Archive for the ‘by Josh Wilker’ Category

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Honus and Hanley

May 12, 2010

I’m hitting the road this morning, bound for the east coast, so I won’t be doing any posts for the next week and a half. My first stop will be a reading at Joseph Beth Booksellers in Honus Wagner’s baseball homeland of Pittsburgh. Before I go, I wanted to quickly finish up the story I started yetserday about my trip onto the field at Wrigley.

After I got down to the field, I waited around for a while, taking a seat in a folding chair in the photographer’s section. I watched some Marlins in the cage hit rope after rope into the outfield.

Here I am, I thought. Inches away.

It was terrifying, actually, being that close to the action and thinking that in a few minutes I’d be on live TV. Eventually, the Marlins’ pregame broadcaster, Craig Minervini, appeared and chatted me up for a few seconds before rushing off to continue his preparations. He was a friendly motormouth, and within seconds somehow communicated that he loved baseball cards, loved Strat-O-Matic, and loved the same Cheryl Tiegs fishnet bathing suit photo that ruled my fantasy life in the late 1970s.

A few more minutes passed, and I watched Craig race through the first segments of his pregame show. Everybody was so blasé all around me. The guys behind the TV cameras, the photographers next to me, setting up, the giant-haunched baseball players sauntering around on the green grass like vaguely immortal minotours. This happened every day for all of them. Brad Stevens, the boy genius who coached Butler to the NCAA finals, threw out the first pitch. I was the only one in my vicinity of bored pros who clapped for him. Finally Craig waved me over, and I sat in a folding chair so close to him that if I were any closer I’d be behind him, and for a few minutes Craig carried me along on a tidal wave of polished cheerful banter. I don’t remember much. I think I called Joe Wallis a hippie. Then it was over. I didn’t know what to do with myself. Craig thanked me for coming on and wished me luck on the book, then he rushed off. I asked the sound guy, a genial, slightly bedraggled young man named Pogo, what happens next.

“Where do I go?” I said.

“Hm, man, I don’t know,” he said, scratching his head.

At that exact ambiguous moment the PA system asked everyone to stand, which when translated to people already standing on the field means “everybody freeze.” A moment of silence for Ernie Harwell and Robin Roberts was held. The Marlins, knowing the drill, had emptied their dugout and were standing in a line, facing the flag.

I was the last guy in this line. All the players standing with their caps over their hearts, and then me, disheveled and bug-eyed, holding a copy of my book like I’d somehow daydreamed so severely through a usual Josh Wilker day that I’d ended up mistaking the Florida Marlins for a library checkout line. I hadn’t recognized most of the Marlins, but I certainly recognized the player directly in front of me, an arm’s length away.

The moment of silence ended, and then a guitarist and saxophone player performed the national anthem. I was loving America and feeling weird, standing at awkward attention right behind Hanley Ramirez, one of the five or ten best baseball players on the globe.

***

Please have fun with the archives on this site while I’m gone, or better yet, curl up with a nice book!

Also, I’ve got a guest post up at my old writing friend Dory’s blog, In This Light, that wonders if all good things begin by goofing around. And there should be interviews with me going up at soon at Bronx Banter and This Week In New York.

Welp, as my friend Bill used to say, see in the future or see you in the pasture. Or maybe I’ll see you at a reading. Please check out the book tour page for details, and note that the start time for the May 13 reading in Manhattan has moved from 7:00 to 7:30.  Here’s a flyer for the event:

Posted in Loose in the Shoebox, by Josh Wilker | 5 Comments »

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Josh Wilkens

May 11, 2010

A few weeks ago, the Florida Marlins broadcast team became aware of the interview-in-cards I did with Zach Dundas at Asylum.com, and they talked about it on the air. (The Marlins’ color commentator, Tom Hutton, was one of the players featured.) My editor happened to be listening to the telecast. The next day, we approached them to see if they would be interested in having me on as a guest when they came to Chicago.

So last night I took the Ashland Avenue bus up to Addison and walked over to Wrigley Field to appear on the Marlins pregame show.

At Wrigley, I got the “2010 Guest” sticker shown here upon showing some ID. My ID does not confirm that I’m “Josh Wilkens,” but I guess it was close enough. I was early, so I sat around for a little while by the Ernie Banks statue and read the messages Cubs fans had engraved into bricks. All were statements of undying Cub fandom. One was also a marriage proposal, which seemed a gutsy thing to have engraved into a brick. After several minutes I got up and asked the Cubs employee working the media entrance parking lot which truck was for the Florida Marlins. He pointed toward a trailer with a Big 10 network banner on it. I had a stomach ache.

I finally got to see an example of “the guys in the truck” that broadcast teams are always talking about. It was tiny and full of TV screens and guys jawing at each other in a good-natured way.

“You ever been on TV?” the producer, Bob, asked.

“No,” I said. Did my voice crack like that of the teenage guy on the Simpsons who is perpetually going through puberty as he holds down all the fast food service jobs and summer tour guide internships in Springfield? I’d rather not say.

Nervous, I pulled out a pack of gum for something to do as the producer and another guy worked furiously to get images of some of my cards into a display they could run during my interview. One of the pieces of gum from my pack fell into an open briefcase. I thought about digging it out but I decided I shouldn’t be putting my hand into someone’s briefcase. I wonder if the owner of the briefcase wondered about the gum later, or if, given the tight and unruly nature of the production truck, things are always falling randomly into briefcases.

“We gotta get you out to the field,” Bob kept saying.

I thought to myself: The field?

One of the guys in the truck—the one who had brought the Asylum.com piece to the attention of the broadcast team—kindly tried to loosen me up by talking baseball cards. I felt like I was made out of something stiff and easily breakable, like Styrofoam. Finally, a college-aged woman appeared in the truck.

“This is Angie,” Bob said. “She’ll take you out to the field where Craig is doing the pregame show.”

I’ll have more about this experience tonight or tomorrow, before I head out on my little book tour. I’ll leave off for now with me following Angie out of the truck and through a side door into Wrigley Fucking Field and, eventually, right onto the field itself, me, Josh Wilker, or at least Josh Wilkens, walking for the first time on the plain of the gods, untasered. The long and winding walk with Angie from outside to all the way inside felt exactly like this:

[Note: the video that was originally in this place in the post was removed from youtube a few days after this post came out; it was the clip from Goodfellas in which Henry Hill leads his future wife into the Copa.]

Posted in Beyond the Shoebox, by Josh Wilker | 8 Comments »

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Jim Hunter

May 10, 2010

I’m thinking about perfection today. Have you ever had something perfect? I’m not sure why, maybe because I’m also thinking about grandmothers today, but what comes into my mind is the memory of a pair of boots. On Christmas in 1974, when I was six, I opened a present from my grandmother that was a pair of boots that I’d wanted. I don’t know why I was so crazy about them but I was. It’s the only pair of boots I’ve ever owned in my life. I was amazed that she knew that I’d wanted them. I’d never told her.

