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Kent Tekulve

December 12, 2011

The Cardboard Gods Ass Backwards ABCs of Parenting

T Is for Tekulve

Writing while parenting a newborn is like working an inning here and an inning there, loping in from the bullpen without much preparation and heaving some pitches and hoping not to get shelled. I write in little bursts, and I can’t really connect one appearance to any previous appearances. I know the hook is coming, too. It’s a quick hook. This post will not be the equivalent of a complete game but a patchwork of incomplete innings. This is the lot of the reliever.

***

Parenting a newborn is itself like relief pitching. That is, it bears some similarities to a weary bullpen protecting an endless series of endangered leads. Like a chain of relievers passing the burden of a collapsing lead to one another, my wife and I hand the baby back and forth, trying to stem the momentum toward whining then full-on spittle-choke sobs. I’m the marginally useful hurler constantly tinkering with an ineffective array of junk, called into action in situations unsuitable for the staff ace, my wife, possessor of a devastating out pitch (her boobs).

***

According to an excellent biography on the SABR bio website, Kent Tekulve’s “first exposure to baseball was playing catch with his father.” I didn’t play catch with my father. He has no interest in baseball. He did tell me, when I was a boy, to try to write something every day. I’m trying, I’m trying. I’m always trying and always will.

***

Tekulve did not develop his unusual pitching style until years after playing catch with his father. It wasn’t until his pro career began that he decided to pattern a submarining style after what he could recall about the approach of Ted Abernathy, who had pitched effectively for the Reds while Tekulve was growing up in Cincinnati. Tekulve in turn handed down the unusual style to Dan Quisenberry during spring training of 1980. Quisenberry quickly became a star, eclipsing his mentor throughout most of the 1980s, though Tekulve continued to be an effective, tireless, and remarkably consistent reliever in his own right. Tekulve had turned 41 by the time the 1988 card at the top of this post came out, yet in the previous season he led the major leagues in games pitched, with 90, while managing an ERA of 3.09, a very good mark for the home-run-hitting extravaganza that was 1987. He had another useful season in 1988, then finally came to the end of his remarkable and remarkably underrated career in 1989 with a few subpar appearances for the team of his youth, the Reds. Discounting his first brief call-up in 1974 and his last brief go-round in 1989, Kent Tekulve never had a bad year. Relievers almost as a rule go up and down, their numbers the most difficult to predict from one year to the next. Kent Tekulve was that most admirable thing in a reliever. He was steady.

***

My dad went to work every day, no matter what. This was somewhat unusual in the 1960s and 1970s, an era in America when relative prosperity combined with (and probably contributed to) a powerful cultural trend toward self-exploration most commonly referred to back then as “finding oneself.” Everyone was always setting off to find him or herself back then. Not my dad, so far as I know. He either didn’t want to find himself or he already knew where he was. I think of him at a desk. A guy with glasses sitting at a desk. That’s where he still is much of the time, actually. So am I, come to think of it. I’m at a desk right now. Every day, even if for just a third of an inning, or less if I can’t even so much as record a single out or complete a single thought.

***

Kent Tekulve was a hero of mine around the time when my dad told me to try to write something every day. I was a skinny bespectacled kid on the brink of stumbling out of a warm albeit somewhat peculiar childhood into a much grayer awkward adolescence, and as the specter of the lonely era to come loomed, Tekulve, the rail-thin relief ace of the mighty late 1970s Pirates, offered some hope that I could, like Tekulve, find an unlikely place in the middle of the action. In the 1988 card at the top of this post Tekulve, sporting some wrinkles and the beginnings of a pear shape, is unquestionably a member of the adult realm, an adult like all the adults, a guy who would blend into a crowd, but in the cards that I collected in the 1970s he was much thinner and shadowy and more distant from the rest of the world around him and because of that distance closer to my own world of growing distances.

***

Kent Tekulve doesn’t get enough credit as an elite practitioner of his craft. There’s a stat now in use called adjusted ERA (ERA+) that siphons a player’s earned run average through some machinations to account for league and park factors. Basically, it’s a way of showing that, for example, Larry Dierker’s 3.31 earned run average in 1968, when pitching in the cavernous Astrodome during the “year of the pitcher,” was quite a bit less impressive than, say, Francisco Cordova’s 3.31 earned run average in the steroidal homerfest that was 1998. Kent Tekulve is tied for 31st all-time on the career ERA+ list. A few relievers are ranked ahead of him on the list, but not one of them (besides Hoyt Wilhelm, who also pitched for several seasons as a starter) has more innings pitched.

***

I guess if you are a reliever and aspire to immortality you need a gimmick. Tekulve did not really have one. He threw underhanded, more or less, and had glasses, which I guess could be considered gimmicks, but Hall of Fame voting has an element of the channeling of male childlike fantasies of comic-book power (this is, I believe, the subconscious core of the “gut” feeling some “old school” voters talk about when brusquely explaining their Hall of Fame picks), and the elements of Tekulve’s game that might come into the mind of a voter point more toward the flaccid powerlessness of a Clark Kent than to the soaring phallic omnipotence of a Superman. Think of the relievers who have gotten into the Hall of Fame thus far. They all had comic-book superhero attributes. Wilhelm had the baffling uncanny knuckler, like something that would have spiraled forth from the spell-setting fingers of Dr. Strange; Goose Gossage’s fastball and persona raged and rampaged, Hulk-style; Bruce Sutter had an awe-inspiring mad-scientist forkball; Rollie Fingers coupled his excellent but by no means inimitable achievements with a spectacular cartoon mustache and cartoon name. These guys all had good numbers, but Tekulve’s numbers are comparable, and, to use the term for reliever in use in his day, “fireman,” he entered more burning buildings than any of them.

***

I’ve always been drawn to Tekulve because I was a thin bespectacled kid, but I think it’s not necessarily the Clark Kentian eyewear that has brushed him to the side in talk of great relievers as it is his submarine pitch. The pitch, it’s . . . girly. Consider Tekulve’s protégé, the great Dan Quisenberry. I mentioned ERA+ above; the Quiz’s career ERA+ ranks fifth all-time, behind only Lefty Grove, a short-tenured 19th Century pitcher named Jim Devlin, Pedro Martinez, and Mariano Rivera. The Royals ace did not pitch for that long—not anywhere near as long as Tekulve—but neither did Bruce Sutter, who is in the Hall of Fame. The difference? Quiz threw the submarine pitch. I’m telling you, Hall of Fame voting is done with the imagination to some extent, and it’s generally a very strongly Neanderthalic male imagination that values things that crush and smash and are “feared”; it would naturally shy away from things that are somehow vaguely womanly, even if those things are effective. I mean, there was a kid in my little league who threw sidearm. I felt embarrassed for him. I felt embarrassed for anyone who couldn’t fire a good overhand pitch. My father couldn’t. I always worried that this would come to light.

***

My dad throws ideas at me. The gist of them is that, as things stand now, and until we bring about changes, we—as in we the people—don’t have our hands on the reins. We are in many ways dominated by a microscopically tiny percentage of the population. I don’t really understand how this works, and besides studying some of my father’s chosen field, sociology, in college 20 years ago I haven’t done much to learn about it and don’t do anything to fight it. I have a job at a corporation. It helps me and my family get by and provides us with some health insurance. I go to work, come home from work, do what I can to help my wife take care of our baby, write when I can, maybe go for a run. With any other spare time, I generally think about or read about or cheer for sports. Why? I ask this question periodically, and most recently I found myself asking it in regard to the current term for a team’s standout reliever: “dominant closer.” This wasn’t always the term used. I often find myself recoiling from new developments in the lingo of sports, and this is no exception. Compare the term “dominant closer” to a term applied with great accuracy to Kent Tekulve in his day: “reliable fireman.” The 1970s populism reflected most stridently in the theme song, “We Are Family,” of Tekulve’s 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates champs also comes through in “reliable fireman,” a term suggesting a sense that that we can count on one another even in tough times, that we are all in this together. Or, we were all in this together. Things appear to be different now, at least according to the current terminology used for an effective relief pitcher. The noun in this term, “closer,” conjures cutthroat Glengarry-Glen-Ross victimization, and the adjective, “dominant,” adds to it a testosterone whiff of subjugating simian brutality. It’s sort of sickening, if you think about it. I don’t want to dominate anyone. But, if I’m being honest, I sure do like it when my sports teams win. Following sports is a way, I guess, to fantasize guiltlessly about being, for once, the one with the hands on the reins, the dominant victimizer.

***

Kent Tekulve was my passageway from childhood into what came after it, and what came after it lasted all the way until this past July, when my own son was born. Now I’m no longer a loner on the outside of things. I’m the guy my son will first look to. Will I be steady? Will I be reliable? I don’t know. I do know I’ll no longer primarily be the uninspired star of my own tedious story but a supporting player in another new story. I’ll be the guy with glasses sitting at a desk.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Kent Tekulve, Philadelphia Phillies | 8 Comments »

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Del Unser

December 6, 2011

The Cardboard Gods Ass Backwards ABCs of Parenting

U Is for Unser

1.
One Christmas when I was a kid, my grandmother got me a book called Juggling for the Complete Klutz. I was not then or now prone to mastering skills of any kind, useful or otherwise, but for some reason I applied myself to the book’s lessons, most of which were accompanied by a cartoon of a befuddled bearded fellow amusingly failing. Attached to the book was a small red mesh sack with three square beanbags inside. You started out throwing one beanbag, getting the arc of that toss and catch down, then moved on to practicing the mundane exchange of throwing two at a time, first one and then the other, back and forth from hand to hand. Finally, you moved on to trying to get all three beanbags up in the air at once. In that last stage, I tried and failed many times. There was a faint alluring feeling in the failures of something almost happening, as if the latch of a locked treasure chest was on the brink of giving way. I kept failing. I kept trying.

