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Dwayne Murphy

May 21, 2012

(This post originally appeared on The Classical.) 

Gaps

In 1980, when I was 12, I started noticing gaps. I’d drifted out of a trio I’d been a part of all through elementary school. Mike, Glenn, and I had played together all the time, goofed, made up games. We’d even co-written a sequel to Star Wars. (It was mostly light-saber fight scenes.) We’d loved school. Mike and Glenn continued to do so as we all moved on to the more regimented junior high. I reacted to the move onward and upward as I still react to all change, resisting it passively and self-destructively, as if it’s trying to erase me, and as if I could somehow protect something essential, some central glowing ember, by doing the erasing myself.

I can’t name this essential ember, if it even exists. I can only pull things toward where I think it might be. That summer after seventh grade, I collected baseball cards solo for the first time, my older brother having moved on to other things. I guess the cards weren’t the same without him: it was my last year of collecting. Still, or maybe because of this, these 1980 cards stand out. A lot of posed shots, a lot of blue sky. As if someone kept saying, Hold it, stand still. One last time.

***

In 1981, the Oakland A’s completed a return from a post-dynastic plummet into oblivion, once again winning the A.L. West led by what was possibly the best defensive outfield in baseball history. I pulled that trio toward me, imagining all the things it had that I lacked: capability, power, togetherness, speed. The centerfielder playing right field, Tony Armas, was blessed with a lightning-bolt arm that he would pass down to his namesake, Tony Armas Jr., a major league pitcher, and the centerfielder playing left field, Rickey Henderson, was as fast as an Olympic sprinter. The best fielder of the three, the centerfielder among centerfielders, was Dwayne Murphy, who had a strong arm, blazing speed, and the decisiveness, tenacity, and vision of a battle-scarred field sergeant. In high school, he had been a great defensive back in football; he believed his mastery of skills for that position enabled him to play very shallow in centerfield and still be able to sprint back and cover the outer reaches of his terrain. The three A’s were perfectly suited as a trio, a six-armed, six-legged creature, all limbs in synch under the leadership of Murphy. Henderson was a left-handed thrower, putting his glove hand in place to guard liners down the left-field line; Armas was a righty, putting his glove hand in place to guard liners down the right-field line. In between stood Murphy. Anything hit in the voluminous zip code he commanded was subject to a miraculous reversal of Murphy’s Law. Whatever can be tracked down, will be.

My brother went away to boarding school that year, and I entered high school. I got farther and farther away from the action of life, like a centerfielder afraid the ball would be hit over his head. If I looked down I would have seen my heels on the warning track. This was no way to defend against the widening gaps, but I didn’t know what else to do but retreat.

I remember realizing sometime around then that the members of my own disbanded trio, Mike and Glenn, weren’t “cool,” that their continued enthusiasm for math and science and Star Trek and their unashamed friendly banter with teachers set them on the wrong side of what I sensed was a merciless culling in progress in the steely locker-lined halls. Perhaps to avoid sticking out like them, I started playing dead. For whatever reason, playing dead or other, I never studied and rarely paid attention, and I lost the thread in almost every class, instead leering at girls and daydreaming mushily about sports. I remember sitting in the back of a math class and watching Glenn, near the front, ham it up with the teacher and a suddenly deep-chested girl who also still liked school. I wasn’t part of any of it anymore. School became a place of tits and confusion.

***

A 1982 article in Sports Illustrated celebrated the greatness of the trio anchored by Dwayne Murphy. My brother’s subscription still brought the magazine to our house every week, even in his absence, his name in the address box on the cover. “The A’s have the best outfield I’ve ever seen,” Don Zimmer observed in the article. He wasn’t alone in this thought. And this valuation wasn’t one of those beliefs that in later years seems to have been a collective hallucination. The numbers back it up, or so it would seem. For three years in the early 1980s, the Dwayne Murphy trio covered the gaps as perhaps no other trio in baseball history has.

How can this be illustrated? I don’t know. WAR? Range Factor? Total Zone Runs? The A’s trio seems to have performed exceedingly well in all sorts of complex statistical metrics that are as lost to me as that math class. It’s a cruel twist of fate that the one thing clogging up my brain, the mountain of relatively simple baseball statistics I memorized as a child, has left no room for me to learn anything else, including the more recent and complicated ways of measuring performance on a baseball diamond. Conversations about baseball continue, but the conversations are laden with baffling terms and mathematic mazes, a language beyond me.

I blew off my homework every night that year, instead playing a lot of solitaire Strat-O-Matic with cards representing the 1981 season. I rolled three dice, looked for the result of the roll on a pitcher’s or a hitter’s card, cross-referenced it if necessary (along with the roll of a twenty-sided die) on a fielding chart, wrote down the outcome of the at-bat in pencil in a hand-drawn scorecard in a notebook, and rolled the dice again. Over the weeks and months I filled up a large carton with all the box scores. I needed to save them all, every last page. When Dave Righetti pitched a no-hitter in one game I tacked the box score to the wall. Something amazing had happened, it seemed, and I wanted it to last and to be known.

I loved playing Strat-O-Matic with the 1981 A’s. When the dice roll pointed toward a fielding chart for one of the three outfielders, there was a kind of certainty that was becoming rarer in my life. This ball is going to be caught. They were able to turn a major league outfield, that vast expanse, into something without gaps. Gaps kept opening wider everywhere. I disappeared into an imagining of wholeness.

***

In 1983, the A’s trio was broken up by the trade of Tony Armas to the Red Sox, where he would almost instantaneously become old and slow, as if proximity to Dwayne Murphy was some kind of cosmic battery charger. Henderson would also seem to change when he left Murphy’s side and joined the Yankees, blooming into a self-aggrandizing mercenary superstar eccentric. I would be changing soon, too, going away to boarding school, where I would add marijuana and alcohol to my modes of disappearance. Before that departure in the fall of 1983, I spent all summer in the backyard throwing a tennis ball off the ridged tin roof of our house.

With this repetitive physical ritual came an intricate internal ritual of imaginary self-abnegating mitosis. First, I split from myself into a player on offense and a player on defense. I’d give each player a name. The player on offense threw the ball at the roof, trying to hit one of the ridges so that the ball would fly off at an angle. The player on defense tried to catch the ball, making routine grabs when the ball missed a ridge, attempting running, tumbling grabs when the ball caught a ridge. I split again into a team of players on offense and a team of players on defense, all of them with names, and then split myself again into an entire league of teams, each with a roster of players with particular strengths and weaknesses, which I committed to memory and then tried to enact with my body, for example laming up my throws for a guy who was “all glove/no hit” and conversely imagining some extra lead in my ass for a slow-footed slugger as he attempted to track down a roof ricochet.

Every afternoon I was the invisible god for a new world, gone from myself. It would always come down to one last play. Often the intricate fantasy would end in an unsatisfying way, with a routine catch. But sometimes the crucial final play, with the title on the line, would require me to sprint full-tilt across the lawn and dive. Sometimes I couldn’t get there in time. Other times I’d just barely make the catch. That feeling, to be like Dwayne Murphy, was what I was aiming for. To be exhausted and completely gone, laid out in the grass and awash in glory, cheers raining down as if the silent mountains all around were packed stands, the feeling from making the spectacular catch one of impossible containment, as if the rule of the world—that gaps appear and expand—was somehow in this one moment of triumph reversed. That there were no gaps at all.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Dwayne Murphy, Oakland A's | 4 Comments »

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Larvell Blanks

May 2, 2012

(This post originally appeared on The Classical.) 

Sugar, Sugar

Ah sugar

Baseball cards existed for decades on the fringes of the game. Few cared.

Ah honey honey

A core imperative of capitalism is to create demand where there is none. Rhetorical dismissals, however rational, such as “Why would anyone want to purchase cardboard rectangles featuring photographic and statistical portraits of strangers?” are ignored in favor of pragmatic, profit-driven inquiries such as “What can be done to make someone want to purchase cardboard rectangles featuring photographic and statistical portraits of strangers?”

You are my candy girl, and you got me wanting you

These cards bring me back to the beginning. I’m a kid. Each of my days as a kid begins with the only childhood love that rivals my love of baseball. The imaginary-character cereals—Cap’n Crunch, Frosted Flakes, Lucky Charms, Super Sugar Crisp—are not allowed in my house, but I make my own version by sneaking heaping teaspoons from the sugar bowl into my Cheerios or Total or Corn Bran or Rice Chex. For my love of sugar I lie and steal. It feels good. The morning brightens, larval gray giving way to the fluttery winging shimmer of cartoons.

***

Ah sugar

When sugar was added to baseball cards, via a slab of hard bubble gum, baseball cards metastasized from a marginal curiosity to an American institution.

Ah honey honey

For most of human history, sugar was not in demand. But as capitalism took root worldwide during the colonial expansion of European powers, sugar came to be known as “white gold” for its desirability and tremendous profit-making properties. The world tilted murderously toward it.

