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Wayne Cage

July 29, 2010

I’ll resume regularly writing about my childhood baseball cards next week, but until then a couple quickies:

1. The infielder crouch. By 1980, the year of this Wayne Cage card, the stiff poses that had dominated the earlier years of my childhood were beginning to dwindle. By then this was a rare sight, a guy in the ol’ infielder crouch. I channeled Wayne Cage and others, most specifically master of the genre Denny Doyle, during a photo shoot last week for the Chicago Tribune. The photographer came over to my apartment and we went out behind my apartment building where he took several shots of me. This put my knowledge of baseball card poses to the test. (The shoot also put my creaky 42-year-old body to the test: while doing the ol’ “pitcher follow-through” pose I almost fell over and while jerkily trying to stop the fall I pulled a muscle in my shoulder.)  The crouching infielder was the one the Chicago Tribune went with in the story they did on me in today’s paper. You can access an online version of the story (and also get a “behind the story” wrapup from the folks at the Tribune), but the version in the printed paper looks better, as in the print version they were able to do a bunch of formatting to make the story really look like the front and back of a card.

2. An event! Next week on August 4, I’ll be part of the Reading Under the Influence series at Sheffield’s in Chicago. The details:

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 4TH, 7 PM CENTRAL
Reading Under the Influence
Theme: The Gods
Sheffield’s
3258 N. Sheffield Ave., Chicago, IL
Reading and trivia contest (also reading: Marc Paoletti, Simon Smith, and Alex Bonner)
$3 cover charge

3. Luke Cage, Power Man. Wayne Cage, whose brief time in the majors concluded with this 1980 card, his last, stood out to me among the scores of more nondescript short-timers primarily because of the possibility that he was related to Luke Cage, Power Man. Luke Cage, Power Man looked cool with his giant metal Afro-creasing headband and metal wristbands and battle-tattered yellow shirt. God, I wish I could spend the rest of the day today lying around reading old Luke Cage, Power Man comic books from the 1970s, but I no longer have comic books or anything except my baseball cards from those days, so Wayne Cage will have to suffice, and only for a few more minutes because I have to go to work. Such is life.

Still, can I just linger for a second longer on Luke Cage, Power Man, god damn it? Why, I wonder, did I like him so much? Not too many others seemed to, judging from his spotty series history and the inability, suggested by his eventual prolonged pairing with fellow B-lister Iron Fist, to carry his own title. I guess with superheroes I was drawn to characters who had complex and difficult daily lives and comparatively simple superpowers who fought battles that did not veer too far from the recognizable troubles of the “regular” world. I loved the ever-angsty Spider Man, for example. As for the Fantastic Four, whose powers, besides those of the negligibly important, aptly named Invisible Woman, were also pretty basic and elemental: I liked them so long as their ongoing family soap opera didn’t veer too deeply and confusingly into the far reaches of, say, the Negative Zone. But nobody was simpler in their powers or more tangled in the brambles of the everyday world than Luke Cage, Power Man. Luke Cage, Power Man couldn’t fly or shoot rays out of his fingertips or read people’s thoughts or cast spells. Luke Cage, Power Man even had trouble paying rent. But there was this, and I loved it: Luke Cage, Power Man could punch shit real good.

And then again, my love for Luke Cage, Power Man may have derived in part from his status as the only superhero saddled with a comma in the middle of his name, and I was thus drawn to him both because of the inherent pity-invoking belittlement in that mealy-mouthed element of his sobriquet and because I knew, deep down, that I’d grow up to be someone paid to notice commas, a quiet, cubicle-bound proofreader, surely the polar opposite of a wall-smashing street-smart brute with a steel Afro-creasing headband.

Posted in Cleveland Indians, Wayne Cage, by Josh Wilker | 4 Comments »

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Miniature

July 7, 2010

Well, it was bound to happen. If Twilight Zone marathons have taught me anything, it’s that you may eventually become trapped inside your escapist obsessions. The episode with that theme that springs most readily to mind is the long one called “Miniature,” starring a young Robert Duvall as a hermetic cipher named Charlie who is pathologically and detrimentally fascinated with a doll house in a museum. Charlie seeps further and further into his obsession until there is a point of no return. Likewise, it would seem that I have been enough of a hermetic cipher while simultaneoulsy imposing my past and my fantasies on baseball cards to actually have been transmogrified into a weathered, frozen, two-dimensional realm.

But, apparently, this doesn’t bother me so much. As can be seen here, mostly from my body language and the positioning of my giant and disquietingly wrinkly hands, my baseball card persona is of the “Ah, whaddaya gonna do?” frame of mind about the necessary limitations of life.

Still, it’s a little disturbing to think I might have left the actual world behind for a thinned-out cardboard version of it. Maybe what I need is a little break. At any rate, I’ll be taking a break from baseball cards for a couple weeks, partly to make sure I am still a member of the world beyond my shoebox (but also because I have to finish up another writing project).

If you have access to WGN (it’s a Chicago station but I think it might be on cable elsewhere), you might be able to help affirm that I exist beyond a baseball card: I’m scheduled to appear on the WGN midday news today (around 11:35 a.m. central). [Update: you can now view the interview on this page on the WGN website.] Also, this Saturday, July 10, I’ll be talking about my book and signing copies at The Book Stall in Winnetka, Illinois.

While I’m away from the cards for a couple weeks, please feel free to dig through the archives. There are a lot of old cards there, and they all need love.

(Thanks to Baseball Reliquarian and documentary filmmaker Jon Leonoudakis for the baseball card alchemy at the top of this page.)

Posted in Beyond the Shoebox, by Josh Wilker | 11 Comments »

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Gil Flores

July 2, 2010

1. “Has blazing speed.”

I took my first steps as a solitary reader by reading the backs of baseball cards. By the time this 1978 Gil Flores card came out I was a few years along in terms of being able to read. Most of what I read was baseball books. But I still read the backs of cards, too.

The more obscure the player, the more words there would have to be on the back of the card. The longtime superstars had no room on the backs of their cards for anything but high stacks of small numbers, each year of their splendid careers laid out in inarguable arithmetic. The marginal players, the ones who would only be around for a little while, did not have enough numbers to fill a card. When there are blanks to fill, words are needed.

I’ve been writing about my childhood baseball cards for years now, churning out thousands of words. What is the blank I’m filling? I don’t know. But the day always feels a little less empty if I find some flicker of life in a card that I held in my hands as a kid. I felt a flicker as soon as I picked up this Gil Flores card. I remember thinking as a kid that it was different. No card ever showed a guy displaying his leg in that fashion. There he was, reclining in the dugout, possibly injured, but if so not seriously, perhaps trying to work the kinks out of his leg so that he could gain entry into the game. He is watching something out on the field and he wants in.

Because he is Gil Flores and not Pete Rose or Rod Carew, there are space-filling words on the back of the card. They augment the leg-centric photo on the front by pointing out in the rushed, truncated back-of-the-card grammar that is to me the voice of life loved if not of god: “Has blazing speed.” There are no stolen base numbers among the statistics above the words, so the idea of the blazing speed of Gil Flores, left to the imagination, spills beyond the borders of the card.

I started writing about this card yesterday morning, before work, and carried it with me in my knapsack to and from work, and it made me feel like I had something with me valuable and alive.      

2. The dugout

For most of the years that I collected cards, I was playing little league baseball, and so I was spending the happiest part of my life, then and forever, in a dugout. Is there a better thing than to be in a dugout, waiting for your turn in the order to come around again? When I got this Gil Flores card, it was only my second year of playing baseball in little league, and it was my brother’s final year, and he was a star, our best hitter and our best pitcher, and so I had the joy of sitting in a dugout cheering for him. Once, during one of his at bats, I was next to a teammate named Chris.