2.
In this 1978 card, Del Unser has just connected, propelling the ball up into the air. It’s not clear from the photo alone whether the ball will land safely, but the angle of Unser’s head as he follows the path of the ball would suggest that he has hit a fly ball and not a line drive or a grounder. I have determined after considerable study the likely time and place of this moment, and it’s during an inning in which two outs have already been recorded, thus eliminating the possibility of a sacrifice fly, and so the only hope for Unser’s at bat to be considered a useful one is for the ball to carry all the way into the centerfield stands. This is a long shot. It is always a long shot. Most at bats are useless.

3.
I remember I was in my room, alone, once again trying and failing to juggle, when, finally, I got all three beanbags going at once for a couple of seconds. I lost control of my throws almost as quickly as I had all the other times before, but this time the slight difference was unmistakable. I’d juggled. Learning to walk must have felt the same way. Learning to ride a bike. One of those moments when you feel like you’re floating in a brand new way, like the laws of gravity have loosened. I ran downstairs to find someone and tell them the news. I’d juggled!

4.
I’ve been pondering this 1978 Del Unser card for quite some time, and, as I mentioned, I have a theory on the time and place, the particulars of the moment. It took certain skills to be able to place this moment, I suppose. First, you have to be willing and able to look at a baseball card for a long time, to do something, in other words, that most people would consider to be, for an adult, a complete waste of time. You have to know your way around baseball-reference.com. It helps to know that the photographers who took shots at the ballpark in the 1970s most often showed up in New York and the Bay Area. I guess you have to have some powers of deduction. Anyway, I’ll spare you the details, but the key piece of info is that the on-deck hitter is almost surely future Hall-of-Famer Andre Dawson (joined, in the even more remote background, to the right of Unser’s left leg, by fellow Hall of Famer Gary Carter), and Dawson’s presence along with a couple of other indicators and probabilities suggests to me that the photo on this card is from the top of the sixth inning in a game between the Expos and Mets on Monday, May 30, 1977. Most of our efforts in life, let’s face it, amount to the equivalent of a failed at-bat against Bob Apodaca in a game between two also-rans. Moments that turn out like so:

Batter Pitcher Result
D. Unser B. Apodaca Flyball: CF

5.
Everyone in my family enjoyed my new skill, and I was glad to show it to them, especially my grandmother. Warmed and emboldened by my family’s acclaim, I marched off to school with my three square beanbags, envisioning kids chanting my name as they carried me on their shoulders through the hallways; instead, everyone I juggled for smiled briefly, then asked over rapidly encroaching boredom whether I could juggle four things, then turned away to other more interesting matters, such as learning multiplication tables or poking one of the classroom gerbils with a pencil. This reaction was a letdown that could serve as a prototype for all subsequent letdowns in my life. I came to understand, eventually, that I had devoted myself with uncharacteristic tenacity to learning something so gaudily useless that it could, were it necessary, be used to illustrate the very concept of uselessness.

6.
For most of his career, Del Unser played for also-rans, a term seemingly designed primarily to convey uselessness. There are contenders, and games that matter, and moments upon which history hinges, and then there is everything else. Del Unser played for the second edition of the Washington Senators in its death throes, then logged a season with a typically moribund Cleveland Indians outfit, then hitched on with the Philadelphia Phillies for two seasons before, just as they were on the brink of escaping mediocrity, he was shipped to the declining mid-1970s Mets for a year and a half, who then passed him along to the Expos. From the photo on the front of Del Unser’s 1978 card it’s clear, at least in retrospect, that the Expos, armed with young future superstars such as Dawson and Carter, would soon be climbing into contention, but Del Unser’s destiny was to always be on the move, and he wouldn’t be around with the Expos when, in 1979, they finally began to play games that mattered. It must have seemed to Del Unser that he would never find a crucial moment when he might be of use.

7.
I kept juggling. It became a solitary practice, like most of the other things I did or would do or still do, like reading, writing, walking, mulling fantasy sports rosters, jogging, shooting baskets, meditating, beating off. I learned how to juggle bowling pins, big plastic rings, basketballs. I learned to flip tennis balls under my leg and around my back while juggling them. However, as if to highlight the gulf growing between me, the juggler, and a hypothetical audience, a possible connection, I never was able fulfill the inevitable ubiquitous request of anyone who ever saw me juggling—can you juggle four?—with any regularity. I juggled three things, just three things, in seclusion. I tried to imagine that it was some kind of a Zen practice. At my wintry college, where my Zen pretensions were at their most pronounced levels, I sometimes juggled snowballs outside the classroom before big tests “to focus.” I’m sure I secretly hoped that I would be seen doing so, and admired, but no one ever said anything about it, at least not to my face.

8.
Some months ago the birth of my son thrust me into the frazzled center of a rapid unending series of baffling crises. The whole thing started with the birth itself, in which my role was to smile and say “You can do it!” to someone in terrible agony who later confirmed my suspicion that she was looking entirely past my cheerleading to search with animal ferocity the faces of the nurses and doctors for signs that the end of the unbearable pain might be in sight. My efficacy or lack thereof throughout the long ordeal crystallized during one of the terrifying peaks of my wife’s pain, when I was sent out of the room so that my wife could receive an epidural, which she had hoped to avoid back when we imagined that together we could calmly visualize away the rumored pain of labor contractions by believing it would all be like riding rising and falling waves. During the administration of the epidural I sat in a little waiting room alone. It was 2 a.m. or 3 a.m., somewhere in there. I sat and stared at the dim institutional carpeting and hoped and prayed, two activities of limited if not altogether useless impact. I wanted my wife to be all right but couldn’t do anything about it. I was scared that the epidural would lead to some kind of complication. I was also scared it simply wouldn’t work, that we’d have to go on as before, one of us wrenching around on a hospital bed like a fish suffocating at the bottom of a boat, the other standing alongside, useless, hoping and praying.

9.
In 1979, the trend in Del Unser’s career toward less and less playing time continued as the former regular turned fourth outfielder took what most would interpret as a further demotion in role, to that of a pinch-hitter. He had always been a good outfielder (in fact, the moment in the 1978 card at the top of this post testifies to his fielding abilities, as in the game in question he was the centerfielder, chosen to play that key defensive position over Andre Dawson, who would go on to win several Gold Glove awards as a centerfielder), and so he continued to occasionally get playing time as an outfielder, and, proving his versatility, he also logged innings occasionally at first base, but his primary role in 1979 was pinch-hitter. It must have seemed to Unser that this reduction in playing time would be compensated for by an increase in crucial moments, as going into 1979 the Phillies had won the previous three National League East crowns. As it turned out, the 1979 Phillies would finish up the season as also-rans, 14 games out of first behind the Pirates (and 12 behind his contending former teammates on the Expos), but fairly deep into the season there must have persisted the hope that the three-time defending NL East champs might still have a chance to make a charge toward the top. On June 30, the Phillies were trailing the St. Louis Cardinals late and were on the brink of falling to just one game above .500 when Del Unser was called in to pinch-hit. Unser homered to tie the game, which the Phillies would go on to win. Unser homered in his next pinch-hitting appearance, a July 5 loss to the Mets, and was next called in to pinch-hit with two outs and two on in the 9th inning of a July 10 game against the Padres, the Phillies behind 5-3 and future Hall of Famer Rollie Fingers on the mound. No one had ever hit three pinch-hit home runs in a row before. You can tell where this is going, I’m sure, so let’s just say that in that not altogether unimportant moment, the Phillies still within shouting distance of first place, Del Unser proved to be quite useful.

10.
The epidural worked, for a while anyway, probably not because of my prayers, but who knows. It eventually wore off, leading to another long terrible passage of pain that finally ended in the best and weirdest moment of my life, my bloody son riding on the hands of strangers out from between the legs of my wife. Since then, the boy at the center of that moment has centered my life, and my life has been that of a complete klutz. I trip over stuff. I drop things. Sometimes I barely remember how to walk. A few nights ago, I had a dream that I was trying to juggle and couldn’t do it any longer. I kept trying but I’d forgotten how.

11.
Del Unser followed up his 1979 record-setting feat of three pinch-hit home runs in a row by performing multiple off-the-bench heroics for the Phillies in the 1980 postseason, helping the team to its first-ever World Series title. Unser’s efforts on a colorful star-studded Phillies roster including eventual all-time hits king Pete Rose, league MVP Mike Schmidt, Cy Young award-winner Steve Carlton, comically gorilla-armed slugger Greg Luzinski, and the charismatic sloganeering Dionysian relief ace Tug McGraw, among others, provide some guidance to me on how to be father. Being a father, you’re not really the star of the show, the starting pitcher, the cleanup hitter, what have you, but you may be called upon at certain times to step off the bench and into the spotlight. You don’t have the uterus or the boobs or the 500 career home runs or the 300 wins but you still might be called upon to perform a small but necessary duty successfully. You can carry a car seat out to the car. You can change a diaper half-decently. Maybe once in a while you can get the kid to sleep. You are the pinch-hitter.