You are my candy girl, and you got me wanting you

Afternoons as a kid I devour whatever is available, sometimes Chips Ahoy, sometimes Oreos, sometimes Nutter Butters. Sometimes there’s nothing sugary in the cupboards but Quik, which I eat dry in heaping teaspoons. If I still have my small weekly allowance in hand, I go to the general store with enough of my own money to buy one thing for me alone. The one thing differs. Could be Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups or a Nestle Crunch bar or a $100,000 Bar or M&Ms or Rolos or a fistful of Bazooka Joe or a Charleston Chew or a Snickers or Bubble Yum or a Mars Bars or Sugar Babies. Could be a pack of baseball cards.

***

Ah sugar

Interest in baseball cards has been considered for some time to be waning. Every so often there is an article or a blog post or a book or a TV special that wonders whatever happened to baseball cards. It’s fucking obvious what happened.

Ah honey honey

The cultivation and manufacture of sugar in colonial times was extremely labor-intensive, so Europeans enslaved indigenous populations (referenced in the customary generic misnomer on the uniform of the player in the card at the top of this page) to do the work needed to make sugar. What else were the Indians doing? What other use did they have in this sweet new tilted world?

You are my candy girl, and you got me wanting you

In 1977, a nine-year-old boy in the most powerful nation the world has ever known discovers this card in solitude, the sugar coursing through his body causing his heart to pound as if he is in love. He is not in love. He doesn’t know about girls. He doesn’t know how sweet a kiss can be. A kiss? He doesn’t even like to be touched. Here is the boy at the pinnacle of the corrosive arc of capitalism through human history: don’t touch me; gimme sugar.

***

Ah sugar

The most common explanation for the current downturn in interest in cards is that “the bubble burst.” The bubble that is being referenced is figurative, an investment bubble, the vast and idiotic speculating done on baseball cards in the late 1980s and 1990s creating an imaginary fragile orb filled with emptiness. But the real cause in the decline of baseball cards is much simpler. Think bubble, but be literal.

Ah honey honey

When the Indians being forced to work on sugar plantations began dying in great numbers from European diseases, the Europeans looked to Africa. Hundreds of thousands of people of the same color as the player in the card at the top of this page were captured, enslaved, shipped across the Atlantic, and forced to provide the labor needed to produce sweetener.

You are my candy girl, and you got me wanting you

A nine-year-old boy with sugar coursing through his body chews the bubble gum that came with the pack of cards. He chews, gulps, exults, keeps chewing. The gum is not yet ready for bubbles. Some cards stop him, others don’t. This one does, the first name something to be worked over in the mouth like gum, like the contagiously empty syllables of a pop song, like the declensions of a word for forms of life. Larva, larvae, Larvell. The second name is for the things beyond names, a bubble with nothing in it, expanding. The gum is ready now. Breathe-slow, blow, a nothing day in a loveless larval year. Sugar fills the blanks.

***

Ah sugar

When the sugary bubble gum was removed some time in the late 1980s or early 1990s from packs of cards—presumably to protect the cards, those idiotic objects of investment, from damage—it was the beginning of the end. Kids drove the industry and the nostalgia and the joy of baseball cards. Nowadays, with no sugar involved, kids don’t give a shit about baseball cards. Nowadays baseball card conventions are, so I’ve heard, largely childless, instead sparsely populated by middle-aged men like me meandering around and remembering how sweet it all used to be.

Ah honey honey

Sugar causes a fleeting increase in serotonin levels in the body. Sugar makes you fat, gives you diabetes, rots your teeth. Sugar is stupid. Sugar is irresistible. Sugar snares children, topples empires. America was able to gain its independence from Great Britain in part because the British were devoting much of their military might to protecting their sugar-making territories in the Caribbean, weakening themselves in the fight against the colonies. One empire staggered, another began to rise.

You are my candy girl, and you got me wanting you

Sugar stops time. Time has been stopped. The player gazing out at the nine-year-old boy during this stoppage is known as Sugar Bear. The player has explained that this nickname came to him during his first professional season, 1969: “In the months of August and September, while I was in the Arizona Instructional League, there was a hit single being played on the radio called ‘Sugar, Sugar.’ Ralph Garr, Darrell Evans and others started calling me ‘Sugar Bear.’”

***

Ah sugar

Taking sugar away from baseball cards? The only business decision that could compare would be if the music industry equivalent of bubble gum, bubblegum pop songs, attempted to remain a profit-generator in spite of removing from its product the insipid insidious sweetness, the hooks, the groove.

Ah honey honey

The bubblegum pop songs that ruled the air in the late 1960s and 1970s were aimed at me, which is to say they were aimed at children, mass-produced, written by company writers and performed by company musicians, everyone involved in the assembly line production ordered to keep it simple and shiny and contagious. The apotheosis of the genre was the 1969 song “Sugar, Sugar” that was not only its biggest hit but the most direct expression of its aesthetic: sugar and nothing else, a sweetened larval blank. The song was disseminated through cross-platform marketing before that hideous term even existed, and it started its viral sweep around the world by preying on those with the least resistance, appearing first in a cartoon program, The Archies, and coming as a prize in certain sugar cereals so that children could get hooked on it as they crested the first sugar wave of the day. Though children were targeted, many others were struck, stricken, addicted. “Sugar, Sugar” is reportedly a favorite song of George W. Bush. Presumably he first heard it in 1969, his first year out of college, as his privileged class status was likely allowing him to avoid going to Vietnam. Years later, he danced with his daughter at her wedding to “Sugar, Sugar.” He was nearing the end of his two terms as president by then, during which he had blandly fronted the continuing transformation of the United States into a faltering obese diabetic overextended colonial empire that is always at war.

You are my candy girl, and you got me wanting you

I have only ever wanted one thing, the impossible thing, the sweet stoppage of time. Stop the world. Just once. At nine I already know the deal, and sometimes in the middle of the night it springs me awake and upright like a half-broken trap. Time always goes forward, leads to when there will be no more sweetness, no gum, no card to hold, no me. Why wouldn’t I love that sugar has seized me, that time has been called, that play has halted, that there is still a me to be gazed at by a stranger named Larvell Blanks for one sweet American moment alone?

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Cleveland Indians, Larvell Blanks | 20 Comments »

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Fred Holdsworth

April 18, 2012

For Tax Week, here’s Fred Holdsworth, who after his playing career ended became an accountant and is now a vice president of finance for Comcast. During his playing career, Holdsworth floated around on the fringes of rosters for a while and injured Hall of Famers. In a spring training game, one of his pitches broke Carlton Fisk’s forearm. A couple of years later, he ran into Jim Palmer while the two were jogging around the outfield, the collision causing problems with Palmer’s delivery, according to Palmer. In a late August game in 1980, he did not injure George Brett (Brett had already been plunked in the knee earlier in the game by another pitcher) but perhaps Holdsworth’s injurious aura cowed the future Hall of Famer just enough to stop Brett’s streak of 8 hits in 8 at-bats. In the following weeks, Brett’s torrid pace fell off just a bit, causing him to narrowly miss batting .400, and during the playoffs and World Series he developed a painful case of hemorrhoids, but it wouldn’t be fair to blame either of these setbacks on Fred Holdsworth. That said, I am now tempted to research causes of hemorrhoids; perhaps I could discover that certain poor eating and drinking habits contribute to the malady, and a hypotheses could be formed that Brett, confused by his inability to include the eminently hittable Fred Holdsworth (who admitted after stymieing Brett, “Heck, I’m just happy to get anybody out”)  in his steamrolling domination of American League pitching, drowned his sorrows in a post-game bacchanalia of hemorrhoid-causing consumables. But I don’t want to digress. This is my affliction, digressing, the thing by which I am undone. When did I start digressing? Maybe it goes back to 1975, when I was seven and began collecting baseball cards. The cards that year digressed. The main subject of the cards was featured in most places on the front and back, but each card contained a riddle unrelated to the player on the card. You start thinking about Fred Holdsworth, and soon enough, via a riddle, you’re thinking about something else. The riddle on the back of Holdsworth’s card asks, “Which Phillie has a Las Vegas night club act?” The answer is upside down below a cartoon of a baseball player strumming a guitar: Tom Hutton. A few weeks ago, while working on a piece about Alan Foster, I ran across a newspaper article from spring training 1969 about the friendship between teammates Foster and Hutton. The two had been playing together for years in the Dodgers’ minor league system and had been deemed by their current minor league manager, identified in the article as “Tommy LaSorda,” as “the first Siamese twins in the history of organized baseball.” The two friends, who according to the article were on the cusp of becoming major league mainstays for the Dodgers, are shown playing guitar and singing. Hutton jokingly boasts at one point, “And when we get through they’re gonna be saying Simon and Garfunkel who?” By 1975, Hutton was on the Phillies and Foster was a Padre. Hutton, despite the implications of the riddle on the back of Fred Holdsworth’s card, was not currently performing in Las Vegas in 1975, but he had indeed played there. At the Thunderegg blog, Hutton is asked about the baseball card lore (repeated on more than one occasion in back of the card cartoons) identifying him as Vegas performer. Hutton, now a broadcaster calling games for the Marlins, replied that he “played guitar & sang with Maury Wills in the winter of 1971 at the old Las Vegas Hotel in downtown Vegas. Maury invited me to be part of his show and we did 3 shows a nite for 6 wks.” None of this has anything to do with Fred Holdsworth.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Detroit Tigers, Fred Holdsworth | Leave a Comment »

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Win Remmerswaal

April 13, 2012

(This post originally appeared on The Classical.)