“Hey, hit a home run, Ian!” Chris shouted.

“Hey, great idea,” I said as the pitcher went into his windup. “Hit one outta here!”

We were just being goofy in the dugout, but my brother swung, and there it fucking went, high and deep. Chris and I looked at each other, our mouths wide open. We poured out of the dugout with everybody else to greet Ian at home, then moved in one big laughing mass back to the dugout, where me and Chris and Ian and everyone sat and stood and giggled and shouted and practically shivered from head to toe with the feeling of being in a dugout, which is the same as the feeling of having special powers.

3. Third pitch

That’s actually the best part about this Gil Flores card, not his odd caress and display of his leg or the blazing speed in the words on the back but the photo of being inside the dugout. You are right there, just down the bench from Flores, close enough to see him and to see the player just beyond him, a guy staring at a baseball, gripping it.

What pitch is he considering? And who is he? I can’t find the grip he’s using on a web page that describes various grips, and there’s no glimpse of a uniform number to provide a clue to who the player is. But sometimes, if you’re lucky, one card leads to another. I dug back into my shoebox to look first at the team picture on the 1978 Angels team checklist card. I identified only one white guy with a thin mustache. Digging deeper, I found the individual card of a white guy on the Angels with a thin mustache, my 1978 Paul Hartzell. Paul Hartzell had even fewer numbers on the back of his card than Gil Flores, so the great majority of the card contained space-filling words. Among those words was this thrilling clue: “Worked on 3rd pitch after 1976 season. . .”

Is this 3rd pitch the one he is tinkering with in the background of Gil Flores’ card? And is there some kind of story behind everything, linking one card to the next, one day to the next, all to all forever?

4. The last out

I intended to finish writing about Gil Flores yesterday, but he kept spreading beyond my control. I examined his major league statistics, read some online memories of fans who’d watched him briefly flit across their consciousnesses before disappearing, thought about being in a dugout, thought about pitching grips, thought about how I could never learn how to throw a curveball even after my curveballing brother tried to teach me, thought about Paul Hartzell, noticed that he was never as good after his rookie season in 1976, before he added his third pitch. I learned that he was successful after baseball, a smart guy who figured things out and worked hard. Maybe he saw even while succeeding in his rookie year that he’d need more to be able to stick around in the dugout for a while. Or maybe we all make things more complicated than they need to be.

As the morning drained away yesterday, I kept veering farther and farther from a simple consideration of this card of Gil Flores, which if I were keeping things simple I would just say I loved. But love is so deep and mysterious that sometimes you start thinking you need more than just one way of grappling with it. You start to think you need a new grip, a new pitch. I ended up reading about Dennis Eckersley, who is the featured figure in the piece of baseball lore in which Gil Flores most often comes up. In 1977, things were just about to get really complicated for Dennis Eckersley. Before the next season, he would be traded from his original team, and he would learn that his wife was leaving him for a teammate, Rick Manning. But before that happened, he still had a little more time in an uncomplicated world. This world peaked on May 30, 1977, when he squared off against fellow young flamethrowing ace Frank Tanana in a pitching duel for the ages. Tanana lowered his ERA that day to 2.08 and struck out 6 while allowing just 5 hits and 1 run. The Eck was a little better. Through 8 and 2/3 innings, he’d walked 1, struck out 11, and allowed no hits. All that remained was Gil Flores. Flores, though a major league rookie, was in many ways already an old pro. He had been playing in the highly competitive Puerto Rican winter leagues for years and had been knocking around in the minors since 1971, hitting over .300 at almost every stop. He attempted to complicate the young pitcher’s mind by taking a long time between pitches to get settled in the box. The cocky Eckersley was, at least for a little while longer, immune to complication. From baseballlibrary.com:

“I was ready, but Gil kept on stepping out of the [batter’s box],” Eckersley later told the Contra Costa Times. “I pointed at him, ‘Get in there. They’re not here to take your picture. You’re the last out.’”  

5. Must’ve loved the game

Eckersley struck out Flores to complete the no-hitter. He went on to pitch well for his new team the following year, despite the gnawing blank inside.  

“He was so down,” teammate Luis Tiant recalled for the Boston Globe. “It made me feel so bad, watching him. He was in a tough position. We tried to calm him down, tell him he had a life to live. . . ”

Eckersley eventually descended into alcoholism, which seemed as if it would derail his once promising career. But he kept pitching even throughout some disappointing years in the 1980s with the Red Sox and Cubs. He got sober in 1986 after seeing a video of himself drunk while with his 10-year-old daughter. A trade to the Oakland A’s followed, where he was demoted to the bullpen. The rest, as you probably know or can find out if you ever visit the Hall of Fame, is history.

You have to think that Eckersley would not have been able to persevere in the game if he hadn’t loved it deeply. The same seems to have been true for the so-called “last out.” Gil Flores didn’t ever let himself become just the last out, even after his brief time in the majors came to a close. As a commenter on the Gil Flores memory page on the Mets Ultimate Database site points out: “Five years after his last game as a Met he was still with them in AAA. Must’ve loved the game.”

***

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

Posted in California Angels, Gil Flores, by Josh Wilker | 10 Comments »

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Letter to Yaz: an Update

June 28, 2010

As I’ve mentioned on this blog and in my book, when I was a kid I sent a letter to Carl Yastrzemski asking for his autograph. I started checking the mailbox within a day or two of sending that letter, and continued checking the mailbox for years, long after a reply would have been plausible in any way. This bit of unrequited yearning made it into a recent Boston Globe article on me and my book, and a kindly Globe reader named Ann Beaudoin from Worcester, Massachusetts, took note and contacted me:

Hello, I just read the story in the Boston Globe about your book appearance, and it mentioned your favorite player was Carl Yastrzemski who never sent you back an autograph. Funny, I was just going through old stuff in my attic and came across Yaz’s autograph, which my husband got at a local grocery store back in 1977 when Yaz was doing promo hawking Hilshire Farm kielbasa.

 

An envelope from Worcester arrived in my hands a couple of days later with this slip of paper inside:

Some words jotted near the upper right corner of this side of the slip of paper hint at what is on the back of the slip. But I have waited a long time for the markings on the back of the slip to make their way to me, so I feel compelled to search for clues on how the circle that started with me sending a letter to Yaz was finally completed. I think the list along the left side may shed some light. Of all the grocery store items listed in the left-hand column, only onion rings remained elusive. A can of onion rings.

Onion rings seem to have been an issue that predated the creation of the list. The bearer of the list had perhaps brought onion rings home once before, but not inside a can, leading the possibly frustrated list-maker to underline not once but twice the word can.

“We need onion rings, but in a can. You got it? A can.”

“I got it, I got it.”

“Because last time—”

“I know, I know, I know. Jeez.”

“Don’t ‘jeez’ me. A can.”

I’ve been a husband for a little while now, so it’s pretty easy for me to imagine this exchange. Who among us husbands hasn’t been sent off with such a list, only to return home, shoulders hunched, some crucial part of that list unfulfilled? I know I have. So I find myself imagining the bearer of this list wandering the aisles at length, unable to locate a can of onion rings.