12.
After my dream about not being able to juggle I searched the house for three tennis balls. It took a while—in step with the new general disorder of things, all three were in different places, and my wife found the last one behind a bureau. She also found what she termed “a hundred-pound wad of dust” behind the bureau, so after she cleaned back there she stomped off to the shower, asking me to watch the baby in her absence. Time to pinch-hit! The baby was sitting and playing in a little high chair thing by the dining-room table. I kept one eye on him while I gathered up the three tennis balls. I hadn’t juggled in a while, but it came right back to me. Three balls in the air. After all these years, it still gave me some pleasure, or maybe even some kind of very quiet joy. This feeling, joy, announced itself as always having been there, in a kind of diminished, hibernating form, as I noticed it rousing itself to something fuller, a whole note, with the awareness that two small blue eyes were now on me. My son, who had been attempting to jam a small furry book about a family of bears into his mouth, had noticed what I was doing. His fierce grip on the book loosened and the book slid to the floor. I kept juggling, turning to him, calling his name and babbling baby sounds. He was watching the worn yellow balls rise and fall, rise and fall. He was watching the pinch-hitter do what he knew how to do and he was smiling.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Del Unser, Montreal Expos | 9 Comments »

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Mike Vail

November 21, 2011

The Cardboard Gods Ass Backwards ABCs of Parenting

V Is for Vail

1.
I have been working on this one for a while but uncertainly. I am no rookie on a hot streak when I write. There is the hesitancy, the fractured focus, the hitches of a struggling veteran player trying to rediscover his swing.

2.
I’m a rookie at parenting. I just got back to my desk from going upstairs toward the sound of crying. The crying of the baby brought me upstairs, and I rocked him in my arms for a long time, longer than usual, and it was looking like one of the many times when he just decides he is not going to go to sleep, ever, but he finally did start drifting off. This is what I root for these days. When his little eyelids start drooping, it’s like I’m watching the beginnings of a late-inning rally. Come on, keep it going.

3.
I’m not a rookie as a fan, that’s for sure. I’ve been channeling my passions into the rooting for groups of strangers to do certain things better than other groups of strangers for my entire conscious life. This is my life, and there’s really no escape from it at this point, but there are certainly times when this tendency on my part seems ludicrous. When I was a young fan, I saw the ball and hit the ball. Simple. Come on, keep it going. Now I seem to see all sorts of things, but none of them very clearly. I don’t even know what it is exactly I’m rooting for. Life is a series of random occurrences. Can I put this on a banner and bring it to the big game?

4.
Before my family moved to Vermont, I lived in New Jersey for the earliest years of my life, and I assumed for a long time that if I’d stayed there I would have become a Mets fan. This is based partly on my first baseball cards, which I got in New Jersey in 1974 and which included most memorably a Cleon Jones card; it is also based partly on my trips in later years to Shea on visits to see my father, during which the hapless late 1970s Mets became my second-favorite team. But I was actually born in Willingboro, New Jersey, which is not too far from the Pennsylvania border, and if my family had never moved from that town I likely would have grown up rooting for Pennsylvania teams, most specifically the Phillies, like my older cousins who also lived in Willingboro. So instead of the Red Sox and Celtics for me it would probably have been the Phillies and the 76ers and on down the line. I never became a raving fan of college sports, but as a kid in Vermont I rooted for the only regional team, Boston College, that ever rose to any national prominence. So I suppose it’s possible that had I never left my birthplace I would have on some fall Saturday afternoon in my childhood realized that one of the two teams on television hurling themselves murderously at one another had a closer connection to me than the other, and so I would have decided to adopt Penn State as one of my teams.

5.
I hold my baby sideways when I rock him to sleep. He faces out, away from me, and he gets a grip on my fingers with his hands. When he falls asleep I have to set him down very gently and have to then carefully pull his fingers off my hands. If I do it wrong he wakes up. It went okay this morning, and I tiptoed out of the room praying.

6.
This 1976 card is Mike Vail’s first. His rookie card. It suggests in the understated style of the 1976 series of Topps cards that a stellar career may have just begun. The previous season, the player shown here with a determined expression on his All-American granite-jawed visage won the International League batting title, and then in a late summer call-up to the big leagues he produced a feat that more than any other came to loom over the Mets’ subsequent late-1970s nosedive back into the National League basement as a haunting specter of promise unrealized. Vail hit in 23 straight games in 1975, tying a rookie record and setting the Mets’ team record. The Mets figured they had found a future star and promptly shipped the anchor of their lineup, Rusty Staub, to Detroit. Vail injured his foot playing basketball in the winter of 1976, and this injury is often cited as the reason Vail never fulfilled the potential suggested by his hitting streak, but it seems more likely, judging from both his minor league stats (he never hit for power or stole many bases, even before the injury) and his record in later years (for a couple seasons with the Cubs, as a part-timer, he put up numbers equal to or superior to his 1975 marks), that Vail just wasn’t the superstar everyone hoped in his first major league moments he would be. He was a decent right-handed platoonist who could, in a good year, dump enough singles in front of the opposing left-fielder to hover near the .300 mark. He was never going to be, as in the wildest dreams of Mets fans watching his streak unfold, the next Joe DiMaggio. But what can you do? Being a sports fan is about having and holding onto wild dreams.

7.
Friday morning I was on my way to dig up some of the factoids about Mike Vail included above, but before doing so I went to check my email and instead detoured to click the link on one of the headlines among the sports headlines that come up on my mail homepage: “Syracuse assistant in molestation probe (AP).” You can read the story yourself if you want. What I found most striking in it was the extremity of denial on the part of a couple Syracuse icons, head coach Jim Boeheim and former star center Rony Seikaly. Both vehemently deny even the possibility that the allegations of child molestation against assistant coach Bernie Fine could be true. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty, of course, and the allegations against Fine may not be true. I’m not attempting to make a comment on that, but rather on my own reaction to the fierce denials by Seikaly and Boeheim. The denials reminded me of my own reaction, over 30 years ago, when I heard a rumor that a teammate on my seventh grade basketball team had woken up in the middle of the night during a camping trip with our coach, Mick, to discover that Mick was sucking his dick. I felt something close to outrage that such a rumor was going around about Mick. He could not possibly have done such a thing. He was a pillar in the community, beloved by all. It couldn’t be true! It was many, many years and many, many basketball teams and, presumably, many, many camping trips before a boy finally came forward and spoke out until someone listened, and Mick was arrested and found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison for “lewd and lascivious behavior with a juvenile boy.” I tend to think he got off very easy, and I tend to believe he’d been victimizing children for a long time, and I tend to get angry when I think about his sentence. I tend to believe he’d benefitted greatly from the tendency in people to collude in a denial of the worst. Even the judge who sentenced him admitted she was “impressed” with him.

8.
I don’t watch nearly as much TV as I used to before the baby came. And even when I do watch a little here and there at night I watch it with the sound off so as not to disturb the baby, who spends the first part of his fractured night of sleep in his little portable bassinet in the living room. A few nights ago I watched, with the help of closed-captioning subtitles, a muted version of the interview Bob Costas conducted with Jerry Sandusky. With the toes of my left leg I gently rocked the bassinet, which helps my son fall asleep. That left leg was the one that over thirty years ago featured in a moment with my junior high basketball coach that Jerry Sandusky would likely have identified as “horseplay.” Sandusky denied—with creepy hesitancy—that he is sexually attracted to boys, but he readily admitted that he had showered with boys and that he grabbed their legs “without intent of sexual conduct.” This last part struck a chord in me. I was a mediocre athlete, but one day during a junior high basketball game I scored two baskets in a row, which was for me an unprecedented hot streak, my version of Mike Vail’s 23-game rookie-season tear. I mentioned the moment in my book:

Mick subbed for me after my second basket and sat down next to me as play resumed. He was beaming.

“You’re doing great, Josh, just excellent,” he said, which felt good. I wasn’t exactly amassing a giant stockpile of praise elsewhere in my life. As Mick spoke he let his hand fall on my bare leg. He kept it there after he’d finished talking. While watching the action on the court, he gave my thigh two long, ardent squeezes. (Cardboard Gods, p. 134)

When reading the closed-captioned subtitles of an interview and thinking back to that moment, my left leg, the one that was jiggling my baby in a bassinet, went still, like jelly congealing. I was feeling once again that happy rookie moment curdling, and it stopped me. The bassinet I had been rocking with my toes went still, too. What happens to me happens to my baby. My baby began to stir and show signs that, because I’d stopped rocking him, he was starting to wake up. His sleep is a crystalline stadium, fragile, easily shattered. Already I’m failing to guard it.

9.
I’m not a Penn State fan, but, as I was saying, I could have been. If my family had stayed where I’d been born, near the border to Pennsylvania, who knows? It didn’t happen, and instead I threw myself into being a fan, primarily, of the Red Sox. I grew up in the 1970s, a time of histrionic drama and disappointment for that team, and my fandom during that time developed a millennial fervor in which I dreamt at length of the seemingly impossible day when my team would somehow not blow it in the end and would instead be the champions of the world. Because I was unable to formulate more human and intimate wishes for myself or those around me, because my sole way of emotionally engaging with the world was through sports, my wish for the Red Sox to win it all became far and away my greatest wish. Beyond a wish, it was a fetish, a fantasy I replayed in my mind to trigger a response otherwise inaccessible, tears forming at the corners of my eyes as I imagined running in a jubilant mob through the streets the day the Red Sox won it all. I would finally be on top of the world, and there would be, through my absolute worship of the players responsible for lifting the burden of failure and sadness from all life everywhere forever, a kind of immortality in the triumph. I imagined statues to each and every member of the chosen team, the names of all involved engraved not only in civic stone but as deep as anything could go in my mind and in the collective mind I had joined so many years before as a displaced searching hopeful child.