The Other Day

The other day, I came to. I looked around, blinking. I was in a supermarket. This kind of thing is happening more. How did I get here? Where have I been? I used to assume my life was an unbroken chronological line through time, as if a baseball card with my likeness could list every one of my seasons and where I was and how I did. It’s possible this line was never more than a powerful fiction, and even if it ever did exist it doesn’t anymore. Moments flash in and out, past, present, jumbled, strewn. Everything is the other day. It may have gone this way anyway, but the arrival a few months ago of my son accelerated the scrambling of the back of my card. I make lists now to try to keep my shit together. This is how I came to in the supermarket. I was reaching into the pocket of my windbreaker for a list to see why I had ended up in the supermarket. I pulled out a toy, a little jingly giraffe. I checked the other pocket and pulled out a baseball card.

***

When I was a kid I believed, above all, in a line through time, along which losing could change to winning. The idea of winning, winning it all, was distant, millennial, all-encompassing, all-powerful. Just thinking about it was enough to bring tears of joy. The team I loved came tantalizingly close to winning, year after year, but in the end always lost, undone by the limited abilities of the pitching staff. I spent a lot of time staring at the cards of the superstar sluggers on the team I loved—Yaz, Rice, Fisk—but my waiting and hoping for change centered not on the cards but on a perusal of names of pitchers next to small black-and-white pictures in the back of the team yearbook, the names of those not yet arrived, not yet failed. The prospects. I was drawn to those names. I studied them hoping to find the thing lacking, the True Ace. Things were one way, but I wanted to believe things could change.

***

The other day, a coworker (and fellow blogger) stopped by my cubicle to show me a stack of 1980s commons he’d found for next to nothing at a tag sale. He leaned on the corner of the pasteboard entryway to my cubicle as I flipped through the stack, the two of us mocking the mulleted, the bespectacled, the hapless, the fat. I don’t remember how the moment ended. All but one of the cards remains on my desk, cluttering up my jumble of project schedules and calendars and daily to-do lists. I try to keep myself fastened to a line through time. I lose that grip. I lose beginnings and endings. I come to in supermarkets, one hand holding a toy, the other holding Win Remmerswaal.

***

Win Remmerswaal was the most memorable of the young pitchers who existed solely as names in the back of the team yearbooks I read as a child. I never saw him pitch and don’t remember noticing him registering in a box score. He appeared in only 22 major league games. But I do remember the name. The first name could not be simpler, a distillation of everything life was supposed to be aiming toward, clean and clear as an ideal: Win. The second name meandered, complex, unpronounceable but impossible to resist trying to pronounce; it beckoned, a magic spell if said correctly, everything about it a tangle of knowable and unknowable, remembering and swaying and wailing and All, the opposite of an ideal, the dream-drunk wooze of real: Remmerswaal. Who was he? Where was he? When would he arrive to bring change?

***

The other day, I was watching TV for a few minutes. I used to watch TV for hours, cooking my many daily anxieties to a jittery crisp, but then the baby came. There’s always something to do now, up until a few minutes before nightly, ragged unconsciousness sets in, and in those few minutes I generally watch TV for old time’s sake. An ad for a casino came on. The gist was that for some, second place was okay, but for this casino only first place was acceptable. I didn’t want to waste my few minutes of TV watching a commercial, so I flipped around a little. There was a game show featuring people with weight problems trying to defeat other people with weight problems. I kept flipping. There was another game show featuring women in evening gowns trying to defeat other women in evening gowns. I went back to the first channel, but the casino ad was still wrapping up, hammering home the point that second place is no place at all. Images of glamorous people floating toward slot machines and gaming tables scrolled. I’ve been to a few casinos over the course of my life—they are devoid of glamour, cathedrals of loss. But they’re crowded night and day. Everyone believes flaws and limitations can be shed, change can occur. You will be lifted up out of yourself to some idealized version of you, free of your pocked humanity. Everyone wants to win.

***

The back of Win Remmerswaal’s 1981 card shows his stats in 22 games, the entirety of the pitcher’s brief major league career, along with all but one last gasp of his minor league career. The litany of names down the left column of his table of stats lends apt accompaniment to the dim, featureless moment on the front. Winter Haven, Winter Haven, Bristol, Bristol, Pawtucket, Pawtucket, Pawtucket. Red Sox. Pawtucket. Red Sox. And so here he is, representing the last line in the chant of his faltering ascension, Giacometti thin, a presence in the big leagues but only for a moment. Soon he’ll dissolve back into the blur.

***

The other day, I sat my son down on a Fenway Park bedspread on the floor and handed him some toys. He was at that moment in a phase of notable stability, able to sit up on his own but not yet able to crawl. After a few moments I edged away to check one of my baseball books for Win Remmerswaal stories. There wasn’t much about him in the big book I pulled from the shelf, The Cultural Encyclopedia of Baseball, so I started leafing through the book aimlessly, or maybe you could say playfully, no real goal in mind, drifting, curious. My son, drawn to the sound of flipping pages, pitched forward into his stomach. The encyclopedia was on the floor between us. He began writhing and wrenching his little body in such a way that he moved crookedly, haltingly forward. He’d never done this before. I pulled the book a little farther away. He kept moving toward it. I edged away and away until I’d made it to the other side of the room. He kept coming, wanting to grab and tear at the pages of my book about baseball, something so relentless in his efforts that when I told my wife about it we ended up talking about the latter moments of The Terminator, when the android played up to that point by Arnold Schwarzenegger has been stripped to nothing but metal and crawling, unceasing will.

***

Win Remmerswaal had a lot of talent. “Remmersmell, or whatever his name is,” said Reggie Jackson in 1980, “has the best arm of anyone on that staff.” He also had a lot of will. Before him, no European-raised player had ever made it to the major leagues. To get to the major leaguers from anywhere, you need talent and will, a truism no truer than when that anywhere is, in major league baseball terms, a relative nowhere. What Win Remmerswaal had in addition to talent and will was an uncommon connection to the thing that precedes talent and will. He played. In the minor league stop where he lasted the longest, Pawtucket, he became known and loved for his offbeat behavior and learned curiosities and wanderings and absences. He wanted to win and not lose, but he also wrote “win” on one shoe and “lose” on the other and, according to teammate John Tudor, quoted in an excellent biography of Remmerswaal on the SABR bio site, “he’d hop off on whichever foot happened that day.” Remmerswaal wanted to win and not lose, but during one road trip, his team changed planes in Washington, D.C., and he disappeared. He was gone for several days. On his reappearance he gave team owner Ben Mondor a box of cigars and explained, “I realized that I was in the nation’s capital, and that I may never see it again. So I decided to stay for a few days and look around.” He wanted to win and not lose but while his teammates attempted to narrow their focus only to winning and not losing and maybe some downtime painkilling swigs of beer or religion, Remmerswaal read Sartre, who once opined that “the genuine poet … is certain of the total defeat of the human enterprise and arranges to fail in his own life in order to bear witness, by his individual defeat, to human defeat in general.”

***

The other day, I gave up trying to write about Win Remmerswaal. I had been at it for some time, failing. The dour, fearful strain in my voice, the part of me that when I write is like a mediocre guitar player (which, as it happens, I am) playing the same tired blues lick over and over, unable to break through to some new way of feeling, is tempted to present his story as evidence that life only dissolves. He never hooked on with any permanence in the majors, never completely engaged the talent he was blessed with, blithely squandered his chances, meandered onward, out of the game. Several long, hard years followed, leading directly or indirectly to him suffering a debilitating stroke and falling into a coma in 1997. Wanting to know more about what happened next to Win Remmerswaal, I right-clicked the “translate to English” option on a feature on him at a Dutch website:

When, after a few weeks awoke, his brains and nervous system so badly damaged that it for the rest of his life in a wheelchair is designated to be fed and limited him to communicate falls.

***

My son now moves toward what he wants. Words will follow. He doesn’t know any yet. He’ll learn the word win. It’s a word that signifies a coming together. I’ll try to teach him the opposite of that word too, which is not lose but remmerswaal. That word, if it were a word, would signify entropic unraveling. It’s a middle-aged man blinking to awareness in the aisles of a supermarket, a toy in one hand, a baseball card in the other. It’s the spiral of stars in the sky. It’s a middle-aged man surrendering his grip on an unbroken line through the years to hold something better. It’s you, my boy; it’s love. And it’s Remmerswaal himself, in a nursing home undone, but who just the other day was in the big leagues. Just the other day he was coming to a set position and looking for his sign. Just the other day, close enough to touch, to study like a list, he begins.

Posted in Boston Red Sox, by Josh Wilker, Win Remmerswaal | 2 Comments »

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Charlie Hough (by guest author Pete Wingate)

April 11, 2012

The following is a guest article written by Pete Wingate.

