely from their own.

I’m mostly angry about the relatively weak results for Tim Raines and Alan Trammell. Raines still has some time on the ballot to climb, but I think Trammell is pretty much done for. Maybe some day a revamped, sane Veteran’s Committee can induct him and Lou Whitaker at the same time.

No such hopes for the onetime 1980s answer to Mickey Mantle. I’m not as strong an advocate for Dale Murphy as I am for Raines and Trammell, but it seems odd to me that Andre Dawson would get 77.9% of the vote while Murphy would get just 11.7%. Was Dawson that much better than Murphy? (You can even ask the simpler question by knocking out the “that much”: Was he better?)

It’s an odd thing, this vanishing of Dale Murphy. He was not a Bob Grich or Darrell Evans type when he played, i.e., he wasn’t one of those quiet guys churning out good to great seasons in invisibility, but rather a marquee hero with a nationwide TBS audience back when such an audience was rare. I guess he and Don Mattingly have both been dismissed for the abrupt truncations of their careers.

Which brings us back to Blyleven, who unlike the blazing comet types just kept going and going. He was built for the long haul. Here’s hoping that persistence helps him wait for The Call for one more year.

Posted in Bert Blyleven (Cal), California Angels, by Josh Wilker | 14 Comments »

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Andre Dawson

January 4, 2010

In a couple days the results of the 2010 Hall of Fame ballot will be announced. It’s a compelling ballot, filled with a host of interesting newcomers and long-suffering ballot near-misses such as Bert Blyleven and the player shown here in a card I must have left in my pants pocket for a trip through the washer and drier.

Where are those pants now? I was thirteen and had graduated from Toughskins to Levis by then, I think. I remember how much I revered Levis as a talisman of cool. My brother and I even had Levis posters on our wall, crowding the older posters of Hank Aaron, Jim Rice, and David Thompson. The posters featured worlds made entirely out of Levis. The one on my side of the room was of a Mississippi River scene. The river, the dock, the steamboat paddles: everything was made out of Levis. The coming of Levis into my life coincided with the exit of baseball cards from my life, with a bit of a cross-over between the two eras in 1981, when I purchased a few packs. Some things were cool and some things weren’t, and Toughskins and baseball cards were receding to the latter category. This 1981 Andre Dawson card probably resisted my efforts to push it away. He was the star of my second-favorite team at that time, the exciting and seemingly up-and-coming Expos. They had contended for a division title in 1979 and 1980, and in 1981 when I got this card they would finally claim that title before falling to the Dodgers in the National league Championship Series.

That would, it turned out, be as close as they ever got to a World Series title, and now they’re fading from memory altogether, like a card that keeps going through the wash. I have a winter cap with the Expos “M” (or “ELB”) on the crown, and every once in a while it gets a quizzical look, which I take comfort in since it suggests that the person looking is not, like most, completely unaware of the defunct franchise but is instead wondering what kind of a clown would be walking around Chicago in an Expos tuque. I’ll be sad when the quizzical looks disappear, and that’s one reason why I’ll be happy if Andre Dawson gets a plaque in Cooperstown: The more enbronzed fellows with that M/ELB on their cap in the Hall, the better. (Right now there is only one: Gary Carter.)

Which brings us back to the ballot. Aside from helping keep alive the memory of Les Expos, does Dawson deserve mention on the required 75% of ballots? Rather than approach this question by naming my own hypothetical ballot and then asking for yours, I’m going to try coming at the enjoyable yearly quandary from a different perspective: a pre-draft list. If you could have any player to build a team around, whom would you choose? You will get them for their whole career, for their peak and their decline and even for all their various on- and off-field controversies. For example, say you are considering Mark McGwire for your list. His statistical credentials are monstrous. He would also bring you, as a fan of the team, a summer that would seem as it happened to be a once-in-a-lifetime joy. But then you’d also have to live through the diminishing complication of that joy, if not a feeling that the whole thing had been a lie. Knowing all that, would you put him at the top of your list?

Below is my own top ten pre-draft list, with some notes. If I had to make out a HoF ballot, I’d probably go with the first five names.  

1. Bert Blyleven. A bona fide top-of-the-rotation ace who stayed productive for 22 years? Not a bad start to build a team around, I say.

2. Roberto Alomar. My preferred hypothetical team-building strategy is to start from the middle out, first finding guys who can field the crucial middle infield and centerfield positions well while hitting as productively as corner players. I actually had Alomar ranked first, but the incident in which he spit on an umpire sours the idea of him as my franchise player just enough for Blyleven to sneak by him into first.