If it were me pushing the cart, I would begin to think, not without some self-pity, about how I’d never even seen a can of onion rings before. Who knew they even existed in can form? Such a capitulatory line of thinking would give way to me daydreaming about the onion rings sold on Nauset Beach, back when I was a kid and my grandparents lived on Cape Cod. The onion rings at the Nauset Beach snack bar were greasy and good, and the smell of them wafted out over the beach, combining with the other smells, the sea, sand, suntan lotion, to create one of the more indelible scent memories of my life. I’d wish to go back, not only to Nauset Beach but to my childhood, to when my grandparents were alive and would go with me and my brother and our whole family and aunts and uncles and cousins to the beach to lie around and get sunburned and try to bodysurf on the thrashing waves in the freezing cold Atlantic.

But meanwhile, back in the grocery store, no onion rings in a can. And so to compensate I’d do what the bearer of this list seems to have done—cross out each found item extra hard and thoroughly, as if to prove my list-fulfilling capabilities.

Then I see myself taking one more mostly hopeless loop through the aisles, glancing at shelves I’d already looked at but not really seeing them this time, instead letting my thoughts reach forward to my arrival home, where I would deliver an impassioned speech on the impossibility of locating a can of onion rings anywhere on earth, given the great time and dogged attention devoted on my part to the search.

And that is when, rounding a corner to the encased meats section, I would come upon a commotion, people beginning to form a line by a relatively small, tired-looking man with flecks of gray in his hair, seated behind a folding table, a pen in his right hand, the scent of Hilshire Farms kielbasa aloft on the muzaked air. I would join this line and ready the only signable item on my person, the back side of the grocery list.

Though I wouldn’t have thought of it this way at the time, when I sent my letter to Yaz over thirty years ago I was asking a question of the universe. The universe answered with silence for so long that I thought silence was the only answer, but it turns out the answer to the deepest question I could think to ask as a child is this: onion ring. Do prayers come true? Do gods answer letters? The answer is neither yes nor no. The answer is empty. The answer is a circle. The answer is an onion ring.

Posted in Beyond the Shoebox, Carl Yastrzemski, by Josh Wilker | 12 Comments »

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Ross Grimsley

June 25, 2010

Two nights ago, I punched a bag of pretzel nuggets. I needed to punch something but the thing I really wanted to punch, an air conditioning control box, would have broken if I’d punched it, and then I would have had to explain to my wife and then the landlord that I had punched and broken an electronic device, and then I would have had to pay for its costly repair. It was a very hot, humid evening, and I just wanted to turn on the air conditioning, but this device, my nemesis, is extremely complicated. You can’t just turn on the air conditioning but have to program it to turn on; however, all the options for programming make no sense to me: wake, return, sleep. Return? Which one gets the thing to turn on? I could not figure it out and eventually resorted to pushing all the buttons randomly in hopes that I’d luck into turning it on, but that didn’t work, so I stalked around the apartment sweating and hurling obscenities until I came upon the bag of pretzel nuggets sitting on the counter and I punched the shit out of it. Goddamn bag, fuck you! And oh, it knew it had been punched. Many of the nuggets inside the bag were instantly pulverized into dust upon impact with the human TNT encased in my right fist, and the structural integrity of the entire bag was also ruptured significantly, so much so that I had, while tidying up the mess from the incident, heart still pounding from battle, to move the surviving pretzel nuggets into a Tupperware container. Even the surviving pretzel nuggets felt my wrath. They were traumatized crumbling versions of their former selves. I know this because yesterday evening when I got home from work I ate a few of the pretzel nuggets out of my cupped hand and my wife chastised me for scattering pretzel crumbs all over the floor. I hadn’t told her that I’d punched a bag of pretzel nuggets. She wouldn’t necessarily get a thrilling charge out of imagining her 42-year-old husband stomping around our apartment assaulting snacks. But the point is this: don’t fuck with me, pretzels.

***

The point is this: I have been trying and failing all week to write something about this 1974 Ross Grimsley TRADED card. I had six pages of really shitty material even before getting into it about the pretzel nuggets, which, in case you were wondering if you missed something, do indeed have nothing whatsoever to do with the 1974 Ross Grimsley TRADED card except maybe that I bought both of them, one item a few days ago and the other thirty-six years ago.

***   

The point is this: I started buying packs of baseball cards when I was six. It was near the end of the summer of 1974. A high percentage of those first cards I ever obtained were from this disquieting 1974 TRADED cards series, those first packs rife with these indelible testaments to transience and rejection. Maybe Topps slapped together the cards late in their production cycle that year. This makes some sense—the cards depicted relatively late-breaking events from the previous year. Or maybe the gods were trying to tell me something. It was, after all, a summer of trades. You could say that I had been traded from New Jersey to Vermont, or that my New Jersey friends had been traded for Vermont strangers, but the biggest transaction involved my dad. He had been with the club from before I’d joined via the family’s expansion draft in 1968, but just before the move to Vermont he’d been traded elsewhere. There was no TRADED card explaining the trade.

***

The point is this: During this week’s failed attempt to use words for some clear purpose, I read a fair amount about Ross Grimsley. He was known as Scuz and Crazy Eyes. He believed a witch helped him win games. He refrained from bathing while on winning streaks. He is shown here just before he was allowed, upon being freed from the constrictive, conservative Reds, to grow a mustache and let his hair bloom into a big greasy bush in which, some argued, he secreted ball-altering substances. The back of the card has a fake newspaper story from a fake newspaper, “The Baseball News”:

GRIMSLEY TRADED TO ORIOLES

“The Baltimore Orioles, shopping for another starting pitcher, today obtained Ross Grimsley . . .,” the story begins. It then notes some highlights from Grimsley’s time with the Reds and mentions that he’d be joining two other lefties in the Orioles’ rotation. If things were going a little smoother inside my mind or soul or whatever, maybe I could find a way to connect Ross Grimsley’s interesting story (related entertainingly in a good recent post by crack baseball historian Bruce Markusen) to my own life. I don’t know, it has been one of those weeks when things don’t really come together. I have gone to my job and come back from my job. My interaction with other humans has been minimal. I have a portable satellite radio with ear bud headphones. I jam the buds into my ears as I am walking out the door and take them out when I get to my cubicle, then several hours later I shut off my computer and leave my cubicle and shove the buds back into my ear and don’t take them out until I get home. Were birds singing? Did anyone call my name? I don’t know.

***

The point is this: I can picture a 1974 TRADED card for my father. I can see the headline on the back:

DAD TRADED TO NEW YORK  

“New York added another solitary today,” the story would begin. The image on the front of his card would feature some doctoring, as all the traded cards did. Of course, my dad did not wear a baseball cap, then or ever, so it’s unclear what could be doctored in or out. Maybe a pair of large headphones, which he began to use extensively as soon as he moved into his studio apartment in Manhattan. He listened to Bach. He shut himself off from the sounds of the present to envision patterns of perfection beyond time.

***

I shut myself off from the sounds of the present but am mostly just looking for distraction. I listen mostly to chatter, Howard Stern or sports talk. Sometimes I mix in some music, too. Yesterday on the way home from work to my wife and my terrorized Tupperware container of pretzel nuggets I listened to some “classic alternative” music from the 1980s and thought about myself from that time and my friends from that time and the feelings from that time, which seemed in retrospect, backed by the poufy-haired British music in my ears, to mostly amount to a sort of swelling romantic melancholy. I started missing the way I was sad in the 1980s. It was somehow larger and more heroic than the measly lowgrade glumness I often slog around in these days. Plus I was thinner. Such is the way of the world. We get older and softer and weaker and fade. There are no TRADED cards marking the changes. There are no stats to analyze. There aren’t even any words. The point is this:

Posted in Baltimore Orioles, Ross Grimsley, by Josh Wilker | 18 Comments »

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Southpaw

June 21, 2010

I got this card through an even-up trade with my friend Pete a few weeks ago. We were walking the length of Victory Boulevard in Staten Island. Some people climb mountains, some jump out of airplanes, some lie on beaches with umbrella-topped drinks in their hands. We walk.