The greatest story in Wingate history is from when my older brother faced off against Charlie Hough. (Apparently Charlie’s father was some sort of insane Great Santini-type who would hop the fence and scream at him and his brother when they screwed up. Charlie won as many games as Schilling, and his brother got to the minors. Still, no thanks.) In the ’50s, at Mendes Field in Smithfield, RI, Little League, my brother defeated the flame-throwing future knuckler Charlie Hough as close to single-handedly as possible by winning a 1-0 decision and plating the deciding run on an inside-the-park HR.

That was a little before my time. When I got old enough, my brother took me to Fenway in ’73 to see my first game, and I saw Orlando Cepeda hit one over the net. A few years later, my brother allowed me to tag along to work at Foxboro Country Club one day in ’76 because he knew that a threesome of Lynn, Rice and, somehow, Jim Freakin’ Burton had booked that day.  He wouldn’t let me bother them, which may have been a good thing in Rice’s case. We watched the threesome tee off the 1st hole. First Lynn (grounder), then Rice (laser). Then the crowd dispersed. I remember feeling bad for Burton and sticking around, but I don’t remember his shot. Probably a heartbreaking floating line drive right up the middle . . .

When I was born in ’65, he already had amassed a great collection of Ted, Mantle, Mays and Aaron cards that are in my nephew’s possession now. I started collecting, but used to just play with them (outside of my treasured favorite Willie Mays “in action” card) and they got beat to hell. This was as pissed as he would get with me. He understood that I’d be sorry one day. I wasn’t, at least at the time. I eventually gave what was left to my nephew, too, since he had been thieving them a little at a time anyway. Except Willie.

His reputation as a Hough-killer aside, like 99.9% of us he flamed out in High School. Even though I grew up to be bigger and stronger than him, reaching the Power-Righty optimum of 6′ 4”, I was slurving by 15, more interested in guitars and girls and done a few months later without having met his standard.  It still irks him more than me at this point, I think.  Not that he would ever say it out loud.

He had my father, I didn’t.  Father was handed free Lucky Strikes in Hawaii on his way to the South Pacific, never put them down and died of lung cancer a month before the Impossible Dream was over.

My brother’s been sick for 8 years now but has gotten much worse recently and just opted out of treatment. It’s not that unlikely that even though he didn’t smoke, the Lucky Strikes our dad smoked didn’t help my brother either. Neither do our genes.

Time is all that we really can have, isn’t it? The universe’s single gift to us.  The gift comes in all sizes, but if I had all the time in the world, I’ll never figure out why some of us don’t get more of it.

Posted in Charlie Hough, Los Angeles Dodgers | Leave a Comment »

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Ed Kirkpatrick

April 10, 2012

Satori

Three

The smallest communicative symbol on this card, the hyphen joining the positions inside the baseball in the lower right corner, identifies Ed Kirkpatrick as a major league handyman. He crouches in the posture of the second of his two hyphenated roles, but he does so without wearing a chest protector or shin guards, ready at any moment to toss aside his catcher’s mitt for a first baseman’s glove or, perhaps more likely, to walk back to the bench. That’s the implication of the hyphen in a hyphenated cardboard identity. You might be useful but you aren’t terribly important.

I have a job at which I might be useful but I’m not terribly important. My job is to test the suitability of hyphens, among other similar tasks. When not at my job, I write, so when I am presented with the dreaded question “What do you do?” I usually hyphenate that rendition of myself, sometimes putting the “writer” part in front of the hyphen, sometimes after, the hyphen a kind of permanent scar in between the two things. I sometimes attempt a healing of the scar by writing about my job, and whenever I mention this job in my writing it comes off as a complaint, implying that my life should be pure creativity and growth but isn’t. Why must there be cubicles, long bus rides, boredom, upgrades, meetings, processes, layoffs, anxiety? But the truth is I’m glad I have a job, and if I were any kind of a decent honest human being I’d wipe the constant grimace off my face and even smile for the camera about having a job, as Ed Kirkpatrick does in this 1975 card. If I may veer into religious diction for a moment, as a hyphenated Jew-Christian who was raised neither and who just spent the Passover/Easter weekend as if Jesus was only the lesser Alou and Moses was only a hyphenated outfielder-first baseman from the 1980s: thank you Lord Almighty for my job. Life could be a hell of a lot worse. Word of calamity is always so close at hand as to seem inevitable. We took a walk this past weekend, my wife and baby son and I, and near the end we passed a flier for a candlelight vigil. Someone was shot a few blocks from our house last Thursday, a gang thing I guess. Ed Kirkpatrick was the card I picked at random from my shoebox this morning. I knew him only as a hyphenated guy on a card from my childhood, so I checked the internet and learned that soon after his playing career ended he got in a car accident that put him in a coma for five months and left him paralyzed. He kept going for many years beyond that but died of cancer in 2010.

I have to go switch to the other side of the hyphen soon and head for the bus. Throughout the first half of my long ride, the bus fills with community college students about as old as Ed Kirkpatrick was when he first started playing pro ball, a teenage phenom seemingly destined for stardom. By the time of this 1975 card, Ed Kirkpatrick’s first spectacular years in minor league ball were far behind him, as was a sputtering major league start with the franchise he came up, the Angels. He’d moved on to the Royals, where he’d played well, if not superlatively, and by now, on his third team, he’d settled fully into his major league identity, a useful if not essential handyman.

The community college students chatter. They complain about teachers, recite their philosophies, brag that this girl or that girl is “on my balls,” and explain to one another that they soon will be transferring to a better college. This last snippet doesn’t surface every ride but it’s definitely the most common topic of conversation among the students, I’ve noticed. I’m here, yes, but the real me is somewhere better, just a step or two into the future. I’m glad for the extra elbow room when the bus pulls up at the college and the bus discharges all these youth, but the ensuing silence among we few solitaries who remain is always a little sad.

The bus ride goes on for quite a while after the stop at the community college. I could spend it watching my breath, trying to get back to what Shunryu Suzuki called beginner’s mind, but instead I listen to Howard Stern on my satellite radio. Suzuki was a Zen teacher who helped establish the practice of Zen meditation in America. His book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, was an important one for me, but the practice I once believed would grow stronger and stronger until finally I was “enlightened” has instead flickered in and out like a bulb connected to faulty wiring. Unlike the “other” Suzuki who brought Zen to America, D.T. Suzuki, Shunryu Suzuki didn’t stress the idea of satori, of a shattering moment of enlightenment, in his teaching, but he did stress constancy. Watch your breath every day. Watch your posture every day. Straight spine. Beginner’s mind.

It was easy to seize on the idea of beginner’s mind, of being open to each moment, when I was the age of the community college students who ride my bus. It’s a little tougher now. Life is full of tedium, repetition, and I’m complicit in it. I complain about tedium, yet this is the life I’ve built, and I did it for a reason. When the bus empties out at the community college, the few of us left behind are all sitting alone, scattered throughout the bus, older, beyond the years of promise, looking out the windows and worrying.

Ed Kirkpatrick is not worried in this 1975 card. He never attained the satori he seemed as a teenager to be destined for, and by now whatever uniform he wears must certainly seem tentative, but none of this troubles him. Within a couple years he’ll move to another team, then another, then be nudged out of the big leagues altogether. Not long after that, car accident, coma, paralysis. Finally, gone altogether. Here and now, he is everything you would want for yourself or for anyone you love. He is glad to be a part of something. He is glad to have a place. Who knows what transfers will occur a step or two into the future? What can you do but try to take a breath and let it out with a little smile? What can you do but try to assume a solid yet relaxed stance for receiving? Where can you ever be but here and now?

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Ed Kirkpatrick, Pittsburgh Pirates | 7 Comments »

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Matt Keough

April 3, 2012

Satori

Two

Breathe in. You’re a teenager, a talented infielder drafted early right out of high school by the World Series champions, a son of a major leaguer. Breathe out. You stumble your first pro season, hitting .198 as an 18-year-old in the single A Midwest League. Breathe in. You move to another A’s single A affiliate in the California League and blossom, batting .303 with 13 home runs and 81 RBI. Breathe out. At double A the next season, you can’t hit at all, the once-wide path to the majors narrowing to no path. Truth is a pathless land. Breathe in. You start pitching and within two seasons you’re in the majors; within three you’re the A’s representative at the 1978 major league all-star game. Breathe out. In 1979 you do nothing but lose, starting 0 and 14 and finishing 2 and 17, the worst major league pitching record in decades.

***

In all the Zen stories, life seems as uncluttered with the actual concrete pull of life as it is in jokes. Two monks are walking along. One says one thing, the other says another thing, neither thing makes any sense, and that’s that. You’re supposed to ponder the meaning of the inscrutable exchange incessantly until your mind breaks. Thusly shattered, you see the light, I guess. I don’t know. None of those Zen stories—koans—have ever made the slightest impact on me except to produce a mild increase in my general feeling of inadequacy. I am bound to a life of threadbare rationality and disillusionment, a life of suffering.

***

This is how it goes for Matt Keough. Suffering life. Breathe in, breathe out, fall, rise. Fall. Here he is, on his 1980 card, the 2 and 17 record the freshest line of stats on the back, yet he looks straight into the camera. His face is young enough to show signs of pubescent acne, yet his eyes are confident. He’s been down before. He’ll rise.