10.
When considering the news out of Penn State, I noticed that my thoughts go first toward virulently distancing myself from the ugliness. In this I am not alone, I don’t think. It is a monstrous story, and so the first response is to identify a hierarchy of monsters, creatures separated completely by their monstrosities from us, and condemn them to various levels of profound punitive agony. But beyond individual acts of monstrosity the story features the element of apparent collusion, a variously implicit or explicit wish by those invested in and benefitted by an institutional image of purity to keep the ugliness hidden, thus allowing the surface image to remain pristine while the ugliness beneath festers and grows. Even this more general, collective criminality has been viewed most commonly as a monstrosity, as something those of us wishing to remain far on the outside of the issue want to view as completely apart from our own involvement. We may ask, as I have: What do I have to do with it? I’m not a fan of Penn State. I’m not like those idiot college students who rioted not on the part of the many children allegedly victimized by a serial sexual predator but instead on the part of a college coach who did little to stop the victimization. That was my first thought about the campus riot a couple weeks ago that was sparked by the firing of Joe Paterno—these students are fucking idiots, the worst. I have mulled it over since then, and I am not so far off from them, not at all. I’m a sports fan who invested his deepest powers of dreaming into a vision of being in a celebratory mob, my team immortalized in triumph that, because of my dream, had to be for me a vision of perfect purity. As the song goes, we all root for the home team, and if they don’t win it’s a shame. There’s no room in this kind of willful dreaming for any equivocation. This is the deficiency of sports fandom, and maybe of other kinds of collective passion, such as the entity that most closely resembles sports in its worst moments, organized religion: What we love needs to be pure. If I had been an 18-year-old student at Penn State last week, I probably would have been right there with the others, desperate to the point of rage to believe that a deep pure promise remained unbroken.

11.
My father took my brother and me to Mets games in the 1970s. The stands were mostly empty. The team was bad. Mike Vail was there for a while, until in March 1978 he was waived, but I wasn’t enough of a Mets fan to pin any sort of growing feelings of disappointment on him. I wasn’t enough of a Mets fan to take anything too seriously. I wanted them to win the game, but it didn’t kill me if they didn’t. My brother felt the same, and my father didn’t care about the Mets or baseball at all. He saw the whole thing as idiocy and spent the game reading the New York Times and grimacing whenever a plane roared overhead. But his sons wanted to go to the game, so there he was. I was glad to be there, at a game with my brother and my father. I would go there again. I have long thought that if my family had stayed in New Jersey, which also means that I would have stayed in a house where my father lived, I would have been a Mets fan. I wonder now if this is all yet another form of wishful thinking. In a different life, maybe I could have been a fan without the kind of need that can distort and obscure. I’ve thought a lot already about bringing my son to a game, about nudging him toward being a fan. The two of us together, believing. But in what? I don’t even know what it is exactly we should be rooting for. Life is a series of random occurrences. Still, I have that vision, that deep wish, that thing I root for: the two of us walking into a stadium together, his hand in mine so I can keep him safe.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Mike Vail, New York Mets | 9 Comments »

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Alvis Woods

November 9, 2011

The Cardboard Gods Ass Backwards ABCs of Parenting

W Is for Woods

In 1979, the year this card came out, the Iran Hostage Crisis began. I came to this thought recently, when realizing that the era of parenting in my home had passed Day 100, and realizing that I had thought of it that way, as if it were being reported on the nightly news, e.g., “Day 100: Still No Sleep.”

The Iran Hostage Crisis went on through the end of 1979 and through 1980 and into 1981. It was one of my first experiences in following a news story for an extended period of time, though earlier in 1979 I had also been aware that Skylab was plummeting to the earth in chunks and that the Three Mile Island nuclear plant was oozing deadly radiation.

The best moment of Alvis Woods’ professional career had already come and gone in a flash by 1979. You can sense this in his 1979 card. He is being surrendered back into the gray from which he came.

He’d been a minor leaguer for some years when he was selected with other odds and ends in the November 1976 expansion draft that breathed mediocre life into the Seattle Mariners and Toronto Blue Jays. He was the eighth player taken by the Blue Jays, who had already nabbed another outfielder named Woods (Gary) with their fourth pick. Alvis Woods didn’t get a start in the team’s first game, but he entered as a pinch-hitter in the sixth inning and homered. This first big league at-bat for Alvis Woods, in the first game of a brand new team, must have passed by like lightning. I wonder what is left of the moment. Woods played for a few more seasons for Toronto, toiled back in the minors for a few more, then resurfaced for a brief stint with the Twins in 1986. He was a decent hitter, but he didn’t seem to have had any moments that would have topped that first one. What does he remember of it?

I don’t know what I’ll remember of these first months as a father. A few nights ago at dinner we set the baby down in a high chair. It was a first. To this point we have had to eat in shifts designed so that the parent who isn’t shoveling down food can hold the baby and attempt to keep him from becoming loudly and heart-breakingly unhappy, but last night we realized he was okay with sitting in his little chair even though he’s too young to really sit up on his own but okay with the slanted back of the chair propping him, so we sat at the table like humans and ate and he looked at a book made of soft cloth about bears. It was a peaceful moment. It made me want to aim my gratitude somewhere. I’ll aim it now, while thinking again of the moment, at Alvis Woods. These are the only gods I’ll ever worship, I guess. It’s been this way since I was a kid. So thank you, Alvis Woods.

A couple weeks earlier, I took the boy on a walk in his stroller to a park by the lake. Sometimes he falls into one of his exceedingly rare naps in the stroller, but this time he cried the whole way there, louder and louder. I walked faster and faster until I was trotting, then jogging, then running maniacally, because sometimes the extra jiggling calms him down, but on this day it wasn’t working. By the time we got to the park he was wailing and I wanted to tie a cinder block to my ankle and dive off the pier that extends out into where the lake gets deep. Instead, I took the baby out of the stroller and walked him around on some grass below some trees. He started to calm down and look around at the branches of the trees and some little birds hopping around from branch to branch. I sat down on a bench and got a bottle and fed it to him. It was a nice day, blue sky, mild. I was feeding my son on a bench below some trees.

I grew up surrounded by woods, but I never thought about them. Hallucinogens ingested in my late teens finally made me aware of the woods in a worshipful way. You know, like, “Wow, dude, check out those trees.” Now I stand by the window in my apartment in a city and hold my son and point at the trees on our street and say, “tree.” He stares out at them and at everything. His eyes are pure. Sometimes I feel like a hostage or like a flaming chunk of Skylab is about to fall on my head. Sometimes I want to tie a cinder block to my leg and leap into Lake Michigan. Sometimes I hold my baby and feel like it is the best moment of my life, my first at-bat, my first moment in the majors, my first game with a brand new team, my hands feeling some kind of perfect connection that will haunt me the rest of my lucky fucking days.

Posted in Alvis Woods, by Josh Wilker, Toronto Blue Jays | 5 Comments »

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Ekim Xuddam

October 27, 2011

The Cardboard Gods Ass Backwards ABCs of Parenting

X Is for Xuddam

After a few weeks of being a father, I have everything pretty much figured out and am certainly among the world’s foremost experts on the subject, but I am as yet undecided on which of the following theories should become the central pillar in my philosophy of fathering:

1. The Theory of Cancellation: To be a father, one must accept a large X across the version of oneself that existed up to the point of becoming a father.

2. The Theory of Total Upheaval: To be a father, one must accept that everything has been so completely upended that one’s anus is now one’s brain and vice versa, and in this upheaval nothing will really seem to work, and it will be as if one has been a right-handed pitcher all one’s life and is now being asked to escape late-inning jams while pitching left-handed.

Let me hasten to add that these theories, now that they are written out and not merely thoughts in my mind, both strike me as repugnant in that they focus self-pityingly on the father and not on the child or even the fathering of the child. I can’t help it, it seems. I have to complain, it seems. Acquaintances, friends, family members all ask about the baby, and while I may be able to briefly mouth a platitude about the child’s well-being and my genuine loving feelings for him, I then can’t help myself from trying to channel at least some of my darker thoughts into a conversational exchange set up to bear only platitudes.

“He doesn’t sleep,” I say.

Depending on my mood at the moment and on how well I know the person I’m speaking to, I might say this cheerfully, as if it’s just “one of those things,” or I might say it more weightily, like I’m trying to communicate over the phone that I am in a dire hostage situation, my captor pressing the barrel of a gun to my head.

My actual captor would not be able to hold a gun yet, but if you place a rattle near his fingers he’ll grab hold of it and grip it in his fist. He can’t control the rattle, but he’ll hold onto it pretty tightly. He usually ends up flailing his arm and bopping himself in the head with the thing. And yet, despite his inability to control a rattle or wield a gun, he’s got me wrapped up as securely as if I were mummified to a chair with several yards of duct tape. He doesn’t sleep, he wails, all day, all night, I hold him and stand and bounce and rock him in my arms and go “shhh” until my legs ache and I’m covered in sweat and I’m so low on saliva that my “shhh” sound is no more impactful than the scrape of a dry leaf on concrete several blocks away, and he’s still there, staring wide-eyed at the wall or up at me.

Here I am, he is saying.