“How did you know?” I said. I was ecstatic, and since I was ecstatic she was happy, too.

“We grandmothers have ways,” she said, smiling. She had a low, scratchy voice from a lifetime of smoking Parliaments.

I went to sleep that night with my boots by my bed so I could look at them as I fell asleep. I wore them the next day and kept peeking back at them as I walked.

When I was that young, objects had a kind of magic about them. When I started to collect baseball cards heavily a few months after getting my new boots, I brought to those cards the same ability to be wowed.

This 1975 card of the ace of the Oakland A’s surely wowed me, first pulling me in by the imagined game of catch occurring between the pitcher and the person he was staring in the eyes. The thrill of playing an imaginary game of catch with a major leaguer increased with the intimations of immortality on the back of the card. First, there was the unprecedented focus of the trivia question on the subject of the card. In most, if not all, of the other 1975 back-of-the-card trivia questions, the information did not concern the player on the card, but Jim Hunter rated special treatment, the question asking, “What is Jim Hunter’s nickname?” The answer is upside down below a cartoon of a mustachioed player holding a bewhiskered fish. And after turning the card upside down to learn that Jim Hunter is in fact Catfish Hunter, the perfect baseball name, I turned the card rightside up again and scanned the numbers, the wins piling up in a satisfying repetition of twenties. I didn’t know a lot about baseball yet, but I knew the difference between winning and losing, which was the difference between good and bad, and I learned early on that a pitcher with twenty or more wins in a season had a kind of monumental solidity unmatched by anyone else in the game. And Catfish Hunter won twenty games year after year after year.

***

My brother and I had a baseball encyclopedia in our room. In it, Catfish Hunter appeared on one of the shortest of the many lists. His entry to that list came a few months after I’d been born, when he threw a perfect game.

Yesterday Hunter was joined on that short list by another member of the A’s, Dallas Braden. After pitching his perfect game, Braden embraced his grandmother, Peggy Lindsay, who had raised him after his mother died of skin cancer when he was in high school.

Braden had been in the news earlier this season for chafing at Alex Rodriguez stepping on the mound that Braden was using. After that game, Rodriguez implied that Braden was a nobody and should keep his mouth shut.

You know who will disagree with the opinion that you’re a nobody? Your grandmother. If anybody tells you you’re nobody, ignore it and go with what your grandmother would say. Your grandmother knows.

After Braden proved yesterday that he never was and never would be a nobody, his grandmother had a message for the Yankee star and his image of a rigid hierarchical world with select celebrities on top, perfect, and everybody else below.

“Stick it, A-Rod!” she said, smiling.  

***

When you’re very young, you believe there are good things, maybe even perfect things, and you grab onto them with all your might. You don’t want them to change.      

A few days after I got my new boots, the wonder already wearing off, Catfish Hunter signed as a free agent with the New York Yankees, making this card a lie before it ever reached my hands. When I look at this card now, I don’t see myself as part of the game of catch. I see a turning point of sorts. The 1970s turned right here, in this 1975 Catfish Hunter card. The ace of one of the best-ever baseball dynasties is pretending to play catch. He waits for the ball to return. His throwing partner will not return the ball but will point out toward the sky beyond the outfield stands. The game as you’ve known it is over. You’re free to go. It’s a liberation. It’s an erosion of roots. A blessing, a curse. Free to go. 

Posted in Jim Hunter, Oakland A's, by Josh Wilker | 23 Comments »

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Chris Chambliss

May 6, 2010

Discussion of the recent tasering of a seventeen-year-old who ran on the field at a Phillies game has included mention of such past infringements of the spectator-athlete divide as the career-derailing stabbing of Monica Seles and the nauseating father-and-son beating of a Kansas City Royals first base coach, these examples being used as hard-to-refute “what ifs” to justify the tasering. But I found myself venturing farther back in my mind, beyond those two attacks, to my favorite world, the 1970s, when a different relationship between fans and the professional playing field prevailed.

Namely, I thought about Chris Chambliss. I’ve seen the video many times of him swatting a pennant-winning home run in 1976, but when I watched it again, I was once more stunned by it. One thing I don’t remember noticing before: the second the ball reaches the stands, a panel in the right field wall swings open and an already frenzied-looking pack of policeman spills out. It’s already too late. The next shot shows the flood of humanity pouring onto the infield, and the next shot after that shows Chambliss being tackled down to the ground in the middle of a trampling mob after rounding second base. The clip I watched (linked to above) ends before Chambliss makes his way to home plate, and considering the roiling electrified mass he has to get through, the logical assumption would be that he never made it but was instead torn limb from limb by the throng, who took pieces of the sacrificial hero home as souvenirs.

Incredibly enough, this moment was not exactly an anomaly at the time, though I think it was the most striking example of fans instantly seizing control of the field. A couple other smaller but notable and telling fan incursions of the decade included the serial benign game-interrupting done by giant-chested Morganna the Kissing Bandit, and the moment in 1974 when two young yahoos bounded onto the field to pat poor Hank Aaron on the back as he rounded third during his record-setting 715th home run trot (Aaron had been getting an avalanche of racist hate mail and death threats as he approached Babe Ruth’s record, so having two white guys rushing out of the stands at him could not have been a pleasant experience).

As the sun set on the 1970s, the fans’ claim on the field, to be exercised during moments of mania and exultation, seemed to wane. The last hurrah, in the summer of 1979, was a climax of sorts of this feeling, Disco Demolition Night. If the young, stoned mob expressed anything that night beyond the extent to which disco sucked, it was this: This field is ours.

The next year, the field was no longer ours. Ronald Reagan was elected, signaling the end of the chaotic populism of the 1970s and the beginning of a decade in which the economic distance between the haves and the have-nots in America would increase exponentially. Just a couple weeks before Reagan was elected, the last moments of the first World Series of the 1980s occurred with police in riot gear lining the field: One false move and you’ll be beaten with a nightstick or mauled by attack-trained German shepherds. When the Phillies recorded the final out, the field stayed clear of paying customers.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s bad to want to try to discourage people from charging the field. When the Phillies won that 1980 title, everybody stayed in their seats, safe, cheering and crying with joy. What could be wrong with that? But on purely symbolic terms, it seems telling that when the wide-open decade of my youth ended, the boundaries between my personal versions of heaven and earth increased.