We started walking down long streets in one or another of the five boroughs years ago, before I moved away from New York City. Our first excursion was to walk the length of Metropolitan Avenue from the East River in Brooklyn to its ending point at a busy intersection several miles away in Queens. It was Pete’s idea. He’s a gifted traveler, someone who can look at any map and see adventure. He promoted the idea for a while, often over beers and with a jukebox backing him, using his gift for mythologizing the world to make Metropolitan seem like it would be as fraught with uncertainty and revelations as a foray into the Forbidden Zone. In fact, speaking of the Forbidden Zone, I am fairly certain that on more than one occasion Pete hyped the potential excursion by reenacting and slightly altering the ominous exchange of dialogue near the end of Planet of the Apes, just after the loin-clothed Charlton Heston has trotted off on his horse down the beach.

Pete (as Zira): What will they find out there, Dr. Zaius?

Pete (in the oracular voice of Zaius): [Long pause] Their destiny.

This appealed to me, and I brought to that first walk my dabbling interest in spiritual privation and ritual, attempting to frame the leisure time activity as a vision quest. To that end, I decided to refrain from eating or drinking, like a young Indian brave, and I selected two cards from my shoebox of cards so that we could “bless” the journey. (Unfortunately, I don’t remember the identity of either card. This is why I am writing about Southpaw, of all things: so that life stops slipping through my fingers.) I placed one of the cards in a chain link fence at the start of Metropolitan Avenue and then saved the other card for the end. By the time we got to that end, we’d both received bad haircuts from a gray-haired Italian guy gently edging into senility, and I’d broken down and abandoned my fast and the hope for visions by eating a bagel. I jammed the second baseball card on a lamp post at the intersection where Metropolitan Avenue ended, and Pete announced our accomplishment to a couple guys manning jackhammers nearby. Without missing a beat, one of the hardhats grumbled drily, “Lewis and Clark over here.”

As the years went on, we continued exploring. We walked the length of Bedford Avenue (passing, among other things, the site of Ebbets Field, now just a parking lot with a small plaque), walked the length of Kings Highway, and walked across the Bronx from the Hudson River to City Island. A few miles into the most recent walk, down Victory Boulevard, we stopped at an arcade searching in vain for some miniature golf. We came upon a small sports card store and each bought a pack. A little while later we sat on a guardrail by the side of the road and ate sandwiches. When we were done eating we opened our packs, as if looking for a message inside a meal-ending fortune cookie. I didn’t get any cards of guys on my team, the Red Sox, and Pete didn’t get any cards of guys on his team, the Mets, but I got oft-injured Mets centerfielder Carlos Beltran. 

“Trade you,” I said. I held up Beltran.

He didn’t have any Red Sox, so I settled for Southpaw. I don’t have a particular connection to the White Sox mascot, other than that now I live in the city where he plies his trade. He’s about as bland a mascot as you could imagine. But even so, I feel like my shoebox is a little richer now, since Southpaw came to me in a trade with my friend.

***

(Speaking of mascots, there are a couple of them in the news of late: in Pittsburgh, the dissenting opinions of a Pierogi got squashed; and in New York, remembering the short sad tale of Dandy.)

Posted in Chicago White Sox, Southpaw, by Josh Wilker | 7 Comments »

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Bill Walton

June 17, 2010

This card came with a T-shirt given to me by No Mas when I did a reading a few weeks ago at a store they are associated with in New York City. (Not that it’s the center of the article, but the shirt is described in a recent Boston Globe story about my book and my visit to Fenway Park.) As explained on the back of this card, the No Mas people based the shirt on a something they found in a thrift store, a relic from Bill Walton’s short, sweet era as a healthy Celtics’ reserve and, consequently, the Happiest Man on the Face of the Earth.

By the time he came to the Celtics, Walton had been riddled with injuries for so long that it was as if he were rising from the dead. I had started following basketball at the same time I began playing it for the first time, on my seventh grade team. That was in 1979, just after the end of Walton’s brief day in the sun as arguably the best player in the game. For the next several years, I associated him with gigantic, glowering unhappiness, his injuries keeping him from doing the thing he loved as much as anyone ever loved anything. When you’re a kid, each year seems to go on forever, so Walton’s relative obscurity for the first six years of my NBA fandom, years in which he played sporadically and/or for the nearly invisible San Diego Clippers, seemed much longer to me then. If Bill Russell and not Bill Walton had joined the Celtics for the 1985-86 season, it wouldn’t have been much more of a surprise. He was as shadowy and, because of his renowned, unique game, as magical a cultural presence as Bigfoot.

And as every NBA fan knows, Walton’s body held for exactly one year with the Celtics, and his contributions on an already loaded roster made the ’86 squad one of the greatest teams the league has ever seen. The next year, he was cooked, and the rest of the Celtics slowly began to follow his lead and physically crumble, too. In the ’87 Finals, with Walton sidelined, the Lakers won the rubber match between the two teams, who’d split their previous two Finals meetings in ’84 and ’85. For good measure, the Lakers won the title again the next season, demolishing any lingering doubts that they and not the Celtics were the team of the decade. It would have been nice if Walton’s body could have held up a little longer, but we all knew it was already a miracle for him to be out on the court for a whole season. When I think of Big Red I don’t wish for more. I’m just grateful.

Posted in The Basketball Kid, by Josh Wilker | 10 Comments »

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Don Mossi

June 15, 2010

The concept of the muse suggests that artistic inspiration is a soaring rendezvous with some sort of personification of perfection. I’d guess that more often art struggles to its feet as a messy, necessary reply to either the grueling sameness of everyday life or to jarring, terrible deviations from that sameness. Somehow, when encountered in cardboard form, Don Mossi embodied both of these crucibles, a man whose haunting mien threw the children who gazed upon it out of the dream of a flawless baseball heaven and back into their imperfect everyday solitudes, where they would be troubled forever after by Mossi, that bringer of the news that life will not be beautiful.

The first to wrestle this specific burden of knowledge into art were Brendan Boyd and Fred Harris, who used their gifts for figurative language and hypothetical riffs to sing of Don Mossi. In their seminal 1973 work, The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubblegum Book, Mossi is discussed in terms of his bullpen partnership with fellow Cleveland relief ace Ray Narleski, as if even years after his retirement the world was not quite ready to look upon Don Mossi alone: 

[Narleski and Mossi] always reminded me of two small-town undertakers who, having found the world at large a particularly cold and hardhearted place to do business in, have banded together in a desperate and distrustful partnership for the purposes of mutual self-preservation. Narleski with his sly little-boy grin and the darting, fishy eyes of the small-time criminal handles the customer relations, and Mossi with his loving-cup ears and the dark hulking presence of one newly dead or resurrected does all the dirty work. (p. 64)

 

The card used to illustrate the passage features Mossi looking particularly sepulchral in a Tigers uniform. Many years later, cartoonist Daniel Clowes recreated the card in his Eightball comic along with a caption that seemed to give voice to the most common reaction of having an image of Mossi in mind.