***

Life is suffering. That’s one of the Billboard Top Four Truths. It’s one I’ve more or less accepted in my own life (though I still reserve the right to complain constantly), but now that I have a kid I am feeling the sting of it for real. I don’t care if I suffer, but now my baby has to suffer? What the fuck is that? He is suffering right now—wailing. My writing desk is in the basement. He’s right above me. I can’t concentrate. To write these words is a supreme act of self-indulgence, really. I should go up there. But no, I have to sit here and ponder enlightenment. Good lord. Okay, fuck it, I’ll go up.

***

And that’s how it goes. You go down, you go up. In 1980 the A’s hire a new manager, Billy Martin, and the haunted Yankee exile, arguably the most desperate man in baseball history, rides the A’s rotation of young starting pitchers as if his life depended on it. The short-term results are good, the A’s climbing from putrid to pretty good, and Matt Keough wins 16 games and the Sporting News Comeback Player of the Year award. Soon enough, however, all the arms of the A’s overtaxed hurlers begin falling off, so to speak. Keough is the first to suffer, feeling pain in his shoulder in early 1981, but he pitches through the pain throughout that season and the next as it worsens and the losses again start to mount.

***

I’m back down. Got the baby to go to sleep. Where was I? Oh yeah, suffering. All weekend long my wife and I tried to deal with the baby’s wailing—he has a cold—and he, or rather, his suffering, has been thrashing us like it is Andre the Giant and we’re a couple of regular-sized tag-team foils. One of us tags in, gets beaten to a pulp, and tags out, and in goes the other one to take a turn getting thrown over the ropes. Our eyes are bloodshot, his cold is our cold, snot streams everywhere, both of our backs are wrenched so badly we grimace if we try to pick up so much as the toothbrush he gnaws on as a chew-toy, and still his suffering rages, huge and undefeated. Two monks walking down the road trying to one-up the other with irrational non sequiturs, what does that do for me? Satori? Who gives a fuck.

***

Battling persisting arm pain through the early to mid-1980s, Matt Keough’s numbers dwindle. Soon, it seems, he will disappear. People disappear all the time. That’s the game. Matt Keough fights this by going east, to Japan. Though American position players by that time have begun to find success in Japan, American pitchers haven’t. It’s a different game, a different culture, a different world altogether, and perhaps the more complex cluster of skills needed to be an effective pitcher make it more difficult to weather all that disorientation and still thrive. Keough proves the exception to that rule. He has the advantage of once being there before, as an adolescent, when his own father capped his major league career with a stint in Japan. The father only lasted one year. The son lasts four. He wins in Japan. He’s big in Japan.

***

Oh, if only I had lived a life of utter seclusion, staring at the wall. If only I’d shipped myself off years ago to a life of privation and koans overseas. I have been to Japan, actually, twice, once for a few hours as a 21-year-old on my way to China, and once for a few hours a few months later on my back. On the way back, I had just said goodbye to a woman I was in love with. I planned to return to her in a few months, but before I could she wrote me a letter on rice paper telling me she’d met someone else. It was another foreign student, a Japanese guy with money. Maybe they’re still together, living in Japan. There’s a certain weight to life, a pull of desire that links you to others inextricably. The root of suffering is desire. I was suffering in Japan, suffering again some months later while reading words on a piece of rice paper, suffering the removal of that pull, that thing that ties one to another, suffering the removal of the insane hope that desire might lead to peace.

***

In 1992, Matt Keough returns from Japan and attempts to find work in the majors again. Who better to carry out an improbable comeback? In the first inning of a preseason game, a foul ball shears off from the bat of leadoff hitter John Patterson. What are you thinking this moment? What will you be thinking when you are struck by the terrible blow of satori? When the world opens up to infinity or ends or who knows? Matt Keough is rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery to relieve the pressure of a blood clot caused by the impact of the errant line drive. Keough survives, but that’ll do it for the comeback. The ball is taken from his hands, replaced with something lighter, more painful. We all get a rice paper note placed in our hands one way or another, telling us the version of life we had welded to our heart is over.

“He lost all self-respect, his self-esteem,” a man named Rob Harley will say many years later, referring to Keough’s horrific satori, that screaming line drive to the head. “And now,” Harley, an attorney for Matt Keough, will continue, “he’s an alcoholic, a caged animal.” These words will come the day Matt Keough is sent to prison. Because his life at that point will have become ensnared in televised samsara, the mug shot of the suffering reality show personality attracts much more attention than any earlier images of Keough ever had. Breathe in. You are young and pimply-faced and pocked with losses but strong, unbowed, poised to rise. Breathe out. You are chained to the world.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Matt Keough, Oakland A's | 6 Comments »

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Chris Arnold

March 29, 2012

Satori

One

“Satori comes upon a man unawares, when he feels that he has exhausted his whole being.” – D.T. Suzuki

I’m exhausted. I’m pretty unaware, too. I’ve been banging into the sharp corners of things, tripping over things, walking out the front door without necessary things. Fucking things! Can we just abolish all things and live in a world of pure idea and sensation? What I mean to say is, can’t I just return to bed for a little while and fall back asleep, where there are no things? No? No, it seems the world is made of things, and life requires repeated departures from sweet unconsciousness to the tangled entrapments of things. So I wonder what things I will smash into and trip over and forget today. Yesterday I forgot my bicycle helmet. I didn’t use a bicycle helmet when I was a kid, but now that I’m riding every morning and night up and down a potholed city avenue crowded with swerving eyeless buses I do, and I felt strange as I started out riding yesterday without one and without realizing that I was without one. Something was different. A breeze massaged my hair, a sensation from childhood, and the vague sense that something was off ferried the feeling of implacable nostalgia into implacable dread.

***

The baseball season has begun, I guess. Way over in Japan. I didn’t pay much attention. I used to think I would someday not only pay attention to everything but master attention. Relatedly, I used to think I might, if I could muster the guts, end up in Japan, in a Zen monastery, my head shaved, my legs pretzeled beneath me, my spine straight, my mind no mind. Big mind. It never came to pass; if anything my unhelmeted mind keeps shrinking. This I suppose would fall under the category of a failure to live up to the dreams of my younger days. Is “dreams” the right word? Convictions, maybe, or perhaps arrogances. There is something arrogant about being seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, no skills, virginal and drug-addled and buried in adherence to beat generation yowling, believing that enlightenment, that is to say complete and unsurpassed understanding of the universe, is not only possible but near at hand. One more acid trip, a few more mornings of meditating in front of a cheap K-Mart candle burning on top of the cover for Bob Marley’s album “Uprising,” maybe a trip to Japan, and boom. Perfect connection. Satori.

***

This card from 1977 is the last Topps offering to feature Chris Arnold’s blandly handsome visage and includes the entirety of his major league exploits. He hit one home run his first season, 1971, one home run in 1972, one home run in 1973, one home run in 1974, then zero home runs in 1975 and zero home runs in 1976. It’s meditative somehow, like a mantra—one, one, one, one—that centers one’s thoughts until eventually all thought falls away to nothing. The card clutters the purity of this dissolving into zero with some text at the bottom circling back around to Chris Arnold’s earlier days in pro ball, before the majors, when in the Arizona Instructional League he “set all-time loop record for most Triples with 12.” That was back in 1970. In 1977 he returned to the minors, and in 1978 he joined that early wave of American journeymen who fought their encroaching disappearance from professional baseball by going far, far away, to Japan.

***

I was unaware of the obscure migration eastward of players at the borders of the majors that occurred during my childhood. It was only in my years of ridiculous conviction that I began to think about Japan. In my weathered copy of Dharma Bums, I read about Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder (or, rather, their stand-ins, Ray Smith and Japhy Ryder) looking east together. Those two went in different directions afterward. Kerouac became a suburban wine-addled recluse, withdrawing from the world, souring, bloating, while Snyder actually went east, to Japan, to be a monk in a Zen monastery for a while before returning and resuming his passionate attachment in words and deeds to this continent. Kerouac died young, while Snyder is still alive, one of the last beats standing, I guess, though I suppose—his genuine affection for Kerouac notwithstanding—he’d chafe at being considered a beat, or as any one thing. He was and is a lot of things, environmentalist, activist, family man, Zen monk, lumberjack, beat, what have you. I’m getting off track here. I was going to talk about baseball in Japan, or about my own enlightenment, or something. Who remembers? As Kerouac once put it, channeling his western dissolution through his eastern fascinations:

Well here I am,
2 PM -
What day is it?