One final thought: Watching the seventeen-year-old Phillies fan gambol around with his towel, eluding security, brought to mind another on-field eluder from bygone years, Tanner Boyle. The 1977 film The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training seemed to sense that the field, the symbolic center of American life, was closing off to all us regular irregulars. The time to play is over, so leave the field to the real professionals. Only Tanner stays out on the field, in defiance of this order, and he is able to elude taserless authorities long enough for a chant to rise up from all the rest of us (Let them play! Let them play!). I remember chanting right along in the theater as a nine-year-old. As I got swept up in the moment, I felt like I had never been closer to a major league field. When the authorities bowed to the unshakeable will of the people and the Bears were allowed to retake the field, I cheered with every other kid in the theater. We felt like we were all running onto that field. 

***

Some book news: Fellow former Baseball Toasterite Bob Timmerman has an interview with me at LA Observed; Patricia at Dinged Corners offers a take on the book from a passionate card collector’s perspective; and Dick Friedman has a short but sweet review of Cardboard Gods in the latest issue of Sports Illustrated.

Also, a May 13 New York City reading has been added to the “book tour events” page.

Posted in Chris Chambliss, New York Yankees, by Josh Wilker | 20 Comments »

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Sal Bando

May 4, 2010

If I were an Oakland A’s fan, I would have realized it was all over for good with this 1977 Sal Bando card. The exodus of stars from the Green and Gold had already been in progress for a couple seasons, and things had been going downhill, but the A’s had still managed to remain competitive. Catfish Hunter had been the first to leave, signing with the Yankees before the start of the 1975 season; in his absence, Oakland’s three-year run of championship titles came to an end. The following year, Reggie Jackson was gone, and the A’s, battling the up and coming Royals to the end, finally relinquished their half-decade rule of the American League West.

Then, this: Sal Bando ensnared in some sort of half-real, half-cartoon world, the cartoon encroaching upon the real, asserting its dominance, despite Bando’s confident fuggedaboudit smirk. Bando was an A, just like the blurry figure in the background of the card, but now he’s part of something else a lot flimsier, and if Bando can be seized by absurd cartoon reconfigurations of the world, then none of us are safe.

The other A’s who had been part of this scattering hadn’t been as troubling. Catfish and Reggie were colorful and cartoonish themselves, the kind of larger than life characters who could have had their own Saturday morning cartoon without anyone blinking an eye, like other real-life figures of the time such as the Harlem Globetrotters and the Jackson Five. But Bando was different. He didn’t have a colorful nickname or an outlandish personality. He even seemed to prefer to go without the customary Oakland A’s mustache.  

So when he showed up on this card clumsily doctored into Brewer garb, the Oakland kids my age must have suffered a gut punch that they would never be able to fuggedaboud. Sal Bando, the steadiest and realest of the A’s, had vanished in the decade’s perpetual and meaningless cartoonish migrations.

***

A couple more Bando thoughts. First, has there ever been a greater era for third basemen than the epoch of the Cardboard Gods? Arguably the three best to ever play the position, George Brett, Mike Schmidt, and Brooks Robinson, appeared during that time, in addition to several very good players just below that legendary echelon in Bando, Santo, Cey, Madlock, and Nettles. Second, has there ever been a less celebrated second banana among position players on a dynasty than Sal Bando? Ruth had Gehrig, Foxx had Simmons, Gehrig had DiMaggio, DiMaggio had Berra, Mantle had Maris . . . and Reggie had some guy named Sal.

***

I did some live radio yesterday for the first time since I was a college DJ mumbling in between playing “Legalize It” by Peter Tosh and the king of all “let me slip outside the studio and see if my one-hitter still works” songs, “Mountain Jam” by the Allman Brothers (in other words, possibly my first-ever moments of live radio that I may remember). Click here to listen to me talking with RC McBride and Jim Fitzpatrick on their afternoon show yesterday on WJBC.

***

Finally, as mentioned in a recent comment by “Lonnie Smith for president,” the current issue of Entertainment Weekly has a review of my book, and also mentions it on their “Must List” for the week (note: these things seem available only in the actual magazine, and not on EW’s website). Here’s a Cardboard Gods “collage” from the magazine stuff:

Posted in Milwaukee Brewers, Sal Bando, by Josh Wilker | 21 Comments »

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Books, Bubbles, and Bevacqua at Quimby’s

May 1, 2010

The first of a few Cardboard Gods book events planned for the next few weeks happened a couple days ago at Quimby’s Bookstore in Chicago without any loss of life or limb, as far as I know. I was pretty nervous, being a guy who gets socially anxious when I’m riding on the public city bus and it’s time for me to pull the cord for my stop (who needs the white hot light of that kind of fellow-rider attention?!?), but I ended up having a great time. Thanks so much to everyone who showed up, and to Quimby’s for being a gracious, friendly host and such a good bookstore (despite the purpose of the reading being, I guess, to sell my own book, I ended up walking out a little poorer in the wallet as Quimby’s put its usual bite on me in the form of my purchase of recent books by two of my favorite writers, Denis Johnson’s Nobody Move and Daniel Clowes’ Wilson).

Below are some photos from the evening, including some of the thrilling action in the post-reading 2010 Kurt Bevacqua/Greater Chicago Bush League Bubble Gum Blowing Championship.

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I employ the ol’ “explainin’ hand” as Steve Garvey looks on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the post-reading competition that was an homage to Kurt Bevacqua and the 1975 Joe Garagiola/Bazooka Big League Bubble Gum Blowing Championship, the eventual champion, a longtime reader of the blog named Bill, throws down the gauntlet in the semifinals. Bevacqua is unmoved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The awards ceremony: 

As I handed over the championship prize of a copy of the book to Bill, I was actually trying to fix my expression into one of awe at his unparalleled willingness to sacrifice his face and dignity in the pursuit of legendary bubbles, but instead I look like I’m shaking the hands of someone who has just worked up a copious sweat by sprinting naked down Michigan Avenue.  

In truth, I was really glad to talk to Bill and everyone else there. Bill, who had already bought his own copy, had me sign the book he won to a childhood friend who had hooked him on baseball cards and whom he hasn’t been in touch with for years. It made me happy to think the book might help them reconnect.

Posted in Beyond the Shoebox, by Josh Wilker | 3 Comments »

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Bill Lee

April 28, 2010

Before we get to this card, a couple book-related thoughts from my increasingly scattered mind:

1. Chicago Tribune writer Robert Duffer has posted, at his Chicago Literary Examiner blog, a review of Cardboard Gods and an interview with me. Elsewhere, Albert Lang has posted part 1 and part 2 of an interview with me at Fantasy Baseball 101.