The most well-known rendering of Don Mossi, which includes the notion that Don Mossi was “the complete, five-tool ugly player,” comes from Bill James’ short article on the subject in his Historical Abstract, but while the “five-tool ugly” passage is hilarious, I prefer some earlier sentences in James’ piece, when he simply peers directly into the face of Mossi and describes what he sees:

Mossi’s ears looked as if they had been borrowed from a much larger species, and reattached without proper supervision. His nose was crooked, his eyes were in the wrong place, and though he was skinny he had no neck to speak of, just a series of chins that melted into his chest. An Adam’s apple poked out of the third chin, and there was always a stubble of beard because you can’t shave a face like that. He looked like Gary Gaetti escaping from Devil’s Island. (p. 245)

 

There’s just something about that face. It stays with you. It makes you want to do something. There’s no way around it: it inspires. Mike Shannon, in his book Tales from the Dugout, relates how the image of Don Mossi’s face on a baseball card led to new life and new connections, a cult of Mossi arising around a wild Cincinnati party thrown every year on his birthday and climaxing in a phone call to the man himself.

Out of all the cultural growth spawned by Don Mossi, the party related by Mike Shannon is the most touching, in that, as the co-creator of the party, Tom Jackson, relates, the party “started out mocking Mossi, but as it went on year after year he became a hero, sort of a folk hero. We found out he is a very decent guy, a real dedicated family man.”

Mossi was a good pitcher, too, which often seems to get overlooked when he’s mentioned (he’s been mentioned before on this very site, in an early post I did on Andy Etchebarren, and I neglected to mention Mossi’s pitching prowess, instead going for the cheap shot of calling him “the Babe Ruth of ugly”). Bill James, always on the money with this sort of thing, does call Mossi “pretty darned good,” but the praise is like a quick glimpse of the back of a card soon forgotten amid all the hours of staring queasily and with strangely tenacious fixation at the front of the card.

I for one have been staring at the front of the 1966 Don Mossi card at the top of this page for days, ever since it was very kindly given to me by a fellow baseball card fanatic named Bruce at my book-signing in San Diego this past Saturday. (Bruce does not shy away from the face of Don Mossi but, perhaps like some sort of medieval penitent believing that subjecting oneself to horrors daily might bring one closer to a holy life, has made the collecting of Don Mossi cards the center of his continuing forays into baseball card collecting.) The 1966 card is Mossi’s last, and it is Bruce’s favorite. I can’t remember Bruce’s exact thoughts on why it was his favorite, but I think part of it had to do with him being in baseball nowhere with the Kansas City A’s. He had, in his earlier years, been a member of good and, in 1954, his first year, even great teams, and now here he was, on the brink of oblivion with a team that would soon cease to exist in its current form. The theme of imminent dissolution extends to his features, which all seem to be straining to escape the general parameters of what it means to be a part of a face. Only the context of a baseball card would fix the mass in the background as the blurred image of a stadium; taken on its own, the mass seems much more like a polluted cresting wave. In moments, Don Mossi will be no more, the cubist collage that is his face swept away in a grimy riptide.

Enough, no more. Turn the card over. Go back to the beginning. To things that can be measured and understood. In 1954, Don Mossi helped win a pennant. He went 6 and 1 with a 1.94 ERA. Just above the stats for that first season of Don Mossi’s major league career is some text, including this sentence: “The vet reliever retired 27 straight batters in 8 relief appearances in 1954.”

That’s right. In his own way, and quietly, and long ago, and in lumpy fits and starts, Don Mossi set down an entire nine innings worth of batters in a row. Don Mossi was perfect.

Posted in Don Mossi, Loose in the Shoebox, by Josh Wilker | 13 Comments »

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Tom Griffin

June 9, 2010

Has Tom Griffin ever been mellow? It would appear so. Today I offer apparently mellow southern Californian Tom Griffin as a little mellow prayer for smooth passage today to California. I’m headed to the airport shortly and if all goes smooth and mellow I’ll be seeing a game in Dodger Stadium tonight for the first time in my life.

So why not feature a Dodger today? Well, for one thing, I didn’t want to leave the Angels out of my embrace of all matters baseball in that sunny region. Also, after a couple days in Los Angeles, I’ll be headed down to San Diego, where Griffin toiled for a couple years just after several years with the Astros and just before joining the Angels.

Griffin was born in Los Angeles and attended Grant High School (where he must have been a superstar—his showing there got him taken fourth in the first round of the 1966 MLB draft) in Van Nuys, California.

Van Nuys has been a place of some mystery for me lately, as it is the core of an enigmatic utterance by Kelly Leak in The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training. The boys have just made their getaway from their parents in the customized van, and someone has asked Kelly if he “really knows how to drive this thing.” I don’t have time to check Kelly’s exact reply, but I believe all he says is, “Relax, I’m from Van Nuys.”

What the hell does this mean? I’m not sure, but the implication seems to be that in Van Nuys it is customary for a newborn baby to drive itself home from the maternity ward. If this is the case, I am from the opposite of Van Nuys, in that I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 30, and only then with great reluctance and trepidation, and even now after over a decade of tense-shouldered practice behind the wheel, I’m still generally terrified in the driver’s seat.

And yet, later today, after picking up my rental from Thrifty, I will be grappling with Los Angeles traffic, which in American mythology is to traffic what Moby Dick is to creatures of the sea.

But if all somehow goes smooth and mellow and Tom Griffin-y, and maybe if I can channel my inner Kelly Leak and pretend I’m from Van Nuys, I’ll be watching a Dodger game tonight and tomorrow will be doing the first of a couple Southern California appearances for my book. Below are the details on those appearances. Hope to see you there.

THURSDAY, JUNE 10, 7 PM PACIFIC
Baseball Reliquary, South Pasadena Public Library Community Room, 1115 El Centro St., South Pasadena, CA
Author appearance, reading and book signing.
Free and open to the public.
For more info call: 626.791.7647

SATURDAY, JUNE 12TH, 11 AM PACIFIC
Upstart Crow Bookstore, 835C West Harbor Drive, Seaport Village, San Diego, CA
Author appearance and book signing.
Free and open to the public.
For more info call: 619.232.4855

Posted in California Angels, Tom Griffin, by Josh Wilker | 14 Comments »

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Enos Cabell

June 7, 2010

I’m no journalist, just a guy trying to stay sane via the dubious, possibly even insane, route of clinging to his childhood baseball cards, so don’t take this or anything else I ever say as unassailable fact, but I believe that at a certain point in his lengthy major league career, well after he had become established as a regular presence in the major leagues, Enos Cabell became a tool used by a then somewhat obscure baseball writer and analyst named Bill James to, first, attack the idea that Enos Cabell should be a regular presence in the major leagues and, more generally, to attack the established parameters for determining the relative worth of a major league player. Enos Cabell, James argued, was, contrary to the general consensus on the matter, in fact pretty worthless. I don’t think James had anything personally against Cabell, but he did have a seething, avenging hatred toward ossified conventional thinking, so he battered Cabell pretty mercilessly as he slammed the idea of the tall, thin infielder against the norm of what, in baseball, and by extension in life, is good. Enos Cabell, James concluded, is not good. The implied big question in this Seige on Enos: What is good? 