***

Those four home runs Chris Arnold hit, one per year, they must stand out in his mind, little bursts of perfect connection. The superstars with bushels of homers every year, surely some of their glories blur into one another. Not so with Chris Arnold. His first home run came in his very first major league start and was struck off the most unusual, unpredictable pitch in baseball history, the knuckleball, thrown by the master of the mystical offering, Phil Niekro, a future Hall of Famer. His second home run was not as momentous, perhaps, as it was hit off journeyman Ron Schueler in a loss, but then again it was his second home run, proving the first was not a fluke. Then Chris Arnold really got cooking. His third home run was a grand slam pinch-hit with two outs in the bottom of the ninth that keyed an incredible comeback from a 7-1 deficit. His final home run also came in a win and was hit off another Hall of Famer, Steve Carlton. For good measure, later in the season Chris Arnold also stole his lone major league base off the battery of Steve Carlton and Gold Glove perennial Bob Boone. Consider the sweet lucky life of Chris Arnold, and of us all. We stumble into things, lose our grip on other things, go to Japan or don’t go to Japan, whichever would be more indicative of life’s tendency to expel us from our dreams, and yet once in a great while we connect in such a way that there is no feeling whatsoever, the bat meeting the ball just right, no mind, big mind, and we round the bases, tracing an imperfect oval with our route, a woozy zero, our misshapen bliss.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Chris Arnold, San Francisco Giants | 6 Comments »

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Dick Tidrow

March 26, 2012

Dear Dick Tidrow,

I hate your guts. I don’t hate your guts like I hate some guts. There are guts I hate more than your guts. The guts of your teammate Reggie, for example. God, how I hate his guts. Your guts, though, well, there really is something about your guts that I hate, and not just because of the pinstripes and the word in the lower left of your 1978 card. Some guts I hate out of duty, for example Roy White, who has guts that are pretty unhateable, but still, rules are rules, so consider his guts thoroughly hated, too. But you, well, years will pass, empires will rise and fall, puberty will arrive, giving way to a young adulthood spent stumbling backwards, eyes trained on the past, the young adulthood gradually eroding into just plain adulthood, the stumbling less pronounced, replaced in essence by a less readily perceptible but deeper, more existentially disorienting uncertainty, which brings us to now, to me, a middle-aged man writing a letter to a baseball card after spending last night realizing that the monthly bills have edged beyond the monthly income, and there’s a baby involved now, and I always thought as a child I’d just be able, worse comes to worse, to sell my baseball cards and in so doing become unutterably wealthy, free of care, but as everyone knows the value of baseball cards was an absurd mirage, and you, Dick Tidrow, are the valueless card I pull out of my shoebox this morning and your name resonates across the years in a way beyond that of most others, a name I’ll always associate with the Yankees, with the deep and focused professionalism that allowed that team to beat my team, a myth that shaped my world—there are winners and losers and the winners have a cohesive swarm of assassins like Dick Tidrow, fiercely adept role-players, while we losers have some bright spots but nothing that holds together in the end. Life is fun here and there but doesn’t work out. But there’s more, Dick Tidrow. I feel like your name, Dick Tidrow, is one of those upper echelon names in terms of being able to be used as a password to let someone know I know that he knows that I know that he knows that I know. Larry Gura is another. Biff Pocoroba. Jim Wohlford. There are more. You say the name and the name means my life and—if the name raises a flicker in your mind, a click like that of the flap of a pack of cards coming open—your life, too, our shared stupid life as 1970s boys with nothing better to do than fill our mouths with gum and our brains with names, Larry Gura and Jim Wohlford and Biff Pocoroba and Dick Tidrow. The name Dick Tidrow means nothing to most but it means to me this dumb losing life I hate and love.

Sincerely,
Josh Wilker

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Dick Tidrow, New York Yankees | 10 Comments »

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Bill Greif

March 20, 2012

The Tour Guide

Pitcher and Sky #5

In this last piece, we see the completion of a motion that has so far in this series been shown only at an early stage. In this card there is blue sky, as in the others, but there’s also one shred, finally, of the everyday world: in the lower left, just behind the icon of a pitcher, what appears to be the top of a metal fence or a backstop. The pitcher icon in the lower left reveals the larger human figure to be an off-rhyme of an ideal. The real version is slightly ahead of the icon in the motion, his right leg settled. Forward momentum has ceased.

When I can’t write, when I can’t see anything, I feel like I’m imitating existence instead of actually living. I’m going through a motion, pitching without a ball. It has been this way for a few days. It always comes back around to this. It is like this more often than not, yet the other life I see in brief glimpses, when I’m curious, interested, working, always feels real, while this way, though inescapable, feels fake, the milieu of a fraud.

Bill Greif has hope. I would venture to say that he believes that his authentic self as a pitcher is one who succeeds. Yet in the three seasons leading up to when this photo was taken in the spring of 1975, Bill Greif lost a total of 52 games, the most over that span in the National League. His American League counterpart, Wilbur Wood, lost even more games during that time, 57, but Wood also won 64 games, while Greif won just 24.

It’s difficult to know what’s authentic. The distortion of limb in this portrait of Greif—the right arm seems elongated, exaggerated, while the left arm is thin, small, barely visible—reminded me of Mannerism, a movement in the visual arts during the renaissance. A blog called Beauty in Distortion includes this quote from Montaigne in its discussion of Mannerism: “Since our state makes things correspond to itself and transforms them in conformity with itself, we can no longer claim to know what anything truly is: nothing reaches us except as altered and falsified by our senses.”

This morning, I did a search on Daumier and Montaigne, hoping to find some connection that might tie this meandering tour together. All I found was that they both commented on the crinoline. The crinoline was that giant frame of a house kind of thing women wore under their dresses in olden times. Out of all the endless series of torture chambers women have been forced to wrestle themselves into in the name of fashion, the crinoline seems to me to be the most pronounced and absurd, yet at the time I’m sure it seemed like a good idea. It idealized and codified and disempowered the most powerful form in human culture, that of the human female. It distanced everyone from everyone, including themselves.

The moment in history I keep coming back to is the era when I was a child, the 1970s, when Bill Greif was losing and yet had hope and a droopy, elongated Mannerist mustache. Bras and draft cards had recently been burned. The distorting virtual crinoline below the nation’s idea of itself, that postwar blue sky Mickey Mantle America, had disintegrated from within as if gnawed by termites. Mickey Mantle was out of his uniform, red-nosed and limping. There was defeat overseas, fraud at home. My mother painted her loved ones backed by blue sky. I moved toward blue sky captured in cardboard rectangles. No one is leading the tour.

Posted in Bill Greif, by Josh Wilker, San Diego Padres | 3 Comments »

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Dave Freisleben

March 6, 2012

Tour Guide

Pitcher and Sky #4

I’m going to try to get out of the way for once, so I’ll keep this brief. Take a moment with this Dave Freisleben card, another 1976 offering of a long-sleeved San Diego Padres pitcher backed by blue sky. Your day is hectic, imperfect, a snarl of worries and frustrations. Step out of all that for one moment. That’s what these cards are for.

Now, let’s have a look at the moment behind this moment of blue sky. Go to the Fantography™ website homepage and click on the second photo from the top in the far left-hand column of photos. When you click on the photo, it will expand, and you’ll be able to see it along with this 1976 Dave Freisleben card and a caption: “This is the exact moment that Topps’ photographer Doug McWilliams shoots Dave Freisleben’s baseball card photo.”

So many things could have made it into the baseball card photo but didn’t. So many possible deflations and detractions. The blotchy brown grass, the measly bleachers, the empty field, the cages and fences and light tower and even any number of lesser versions of Dave Freisleben, whose lifetime record when the shutter clicked stood at 14 wins and 28 losses. McWilliams transforms a blotchy world. McWilliams transforms a young losing pitcher. Take one moment and attend transformation.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Dave Freisleben, San Diego Padres | 15 Comments »

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Mickey Mantle

March 2, 2012

Tour Guide

Batter and Sky

You know the old saying by comedian Joe E. Lewis that rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel? For all of us who have suffered at the hands of the Yankees, it’s an irresistibly savory putdown of Yankees fandom, to be sure—though those most likely to use it, i.e., the staunchest Yankee-haters, namely Red Sox fans like me, also follow a team that is now a gigantic worldwide corporation with a payroll that towers over most other franchises—but it doesn’t quite get to the qualitative difference between rooting for the Yankees and rooting for any other team. Rooting for most teams is like hoping for one sweet day in the sun. Rooting for the Yankees is like knowing there is an eternity of blue sky.

I’m not suggesting that rooting for the Yankees doesn’t have many other levels and subtleties, or that it doesn’t involve pain and humor and longing and familial bonding and worry and nostalgia and all the other countless shadings of joy and woe that draw us into sports. But compare, say, a San Diego Padres Padres fan to a Yankees fan. Imagine you’re a Padres fan from way back. In your youth you held in your hands the baseball cards of the likes of Alan Foster and Rich Folkers. You tried to believe these innings-moppers, itinerant, nondescript, heretofore untouched by any measure of major league glory, shrouded in homely, vaguely humiliating fast-food yellow and brown, would somehow lead your team to its first championship. It’s 36 years later, and you’re still waiting. Meanwhile, your hypothetical Yankees fan contemporary spent his 1970s youth learning of Berra and DiMaggio and Ruth and a string of championships going back as far as a young mind could conceive, and living through back-to-back World Series titles in 1977 and 1978, then racking up several more championships a few years later, including one in which his team set a franchise record with a staggering 114 wins before stomping the National League entry in the World Series, the San Diego Padres.