2. Tomorrow (4/29) at 7 p.m., I’ll be proving that I know how to read by publicly doing so aloud from my book. This demonstration will occur at Quimby’s in Chicago (1854 West North Avenue). I’ll be doing a fair amount of readings and appearances over the next few weeks (or a lot for me, anyway, and enough to max out my vacation days at my job). Please check the “Cardboard Gods book tour” page for more details. (Note: This page may continue to be updated; we are still working on possible additional appearances in the NYC area between May 13 through May 16.)

3. The latest addition to the list of appearances for the book had me jumping around my apartment a couple days ago:

WEDNESDAY, MAY 19TH, 5:30 PM EASTERN
Red Sox Team Store, 19 Yawkey Way, Boston, MA
Author appearance, book signing.
***With special guest Red Sox legend BILL LEE***
Open to those holding tickets to May 19th Red Sox game.
(Note: We tried to get a bookstore appearance in Boston, too, but because we started looking so late–or because I’m not exactly Stephen King–were unable to find any takers.)

And on that note, on to the card:

One late summer day, my brother and I bought a couple packs of cards at the general store, knowing they’d probably be mostly full of cards we’d already gotten by then, and then as we were about to head home we noticed something going on at a house just over the little bridge by the store. We walked over. There was a bunch of junk on the lawn, and a couple people picking through it, and one lady who looked a little older than our mom sitting in chaise lounge with a cigar box full of dollar bills and coins in her lap. Among the rusty garden tools and lopsided lamps and stacks of plates, we found a box that had a few baseball cards in it. I don’t remember what the price tag on the box said, but it must have been cheap, maybe 5 cents a card. This seemed like a stroke of great luck to us, as the cards seemed incredibly ancient, even though they dated from only four or five years earlier than when we’d started buying cards. We couldn’t have been more excited or more convinced that we’d stumbled upon the key to great riches if we’d taken a shovel to our back yard and found the bones of a tyrannosaurus.

We both walked away with about a pack’s worth of old cards each. This card was my favorite find, of course, and I didn’t even put any extra value on getting a player’s rookie card. I just liked that this card featured a member of my favorite team, and not only that but one of my favorites on that team, Bill Lee, and not only one of my favorites but the one guy on the team who seemed like he could waltz right into my weird house at any moment and start talking loudly with my parents about solar power and homemade beer while simultaneously joking around with me and my brother about Dick Pole and Mad Magazine.

I like that he is shown here with the Green Monster in the background. Around the time the picture was taken (perhaps on the very same day), Lee got his first look at the batter-friendly wall and famously asked reporters, “Do they leave it there during the game?”

Beyond being a fitting visual accompaniment to that quote, the card is also—and I just now realized this—the single card that ever came to me as a kid that features my favorite place in the world. All later cards featuring the Red Sox, or any other players, for that matter, were either taken in spring training or at another stadium. (Other readers of this site with a better handle on identifying stadiums in cards can more accurately comment on this, but I think California stadiums showed up most often in 1970s cards, with Yankee Stadium and its Brut sign also in the mix).

So anyway, it’s a beauty, this card—Bill Lee as a very young man in the place I love the best. I was just a year old when the picture was taken. When I was born, Bill was in the last season of a stellar college career at USC. In June, he started the final game of the College World Series, which his team won (I can’t find anything confirming that he got the win in that final game, but he was named to the all-tournament team). He rose quickly through the minors, excelling in each of his three quick stops, and was in the majors for good by 1969. His big league career spanned my childhood almost exactly, and it was a good one, over a hundred wins and a strong ERA even while pitching in a park that seemed designed to send lefties to the trauma ward; a selection to an all-star team; and eventual induction to the Red Sox’ Hall of Fame and to the Baseball Reliquary Shrine of Eternals. His career after the majors is even better in some ways in that it revealed an unsurpassed love of the game: he never stopped growing and roaming the globe and, most of all, pitching. He has played the game on practically every last shred of land on the globe. His old nemesis, Don Zimmer, is renowned for never existing as an adult outside organized baseball, even to this day holding down a job as a coach with the Tampa Bay Rays. But Bill Lee is much more impressive to me: he has never been outside of disorganized baseball, even when he was in organized baseball.

Posted in Bill Lee, Boston Red Sox, by Josh Wilker | 13 Comments »

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George Brett

April 26, 2010

Does George Brett remember that he won his first-round match in the 1975 Bazooka/Joe Garagiola Big League Bubble Gum Blowing Championship? So much came after that. Batting titles, kisses from Morganna, division titles, the flirtation with .400, pennants, hemorrhoids, MVP awards, pine tar, a World Series title, 3,000 hits, enshrinement in the Hall of Fame. How are you going to remember every victory? Still, it would be a shame if all the drama and glory in his career obliterated any recollection by Brett of when his bubble bested that of his first-round competitor, White Sox infielder Lee Richard. I can see it now. Richard’s bubble springs a small hole, its growth stalling, while Brett’s bubble continues to expand. He’s a young man. I imagine him finding it hard not to laugh.

***

I find myself nostalgic for moments in my own life that are inconsequential enough to seem to be bordering on vanishing. Driving home from work years ago, when I first moved to Chicago. The radio is on, sports radio babble. It’s an instance of being neither here nor there, but I remember that feeling, being in a new place, driving, not feeling particularly bad or good, the sky growing dark, and I want to hold onto it, and I don’t know why. Years before that, I took a short trip with my friend Charles to Montreal. We were walking around, and I saw a guy sail past on a bicycle. I wanted to be that guy, some guy who lived in Montreal and rode around on his bicycle. There are these moments that seem like nothing but in retrospect seem like you were close to the edge of the veil.

***

Brett was one of three future Hall of Famers to participate in the one and only major league bubble-blowing tournament. (A fourth standout, Bert Blyleven, seems to have a chance to push the number of enshrined bubble-blowers to four.) The other two Cooperstown-bound players, Johnny Bench and Gary Carter, bowed out in the first round of the tournament, to Jerry Johnson and Johnny Oates, respectively. But Brett notched the win over Lee Richard to advance into a three-man second-round match with Blyleven and Mickey Scott, which Scott won, making the final six in the three-man semifinal matches free of guys whom the casual fan would be able, just a few years later, to remember.

***

When I was a kid, my conception of my future adulthood was very vague, with one exception. Generally, I imagined that adulthood meant finally being free of the kinds of worries that tied my stomach in knots. I assumed that adult me would have it all figured out. I’d have a house and kids, too, because that’s what adults had. That’s about as specific as it got. But I did imagine one specific eventuality: some day, I would make a killing by selling my baseball cards. All my stars would be worth millions. Even the nobodies would be somebody because I’d held on to them.