It’s a statement that I am able to appreciate at certain times as the greatest gift of my entire life. The statement takes on a different meaning when I’ve been rocking him uselessly for a long time and my poor wife—who bears an exponentially larger amount of the brunt of the ravages of this sleepless hostage situation than I do—is staring at the wall like she just got carted home after storming the beach at Anzio. In those moments, which are so plentiful as to suggest themselves as the norm, my son’s “here I am” is more like the living, breathing embodiment of the kind of math problem that shows up in nightmares, an unsolvable complexity designed expressly to confound, frustrate, and defeat.

And another problem is that everything I try to write on this subject misses the mark. For example, just as I was finishing off the above paragraph, I heard my son making “talking” sounds upstairs with my wife, and I stopped writing and went upstairs and played with him on a blanket on the floor and took a video of him using his legs to push off his mom’s hands and slide across the blanket and smile. He has been trying to laugh lately, but he doesn’t quite know how to do it. He smiles and goes “uuuuh,” not getting how to break the sound up into laughs. Whenever he does this I laugh so hard my face hurts. I came back downstairs from that and the words I’ve written so far make me want to carve a big X over the writing. This is how the writing has been going lately—everything I say seems within moments like it deserves cancellation. Whatever used to work or appeared to work doesn’t work anymore. Parenting is like that for me. Whatever worked the day before doesn’t work today, so you have to write a big X through it and start over. One moment doesn’t seem to offer much relation or support to the next.

I had a moment on the bus a few days ago, coming home. I can’t really access it now, but the whole world seemed to be glowing and I was thinking about writing, thinking about how the way to do it is like Van Gogh and approach form in a siege of messy feeling instead of caution and hesitating care. I was thinking about my son, hoping and praying for him to have moments when the world is all possibility, a sunflower the same as a creator deity’s cupped hands full of brand-new stars. The bus groaned past a guy standing in a sandwich board in the growing dusk outside a muffler shop, advertising $10 off something, and even that or especially that in conjunction with an inexplicable burst of a memory of watching the sun set in China at dusk when I was 21 years old moved me almost to tears, to think that my son will have the feel of life inside him, the weight of a sandwich board on his shoulders, maybe, or the glow of a sunset in a faraway place, the memory of his mother’s soft words, all of it, the highs and lows, and I wanted to find words for this and started wondering whether I could find a way to use it in this post about Ekim Xuddam, left-handed unassuming pencil-mustached journeyman and representative of a world turned upside down.

The X in the surname of this player, Xuddam, is pronounced as an “sh” sound, as if it is an X in pinyin, the pronunciation system used for the rendering of the Chinese language into our alphabet. Also in keeping with the upside down nature of the player, and in line with the Chinese custom, this surname is listed first on the player’s card. I studied Chinese for a few months in Shanghai when I was 21, and this study pinnacled one day in a public park with a conversation I was able to hold, barely, with a Chinese toddler. Almost all the words I learned are gone from my mind now, cancelled like most things that come and go in a life. I sometimes worry about my memory, my purchase on life, my lack of expertise about anything, even baseball, that primary lifelong means of escape from life, but in a way it is good to be—at least in terms of baseball fandom—in possession of a porous, faulty memory, because it allows the game to retain the vastness and mystery it had when I was first discovering it. The day before my glowing bus-ride moment, when still trying to figure out who I could possibly write an “X is for” essay about in the world of baseball, I started casting around baseball-reference.com, and for several minutes I lingered on the player with the most X’s in his name in baseball history, plus a nickname (“Double X”—one of two nicknames, along with “The Beast”) that made reference to the X’s. As I was studying Jimmie Foxx’s page on baseball-reference.com I was remembering the particular pleasure or even joy in first discovering his numbers, back when I was a little boy just beginning to explore baseball history. I knew Ruth and Aaron and Dimaggio, but in those early days there was actually a moment when I loved baseball yet still didn’t know Jimmie Foxx, who was tucked away just a little, a surprise for the young baseball explorer to find. And what a find.

The game never stops offering up these surprises, though in different ways, no monumental icons like Foxx left to discover but plenty of other discoveries to be made, even in the recent past. I drift into and out of the game. Years go by where it seems in retrospect that I was hardly paying attention at all. I don’t know what the fuck else I was doing but somehow I couldn’t even get it together to grasp the details of whatever baseball season was unfolding somewhere beyond my personal fog. For example, after I left Jimmie Foxx’s page in order to search for more candidates for the “X is for” post, my search brought me to Xavier Nady, and though I then searched my shoebox for cards for this player and found I had none (and none for Xavier Hernandez, either), I lingered on the Xavier Nady page because I guess I don’t want to entirely cancel my former self in these strange new sleepless days and instead want to linger and digress and waste time, just a little, please, and I poked around Xavier Nady’s page until I got to his first at-bat, which turned out to be against a pitcher whose first name, incredibly, was Onan. What is incredible about this is that I had never heard of this Onan, despite his presence in box scores for a couple of years and despite Onanism being very near the foundation of the cluster of practices and habits and compulsions that have ferried me haphazardly through 43 years and that more or less make up the self that is known as Josh Wilker and that seem now under the duress and angst and joy of parenthood in need of either cancellation or total upheaval, depending upon which of my self-pitying theories of fatherhood is holding sway at any given time.

Oh Onan, I can’t believe I missed you. What am I missing now? I guess I never catch much on the first go-round anyway but only ever find anything in the detritus after the fact, little treasures left behind and forgotten. Onan was born in Hawaii but the name suggests Japanese descent. I was in Japan once, but only for a night, a stopover on my trip to Shanghai, the night after I wept in a weakened state at the in-flight movie Field of Dreams while thousands of feet above the Pacific. The next day I arrived in China and knew no words at all, not even hello. One of the words I learned early on, and one of the few that haven’t been X-ed out in the acid-bath barrel of my memory, is the word for thank you, which is written as “xie xie” in pinyin and is pronounced with the same “sh” sound that begins Xuddam, so the word to express gratitude sounds like waves or like the sound I use to try to get my son to sleep.

Here I am, he keeps telling me, eyes wide open.

Xie xie, I say. I’ll keep saying it. I’ll say it to him the rest of my life. I’ll never forget what it means.

***

Previous installments in the Cardboard Gods Ass Backwards ABCs of Parenting:
Z Is for Zisk
Y is For Yeager

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Ekim Xuddam, San Diego Padres | 6 Comments »

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Steve Yeager

October 17, 2011

The Cardboard Gods Ass Backwards ABCs of Parenting

Y Is for Yeager

Baseball is often used to define fatherhood, and fatherhood is often used to define baseball. Somewhere it was said that baseball is fathers playing catch with sons, or something like that (I don’t know if he coined the phrase, but the great poet—and Dock Ellis collaborator—Donald Hall wrote a book of essays about sports using that title). Feeding into that notion is the familial bond strengthened and even defined through a shared love of the game, the game being passed down from generation to generation, and, last but not least, the literal act of fathers playing catch with sons, an act perhaps as sacramental as any other in secular America. What above that would a new father think of when imagining his relationship with his son? What else could more firmly lock father and son together and lock them both to the most tender and joyful element in the myth of the nation? This notion of fathers playing catch with sons has become an epicenter of sentimentality, too, a way toward weeping hot, nostalgic tears for, depending on the weeper, the distance in time from such a catch, the absence of such a catch, the absence, in part or in full, of the father. This is the myth of the land, too: the absent father, the catch that never was.

The elevated notion of fathers playing catch with sons crested in the popular imagination in Field of Dreams, a movie about a guy named Ray Kinsella hitting middle-age and still looking for that catch with his dad. In the end, the ghost of the long-gone father, John Kinsella, emerges from the corn, and he’s a catcher, that’s his position, his role during his time on earth playing baseball as well as in eternity: he is a father and he catches. The movie climaxes with this exchange between father and son:

John Kinsella: Well, good night Ray.
Ray Kinsella: Good night, John.
[They shake hands and John begins to walk away]
Ray Kinsella: Hey… Dad?
[John turns]
Ray Kinsella: [choked up] “You wanna have a catch?”
John Kinsella: I’d like that.

The second time I saw Field of Dreams I wasn’t having any of this, rejecting it as I would the idea of eating a bucket of sugar. By the time of the climactic catch between father and son, I had already come to this conclusion about and rejection of the movie, and Costner’s phrasing—“have a catch”—put me over the top. I’d never to that point heard of the act of throwing a ball back and forth as “having” a catch, and the term made the act sound all the more precious and sentimental, almost unbearably childish, even though the term my brother and I used when we wanted to do throw a ball around, if we had to use one at all beyond just eye contact and the waggle of a glove—“play catch”—was also childlike. I don’t know, “playing catch” just sounds, still sounds, less like a big production with swelling orchestral strings than “having a catch.” I understand now that it’s probably just a regional thing—in some places this is just what people say when they want to throw a ball back and forth. (But, still, I for one will never use the phrase “have a catch.”) Anyway, that second viewing of Field of Dreams formed my official stance on the movie, but I must admit that my first viewing of the movie went much differently.

I first saw it on an airplane over the Pacific Ocean. I was at one of the more vulnerable moments of my life, as I was on my way to spend a few months in China with the idea that I would study there, but I had no real plan beyond the notion that I was going to meet up with my college writing professor, who was teaching there for a year, and together we would “figure something out.” I had never left the continent before, and I didn’t know a single word of Chinese or anything about Chinese culture. It was a leap into the unknown. And here, during the longest flight of my life, into this unknown, came a soothing story about baseball and the American Dream and fathers playing catch with sons, and I fell into it completely, desperately, and at the end, during the “have a catch” scene, I started to lose it. I was sitting next to a young Japanese guy, and he was starting to lose it, too, and the two of us turned to one another and grinned sheepishly.