These two hypothetical fans can’t help but differ. First of all, the hypothetical Padres fan has a much smaller chance of existing. I’ve been to a game in San Diego. The Padres were in first place and it was a Friday night and there was even the mild novelty of it being an interleague game featuring Ichiro Suzuki. Despite all that, the hypothetical fans still strongly outnumbered the actual paying customers, and throughout most of the game the sound of the scattered, atomized gathering was anemic. Even when the division-leaders won in highly dramatic fashion with two runs in the bottom of the ninth, the reaction, at least in my memory, less resembled a thunderous stadium yawp than the thin, ragged soufflé of boozy yells, whistles, and clapping you might hear at last call upon the final crashing cymbal of a bar band’s stomp through “Freebird.”

And then there’s the sound that Yankees fans make when massed together in their home stadium, specifically when a crucial game that had been in doubt teeters to the brink of turning in the Yankees favor. I’ve been in the middle of this sound, quietly praying for the opposing team, and it’s like being dissolved by stomach acid inside the belly of whale. It’s a roar unlike that made by any other fans. Other roars are as deafening and hungry, but none have that serrated edge of absolute certainty. We win, it says, devouring. We will always win. There will always be a hero. There will always be blue sky.

***

When a young man named Doug McWilliams started taking photos for Topps baseball cards in the early 1970s, he was looking beyond the standard existing parameters of baseball card photography. He was looking to the blue sky. His work, displayed so far in our tour in the gleaming, statuesque photos of Alan Foster and Rich Folkers, followed the lead of a boyhood idol. As McWilliams told Carl Steward in 2010, “When I was a kid, I got a subscription to Sport magazine in 1948. I fell in love with Ozzie Sweet, a photographer who shot photographs of athletes and celebrities with brilliant colored backgrounds and they were more like portraits. I really liked what he did and I tried to emulate him throughout my career.”

Ozzie Sweet’s photographs have the gravity and chiseled solidity of great sculpture. According to a 2001 article by John Breneman, Sweet had himself idolized the creator of the Mount Rushmore monument and had begun his own artistic life as a sculptor before turning to photography. His painstakingly composed shots, which earned him praise from Newsweek photo editor Thomas P. Orr as “the Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth of the magazine cover business,” create a sense of heightened, often heroic reality filtering through a moment that in lesser hands would feel stiff, forced, but that in Sweet’s care is natural, graceful, human. Sweet got his start with posed photos of soldiers during World War II and went on to create portraits of titanic public figures such as Albert Einstein and John Wayne, but his talent found perhaps its greatest and most suitable playground when he turned his lens to the world of sports. In his work for Sport magazine in the 1950s and 1960s he defined a key aspect of that surging post-war era, his sunny, iconic images of star athletes, such as the one at the top of this page, as bright and striking as the opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night,” as brimming with youthful assurance and hope as John F. Kennedy’s claim that “the torch has been passed to a new generation.”

***

The certainty of Yankees fans is a streamlined version of the certainty of the most powerful nation in the history of the world. This certainty peaked in both cases during the post-war boom years of the 1950s and early 1960s, those days of heroes and blue sky. The Yankees had been strong before, as had America, but a kind of undefeated and undefeatable mindset set in during the 1950s, as the Yankees ripped off a string of championship wins unprecedented even in their already luminous history. The key figure, in that championship run if not, symbolically speaking, in all of America, was the young man Ozzie Sweet’s mythologizing camera loved most of all, Mickey Mantle. With Mickey Mantle, we not only win. We will always win.

American certainty began diminishing at some point. Compulsively, repeatedly, attempts are made to pinpoint a moment when this certainty was first shaken. It happened in Dallas in 1963. It happened in Memphis in 1968. It happened in Altamont in 1969. It happened in 1980 on the Upper West Side, outside the Dakota. It happened in 2001, on a morning when the sky was, well, you know what color the sky was that morning. But maybe it didn’t really happen anywhere, or happened everywhere, a little or sometimes a lot at a time, and kept happening, and keeps happening, and will go on happening. Maybe it was all an illusion anyway, or if not an illusion then a fleeting reality, here for a while then gone. A hero arrives, the embodiment of America, all flawless strength and innocence, but he can’t stay that long. By 1976, the year the cards featuring Doug McWilliams’ portraits of members of the San Diego Padres appear, the hero has been gone from the field for a while. In McWilliams’ images, the blue sky remains, but it is juxtaposed by the unremarkable journeymen in the foreground. The result is a vivid glimpse of the core national irony of we the people, we of the blue sky, we the defeated.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Mickey Mantle, New York Yankees | 3 Comments »

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Rich Folkers

February 28, 2012

Tour Guide

Pitcher and Sky #3

Ours is an age of mockery. An impotently diffuse irony has descended, a haze of tiny hooks, imperceptible quotation marks settling over everything. Consider this sentence: I love this 1976 Rich Folkers card. Air quotes want to pincer the verb and drag it toward some shading of mockery. I should know. I’ve spent over five years writing about these cards nearly every day, and in the process have written thousands and thousands of mocking words. I need look no further than Rich Folkers himself for an example of this mocking tendency in my writing. Consider my post on his spectacularly hideous 1975 card. I wrote that post very early on in this endless tour of mockery and life. In that post I can recall consciously attempting to emulate the concise witticisms that animate The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book. If I were funnier, wittier, I would have been able to continue approaching every card that way, each card the occasion for a short zinger. Soon enough, however, my long-winded ponderous digressive nature took over, and I started roaming farther and farther from that first delectable sting of irony, that rush of feeling you get when a card reappears in your hands after an absence of decades and all you can do is laugh. In the expanding posts a certain tendency of mine toward attempts at achingly sincere quasi-poetical conceits became part of the proceedings. I remember once early on when a post of mine was linked by The Baseball Think Factory; a commenter in the thread below the link pulled one of my more ambitious beatnik flower-child sentences, put quotes around it, and supplied a devastating monosyllabic response: “Ugh.” I felt it like the syllable had been propelled into my flesh with an air rifle. I’d been quoted, I’d been mocked.

What can you do? This is the world. Keep going. Try every day to see these cards with new eyes. Try to see everything with new eyes. It is a ridiculous thing for me to say. My life is monotonous, my courage meager and probably like everything else eroding. Most days I feel ridiculous, and those are the good days. Bad days I’m entirely enclosed in air quotes, product of a cosmic mocking. “Josh Wilker” rides the bus. “Josh Wilker” eats his lunch. “Josh Wilker” gazes at a 1976 Rich Folkers card and tries to shake the quotation marks, those sardonic hooked spores, off of his conviction that it is a thing of beauty.

So on to the card. There are some differences between this image and the first image in this series, that of Alan Foster. The sky here is entirely cloudless and has deepened in color. A shadow from the figure’s upraised arms is falling on his chest. The icon in the lower left corner is a reverse of the icon in the previous card. We are looking at a left-handed pitcher. He does not have a mustache or sideburns. He has aviator-style glasses. There is some damage to the card, along the top border, possibly the 36-year-old residue of gum. The damage makes this card worthless, I suppose, but also unique, one-of-a-kind. And personal. The gum that fucked it up—I chewed that gum as an 8-year-old boy.

There are also qualitative differences between the two Padres cards from 1976 and the 1957 Dave Sisler card featured most recently on this tour. The Dave Sisler card is washed out, drab; the color of the sky not as deep, producing a weak ineffectual contrast with the figure in the foreground, a compositional problem compounded by the unintentional cluttering of other shapes intruding haphazardly in the background. The photos on the 1976 cards evidence a much more focused and sensitive artistic sensibility than the photo on the Dave Sisler card. On the next stop on this tour, I will talk some more about the artist behind many of the photos on the cards that have come to center my ridiculous life. But for now, let’s linger for one last moment on Rich Folkers. Rich Folkers, journeyman reliever, bespectacled ectomorph, remembered if at all not for any heroic feats but for a Jerry Coleman malapropism (“Rich Folkers is throwing up in the bullpen”), is in his 1976 card transported beyond the deflating ironies of this world, his form natural but somehow purified, a sculpted undeniable presence lit by the sun, encased in cheap gum-flecked cardboard but haloed in a beatified cerulean emptiness. Imagine yourself in such a card. Can you see it? Maybe that’s you for once, for real.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Rich Folkers, San Diego Padres | 8 Comments »

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Dave Sisler

February 26, 2012

Tour Guide

Pitcher and Sky #2

The primary focus of this tour is a small unofficial series of baseball cards within the 1976 series of Topps baseball cards. We have seen the first of these cards already, featuring Alan Foster, but before proceeding to the next in the series let’s pause for a moment and consider a card from nearly two decades earlier, the 1957 card of Dave Sisler. Note the profound similarity of pose. The artistic mind behind the Alan Foster card did not invent the arms upraised pose. Essentially, there’s nothing new under the sun. What do you do with the burden of history? What do you do with limitations?