3. Tim Raines. Around this time last year, I took a stab at advocating for Tim Raines. More recently, much brighter baseball analysts (namely, Neyer and Posnanski) have weighed in on arguably the second-best leadoff hitter of all-time and the man most deserving of joining Gary Carter as an enshrined Expo.

4. Alan Trammell

5. Barry Larkin. Bill James has Barry Larkin ranked ahead of Alan Trammell in his Historical Abstract (Trammell is ninth and Larkin is sixth—behind only Honus Wagner, Arky Vaughan, Cal Ripken, Robin Yount, and Ernie Banks and just ahead of Ozzie Smith). I went with Trammell ahead of Larkin here because of my impression that Larkin fairly frequently limped through parts of a given season. For my team, I’d rather be able to know with some certainty that I’d be looking out every game at the ninth best shortstop of all time than having to hope from game to game that the sixth best shortstop would make his way out there. (But both deserve to be in the Hall, I think; I also think that only Larkin will make it on the strength of the writers’ vote, which may be another reason why I ranked Trammell higher.)

6. Edgar Martinez. Hit like Joe Dimaggio, fielded like a fire hydrant until, early on, the Mariners took the glove out of his hand altogether. If you were building a hypothetical team around him, you’d have to be an American League team, I guess. But man could he rake.

7. Andre Dawson

8. Dale Murphy. Bill James ranks Murphy as the eleventh-best centerfielder in history and ranks Andre Dawson as the nineteenth best right-fielder. I’m still going with Dawson over Murphy, though, mostly because of his longevity. Murphy had a higher peak, but Dawson’s peak wasn’t too shabby, and he remained productive for considerably longer.

9. Jack Morris. He’s a distant second to Blyleven among the pitchers, but second nonetheless. I think a solid starter who showed an ability to rise to the big occasion is worth inclusion on my list.

10. Dave Parker. Like Alan Trammell, Parker seems to be on the brink of fading out of sight altogether in the yearly balloting. He deserves better. When I was a kid, in the late 1970s, Parker looked like a sure Hall of Famer in the making, and while he stumbled a little after his late 1970s peak, he came back and had a few more very good years.

So who’s on your top-ten list? If I get enough lists I’ll tally them up by assigning ten points to the number one pick, nine points to the number two pick, and so on, and see who gets the most points. (Here’s a link to the 2010 ballot again.)

Posted in Andre Dawson, Montreal Expos, by Josh Wilker | 26 Comments »

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Jim Carroll, 1949-2009

December 30, 2009

I didn’t want the year to end without saying a few words about Jim Carroll, who died this past September 11 while at his desk, writing. Back in the early 1980s, when I was twelve or thirteen, I was wandering around a bookstore in Hanover, NH, looking for a sports book to read, and I came upon the 1980 Bantam paperback version of Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries (shown at left). To that point most of my reading consisted of Spider-Man and Fantastic Four comic books, Alfred Slote little league sagas, and sports biographies. The farthest I’d ventured from that realm to that point had probably been when I read Judy Blume’s Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, a tale of a solitary basketball-loving boy edging into puberty (just like me) that offered helpful tips on how to hide unstoppable public erections. I suppose I figured The Basketball Diaries would be something along those lines, though I was probably vaguely aware of and excited by the darker currents suggested by the lean, somber figure in black on the cover. He seemed like a combination of the cool older longhaired kids in my town and, by virtue of his sneakers and long frame, the cool older guys on the varsity basketball team in my town. In fact, there was one kid in my town who almost bridged those two worlds, a guy who partied with all the longhairs but who was also renowned to have almost mystical basketball abilities. Danny Lollar was his name, and as I remember it his final foray into organized basketball lasted only a couple days of being hectored by the totalitarian varsity coach before he grumbled something like “fuck this shit” and shouldered out of the gym’s side door to go get wasted. Some time later, he materialized again one day on the sidelines of the court while some guys, including my brother, were shooting around. An errant shot got past everyone and rolled toward Danny Lollar. He picked it up and spun it in his hands, then stepped over the sideline and onto the court. He was just over the halfcourt line, in desperation heave territory, but he rose up in perfect jump shot form and sent the ball on a high arc that stung the bottom of the net just as he was finally dropping his textbook follow-through and turning to leave. I think when I picked up The Basketball Diaries I was aware I might find something like the legend of Danny Lollar in its pages.