Japanese guy: It is nice.
Josh: [choked up] Yes.

So, let’s face it, I’m as deeply snared as anyone in the myth of baseball and America and fathers “having” catches with sons. Now that I’m a father I have already thought repeatedly about such a catch with my own son, even though his command of his hands and limbs is minimal, but it is not nonexistent, and he is able to grip onto my finger, which has more than once made me feel choked up. Anyway, it’s a long way off. In the meantime, however, everything but everything, or so I’ve been told, maybe not in so many words, is fathers playing catch with sons, and in this my role is to be a catcher. I have to catch what he throws. I have to be there. I have to be sturdy and balanced and relaxed but ready. Like Steve Yeager in this 1977 card, an impossible ideal of relaxed readiness, the supreme catcher. Whenever you’re ready, Yeager seems to be saying. I can crouch here all day. Whenever you’re ready, I’ll be here.

***

Previous installments in the Cardboard Gods Ass Backwards ABCs of Parenting:

Z Is for Zisk

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Los Angeles Dodgers, Steve Yeager | 20 Comments »

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Luis Tiant

October 5, 2011

Last Wednesday, my wife and I took our son to the doctor for his two-month checkup. Two months seems too insubstantial. Parents of older children tell me to enjoy every moment because “it goes by so fast,” but I find myself yearning for a quicker passage of time so that the boy can stack up the days and weeks and months and become more and more fully and safely here. I don’t know how to explain that feeling (or feelings in general) except in baseball card terms. Most players, like most things, come and go with very little trace or even no trace at all, but certain cards, such as this 1979 Luis Tiant, seem to be invincible, despite their inherent flimsiness, and it has to do with all the many seasons on the back of the card anchoring the player into place as a star, a bright constant in an ever-shifting world.

At the doctor, my son got two shots, one in each leg, to protect him from several diseases. When we got home his legs began to swell up, and he started screaming. We couldn’t find any way to help him. Finally, around dusk, we put him in a stroller and went to the drug store to get some baby Tylenol. The walk seemed to distract him a little, and the screaming tapered off to little grunts and groans. When we got to the store I stayed outside and rolled the stroller up and down a patch of sidewalk while my wife went in to buy the pain-killer. The store is in an area where there are some sketchy characters, and on the way out of the store my wife was harassed by a pack of them.

“Fuck you,” my wife shouted over her shoulder at them.

“What’d they say?” I asked.

“Whatever,” she muttered and started leading the way back toward home, where our son would start screaming again. She held the Tylenol, and I pushed the stroller containing our suffering baby away from the pack of harassers, salving my feelings of powerlessness with fantasies of violent revenge.

***

This is Luis Tiant’s last card with the Red Sox. He left the Red Sox a little over a month after a one-game playoff defeat ended the team’s 1978 season. Players on the Red Sox lamented that the heart of the team was gone, and the team’s immediate plummet into uninspired mediocrity bore those claims out. I was only 11, but I didn’t blame Tiant for leaving. I don’t think other fans did, either, even though he went to the Yankees; the general feeling about the exodus of many players from the star-studded 1970s team was that the incompetency and cheapness of the front office was to blame, not the players. This last card of him as a Red Sox player seems fitting to me, a quiet, almost meditative shot of him doing what he did as well as any player ever has: connecting with a fan. We want to feel solid and capable and powerful. We need that connection.

***

I am fairly certain that I would lose to almost everyone on earth if ever pitted against them in a fight, so it was difficult for me to come up with realistic fantasies in which I was able to run up toward the street-hardened harassers of my wife and cause them all grave pain. I decided I’d have to rely on a lot of surprise groin-kicks, as many as I could fit in before their superior strength, fighting skills, and generalized rage at the unjust world kicked in and left me fractured and bleeding on the sidewalk (at best). Really what I needed, I reasoned while pushing my baby home, was a large and powerful weapon, not a gun but some kind of industrial-strength many-barreled taser capable of subduing with agonizing force several members of a gang of harassers, but even armed with that in my fantasy I saw myself somehow fumbling my grip on the weapon and having it used against me in horrible ways. Finally I surrendered to that old standby of my life and of the impotent and powerless everywhere: the impossible fantasy of having super-strength. Oh, they would laugh and heckle as I approached in my glasses and my drab middle-aged ectomorphic garments, but then wham and ca-crush and b-doouuzzzh and bodies flying everywhere, jaws cracking, eye sockets caving in. Oh, the weeping and begging. Oh, my great and awesome power! Fear me!

“What’s the matter with you?” my wife asked as we neared the entrance to our building. I guess I had a look on my face.

It was a rough night with the baby, but not as bad as the day had been, and finally he settled into a shallow sleep. I was free to follow the progress of game 162 of the 2011 baseball season. I have nothing to say about that game, but the departure the following day of Terry Francona from the Red Sox reminds me a little of Luis Tiant’s in the fall of 1978, just after the end of a Red Sox collapse that until the night of baby Tylenol and groin-kick fantasies was inarguably the worst regular season flop in franchise history. That 1978 team, like all 86 yearly editions of the Red Sox that had failed to win the World Series from 1919 to 2003, was redeemed in 2004, thanks in considerable part to the leadership of Terry Francona. Once the Red Sox finally won the World Series, everyone who had ever played for the Red Sox got to ride in the victory parade (figuratively if not literally), which to a lifelong fan was supremely gratifying. It helped give me back my childhood, the sheer fun of rooting for Lynn and Rice and Yaz and that warm ancient wizard, Luis Tiant, of believing he was going to lead them all the way. Until 2004, I avoided my summery childhood memories because they were tangled in a slanting October twilight that made all the players from the 1970s team seem forever doomed to fail, and since my identification with them was so deeply rooted and intimate—they were the projections of my deepest wishes in the world—I felt forever doomed to fail, too. Terry Francona was the leader of the team that lifted that burden. I will always be grateful to him. Fan is short for fanatic but it might as well be short for fantasy. In being a fan we hope to become more powerful, more victorious, than we are in real life. Amazing that sometimes it actually turns out to really feel that way. It certainly didn’t last Wednesday night for me, and the next day Terry Francona was no longer the manager of the Red Sox, but two times in my life I really did have super-strength, and both of those times Terry Francona presided.

Posted in Boston Red Sox, by Josh Wilker, Luis Tiant (Bos.) | 6 Comments »

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Previous Post

September 29, 2011

Posted in Boston Red Sox, by Josh Wilker | 3 Comments »

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Richie Zisk

September 16, 2011

The Cardboard Gods Ass Backwards ABCs of Parenting

Z Is for Zisk

This morning, the start of my 48th day as a parent, while groping around in my shoebox of cards, exhausted, unmoored, looking for some kind of anchor, I randomly pulled free this Richie Zisk card and started thinking—because of the unusual first letter of his surname—about the alphabet, and at that moment in another room of my home my son began to cry, a sound that spikes the air with barbed invisible question marks, and I began to wonder as I hurried toward the sound what it might be like to know everything I need to know. What if—instead of knowing nothing at all—I knew the terrain of parenting backward and forward? My life has been nothing if not an exercise in palliative fantasies, so why stop now? And so we begin a Cardboard Gods ABCs of parenting at the end, with Z, first things fuckin’ last, to use the phrasing of Nice Guy Eddie in Reservoir Dogs, when he was trying to piece together the details of a situation that had gone completely to shit and was clearly only going to get worse. Am I hinting with this cinematic reference that parenting for me has been like a botched, bloody heist scheme threatening to destroy everyone involved? Are you imagining that me, my wife, and our baby are currently in a Mexican stand-off, weapons drawn and cocked, shirts stained with the liquid of soured internal processes, eyes reddened with fatigue and weeping? Well, it hasn’t been like that, or at least not all the time. It is one moment at a time, some better than others, each a volatile enigma. Yesterday, the boy took a break from a long stint of red-faced grunting unhappiness and smiled up at me for a few minutes. Two days ago, he gnawed on a Red Sox pacifier and seemed content, briefly. Three days ago, when I was almost done with my bike ride home from my commute, I spotted my wife on the sidewalk, carrying the boy in a baby bjorn. I got off the bike and fell in slow step with them, the three of us meandering around the neighborhood for a while on a mild fall evening, an awareness falling down on me that in moments like this I could not be more blessed. (Key detail: just before my arrival, the boy had abruptly stopped screaming and fallen unconscious.)

Anyway, on to today’s lesson, while I still am within this narrow gap of time between tasks that have otherwise banished my writing to regions so distant and hypothetical as to border the hoary regions of frustration in which occurred my long-gone pubescent imaginings of sexual intercourse with the intangible pop culture sex symbols of my youth, such as Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman and Bailey and Jennifer from WKRP in Cincinnati (yes, the gnawing ache of knowing that in reality I would never be able to fondle Cheryl Tiegs’ boobs has now reentered my life as a yearning for having time to sit down and write, say, a literary ode to Cheryl Tiegs’ boobs): Z is for Zisk. Z is also for zero, as in nothing. When I became a parent, I suffered the feeling of being back at zero, knowing nothing. I suffered unto feelings of despair, no lie, sprinting past fantasies of Cheryl Tiegs or writing about Cheryl Tiegs to imagine scenarios of sheer desperation involving the witness protection program or the foreign legion. And it’s not accurate to put these statements in the past tense. That feeling of zero is with me right now and from now on, probably. I will always be at zero as a parent, always knowing nothing, a tenuous and agonizing way to be when someone is looking to you and depending on you to know what to do.