I wasn’t aware of Bill James during the years I collected baseball cards, or for several years after I stopped collecting. At the time I got this 1978 card, I would only have been able to draw from a couple of sources in determining where Enos Cabell stood in my world. (I almost wrote “the world” instead of “my world,” but when you’re a kid, the world belongs to you. Even though this thought is occurring as a parenthetical aside, it is probably the thesis of this sloppily conceived essay, if not the thesis of my entire ongoing-until-the-graveyard experiment in baseball card worship and solipsism and nostalgia and anti-nostalgia and the attempt to hold onto joy. When you’re a kid, the world belongs to you, and then little by little you lose it. This is my attempt to reclaim, card by card, my world.) One source in determining where Enos Cabell stood in my world was this card. On the back, the statistics for Cabell’s latest season suggested he was good. He had batted .282 with 36 doubles, 16 home runs, 68 RBI, and 101 runs scored. That, I would have concluded, is good. On the front, he is smiling, happy, a glimpse of the blaring rainbow colors of the Astros visible on his chest. This happy portrait brings me to the next source in determining where Enos Cabell stood in my world: he had appeared before my eyes, on screen, tall as a two-story building, in the very same uniform and with a similar happy expression the summer before in The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, a throwaway sequel that I nonetheless and without shame or irony loved and still love.    

I am not going to venture too deeply into that movie at the moment, even though it is on my mind constantly as I work on a short book about it. I have been watching it on a fairly regular loop, and have watched some scenes as if I’m dissecting the Zapruder film. One of those scenes is the appearance of the Houston Astros in the dugout being used by the Bears. Bears’ third baseman Jimmy Feldman (played by Brett Marx, grandson of Gummo and lookalike of grand uncle Harpo) announces the arrival by exclaiming the names of the Astros’ stars, Cesar Cedeno and Bob Watson (the latter the only Astro who gets to speak a line; it’s the most crucial line in the movie, or, if you’re me, in movies in general), but besides Watson and Cedeno there are several other Astros who amble into the scene: Bill Virdon, Ken Forsch, JR Richard, Joe Ferguson, Roger Metzger, and Enos Cabell. Most of the Astros fade into the background, taking a seat on the bench, but Cabell is shown reacting with glee and pointing as he watches Tanner Boyle elude officials trying to grab the Bears shortstop and drag him from the field.

Like I said, I’ve been watching the movie constantly, which has a way of pounding all the enjoyment out of a thing, but I still get choked up by Tanner’s Last Stand. I don’t have the time or inclination to get into that now, but I do want to say that Enos Cabell deserves credit for shepherding that moment along by his enthusiastic reaction. While Ken Forsch, for example, sits idly by and dispassionately watches the little boy fight for his life (for what is life without baseball?), Enos Cabell points and laughs, the first among anyone in the entire Astrodome to become a fan of Tanner’s tenacious elusiveness. Soon enough, buoyed by Bob Watson’s one line (“Hey, let the keeds play,” Watson drawls, accompanying the somewhat stiff line-reading with a mistimed, limp-fisted air punch), Coach Leak will exit the dugout and in his Nam-Vet-suggesting army jacket he will begin exhorting the crowd to also become fans of the spectacle and of what it means. Soon enough, Kelly Leak, that stubborn non-joiner, will stand beside his estranged father outside the dugout, the two of them chanting “Let them play” (goddamnit, I vowed not to get too deep into this today but here I am again in the middle of the greatest fictional political movement of my world) and then soon enough all the Bears will join them, and then soon enough the whole stadium will be chanting, everyone shedding their indifference. It all started with, or was at least nudged forward by, Enos Cabell, rainbow-bright major league athlete and fan.

So in my world, Enos Cabell is good.

This isn’t my world, of course. I’m just passing through. My only claims are those of a fan. I’m a fan of baseball. I’m a fan of homely forgotten movies. I’m a fan of Bill James, but I don’t want to (and never could) follow in his brilliant footsteps. I’m a fan of the statistics on the backs of my old baseball cards, but I know they don’t tell an accurate story of a player’s accomplishments. I’m a fan of fans. Each fan owns the world as much as possible by way of his or her distinct point of view. Each fan remembers. Each fan cares. Each fan sheds indifference with weird, inexplicable love.

***

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

Posted in Enos Cabell, Houston Astros, by Josh Wilker | 20 Comments »

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Ed Figueroa

June 4, 2010

“I didn’t know what the heck I was doing [in Vietnam], but I was there. I learned that life, it’s beautiful to be alive. I saw a lot of people dead there. When I got out of there, I was happy I was out, happy I was alive.”  -Ed Figueroa

That quote, from a 2008 Daily News article by Anthony McCarron, fleshes out the stat line for 1969 on the back of this card. (The card merely states “IN MILITARY SERVICE” for that year.) Figueroa had already spent three years in the minors before that year, and when he got home from serving with the Marines in Vietnam, he spent several more years in the minors. In all, it took him eight years, with nine minor league teams, to reach the majors, and he didn’t spend an entire season in the majors until 1976, a full decade after signing his first professional contract. I’ve written some before about Figueroa’s short, quiet span of excellence with the dynastic Yankees, so all I’ll add here is the added appreciation for him (grudging, of course, since he is a Yankee) that I got this morning upon looking at the long, winding road on the back of this card. (The back of the card also features a retroactively ironic trivia cartoon relating that “Fergie Jenkins was 1st Canadian pitcher to win 20 games in a season”; the year after this card came out, Figueroa became the first, and still only, Puerto Rican pitcher to win 20 games.)

As for the front of the card: For some reason he looks to me like he’s about to break into a stiff sales pitch for one of those ads you might see just after returning home from a night at the bar and just before falling into boozy unconsciousness. I don’t know if he ever got any endorsement deals, but if he did, considering his low profile on a team of loud, colorful characters, don’t you think that they’d have to have been the kind that aired late at night? “Oh . . . hello. I did not see you come in. Hey, now that you are here, let me tell you about this really groovy new mustache-sculpting tool that has changed my whole outlook on life.”

***

Well, maybe I’m prone to imagining versions of Ed Figueroa because he made some headlines yesterday in the imaginary world over at Play That Funky Baseball, the site currently replaying the 1977 season in serial novel form. The biggest story of the resurrected season so far has been Rod Carew’s 46-game hitting streak, which came to an end yesterday at the hands of Figueroa and the Yankees.

***

And speaking of baseball replay, I have an article up on the Huffington Post that bloviates with varying degrees of coherence about the current Joyce-inspired clamor for the expansion of the use of instant replay for umpiring decisions.

***

Finally, just a reminder that I’ll be sitting behind a table, or perhaps standing periodically, at a bookstore in Chicago tomorrow. Here are the details:

SATURDAY, JUNE 5TH, 3 PM CENTRAL
Barbara’s Bookstore @ Macy’s, 111 North State Street, Lower Level, Chicago, IL
Author appearance and book signing.
Free and open to the public.
For more info call: 312.781.3033

Please see my “book tour events” page for more details about other upcoming events, including a June 10 appearance in South Pasadena, a June 12 appearance in San Diego, and a June 13 appearance at the Printer’s Row festival in Chicago. 

Posted in Ed Figueroa, New York Yankees, by Josh Wilker | 9 Comments »

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Pat Putnam

June 2, 2010

After a bit of a return to my normal life as a couch-bound shut-in, I’ll soon be leaving my house again to try to use my corporeal presence and astonishing ability to sign my own name to politely strongarm civilians into buying my book. On Saturday I’ll be sitting at a table with a stack of hardcovers and a Sharpie in the Barbara’s Bookstore on the lower level of Macy’s in downtown Chicago. A few days after that, at the request of the great Baseball Reliquary, my wife and I will fly to Los Angeles for a reading and signing at the South Pasadena library, and on Saturday we’ll be at the Upstart Crow Bookstore in San Diego. The following day, I’ll be back in Chicago, on a panel with novelist Billy Lombardo at the Printer’s Row Festival. (Please see my “book tour events” page for more details on those and other upcoming appearances.)