***

There were some good players involved in the bubble-blowing tournament (besides the Hall of Famers: Bill Madlock had been on the all-star team that season, and John Stearns, Doug DeCinces, and Rick Rhoden would be all-stars later in their careers), but the majority of players able to rack up bubble-blowing wins in the tournament came from the ranks of the relative unknown. It’s odd to think that George Brett was at that time a member of the lesser-known of the bubble-gum competitors. But he was once merely a guy with just one card in his likeness, a young man staring out into the unknown.

***

I wouldn’t want to sell my cards now, but if I did, I’d probably only get enough to buy a suitcase of Miller Lite to haul back to my apartment. This George Brett rookie card would theoretically be my most valuable card, I would guess, though I don’t know that much about the relative worth of various cards. But as you can probably tell, the card has been handled a lot, all its corners dinged up and parts of the card worn down to flecks of white. It’s also off-center, as a lot of 1975 cards were. But I like it. It’s mine, worthless to anyone else but me. It seems to be before anything has happened. Brett has an erect batting stance that he would soon jettison to become the foremost warrior in the crouching cult of Lau. His shoulders are even bunched a little so that he looks like an eight-year-old worried about being drilled by a pitch. But besides that suggestion of anxiety, there is no urgency in the moment. Off in the distance, some guy is walking around holding a windbreaker in his hands. Who is that guy? Where is he going? Can I go with him?

Posted in George Brett, Kansas City Royals, by Josh Wilker | 25 Comments »

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How I spent my summer (1984)

April 23, 2010

ESPN is lousy with Cardboard Gods stuff today. In addition to an excerpt from my book and a conversation between me and Rob Neyer, there’s a story by Buster Olney that reminded me of the summer of 1984, when Damaso Garcia somehow helped me briefly interrupt Buster’s previously impenetrable dynasty of Strat-O-Matic dominance. I’ll add only a couple things to his story of the day an ungodly string of luck on my part made him storm off in a rage. First, he is not embroidering the truth at all when he notes that the Strat-O-Matic teams he put together routinely crushed all the competition. He was way ahead of the rest of us in terms of valuing on-base percentage, for one thing, and cackled away at our slavish attraction to .300 hitters as he loaded up his roster with Gene Tenace bases-glutting types. He also wasn’t above gamesmanship. I remember one time when we were throwing bales at his family’s farm. He spent the entire exhausting day trying to sell me on some trade with him that, as soon as I finally relented and agreed to it, made me feel as if I’d been pick-pocketed. Second, as I’ve already suggested, I’ve always suspected that my big championship season versus Buster was purely a pronounced twist of good fortune, or, as Buster kept putting it throughout the marathon session of games that decided things between us, a “chunk of shit.” (This was his favorite dismissive term at the time, and he said it with a vehement sense of authority; as a farmboy who did all the grueling work involved in taking care of cows, he certainly knew a chunk of shit when he saw one.) I have these doubts about my team being inherently superior because one of the few players I remember from that championship season, besides my MVP, Eddie Murray, was Damaso Garcia, shown here in his 1983 Strat-O-Matic likeness. I batted Garcia leadoff, despite the fact that he wasn’t really that great at getting on base. Somehow it worked. I can’t explain why. I guess the gods just felt like smiling on me that day.

Posted in Beyond the Shoebox, by Josh Wilker | 9 Comments »

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Jerry Martin

April 22, 2010

What could possibly be better than to be a starting centerfielder for a major league team? And yet, Jerry Martin, who held just such a position for the Chicago Cubs at the time of this 1980 card, wears an expression that makes it seem like he’s counting the hours left in his shift at the circus, where he’s employed to brush the teeth of tigers and give elephants enemas.

According to the back of this card, life was getting better and better for Jerry Martin. The son of a major leaguer, Barney Martin (who pitched briefly for the Reds in the 1950s), Jerry had broken in with the Phillies in 1974, playing just 13 games, and then had gotten more and more chances at bat with each succeeding year as the Phillies developed into a National League powerhouse. The card suggests that he played an important supporting role for the Phillies as they won three division titles in a row from 1976 through 1978. In the first of those seasons he appeared in 130 games despite logging just 121 at-bats, evidence of his usefulness as a late-inning defensive replacement for lead-footed fly-ball mangler Greg Luzinski. In 1977 he got nearly a hundred more at-bats, occasionally platooning with Bake McBride, and hit a respectable .260 with some power, and in 1978 he got even more playing time and responded with new career highs in homers and batting average while, as the bullet points at the bottom of the back of the card relate, also hitting three pinch-hit home runs during the regular season and a fourth in the playoffs. Finally, in 1979, he got his chance to be an everyday player upon being traded to the Chicago Cubs, and he upped his career singe-season high in batting average to .272 while smacking 19 home runs and 34 doubles.

But on the front of the card, he seems to be considering his life and saying, I want out. 

In fact, that’s exactly what he said, publicly, just before the start of the 1980 season, according to a 2006 story on The Baseball Think Factory about that year’s putrid edition of the Cubs. Martin had been promised a five-year contract if he proved himself capable of handling a regular centerfielder gig. His 1979 season, though not the stuff of legends, certainly seemed a decent showing for a regular centerfielder, and yet Cubs brass did not come through with the contract they’d promised. Worse, the Cubs general manager, Bob Kennedy, publicly denigrated Martin, saying that his disgruntled player “was not even a center fielder. He’s a left fielder playing center.” 

The Cubs did not comply with Martin’s demand to be traded, and Martin manned centerfield for another season as the Cubs lost 98 games. Martin managed to hit 19 homers again, but slumped to a .227 batting average. After a season back in part-time duty with the Giants in 1981, Martin got one more year as a regular, with the Kansas City Royals in 1982, but his time in Kansas City powder blue would be much more widely associated with his arrest the following year for attempting to buy cocaine along with Willie Wilson, Willie Mays Aikens, and Vida Blue. All four players spent ninety days in prison and were suspended from baseball for the 1984 season by manager Bowie Kuhn. The suspensions were reduced on appeal, and Martin hooked on with the New York Mets. It would be his last season in the majors. Considering the following two anecdotes stemming from that season, from the Jerry Martin memory page at the great Ultimate Mets Database site, you have to conclude that life’s glum eventualities are unavoidable, even for gods:

vemmerf: I grew up 30 minutes from Shea. [Martin] rented a house in my neighborhood for the summer . . . and my buddy and I looked in the yearbook and found the name of some assistant to the PR director and called Martin, saying we were that guy. We told him we were shooting a commercial for Banner Day and we wanted him to be a part. He fell hook line and sinker. Feel kinda bad about it, but it was better than egging his house.

Shari: I remember this poor shnook getting the call to pinch hit in the bottom of the ninth . . .  he struck out, and he got booed the whole way back to the dugout. That was the last time I think I ever saw him as a Met. He was trying to make a comeback after being in re-hab. I was at the game, and I just remember feeling really sorry for him, as he hung his head in shame and took the slow stroll back to the dugout.