So Z is for zero but Z is also for Zisk, and in terms of this 1977 Richie Zisk card this can only mean good things, possibilities, unpredictable but not necessarily negative changes. The year this card came out, Zisk, after logging a few years as a prototypical good-hitting, dubious-gloved member of Pittsburgh’s vaunted Lumber Company, shifted over to the city where I now happen to live and where my son was born, Chicago, and had the best season of his career. Sometime during that season, Topps included Zisk in its line of cloth stickers, and in that product the picture shown here has been airbrushed so that Zisk is shown as a member of the White Sox. That year was the best of the decade for the White Sox, as they led the American League West deep into the summer before succumbing to the charge of the dynastic Royals. The team was one of the oddest in history, in that it had been consciously built by owner Bill Veeck as a desperate one-off, the roster fortified through trades for players acquired at bargain prices because they were on the brink of free agency. Veeck knew he would soon lose these players (most significantly Zisk and Oscar Gamble, the heart of the team’s slugging attack), but he apparently figured one brief shot at glory was better than none at all. And it almost worked. The following year, Zisk indeed cashed in on a free agency deal with the Texas Rangers, and White Sox fans had to pack away the bedsheets that they’d carried with them to the ballpark in 1977 festooned with these words: “Pitch at risk to Richie Zisk.” This slogan has stayed with me since I was a boy, and has always imbued the name of the player shown at the top of this page with a sense of sizzling hazardous excitement, all the good qualities of the unknowable and unknown.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Pittsburgh Pirates, Richie Zisk | 3 Comments »

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Mike Flanagan

August 29, 2011

When I got this card in 1978, I would have had no wish for my life above being a major league baseball player. Back then I would have envisioned myself as a member of my favorite team, which was not the Orioles, but now, in my early 40s, looking back on that purposeful team and on my own often purposeless life, looking also at this card of a young focused left-hander throwing free and easy, a year from winning the Cy Young award and the first game of the World Series, I am thinking that if I could have been a baseball player, someone with a rare and beautiful gift, and I could have chosen an organization to come up in as a player, I would have been an Oriole during the golden years of that franchise.

I would have learned the right way to do things, the Oriole Way, and I would have learned what my place was in the world, my role, and I would have learned how to play that role. I would have been surrounded by others with rare and beautiful gifts doing the same thing, all of us coming together instead of pulling apart. Life is in constant disintegration, but to be an Oriole during those years must have felt like something close to that opposite of that, as if a life could be led, at least for a while, as an integral part of a song.

Some years after the Orioles fell from that grace into a more familiar kind of perpetual disintegration, I spent four seasons in a primitive cabin in the woods. I’ve been thinking about that cabin lately. Sometimes, at dusk, there was a symphony. I don’t want to romanticize it: more likely than not, I would have been depressed, aching with loneliness, guilty for wasting another day, angry at my inability to write anything worthwhile, wishing not that I was part of a song but that I had more batteries for my handheld battery-powered television so that I could watch sitcom reruns on the screen the size of a baseball card. That is, I was not in a lotus position peacefully drinking in the majesty of the forest. But now, many years later, I can discard the fetid personal demons fouling the moment and remember that there were two main parts of the symphony: frogs and a wood thrush. The frogs honked along dumbly, one-note simpletons, and then every once in a while the wood thrush would let loose with that watery many-noted call that I wish I could describe but can only say that whenever I heard it I loosened up just a little on the chronic grip that held me to my misery.

I thought about that symphony a few days ago when I heard that Mike Flanagan had been found dead, that he’d done himself in with a shotgun. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this site, one of my more memorable trips to the ballpark was when I saw the Red Sox play the Orioles and a pack of drunk guys behind us spent the whole game honking at the opposing pitcher, “Mike Flanagan: UMASS!” They were fellow UMASS guys, I guess, trumpeting their pride, but what I was thinking about a few days ago was how their drunken monotonous croaking was to the graceful pitching of the victorious Flanagan like the frogs’ guttural belching to the song of the wood thrush. Those guys were fans, like I am a fan, and we fans are of this earth, simple and dull, limited, unblessed by the rare and beautiful gift that inspires our croaking, and all we can do is call out to those we believe are part of something higher.

And if there’s such a thing as prayer, let me send mine into the sky like a frog croaking at dusk, and let the words of the prayer be “Mike Flanagan: UMASS!” and let the prayer find Mike Flanagan somewhere with the wish that such a thing, blunt and absurd, but sincere, could help spirit him back into the center of the harmony he once knew, a blessed note in the center of a swinging, indestructible song.

Posted in Baltimore Orioles, by Josh Wilker, Mike Flanagan | 6 Comments »

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Carmen Ronzonni

August 17, 2011

Chico’s Bail Bonds Player of the Week: Carmen Ronzonni

Ever since my air conditioner died a few weeks ago I don’t trust any of the things humming and groaning in my home—the dishwasher, the fridge, the microwave, the computer: each seems on the brink of having some small, cheap, vitally important cog snap and cause the whole mechanism to seize up and go silent. I’ve lived a meandering life, awake only in stories, never forging any kind of direct, pragmatic connection to actual events, and my tendency for anxiety feeds into my literary dreaminess so that every possible setback seems not simply one problem to solve but an omen foreboding the inevitable unraveling of daily life into a tragedy, as if a broken toaster will lead, eventually, to me freezing to death on an ice chunk in Antarctica or gagging fatally on Elizabethan poison. More than once in the last few days I’ve thought of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the horrifying novel in which the whole of human civilization as we know it is shown in smoldering irrevocable cinders, in a state of tragic fall, and a father and a son walk through it together, barely surviving. I am a father now and I have a son. I am nervous; everything seems provisional; at the core of it all as always I feel fake.

I turn and have always turned to stories. Yesterday various stories travelled alongside me by chance or design. I read a book about how to calm unhappy babies, the story there being that several methods must be mastered and executed perfectly or there will be a house full of suffering. My son is too young still, just a couple weeks into his life, to have hit the period when some babies start wailing for hours on end, but he has had his fussy moments, and I’ve tried to bring the story of the book to life and have felt like I wasn’t quite doing it right, and my own son felt awkward in my hands and in the gap between the ideal story and the real fakery of life. I read that book on the bus but kept getting my attention coaxed away by two guys talking nearby, trading stories of things gone wrong to the point that litigation ensued. The story one of them told that I can recall now involved a man with cancer in one eye who went in for surgery to get the eye removed and the surgeon removed the other eye by mistake. Later, at lunch, I read a couple articles sent to me by my father and a friend, respectively, both articles concerned with identifying the narrative embedded behind certain current events. In the column my dad sent, the author traced the roots of the London riots to a sense of profound desperation, the riots a grab for power by the powerless. In the column my friend sent, the author criticized President Obama for failing to tell a pointed story in his words and actions, instead attempting to placate both sides and in doing so satisfying no one. My thought when I read the former article was that the roots of riot are everywhere now, and my thought when I read the second was that even the President is faking it, and not even that well. On the long, bumpy bus ride home I stared out the window at what seemed like imminent ruins.

In my mind, the specter of Carmen Ronzonni presides over the anxious flimsiness of all things. He is, as his teammates in The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training quickly realize, a fake. That he is friends with Kelly Leak buys him a lot of time and credit with the team, but once he actually has to start pitching in game conditions, the ineptitude beneath his fakery becomes apparent, and it begins to dawn on the Bears that he and they are all doomed. He’s supposed to be their pitcher, the center of their hopes, but he is only a collection of imitations and bluster. He is insubstantial, a scarecrow stuffed only with stories.

Still, maybe there’s a place for guys like Carmen Ronzonni. When I first saw the movie back in 1977, I was drawn first and most strongly to Kelly, Ogilvie, and Tanner, and I think I sided with the general feelings of the team regarding Carmen. Even though I hadn’t even seen the first Bears movie yet, I understood that Carmen was an outsider, and though (or maybe because) I saw some of myself in his tendency to use imitation in place of anything real, I kept Carmen at arm’s length. He wasn’t quite one of us. But as I’ve watched the movie more recently and repeatedly, I’ve come to think of Carmen as a deeply important member of the team in terms of the sequel. I see him this way not only because the team needs a pitcher and not even because his persona of recycled bullshit is a crystalline microcosm of that deeply American genre, the sequel. It’s this: maybe a guy saturated in stories can help things feel more like a story and not just part of some mundane conveyer belt toward the bone yard.

This is not just an abstract thing, either. There are a couple of cases in which Carmen livens things up in a concrete way, such as when he swipes a couple of Playboys and brings them back to the guys in the hotel room. More importantly, he’s a key figure, along with Kelly, in procuring the van that takes the boys to Houston. Kelly is the driver of the van and we assume he was the driving force in the ballsy move to take possession of the van, but it seems there would be no van without Carmen’s mysterious connections (I believe Carmen’s explanation about where they got the van is an uncharacteristically terse statement along the lines of “From a guy I know”). Carmen, albeit a bullshitter, has bullshitted his way into the darker, more grown-up world that Kelly rides through. Though he comes off as a fake as a baseball-playing boy among the other boys, he seems, at least according to Kelly’s estimation of him as “cool,” as if he has been more successful at finding a legitimate place among the older hoodlums that we assume Kelly hangs out with when not smashing home runs with the Bears.