If you’re around for any of those events, I’d love to meet you. I honestly would! I don’t think of myself as a people person, but I really did like meeting people on my trip through the northeast. At a lot of stops, I saw people I hadn’t seen in decades, including some old high school buddies in Manhattan and one of my elementary school teachers in Vermont. I also got to meet people who are readers of the blog, and to talk with them and others about the joys of old cardboard.

One of my favorite meetings occurred with a fellow baseball card lover in my old hometown, East Randolph, where I hung out for a couple hours at the general store that had provided most of my childhood cards. Halfway through my visit, the son of Amy and Joel Messier, who now own the store, showed up, home from a little league game, and he and I spent a while digging through a lovingly protected selection from his baseball card collection. (Both of us were in uniform—Darrin in his little league Dodger duds and me in a Papelbon jersey.) He had some older cards of superstars and, being a fellow Red Sox fan, he also had several Red Sox cards from different eras. One card in this penthouse of his collection might not have seemed to fit in with such lofty company, but being from East Randolph, that little town that is really only a few houses along Route 14 in Central Vermont, I knew why there was a Pat Putnam card mixed in among the likes of Yogi Berra and Willie Mays and Wade Boggs and Dustin Pedroia.

Baseball was the center of my world growing up, just as it seems to be now for Darrin. I understood on some level how far from the action I was in East Randolph. East Randolph was not Mobile, Alabama, or some sun-drenched hotbed of talent in Florida or California, or San Pedro de Macoris. Baseball players did not come from East Randolph, Vermont. They rarely came from Vermont at all. Even Carlton Fisk, born in Bellows Falls, which was a long way from my town anyway, stridently defined himself as a native of New Hampshire, and not of Vermont, where he’d been born only because that’s where the closest hospital was located.

But Pat Putnam, somehow, some way, was born just down the road a few miles from East Randolph, the next small town over: Bethel.

“Bethel!” I said upon spotting Pat Putnam’s card in Darrin’s collection. Darrin’s father, Joel, said it, too.

“I couldn’t believe he was from Bethel,” Joel said, shaking his head and smiling.

Putnam had not, as far as I could ever tell, stayed in Bethel long. There were no local legends of his exploits as a child and teen titan of baseball prowess. I assumed early on that he and his family had quickly moved away to somewhere more populated and warm, and from there he’d begun his ascension to the big leagues. But he’d been there, in Bethel, at least for a second. And by making it to the big leagues, and making it onto a card, his birthplace immortalized on the back, he’d brought my faraway part of the world within reach of the gods.

Posted in Pat Putnam, Texas Rangers, by Josh Wilker | 28 Comments »

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front porch sittin’

May 31, 2010

I’ve been lucky enough to get some good reviews for my book over the last few weeks, but an email I got yesterday is my favorite thumbs-up so far:

i got your book about two weeks ago. it came in a care package from my beautiful wife (care package cause i am in afghanistan right now). a few months ago, she and i were on a plane and i was reading some magazine that escapes me now about your book coming out. it sounded awesome. i was also an avid card collector growing up. i was OBSESSED with jose canseco. haha. he was my fucking hero. i couldn’t get enough of him. i read all the stuff i could in beckett’s about him, got all the cards i could, and even saved my allowance to buy his rookie card (when it was actually worth something) when i was young. i was maybe 9 or 10 when i finally got it. it was such a triumphant day. i was on top of the world. 

today, as i was finishing your book, something really spoke to me. when you talked about ricky henderson (who i was a fan of, cause i loved my oakland a’s), it helped me put shit into perspective. there are certain challenging things in my life, and it got me thinking. the way that you described henderson’s willingness to treat every at bat like he was deciding the world’s fate with his performance made sense. no matter how bad they were losing, he would still try his hardest. even in a situation where it seems easier to give up and lay down and wait for the loss to be official, his ass made shit happen.

i applied that to my current situation in this third country hell hole. so… thanks. you helped me get perspective. 

again, i really enjoyed your book. i hope you don’t mind, but a few buddies here are gonna borrow it and read it.

take care,

SGT Dane Brown
414th MP Company
 

I thanked Sgt. Dane Brown for writing to me and tried to express my gratitude for his service and sacrifice. I asked if he’d be willing to talk a little more about his experiences as a baseball fan growing up and as a baseball fan now. He got back to me, and so the floor is his for the rest of this Memorial Day:

when i was younger (six or seven) i was drawn to jose canseco. i think it was cause he was a star starting from his rookie year. there were plenty of his baseball cards out there, and he was everywhere. i remember having a poster in my room celebrating his monumental 40/40 season. i remember thinking how awesome it was that he was able to that. that’s why i was an a’s fan. because of jose canseco. i didn’t grow up in california, and didn’t even go there until my adult years. so it wasn’t a geographical thing. it just worked out that way, oddly.

my other team (you can have two favorites, you’re a kid!) were the cubs. talk about a heartbreaking team. i was born in central illinois, and my dad’s side of the family is die hard cubs. my grandpa breathes the cubs. i remember watching games with him on wgn. he would drink pabst NA, and eat candy. i’d drink root beer, and eat candy. and we would have fun. at the same time in life, i had my baseball cards separated in binders, divided by teams, then players. i had a big section for ryne sandberg and mark grace. they were really big when i was a kid. and my grandpa and dad used to cheer for “ryno”.

i can still remember hearing my grandpa yelling at the TV cause the cubs let another run score, another error, or another game lost. to this day, my grandpa still believes. hell, every cubs fan still believes. someday, in some miracle that we deserve, the cubs will finally win the series.

i went to a cubs game with my mom last may. it was miserable, temperature wise. it was raining pretty good, and it was cold. and there were so many people at wrigley, drinking a beer, eating nachos. everyone there, waiting, hoping that, maybe, this is the year. of course, it didn’t end up being the case. but, it never is. but we refuse to give up hope.
 
and that’s something that i love about cubs fans. no matter how bad the cubs are doing, they just deal with it. i live in springfield, missouri. stl cardinals everywhere. that’s who everyone loves. no one really gives a shit about the royals, just the cards. i get a lot of stupid looks and questions. i also get the inevitable statement, “the cubs fucking suck.” well, i know that. but i don’t care. i love them, and i refuse to switch just because they will probably never win a world series while i am alive.
 
the dedication, the undying devotion, the sense of brotherhood with other cubs fans. i love that shit. it reminds me a lot of different things in life. my current situation, here in lovely afgahnistan, even. it sucks here. i don’t like it. my brothers and sisters in arms here hate it. but we move on. it’s what we do. our day sucks? fuck it. we move on, and go onto the next day. just like a cubs fan, “well, today was not good. but we will wake up tomorrow, and do our duties.”
 
and i think that’s really what it’s all about. our willingness to do that part of the job. and being a cubs fan is just that. a job. just like a shitty job for minimal pay… you do it. you do it, but you hate it. but you find companionship with your co-workers… just like with fellow cubs fans.
 
as for me right now, it’s not glamorous here halfway across the world from home, but i’ll be home soon enough. then my wife (who is a yankee fan, GASP!!!) and i will be able to go to a few games. chicago, new york. either way, we’ll both be home [Dane's wife is in the military, too] and back together. i am pretty fucking ready for that time to get here.
 
***i put a few pics in here. one is me, chilling in the sun… with your book. it’s what we call “front porch sittin.” haha. the other one is a few buddies and i. just to let you see the kind of nerds we are. haha.

put the pics up if you want, but you certainly won’t hurt my heart if you don’t. thanks
 
take care. keep up the good work.
 
dane

Posted in Beyond the Shoebox, by Josh Wilker | 18 Comments »

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Bill Lee, 1974

May 27, 2010

Well, I met Bill Lee. It was last Wednesday at Fenway, or actually at the Red Sox Team Store right outside Fenway on Yawkey Way.