***

Couple of book-related things: Josh Spilker (not a lazily conceived pseudonym, I swear) has a feature at Impose Magazine on my recent reading list. Elsewhere, Tom Hoffarth of the L.A. Daily News reviews Cardboard Gods (and Dave Jamieson’s book Mint Condition).

Posted in Chicago Cubs, Jerry Martin, by Josh Wilker | 11 Comments »

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Cookie Rojas

April 20, 2010

You don’t hear about Cookie Rojas so much anymore, but at the time this 1977 card came out (in what would turn out to be Rojas’ last year in the majors), you could argue for his inclusion in the starting lineup of two franchises’ all-time rosters. He’s kind of like a poor man’s Carlton Fisk that way. For the Philadelphia Phillies, with whom he played throughout the 1960s, his main competition for the second base spot on the all-time squad would have been fellow Cuban Tony Taylor, and though Taylor had a longer tenure with the club and is more often mentioned as a Phillies all-timer than Rojas, when Rojas’ promotion to the majors gave the team a choice between Rojas and Taylor at second base, the Phillies chose Rojas and moved Taylor to third. In Rojas’ first full season at second, in 1965, he made the all-star team, matching Taylor’s one career selection to the midsummer classic.

Rojas became an all-star mainstay for his next team, the Kansas City Royals, earning a spot on the team four years in a row from 1971 through 1974. Nonetheless, history began nudging Rojas into the shadows pretty quickly in Kansas City, when the brilliant glovework and, eventually, the surprising power of Rojas’ successor, Frank White, elevated White to a clear choice as the best second baseman the club had ever had.

Back in Philly, the pretty good second baseman club that Rojas was in with Taylor swelled to include Dave Cash, Manny Trillo, Juan Samuel, and Mickey Morandini, and by the time Chase Utley came along to settle the second base argument, Cookie Rojas seems to have dropped out of that argument altogether. (He’s not even listed as a choice in a fairly recent poll asking fans to choose the all-time Phillies team.)

I started avidly collecting cards in 1975, just as Cookie Rojas was beginning what could have been a total fade from history if not for a couple things: his glasses and his name. Out of all the glasses ever worn by any major leaguer ever, the ones seen here really were the nerdiest. You winced for Cookie Rojas. You admired Cookie Rojas. You never forgot Cookie Rojas, the professional baseball player with the glasses of a small-town spinster librarian from 1952. As for his name, it could not have been more appealing to a kid unless perhaps it was Hostess Cupcakes Rojas.  

The name had much to do with a third reason why I’ll never forget Cookie Rojas. Though you might get the idea, what with all the verbiage about it these past few years, that I was an extremely attentive lover of baseball cards back when I was a kid, in truth I was the same dufus then that I am now, given to gaps of comprehension that were (and are) so glaring as to seem intentional, willful, as if I am someone who prefers being sort of stupid about the world. It kind of added a certain mystery, not knowing everything very well. And this is how I confused, for the entirety of my childhood, Cookie Rojas with Cookie Lavagetto.

I read baseball books all the time, so I had come upon the story of Cookie Lavagetto breaking up Bill Bevens’ bid to throw the first no-hitter in World Series history in 1947. I added to my knowledge of that dramatic anecdote my glancing sense, from looking at the back of Cookie Rojas’ card, that Cookie Rojas had been around for a long time, from several years before I had even been born, and once you got several years beyond when I was born you might as well have been around since Moses parted the Red Sea. And so through stupidity and perhaps some sort of need for magic Cookie Rojas became in my mind the longest-tenured player in the majors, by far, an amazing feat considering his fairly modest stats. It was somehow a life-affirming story, this tale of Cookie Roja-getto, who after becoming an unlikely World Series hero in the immediate wake of World War II stuck around decade after decade without ever really being noticed very much, just sticking on the sidelines and enduring in his horn-rimmed glasses. As a fellow marginal type with glasses, I aspired to such a tenacious if barely visible purchase on the world. But I knew it was magical, impossible, so I didn’t look too closely into the matter, knowing that to do so would be to disperse the myth that a relative nobody could last and last. 

***

And:

Turns out I wasn’t the only one with Cookie Rojas visitations in my youth. The bespectacled second-sacker comes up in a conversation I had with Will Carroll on Will’s Baseball Prospectus podcast.

Thanks to long-time haunter of these posts “spdurph” for his very generous review of Cardboard Gods at his site, Innocents and Accidents, Hints and Allegations.

For those wishing to chime in on this site about my book, I’ve opened the comments section for that purpose here. If you have read the book and want to talk about it, please feel free, and please also consider posting a review on the page for the book on Amazon and/or on the page for the book on Goodreads. (And big thanks in advance for that.)

Posted in Cookie Rojas, Kansas City Royals, by Josh Wilker | 17 Comments »

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Chet Lemon

April 19, 2010

A couple months ago I posted some thoughts in conjunction with a 1977 Chet Lemon card about the all-1970s roster I was pitting against the all-era squads of my esteemed competitors in a “media league” in the online Rob Neyer Baseball game. The season, which had been a lot of fun, came to a wrenching end this past weekend: my East Randolph Kerouacs, after maintaining a slim division lead for the majority of the season, tanked down the stretch, losing five of their last six games, including a three-game sweep at the hands of Carson Cistulli‘s cellar dwellers (who had already amassed 99 losses going into the series). Still, we had a chance going into game 162, just one game out of first. If we beat Norm Wamer‘s squad (which had contended all season long and had only just been eliminated), and Jonah Keri’s Montreal McGaffigans lost, the Kerouacs would have moved into a tie for first.

According to the Complete Game Log in the box score for that final game, rain began to fall at the end of the eighth inning with the Kerouacs down 1-0. In the top of the ninth a reliever named Jim Roland came in and retired the first Kerouacs easily, and then, as suggested by the Complete Game Log, sunshine peeked through the October clouds—a last shred of hope, all of it resting on a damp but sun-dappled afro. But hope and light, like life, is brief: 

- Stopped raining
- Gamble struck out

I felt physical pain when I discovered my team’s fate in that terse report. Oh, Oscar Gamble, why hath you forsaken me? (It turns out that a win wouldn’t have helped anyway, as Jonah Keri’s demonstrably superior team won its last game, too, to finish two games in front, but I didn’t know that at the time I discovered my own team’s wilted last effort.) Now that the pain has subsided, I can say that my guys performed decently enough, posting an 85-77 record. Team captain Chet Lemon led the way, the only player to appear in all 162 games. He topped the team in runs scored with 100 and doubles with 37 and tied for second on the team in both RBI and homers. Don Buford would be the only other player who could have a case for team MVP, but Lemon contributed more with his good glove in center field than Buford did while doing a serviceable job at third. (Here are the complete hitting and pitching stats for all my failed gods. Oddly enough, even though my team would seem to be offensively challenged, we led the league in homers and were one of the better all-around run-scoring clubs in a league that played like the 1968 “Year of the Pitcher”; check out the league stats for team batting and team pitching.)