Carmen’s legitimacy as an experienced outlaw reaches its apex in one of the film’s best scenes. The Bears have made their getaway from their parents, but they still need to pass through one more barrier before truly embarking upon the Open Road, that barrier being a police car that starts to follow the van (this scene starts at about 6:30 in the clip below). When this police car is noticed by the team, almost everyone begins to panic. Kelly will become the hero of the moment, acting quickly and coolly, lighting a cigarette and putting on his hat and shades to make himself look older. (This transformation worked on me as a kid—back then, he really did suddenly look like an adult—but when I watch the film now Kelly’s stoned, acned leer as he salutes the cops marks him hilariously as the single most suspicious-looking driver in history). But while Kelly is leaping into action, Carmen is encouraging everyone to “stay cool.” It could read like another blowhard moment from the imitating interloper, but something about it rings true, as if Carmen, the boy made up entirely of stories, has been through moments like this before, charged moments, the heartbeats of a storied life. When the police move on without pulling the boys over, Kelly slumps and exhales, betraying a nervousness he had kept hidden, the boys exult, and Carmen smiles and nods in the center of it all like a happy maestro who knew how the song would go all along.

And speaking of songs, the makers of the sequel chose this happy moment (about 7:30 in the clip below) to unleash what they surely hoped (in vain, it turned out) would be a runaway hit song, James Rolleston’s “Life Is Looking Good.” Soaring, cheesy freedom! I chase that sweet lie through all disintegrations.

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Special thanks to nunyer for creating Carmen’s card.

For more on the skewed, illuminating America of the Bears, please check out my ode to The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training.

Posted in Bad News Bears, by Josh Wilker, Carmen Ronzonni | 1 Comment »

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Mark Fidrych

August 14, 2011

Today would be Mark Fidrych’s 57th birthday. At left is the autograph of the 1976 Rookie of the Year, a great gift sent along to me recently by Carl A., a fan of my book. Carl’s father got him the autograph one early spring at a motor inn in Lansing, Michigan, along with a few other Tigers autographs. In all but one of the other Tigers autographs, the players mentioned the father’s son by name and included a brief message:

To Carl
My Best Regards
Always
Ron LeFlore

To Carl
BEST Wishes!
Benjamin Oglivie

To Carl,
Best Always
Gates Brown

In addition to those signatures, all written on Hospitality Motor Inn stationery, Carl’s dad also got Al Kaline’s autograph (no message) on a smaller slip. But the scrawl of a Tiger all-time great could not have had more impact than the sideways scribble of Mark Fidrych. I imagine he and Kaline were unable to include personal wishes because their tables were besieged by fans, and if they were to personalize every message they would have been there all night. The presence among the signers of Ben Oglivie suggests that the signing occurred in 1977, Oglivie’s last with the Tigers, and a spring 1977 sighting of Fidrych, the reigning Rookie of the Year, must have caused quite a stir. He wouldn’t have had time to write the name of every father’s son on a slip of paper or to wish them the best, but he didn’t have to. Every father’s son from those days knew that the Bird was pitching for us and sending us his best. He was our way into the center of the action because he was exactly like us, a boy in love with the game.

This morning I roamed the Internet a bit in search of stories about meeting Mark Fidrych. There were glimpses of him long after his playing days were over, giving himself over to charity work, and glimpses of him crossing over into the world of comic books, and glimpses of him gazing backward with some hurt and confusion but also humility and gratitude.

The best glimpse of him that I found on this day, his birthday, was one taken by a photographer, Joe McNally, who—like most who ever seemed to spend even a little time with Fidrych—came to think of the big-hearted pitcher as his friend. Check out McNally’s touching tribute if you’ve got a second, and raise a glass today to the Bird.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Detroit Tigers, Mark Fidrych | 7 Comments »

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Steve Foucault

August 9, 2011

All right, I’m up, showered, fed; the kid is asleep, the dishes are all clean, and I’ve got a half hour to write before I have to climb on my bicycle and pedal to the bus stop and ride to work. This is it from here on out for a while, more or less, so I am not going to mess around with craft too much. Jack Kerouac, who my kid is named after, said that craft in writing is a kind of subterfuge, a way of avoiding honesty anyway. Then again, well, I don’t totally believe that and see that it can be a way out of doing the work needed to make a piece of writing be more than just someone’s spit-up. (Sorry, I have spit-up on my mind.) Also, Jack Kerouac’s writing lost momentum as the years went on, his writing lost life I mean, and his greatest book was written and rewritten many times and suffered for despite the myth that he spontaneously created the whole thing in a few weeks with no forethought or even any effort beyond what it took to crack open a bottle of benzedrine. Still, there is a time for carefully crafting stuff, maybe, and a time to just report from the bunker as fast as possible so as to keep a semblance of sanity and the human voice alive. This situation I am in is not—is actually the farthest thing from—holing up in a bunker. But it is relentless, dealing with a newborn. Of course, I am far from the front lines on this one (back to the battle metaphors again, I know) and am more like a guy running supplies to the ranks on the front lines, those ranks being my wife, a beleaguered army of one who nonetheless is all softness and love with the baby, and when he’s sleeping and giving her a chance to think, her mind is racing with worries that something might happen to him, to his tiny fragile life. As for me (I almost stopped writing to consider my next thought instead of just slamming it down first thought best thought beatnik style) I am coming down from the first high of the kid being born, when I thought I would be a different guy altogether forever, someone able to give myself over totally to complete holy sacrifice all the time, like fucking Gandhi or something, transformed by my love of the boy. Turns out I am the same as always, just more tired. I live for the kid now though. But when I get a little time here and there, I want to figure out what the hell is the shape of my mind. So here I am, staring at the third and final Steve Foucault card in my collection. My three Steve Foucault cards form a progression through the years, the 1975 card showing him looking in for a sign, the 1976 card showing him coming to a set position, and this 1977 card showing him just after delivering a phantom pitch. No ball is visible in any of the cards. Foucault wears a Texas Rangers uniform in various combinations, a long-sleeve undershirt disappearing then reappearing. His right pointer finger pokes out of his glove in all the photos. He has the same long mustache and thick sideburns every year. He looks off to his left in the first picture, off to his right in the second picture, and in the last picture he gazes straight at the viewer. The imaginary ball is out of his hands now and out in the world. Your turn now. He is looking at me, and looking at you. His right hand is in a fist, but it is loosening just a little, his middle finger itching to unfurl. The days are long and exhausting. The years fly by. You can’t touch this pitch. You can grow a splendid walrus mustache and sideburns but you can’t know what’s next. You can’t ever know.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Steve Foucault, Texas Rangers | 2 Comments »

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Kelly Leak

August 5, 2011

Chico’s Bail Bonds Player of the Week: Kelly Leak

Giving Kelly Leak a player of the week award is kind of like handing Jesse Owens a “participant” ribbon at the end of the 1936 Summer Olympics. But this has been the happiest week of my life, so the player of this week could only go to Kelly Leak. I don’t have many words or much time to say them at the moment, but you can read some of my thoughts about Kelly Leak over at Deadspin, in a chapter from my book on The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training called “The Coolest Kid Who Ever Lived.”

The back of Kelly’s baseball card would be mind-boggling, judging from the glimpses of his performances seen in The Bad News Bears and The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training. Here’s what we know from those glimpses: in the seven plate appearances shown in those films, Kelly homered three times, tripled, doubled, singled, and was intentionally walked. These results suggest that he may have actually been underselling himself when he tried to hit on a woman in Amanda’s dance class by saying that he was hitting .841. Player of the week, player of the year, player of all recorded time. 

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Special thanks to nunyer for creating Kelly’s card.

For more on the skewed, illuminating America of the Bears, please check out my ode to The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training.

Posted in Bad News Bears, by Josh Wilker, Kelly Leak | 5 Comments »

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Joe Nuxhall

August 3, 2011

My wife gave birth to our first kid a few days ago on July 30. The boy is a few feet away, sleeping. I have no idea how to write about how he makes me feel. So here’s a baseball card. It features Joe Nuxhall, who was also born on July 30. Joe Nuxhall was nearing 37 and had played his last game when this card of him as a gray-haired hurler in what looks to be a rubber undershirt came out. It appeared the year before I was born, so I wasn’t familiar with it until I got it along with some other old cards as a gift from my wife’s mother a few years ago. But when I was a kid I knew about Joe Nuxhall as the youngest to ever play in a major league game, making his debut as a 15-year-old. I remember holding on to that image of him as he was on his first day in the majors, everything in front of him, even as I learned about his actual career, a good one and a long one but one without that purity of a boy standing on a big league mound, readying to fire his first pitch.

After his playing career ended, Joe Nuxhall served as a broadcaster for many years, becoming arguably the most beloved figure in the world of the Cincinnati Reds. My boy has some Reds blood in him, his mother born in Cincinnati to a large clan of rabid Reds fans. His first live baseball game, which he snuck into inside his mother’s belly, was a Reds victory over the Cubs at Wrigley earlier this year. Below is a picture of his first contact with baseball outside the uterus. The Red Sox were in town, so the hospital room picked up the local coverage. I whispered into my son’s tiny ear. Youk, I whispered. Yooooouuk.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Cincinnati Reds, Joe Nuxhall | 18 Comments »

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