I’ve been having trouble writing since I got back from my book tour through the Northeast, possibly because the foundation of my writing has always been whining and complaining, and what’s left to whine and complain about if you get to meet Bill Lee at the Red Sox Team Store right outside Fenway on Yawkey Way?

I guess at least I can try to tell the story. I drove over to the park in the late afternoon with my wife, who’d just flown in to meet me, and our friend Alex. We found the alley that led to the lot where I’d been told I could park. A guy ambled over to us as we pulled in, and I explained why I was there.

“You’re the authah,” he said.

This accented utterance made the dream of my life official. For good measure, the man then directed us where to pahk the cah. After that, we went up a back way to the store (my second Goodfellas entering-the-Copa moment in the last two weeks). We found two guys from Seven Footer, Pete the editor and Robert the sales honcho, up near the front by a table with a couple stacks of my book.

“Bill was here,” Robert said. “He said, ‘I’ll be back in a few. I gotta go “tune up”.’”

It’s hard for me to make judgments on time for that evening, which went by in a euphoric blur, but I guess about a half hour went by before Bill was done tuning up. He barged in and made his way over to our table. We shook hands. I don’t remember what I said. Probably not much—he pretty much runs any conversation he’s in. He is a big guy with a booming voice. He had the rough hands and sunburned face of a farmer. He had white hair and a gray and white goatee. At one point during the signing someone asked me if I was his son.

“You guys look exactly alike,” the person said. This was a surprise to me. I later related it to Bill.

“All white people look alike!” he boomed.

Here are those two white people, in a picture taken by my aunt Bonnie:

 

The moment captured in the picture is one of my favorites from the evening. Bill was leafing through the book and telling stories about the players in the cards at the head of each chapter. He said J.R. Richard almost ended his life with an errant fastball that passed close to his head during a spring training game. He said John D’Acquisto once got so down after getting a tongue-lashing from manager Dick Williams that Lee and others had to hold D’Acquisto back from leaping out of an airplane. He criticized Mike Kekich for trying to distance himself from his unusual marital experiment involving teammate Fritz Peterson in the early 1970s (“You’ve got to own that kind of thing,” Bill said). He may or may not have said that [someone whose name rhymes with “Wedgie Paxson”] was an [something that rhymes with “mass soul”].

“I had to ride to the 1973 all-star game with that guy,” Bill said, briefly and uncharacteristically morose as he relived the ordeal.

I could have talked baseball with him all night, but he was of course besieged by fans. I noticed that he always asked each person where they were from, and wherever it was, he had been there and had a story to tell about it, a way of connecting. Everyone walked away smiling. 

When the signing was over, we watched an inning of the game on a television in the store. Bill didn’t want to go across the street to the game because he’d be mobbed.

“When I go I make sure to always have a cup of beer in both hands so people can’t ask me to sign stuff,” he said, “but then people just buy me more and more beer and I end up getting hammered.”

Bill watched David Ortiz bat with special interest. He’s a bat-maker, and Ortiz uses one of his creations, made from a tree Lee had chopped down himself in Vermont. Later, after we said goodbye to Bill and went across the street to the game, Ortiz used that Vermont wood to clout a two-run home run, the difference-maker in a 3-2 win. It just barely cleared the top of the wall. I choose to think that Bill Lee’s handiwork made the difference. 

Posted in Bill Lee, Boston Red Sox, by Josh Wilker | 12 Comments »

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Doyle Alexander

May 25, 2010

I didn’t think to look at the odometer of my rental car when I started on my east coast book tour a couple weeks ago, so I don’t know how many miles I travelled. A lot. I drove from Chicago to Pittsburgh, then from Pittsburgh to Brooklyn, then out to Huntington, Long Island, back to Brooklyn, up to Boston, then to northwestern Vermont, then central Vermont, then southern Vermont, central Vermont again, and then back to Chicago. My wife met me in Boston, so we shared the driving from that point on, and she was at the wheel of our regular car as we drove home from dropping off the rental car. We were both exhausted. A sedan spun out in front of us, the byproduct of a near-collision with a minivan. The sedan swerved onto a spit of land separating the highway from an off-ramp, a cyclone of dust kicking up. The car then swerved back into traffic, coming right at us.

A kind of complacency sets in while you travel all your miles. The monotony, hypnotic, lures you into believing that you’ll always be traveling this road. On the trip east, desperate to break up the boredom, I had listened to a speech on a religious radio station from ex-major leaguer Frank Pastore, who related how an injury to his pitching arm had led him to a religious conversion. Somehow this conversion ended up involving inflammatory anti-Semitic asides (during his speech he made sure to implicate “a Jewish tribunal” in the death of the central figure in his religion, exactly the kind of vitriol that catalyzed deadly pogroms for centuries leading up to the Holocaust). But I understand the need to search for some solid ground when the ground you thought was solid disintegrates. Later on in my long drive, I saw a bumper sticker that said, “You will meet God.” We all will live to see moments when the monotonous, comforting pattern of life suddenly gives way to a terrifying chaos. The defining quality of this chaos is that it will seem to have always been there, below the flimsy veil of everyday life.

The out-of-control car on the expressway came within a few feet of spearing us in the passenger side, where I was sitting. Somehow, it didn’t hit any cars at all, and as we drove on toward home the only aftermath was the sound of other cars honking to protest the disruption in the illusion that we will all go on forever. After a while, I told my wife I felt like Samuel Jackson’s character in Pulp Fiction after he’d lived through a hail of bullets. It was actually the crystallization of a grateful feeling that had been building throughout the trip. I’ll try to write some more about the trip throughout this week, but even before the near accident at the end, I had already begun to get the feeling, repeatedly, that my life was passing before my eyes. People from all parts of my past reappeared in front of me wherever I went: friends from my twenties and early thirties, friends from college, friends from high school, friends from junior high, even one of my elementary school teachers. Even a couple of real-life Cardboard Gods. The fast pace of the tour blurred this procession into one long joyful and also faintly melancholy farewell parade, like you see in movies when someone is breathing last breaths and seeing everything ever seen and loved one more time before going. This life is a short, sweet blessing. Things will change.

Doyle Alexander surely began learning this lesson around the time of this singularly odd 1977 card, the only card I can remember seeing in which an attempt was made to doctor the cap and uniform of a player in the midst of an action shot of sorts. In all other cases that I know of, the practice of altering the cap and uniform to place a player on a team he’d moved to in the offseason was restricted to posed shots, which were certainly easier to manipulate into a new version of reality without creating as much of a profound sense of a figure being divorced from his environment as is shown here on Alexander’s card. I guess it’s the smudgy altered cap against the Rembrandtian darkness in the background at the top of the picture that goes the farthest in making Alexander into a flimsy provisional interloper in this mortal coil. Before the previous year, Alexander had played for several years with one team, the Orioles, but from that point on he became noted for being a well-traveled guy, often going (at least in my memory) from one team to the next during pennant pushes, his veteran steadiness called on to shore up fraying starting rotations. He became a traveler. It started around the time of this card, in which he seems easily removable, as if you could flick him loose from the picture with one fingernail, and then he’d flutter to the ground like a feather, still locked in his ambiguous open-mouthed pose. 

Posted in Doyle Alexander, Texas Rangers, by Josh Wilker | 20 Comments »

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