I did find that. Jim Carroll could play some ball. (In years to come I wondered if all the things he said about his own soaring abilities were true, but on that first read I believed every last claim completely, so much so that I imagined an alternate reality where he hadn’t gone down a different path, and had instead stuck solely with basketball, and was at the time I held the book in my hands somehow also in the NBA, dunking on the head of his old New York City playground rival, the former Lew Alcindor. While this impression of Carroll’s limitless basketball potential may have been a bit of a wishful stretch on my part, he definitely was a teenage standout in the sport, playing varsity for all four years of high school, serving as the team captain during a senior year in which he was all-conference and, according to the 1968 Trinity yearbook, “had occasional spectacular performances and averaged 17 points.”) And I would have surely been deeply satisfied with a book that had merely followed the on-court exploits of a New York City playground star. But the book, from its opening pages, was much more than just that. By the second entry the narrator had diverged from a description of his basketball team’s exploits to describe being high on Carbona and puking on the head of “some dude” on the Staten Island Ferry. Before much longer the diaries were describing heroin addiction, anxious apocalyptic fears and fantasies, and the peddling of blow jobs in Port Authority bathrooms, among many other harrowing adventures. Instead of leaving me satisfied, the book–and more specifically its unique, arresting, and jarring voice–actually had something of the opposite effect on me, its street-stung visions and incantations awakening something like hunger inside me. I had begun writing in a journal by then, a little here and there, inspired by the diary style and the simple, hilarious hijinks of Sparky Lyle’s The Bronx Zoo, but with The Basketball Diaries a new and much wider and stranger sense of what could happen when the pen hit the page was born. I didn’t know what hit me for years and years, actually. I mean I knew I loved the book and laughed with it and was confused and disturbed by it, and I read it again and again, but the place it now has in my life, as not only a favorite book but also one of the three or four most important books in terms of my life as a writer, was not apparent to me for a long time because I didn’t really know I had a life as a writer. But I remember that when I took my first semi-deliberate steps toward that solitary vocation I did so by performing a direct imitation of Jim Carroll. It was for a literature class in my freshman year in college, and I wrote a first-person fictional account of riding a subway uptown “to score.” It was quite a piece of horseshit, I’m sure, but the professor, Tony Whedon, was a very gifted teacher who owed part of his gift to having the ability to find the tiny flecks of real gold in the globs of pyrite that piled up on his desk, and he singled my piece out and had me read it aloud to the class. (Jim Carroll would have been proud of one thing, I suppose: I had come to class that day just after doing several bong hits and was pretty far gone.) The attention helped spur me along to keep trying to find a voice that spoke as truly for me as Jim Carroll’s voice spoke for him.

It’s a lifelong search, as Jim Carroll showed by dying with his boots on, at his writing desk. It’s not an easy search by any means, but I’m very grateful to be on it, and I have Jim Carroll as much as any other writer who ever lived to thank for it. So thanks, Jimmy boy. I owe you big time. Rest in peace.

Posted in Beyond the Shoebox, The Basketball Kid, by Josh Wilker | 5 Comments »

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Gregg Jefferies

December 28, 2009

This Christmas, just like the last one, happily, I got a gift of a stack of thrift store baseball cards from my wife’s aunt. She also gave me four large microbrewery beers and a game called “Classic Baseball” that included about 50 cheaply produced 1989 baseball cards, a small cardboard game board in the shape of a baseball diamond, a die, and three Parcheesi-esque game pieces. There were no directions on how to play the game, but on the back of each card, below statistics that show the player’s 1988 output and his career totals, there are five trivia questions labeled S, D, T, HR, and R. After Christmas my wife used the cards to quiz me, and I stumbled along at a 50/50 pace at first and then, after polishing off most of the microbrews, I started to heat up. I came up with the correct answers for all the questions on the back of this Gregg Jefferies card, though I had to take a couple stabs at the third question before getting it right.

S (T-F) Carl Yastrzemski appeared in at least 3000 M.L. games.

D I was the last player to hit 50 HRs in a season. Who am I? [Note: Remember, the cards were produced in 1989.]

T Who was the Career Strike Out King, prior to Reggie Jackson?

HR Name the only M.L. player killed by a pitched ball?

R Dwight Gooden is sometimes referred to as whom?

I don’t know what to do with the game board and die and game pieces, but the cards will be going into the shoebox with all my cards from my childhood. I like these new arrivals, as they throw light on a section of baseball history that is otherwise not represented in the box of cards that stopped growing in 1981. And even after I stopped worshipping the gods, I still relied on baseball to measure my life by. So seeing players from the late 1980s and early 1990s, which is where the players in the thrift store stacks from Aunt Celia are always from, brings back that time in my life, when I was edging into my twenties, leaving college, starting to see what the world had in store for me.