I made a few in-season moves. The two major ones: Bobby Bonds got injured in the second half of the season and was going to be out for 22 games, so I dumped him for Dwight Evans; Terry Forster was a gas can as a reliever so I released him and picked up Bruce Sutter. The first move was at least a push, considering all the games Bonds would have missed had I held onto him, and the second was a marked improvement, but neither move was able to help stop my team’s gradual but relentless decline over the course of the season. I guess it’s fitting. A team of guys from the 1970s would be destined to start out in an Aquarian sunburst of hope and gutter eventually to a Three-Mile Island/Skylab/Hostages-in-Iran sense of rainy, disintegrating defeat. When the season began Oscar Gamble’s afro was in full bloom; when he took my team’s final feckless swing, he surely was sporting no more than a faint echo of his earlier magnificence.

***

(Note: Though this Chet Lemon card is part of the Topps series being used on this site, by virtue of the 1978 set’s back-of-the-card “Play Ball” game, for a greulingly long match pitting Love versus Hate, Lemon’s was one of the cards in that series that had on its back a recap of the “Play Ball” rules instead of a “Play Ball” result, so no update has been made to the ongoing contest.)

Posted in Chet Lemon, Chicago White Sox, by Josh Wilker | 5 Comments »

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Carl Yastrzemski, 1960 (via 2010)

April 15, 2010

I bought some baseball cards last week, something I haven’t done in a while. I have a guest article up on GQ.com (yes, the same GQ that is to my grasp of manly stylishness as Gourmet magazine is to a convenience store Slim Jim) that mentions my lack of connection to the new cards, and how that feeling dissolved with the appearance, near the end of the second pack, of this reproduction of Carl Yastrzemski’s 1960 rookie card.

The card was seemingly targeted toward me specifically, as if marketing consultants had known that I would inevitably be drawn once more to the gods of my youth. (It was part of a subset of the 2010 offering from Topps called “The Cards Your Mom Threw Out.”) Usually I chafe at being the prey in the consumer culture, but here I didn’t mind. I guess I never will mind when it comes to baseball cards. I bought packs of cards as a kid to find the best and happiest parts of myself inside them. It’s the same now, and while most of the cards in my recent purchase seemed to report back that the best and happiest parts of myself were disappearing in this new, slick world, when I came to a reproduction of the first-ever appearance in the Topps universe of my hero, Carl Yastrzemski, I felt all the things you’d want to feel in this life: lucky, happy, connected.

And ever since I found the card in the pack, it’s been sitting on my desk where I write, growing on me. I can’t get over how young he looks. When I first learned about Yaz, he seemed to me as if he was as old as the mountains, as if he had been around forever. The numbers on the back of the first Yaz card I ever got, in 1975, supported this notion. They were small and voluminous and stretched back way before I was born. But now here he is, a cheerful, clear-eyed boy half the age I am now. He hasn’t learned or forgotten anything yet. He doesn’t even know where he might fit in (note his listed fielding position: “2nd B.”).

It reminds me of a photo of my grandfather that I saw for the first time a few years after he died. When my grandfather was alive, I’d never really considered that he’d been a boy, but in the photo he is a rail-thin Missouri adolescent hanging by one arm from the beam of a lamppost. A goofball. Somehow it brought him back to life in a way that a photo from when I knew him could not have.

And now this goddamn Yaz card is making me sad: I miss my grandfather. I wish he were around to see my book. Jesus, he would have crowed about it long and loud to anyone and everyone he came into contact with. I remember going to the supermarket with him when I was a teenager and he was pushing eighty: he’d introduce me to the lady handing out samples of Cheese Whiz as if she wasn’t a stranger and as if I was the World’s Youngest Pulitzer Prize-Winner instead of a mumbling pothead with a GED.

I spent the whole summer with him after being expelled from boarding school, no college prospects looming in the fall. He never once brought up a single thing having to do with my expulsion or what my plans were for the future. We ate together, watched Red Sox games and M*A*S*H and Magnum P.I. together, went to the movies together, went swimming at a nearby pond together. He was using an oxygen tank to help him breathe by then, but when we went to the pond he laid the portable tank down by our towels and waded out into the water and sort of collapsed down into it. Then he gently flipped over so he was looking up at the sky, and he began making a gradual circuit around the perimeter of the pond by performing a slow but methodical version of the elementary backstroke. I stuck close to the shore, splashing around for a little while before getting out and sitting on one of the towels. I watched him circle the pond. Just a couple years earlier, Yaz had played his final game, and at the end of it he circled the whole park, jogging slow, trying to reach out and touch as many people as he could before he said his final goodbye.

I see Yaz, Yaz as a boy on a 1960 card, Yaz much later, on his last day in the majors. I see my grandfather as a boy, hanging by one scrawny arm from a lamppost. I see my grandfather circling the pond. I feel the water on my body evaporating in the sun. He’ll get back to shore eventually, and dry off, and slide the plastic tubing from the oxygen tank back into his nose, and we’ll ride back home, and eventually the summer will end, and the next summer he’ll be in worse shape, unable to live on his own, and the summer after that I don’t want to talk about. I don’t want to talk about anything except sitting in the sun on the little beach of Slough Pond on Cape Cod. I see my grandfather circling the pond. I see Yaz circling Fenway. Can the circle be unbroken?

Posted in Boston Red Sox, Carl Yastrzemski, by Josh Wilker | 27 Comments »

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Tom Veryzer

April 13, 2010

Tom Veryzer was, according to a story that I can’t seem to lift from the haze of the apocryphal, a measuring stick of inconsequentiality. Have you heard this story? It’s of the Bird, Mark Fidrych, who died too soon a year ago today (the Huffington Post has more of my Bird-mourning today). In the story, Fidrych showed up early to Tiger Stadium for a game he was due to pitch during his wondrous one and only healthy season of 1976. Fidrych was amazed by the crowds already present outside the stadium, waiting to get in. According to the story, someone, either Tom Veryzer or some other buddy of the wide-eyed rookie sensation, slapped Fidrych on the back and said, “They’re not here to see Tom Veryzer.”