My mother’s study of Honoré Daumier focused on a series of his work titled Histoire Ancienne. It was comprised of caricatures that lampooned political injustices and cultural pomposities while puncturing the overbearing artistic orthodoxy of his day, namely the solemn, humorless neoclassicism reflected most notably in the work of Jacque-Louis David and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. David and Ingres were the acknowledged masters looming over Daumier’s world, but instead of aping their painstaking reinterpretation of classical art he crossed the tracks, as it were, to work the “low art” side of town, using the symbolism of neoclassicism—the classical lexicon of heroes and gods—in new ways, heroes and gods pocked and elongated, stooped and frail, perverse with entirely human need. In lesser hands, the work would have been merely the stuff of transiently hilarious vaudevillian schtick, but Daumier was a master craftsman and his work has undeniable, irrepressible life in it. It swings. He wasn’t the only artist producing what my mom identifies as “classical parody,” but the work of the other satirists of his time is stiff and forgettable compared to Daumier’s. This is where so-called “low art” rises to the equal of anything in the realm of “high art”: it has undeniable lasting life, transforming the seemingly transitory nature of its one-off gag-work into a significant turning in the history of art. I guess I’m trying to approach the slippery unapproachable subject of irony.

Irony, in art, has to swing to exist. In the sense that I am using the word irony, there is an awareness, so pronounced as to be painful, of what has come before, an addressing of that burdensome infinite prelude, and in works of true ironic genius a toppling of it. Maybe music can be a way of illustrating my idea on this. Consider the Kingston Trio, that folk group that rode a general interest in folk music to massive popularity in the late 1950s and early 1960s; the Kingston Trio was not venturing into the realm of irony. The group’s orthodox approach to old folk music was similar in some ways to the way Ingres and David solemnly channeled their interpretation of classical art. By contrast, the playful, unorthodox, eventually electrified and amplified (and—by orthodox folkies—vilified) hijacking of folk forms by a young interloper born as Robert Zimmerman: now that was fucking Irony. Go a little later in music history, the mid-1970s, and compare, say, Boston or Styx to The Ramones. On one hand, the short history of rock was ossified in slick unreflective arena acrobatics; on the other hand, four otherwise useless hooligans channeled with ape-man simplicity and focus—and consciously embraced the bungling of, the transfiguring of—the sheer ecstasy of the short, sweet pop song. Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee, Tommy. Hallelujah irony.

Which brings us back to this Dick Sisler card, or more specifically the reckoning of it by Brendan C. Boyd and Fred C. Harris in The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book. Anything I write about a baseball card, anything anyone ever writes about a baseball card, does so in the shadow of that book. It appeared in 1973 and though it has over the years attracted a cult following I believe it’s underappreciated. It seems at first glance to be a product of so-called “low art,” a jauntily cobbled together collection of baseball cards from the 1950s and 1960s accompanied by the authors’ brief descriptions of the cards. As those who have fallen in love with the book know, these descriptions are poignant, hilarious, eye-opening, and as narcotically enjoyable as the world’s greatest piece of bubble gum. Beyond the sum of its parts, however, there is in the book something altogether new. Though the sardonic, leveling gaze of the authors was not unknown in other parts of the fragmenting culture of the early 1970s, the book was among the first—and was the most hilarious and therefore effective—to puncture the long-prevailing classicism of baseball writing. Even as recently as the all-encompassing cultural hagiography of Mickey Mantle (more to come on this), baseball writing and baseball imagery was most commonly a hallowing of othwerworldy abilities and of the worship of these abilities and of boyhood itself, where this worship was the strongest. Boyd and Harris used the cards of their youth to level and to decimate and to puncture and—in brand new ways—to praise, to swing in a way baseball writing hadn’t swung before. I’ve read the book many times and it still makes me laugh.

The authors mourn for the lot of Dave Sisler, who in a way is like all of us, burdened by history. Sisler was the son of a Hall of Famer and the brother of a pennant-winning hero. “Do you imagine,” the authors write, “that there were ever fifteen seconds during the waking existence of Dave Sisler that he was ever able to forget these facts?” The authors don’t comment on the arms upraised pose of Dave Sisler—a pose repeated throughout baseball history, as if it were the symbol for the inescapable shackling of history itself, one pitcher after another locked into a handcuff-ready surrender, year after year after year—but they do turn their gaze to the Dick Sisler offering from the exhibit that haunted and exalted their childhood:

Wouldn’t he have been happier as a lawyer or a clamdigger or something along that line? He must have known that no matter how good he was he was never going to be good enough. He seemed bright, too. He graduated from Princeton, wore glasses, and was very analytical in postgame interviews. Look at his face in the card—serious, intelligent, taut—the face of an early suicide.

This was not how people wrote about baseball players. It’s nearly forty years since the words were written and I’m still fucking laughing.

Posted in Boston Red Sox, by Josh Wilker, Dave Sisler | 4 Comments »

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Alan Foster

February 23, 2012

Tour Guide

Pitcher and Sky #1

Note how the blue deepens as it rises, as if to suggest an unutterable perfection beyond the frame, just above the human figure’s clasped hands, that makeshift steeple. I love the idea of blue sky. I don’t know what to do with my life.

When my mother was just about the age I am now, edging into the mid-40s, she quit her job and left her home. She had been working as an editor and writer of technical manuals for a synthesizer company. This was in the mid-1980s. She had raised two kids, my brother and me, and we were both safely away at school. She was accepted into the NYU graduate program for art history and found a room to rent in a duplex in Manhattan owned by a woman who lived there with her daughter. She had use of the kitchen but tended to stay away. She studied art textbooks in her little room eating takeout, a nervous new life, cheap deli soup and centuries of beauty.

The figure in this card would seem almost sculpted, adamantine, if not for the entirely human facial expression, that uncertainty and self-consciousness, however slight, that cuts against the otherwise iconic nature of the portrait. The history of art is a history of disenchantment, of gods stumbling to earth, of humans in heroic poses reckoning that no moment is eternal, that the next moment, inevitable, will be some sort of undoing.

My mom was older than most of her fellow students, many of whom had not yet ventured out into the working world, as my mother had many years earlier. The department also reflected the tradition in that field of attracting members of the upper class, the future curators of major museums, those who had been practicing all their lives on Nantucket yachts and the slopes of Vail to float with grace and magnetic charm through gatherings of deep-pocketed donors. My mom didn’t have much in common with them. She had just gotten through two decades of raising children and getting by. She had been a painter herself, filling our house with colorful pop-art portraits of friends and family, and she had moved from that passion, when her family needed money, to the more stridently commercial artistic endeavor of opening and running a sign-painting business, and when that also didn’t bring in enough money she had edged away from art altogether for a while to just work and make a steady living, editing and writing the technical manuals. But art was always calling. Maybe because she had intimately experienced the pressure that needing money can exert on the creation of art, she was drawn in her new life to the study of popular art forms. Cartoons, prints, caricatures, comics: so-called low art. The kind of thing made to sell and sell cheap. The kind of thing everyone can get their hands on.

This particular example of low art appeared in 1976, selling for 25 cents with 14 other cards and a piece of gum in a waxy plastic wrapper. That year would turn out to be Alan Foster’s last in the major leagues, though he was also featured in a card in 1977. Here he wears the brown and yellow of the Padres, a homely juxtaposition to the backing blue sky, but he had come up in the system of the Los Angeles Dodgers, seemingly destined for a career entirely in blue, the life of a Dodger superstar. In 1967, with the Dodgers’ top minor league club, Foster had thrown two no-hitters, the first to ever do so in the history of the Pacific Coast League. This level of achievement did not transfer to the majors. In 1969 Foster surrendered a 506-foot blast to Willie Stargell, the first home run ever hit out of Dodger Stadium. The next year he was shipped to the Indians. He went from the Indians to the Angels to the Cardinals and finally to this last stop, the Padres.

After completing her master’s level course work, my mother spent several years researching a PhD thesis on a 19th century French caricaturist named Honoré Daumier. She spent most of a year in a small apartment in Paris. Every day she went to the national library and requested materials from the archives in her timid but capable French and worked. I visited her for a week or so in the spring, taking an unpaid break from my job at a liquor store. I walked around a lot. I looked at a lot of art. I played basketball with some French guys in a park near my mom’s apartment. They were fairly skilled but soft and didn’t know or care about boxing out, so I kept grabbing offensive rebounds and finally, after otherwise playing terribly all game, I scored the winning basket on a tip-in. It’s ridiculous what stays with you, what haunts you. Later that day I took a tour of some underground catacombs filled with thousands of human bones and skulls. Ever since then I have periodically thought of my skull below the skin of my face, just waiting there for the temporary covering to fall away.

Here in Topps 1976 card number 266 there is a covering of homely yellow and brown. Everything goes from one thing to another to another, declining, and everything goes from one thing to another and another, on up to a vanishing into blue. One day during my visit to Paris my mother took a day off from researching and we went to Chartres. We took a tour with a British tour guide famous for his illuminating spiels and erudition and learned devotion to the cathedral. He had based his whole life on one thing, that cathedral. I remember wondering how anyone could limit themselves like that. I don’t remember anything specific about the tour except that the guide was entertaining in describing the years of anonymous human toil that went into the creation of the cathedral, and that at the end of the tour he deftly let us all know that he needed our tips to survive. We all looked down at the ground and dug in our pockets for bills and coins as the cathedral beside us pointed unequivocally upward, toward an unutterable idea, the perfection of blue.

Posted in Alan Foster, by Josh Wilker, San Diego Padres | 2 Comments »

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