Gregg Jefferies occupies a small but key place in my internal baseball-compassed map of the world. By the time I started living in New York, fresh out of college, in 1990, Jefferies (just a few months my senior) had already begun gathering blame for the flagging fortunes of the New York Mets.

Jefferies had been drafted in the first round by the Mets in 1985, the same year the team arrived as a force in the National League, winning 98 games behind a young, talented core that seemed destined to lead the team to championship contention for years to come. The promise of the team arrived the following year, the Mets winning 108 games and a World Series title. That year, Jefferies, just 18 years old, blitzed the minors at the A and AA levels with a combined .353 batting average with 32 doubles, 11 triples, and 16 home runs in 125 games. He hit .367 in the minors the following year, earning a late-season cup of scorching coffee (3 hits in 6 at-bats) with the big club, and in 1988, the year depicted in this “Classic Baseball” card, he came up to the Mets in late August and sparked the team to a dominating 24-7 finish to the season by hitting .321 with 8 doubles, 2 triples, and 6 home runs in 29 games. The 20-year-old kept up the hot hitting in the playoffs, playing in all seven games of the team’s series loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers, in which he hit .333 with a .438 on-base percentage. Despite the loss, the future still seemed bright for the Mets, in large part because of the great expectations created by the young switch-hitter.

As the would-be dynasty of the Mets began to unravel due to poor trades, drug problems, and aging, the spotlight of fan hopes for the team fell on Gregg Jefferies, and Gregg Jefferies proved to be something less than the sawed-off shotgun version of Mickey Mantle that he had first appeared to be. Unfortunately for him, the disappointment around his failure to meet nearly impossible expectations was compounded by his being something of a polar opposite of the Mets at their 1986 peak. Compared to those Mets, who collectively had spilled over with the volatile, abrasive, magnetic personality of a band of outlaws, Jefferies seemed almost robotic. Worse, his dogged pursuance of a metronomic consistency in his game came across as bordering on selfish, as if all he cared about was the health of his batting average and not about “doing the little things” it took to win. Also, he was well short of being a wizard with the glove, and his inability to put an ironclad claim on a fielding position added more marks against him in fans’ minds. As he bounced from position to position he kept supplanting the incumbent at the position, and it was almost as if he was an eraser, removing one player after another who had been on the 1986 team. I don’t think this is actually how it went down, i.e., that as he switched from position to position he sent one after another ’86 champ packing, but I’m pretty confident that I’m getting the general subjective view of Jefferies correct: he replaced the ’86 Mets. It was hard for Mets fans to look at Gregg Jefferies’ youthful, slightly pudgy face and his underwhelming batting average and not feel a little cheated.

So by the time I got to New York City to start my adult life, Gregg Jefferies had become something of a human bad luck charm. If it had been colonial Salem, he probably would have been deemed a witch and tossed onto a bonfire. Nowadays such offenders are shipped to Kansas City. The following season the erstwhile future of the Mets returned to the National League, with the Cardinals, and hit his stride, vying for the 1993 N.L. batting title and hitting over .300 for three years in a row. He kicked around for a few more years beyond this admirable peak, and hung it up in 2000 with 1593 total hits and a .289 career batting average. (A few years later, he somehow even garnered two Hall of Fame votes.) But I’ll always remember him as a young guy who couldn’t get it together back when I was a young guy who also couldn’t get it together. You’d think I’d have thought fondly of him, or at least empathized with his plight, but I razzed him along with everyone else. Even to this day I can’t help looking at this 1989 “Classic Baseball” card of him laying down a bunt and think that he is in the midst of a humiliating failure. In truth, the ball has probably already made contact with his bat, and he has ably carried out his task. But it just seems more fitting to think that the ball is still on its way from the pitcher, and that Jefferies has sorely miscalculated in his gyrations, and in the next moment the ball will punch him in the stomach and he will crumple to the dirt in a heap as mockery and derision rain down from the stands. 