I searched the Internet for this story and found it only on a couple of blog posts, and neither post listed a source for the story. I revisited a video feature of Fidrych in the early 1980s on youtube, thinking maybe he mentioned it there, but it didn’t turn up. I read a long 1986 Sports Illustrated article by the great sportswriter Gary Smith, who depicts Fidrych as somewhat adrift and rueful about being cast out so abruptly of the wonderful dream that was 1976, but the story wasn’t in that article either. So, in essence, at least as of this moment, Tom Veryzer exists in my mind as a footnote used to define inconsequentiality in a conversational exchange that may not have ever happened.

But while the throng in Detroit may not have come to the ballpark to see a light-hitting shortstop who would soon be shipped to Cleveland to make room for Alan Trammell, I come to these cards to see Tom Veryzer. I come to see every player that ever arrived in my hands as a kid and seemed, by their very presence in the cardboard, to be something better and more lasting than the flimsy uncertainties of everyday life. And while a certain sunny and powerful glow comes off the cards of superstars, the cards of guys like Tom Veryzer exert a quieter but somehow stronger pull on me. You have to lean close to hear what the cards of guys like Tom Veryzer are saying, and that’s when they grab you and don’t let go. To say Tom Veryzer is inconsequential is to say that this life is inconsequential.

One man who would never have made either claim, about life or Tom Veryzer, was Mark Fidrych. At the pinnacle of his fame and on-field dominance, he humbly gave all credit to his defense, which was anchored that year by Tom Veryzer: “My teammates . . . are the ones who count,” Fidrych said in a 1976 Sporting News article. “They’re the ones who are making me. I don’t make them. If I was making myself, I’d be striking out everybody. If they don’t play well behind me, I’m not even here. I can’t believe what these guys are doing for me. I feel so good. I don’t know how to say thanks.”

Years later, long after anyone had come to the park to see Mark Fidrych, the Bird, who could have easily descended into a deep gap of bitterness over how quickly it all ended, continued to be grateful for all he’d seen and to all who’d once thronged to the park to see him and cheer his name.

“Please,” he asked Gary Smith in 1986, “just end this story by saying thank you to the people. Thank you to our society.”

***

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

Posted in Detroit Tigers, Tom Veryzer, by Josh Wilker | 7 Comments »

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Glenn Abbott

April 12, 2010

Well, I guess today is the “official” release date for my book, though Amazon has been delivering copies to people for a few days, and over the weekend my aunt and my friend Rick reported seeing the book in stores in Montpelier, VT, and in Boston, respectively. Later today, when I get off work, my wife and I are going to head downtown here in Chicago and see if it’s on a shelf at Barnes & Noble or Borders (I’m not holding my breath), and then we’re going to go somewhere and get a beer and some food and enjoy the moment.

This is not something I do very easily—enjoy the moment, I mean—so I thought I’d enlist the help of smiling Glenn Abbott today. My natural tendency is toward feeling slightly miserable. It comforts me to feel this way, I guess. This past week, I neither enjoyed the moment nor felt slightly miserable but instead just felt wound up and anxious. Things began to turn around over the weekend, first when Abby and I went to a park and played catch, using a baseball I had written on as a moronic gag for her benefit back when we’d first started dating almost ten years ago (“To Josh, You’re the true Sultan of Swat. Love, Babe Ruth.”), and then calming down more yesterday by virtue of a Masters-aided nap, truly one of the great experiences in all of sports fandom. The hushed tones, the intermittent calm-ocean sound of applause, the half-dreaming awareness of players charging up or toppling down the leader board, and the life-affirming rally to consciousness in time for the rousing cheers as the leader strides up the 18th fairway.

Yesterday’s Masters nap may have been among my best ever, rivaled perhaps only by the one punctuated by the missteps of Greg Norman’s inevitable and yet still horrifyingly complete, and somehow in its grandeur even heroic, collapse in 1996. Yesterday I drifted in and out as Phil Mickelson forged ahead of a pack that included—most significantly in terms of napping—Fred Couples, whose aura of profound relaxation long ago made him the greatest golfer of all time, for my purposes, and I was awake in time to watch the finish of another contender, Tiger Woods. I’d never liked Tiger Woods, but his recent public fall from grace made him seem human, finally, and so I found myself rooting for him whenever I was awake enough to focus on the action. This newfound personal investment on my part ended with his post-match interview, when he seemed once again robotic and sour, the personification of ruthless gain. He had a chance in the interview to humbly acknowledge the prowess of his fellow golfers, and also to nod to the generously warm reception he got from fans all through the tournament, but instead he groused about finishing fourth and bristled at a question about his emotions. The guy’s a multinational corporation with some public relations issues, not a person down here with the rest of us (to quote the old Social Distortion song). I won’t be rooting for him anymore.

I think what I was hoping for was an appreciation on Woods’ part for being back at something he loved. This is why we watch sports, right? I mean, we don’t watch them to learn how to be good citizens, contrary to what all the moralizing that accompanied Woods’ return would have you believe. We watch to remember that it’s good to be alive. The guy who beat Woods and everyone else came through on that account: when Phil Mickelson won and tearfully hugged his wife, who has been struggling with cancer, it was plain that we were seeing a man who now understands that everything can be taken away at any time. I don’t know what kind of a guy Phil Mickelson “really” is, and I don’t care. Yesterday he gave me what I come to sports to find: inspiration to hold on tight to this life.   

So anyway, I’ll try to follow that inspiration today, and follow also the smiling lead of Glenn Abbott, who beamed in his 1976 card despite being on an A’s team about to plummet, slowly but completely, into its late-1970s abyss, a decline that Abbot would not see the depths of only because he would be experiencing similar daily humiliation with the expansion Mariners. But, really, even with that on the horizon, what’s not to smile about? Not only did Abbott reach the majors in time to chip in for the A’s in both 1973 and 1974, both championship years, he was also fresh off an appearance in the 1975 Bazooka/Joe Garagiola Big League Bubble Gum Blowing Championship.

Abbott’s participation in the tourney is one of the bigger mysteries of that one and only quest to find the greatest blower of bubbles in the major leagues. He was not originally slated to advance from the individual team championships to the league-wide competition, but as A’s runner-up he took the place of team champion Angel Mangual when Angel Mangual was for some reason unable to participate. What was the reason? Did Mangual sprain his lower lip? Was he found out to be augmenting his bubbles with some kind of elastic epoxy? Was he reluctant to join the tournament because he saw bubble blowing as an art, something that could only be defiled in a public competition? We may never know. But we do know that Glenn Abbott bowed out in a first-round loss to oglin’ Mickey Scott of the Angels. You have to think it didn’t bother Abbott too much. He was just glad to be there.

***

Finally, some more book buzz: Big thanks to Brian Joura, who has a very kind review of my book up at fangraphs.com. (Tolstoy is referenced!)

Posted in Glenn Abbott (Oak.), Oakland A's, by Josh Wilker | 13 Comments »

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