Posted in Gregg Jefferies, New York Mets, by Josh Wilker | 19 Comments »

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1970-Most Valuable Players

December 22, 2009

The most popular movie of 1970 was Airport, a star-studded disaster film, and the biopic Patton was the most honored film at the Oscars, but to me the most interesting movies that came out that year, in terms of understanding the time, are Woodstock, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and Joe. The first movie, Woodstock, is the most well-known, a concert film that presented the hippie subculture for public consumption. The Age of Aquarius was also near the center of the Peter Boyle vehicle Joe, which follows the story of a reactionary proto-Archie Bunker blue collar worker who turns into a hunter of hippies. As for Beneath the Planet of the Apes: it was about a horrific world in its last thrashing moments before complete annihilation. A disturbing toxic landfill of a movie, Beneath fell well short of the critical and popular success of its predecessor, Planet of the Apes, but somehow with its disfigured mutants and atomic terror and narrative disorientation it manages to offer an acute portrait of the spiraling uneasiness of that first year of the decade, which saw the breakup of the Beatles, the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, and the Kent State Massacre. In 1970, the world felt a little shaky to everyone.

In 1970 I was still a few years away from balancing uncertainty and nightmares with a worship of baseball players, but if I had been old enough I would have taken comfort in the rocklike solidity of Boog Powell and Johnny Bench. I did take solace in both of those individuals anyway by the mid-1970s, when I started buying cards, in part because a bit of their history came to me in this card celebrating their 1970 MVP awards. They had been around for a while by the time I came along, and this felt good. There was gravity in their names. Boog. Bench. They made the world seem sturdy, durable.

Years later, when I was a young man, I watched Beneath the Planet of the Apes for the first time, on video, then stepped out onto the seventeenth story balcony of the apartment where I’d watched the movie and felt a powerful wave of vertigo. The movie, which ends with the white light of atomic bombs, had tapped into some deep insecurities I’d always had about the essential flimsiness of life, and the balcony seemed small and unsafe, though in truth at that moment I would have felt unsafe anywhere.

The moment of panic abated but never fully disappeared, not really. When I was a kid I had an inherent belief that the world was well-made and ably steered by adults who knew what they were doing. Now that I’m an adult I know all too well the potential for mistakes in everything.

It extends everywhere, even to the world of greatest solidity, my baseball cards. Take this card for the 1970 MVPs. Did they even deserve the MVP awards? In the American League, Powell had very good year, but it was decidedly less productive offensively than that of Carl Yastrzemski, and Yaz even stole some bases that year and aided his team by being flexible and splitting his estimable fielding skills between left field and first base as the team needed. Over in the National League, Bench finished behind Orlando Cepeda and Tony Perez in slugging percentage and was not among the top ten in on-base percentage. (Bench was arguably the greatest fielding catcher who ever lived, which coupled with his significant offensive production lends legitimacy to his award, but the stat-heads among us might think that his glovework and leadership did not entirely make up for a tenth-place league finish in adjusted OPS.)

Anyway, my unease in the world, my adultness, even my vague understanding of “adjusted OPS,” has its repercussions. I’m a tentative, cautious cipher. Sometimes in the morning I say something to myself that’s vaguely related to a prayer. I wonder if something unusual and amazing will happen during the day. It feels as if it never does. Each day for me is sealed shut somehow. Within the confines of it I have my pleasures, and even once in a while experience something like joy, but is there ever the sense of shattering newness?

I think I used to be closer to a kind of life that would let in the strange light I seem to be lacking. When you’re younger, you stumble into adventures. The truth is, I don’t want adventures. I don’t want to have to rescue someone from a building or invite an unshowered wino to sleep on my couch. I barely even want to have a conversation with anyone. I like my bubble. Leave me alone.

But still, there’s that wondering about newness. It’s partly a request for it and partly a request that it stays away. The train I ride travels along the highway for a while, and yesterday it came to a station stop right next a woman crying inside a car stopped on the shoulder beside the passing lane, the front of the car caved in. I don’t want that kind of newness. But it’s coming. One way or another, it’s coming. This bubble will burst.

I first started writing about this card a couple months ago, believe it or not, after hearing Boog Powell mentioned during a radio broadcast of the Phillies’ pennant-clinching win over the Dodgers. Chase Utley, the Phillies second baseman, had tied with Boog Powell for the record of consecutive playoff games in which he had gotten on base. Utley then got on base in the first game of the World Series and now has the record all to himself, which means we’ll all have less of a chance of hearing the name Boog Powell as we go about our daily rounds.

I for one was glad to hear the name. I always have been, ever since I first read it on a baseball card, the newness of it sending a thrill through my body, a message that new things are OK, that everything will be OK, that the world yet to come will be—ah, you know what? I probably didn’t think any of those things, not really. I’m just trying to reach for something literary and elevated before trudging off through the snow to a train that I hope doesn’t derail. But it’s true: the name Boog did once comfort and thrill me. Still does, just a little. Boog.

Posted in Loose in the Shoebox, by Josh Wilker | 19 Comments »

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