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Jim Gott

May 6, 2013

I had stuffed animals as a kid. The dog shown here isn’t one of them. I don’t have them anymore. My favorite was a stuffed dog named Spot. He and I used to have brawls. I used to punch him and throw him across the room, and I’d pretend he was doing the same to me. The key element of the whole recurring fantasy was that Spot was beating the shit out of me as I was beating the shit out of Spot. I suppose I imagined that in the end I threw the final, decisive punch, but this victory was secondary to the central function of the whole endeavor, which was to pretend that I was in a horrible fight. I don’t know why I was so prone to imagining violence, specifically violence being done to me. There wasn’t any actual hitting of me or anyone else in the house I grew up in, besides my older brother sometimes becoming so exasperated with my incessant needling commentary and questions and need for attention that he’d punch me in a “phaser-set-to-stun” kind of way in the arm.

And yet, I still imagine my face getting smashed in on a fairly regular basis. Life is one fucking invisible worry after another, one thing breaking after another, one long day after another. And now, for me, there’s a small boy in the center of it, not even two years old, and it’s up to me to protect him, as if I could do so by draping my arm around him like the stuffed dog in this photo is doing to Jim Gott, one of the cards my son plays with sometimes. But I can’t protect him. I’m at the mercy of forces far beyond me.

Spot is in a landfill somewhere, I guess, probably all but disintegrated. He was full of white Styrofoam pellets. Because of all the fighting I subjected him to, he sprung several wounds and would bleed the little white pellets everywhere. I imagined bleeding all over the place, too. Then the two of us would lie there together in the wreckage, arm in arm, and make peace.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Jim Gott, Pittsburgh Pirates | 4 Comments »

Brayan Pena

March 12, 2013

My son’s baseball cards reside, in theory, in a small wicker basket downstairs. My wife found this one in a completely different part of the house and brought it to me.

“It’s a baseball card, I guess?” she said dubiously, handing me the two larger pieces.

“Here’s his head,” she added.

Sometimes in the evening when my wife takes a brief break from her 24-hour-a-day job, I take my son downstairs and dump his cards onto the carpet. Sometimes I read the backs of the cards, which often prompts him to grab the card out of my hand and then look at me, grinning. Sometimes he handles some of the cards while I try to flip them one by one across the room and back into the basket. Eventually, he gets bored with the cards. Check that, I don’t know whether you can ascribe the feeling of boredom to him. He gets restless, interested in seeing something else. He’s walking now, so there’s always something around the next corner as well as a way to get around that corner. Sometimes he takes a baseball card with him when he goes, and sometimes he chews on it until it falls to pieces.

I pieced this chewed card back together and then poked around on the Internet in search of some details about the photo. I figured out it was taken during a moment that the subject of the photo hoped would change the fortunes of his struggling team for the better. In a game the Royals would end up losing anyway, Royals catcher Bryan Pena blocked Chase Headley of the Padres from scoring.

“I hope that that little thing will turn it around for us,” Pena was quoted as saying in the San Diego Union Tribune. “It’s for us to try and figure out and turn our luck around.”

The play didn’t really turn anything around. The Royals were a sub-.500 team before it happened, and continued to play sub-.500 ball the rest of the year. But maybe life isn’t so literal, so linear. Maybe everything is scrambled, a plaything, and we’re lucky just to hold on.

Posted in Brayan Pena, by Josh Wilker, Kansas City Royals | 2 Comments »

The Tao of Expo

March 5, 2013

For most of my life, when baseball cards came to me, I sorted them into teams. The majority of my baseball cards from my childhood are sorted by teams right now, each team wrapped in a rubber band. The exception to this general rule is in the cards that I’ve written about, which have been removed from their teams and are loose in the shoebox, as if the process of writing about the cards is a way to offer them back into the originating randomness of life. I vowed early on to write about every single card that remains from my childhood, and I still plan to keep that vow, but right now the shoebox with all my old cards is in a closet, out of my immediate reach for the first time in many years. There are a few reasons for this. One is that I’m using whatever small pockets of time I have for writing to work on a new book (that’s not about baseball cards). Another is that I don’t want my 19-month-old son to get his hands on those cards just yet. Finally, after writing about my baseball cards for several years, there’s something appealing to having them go away, get a rest from my exhausting attention, gain strength in silence, like they did all those years when they were in a storage facility.

But baseball cards are still in my life, more actively now than at any time since my childhood. They belong to my son, a heaping pile of loose cards, some new ones from 2012 and 2013 and some older ones that came as a gift to me from my wife’s aunt, who found the cards in a binder at a garage sale. They’re all from the late 1980s and early 1990s. My wife helped me remove them all immediately from the protective plastic of the binder, and we piled them on the living room rug like leaves, where our son Jack started doing something very much like the breaststroke through them. Then, the diaspora: the cards were gradually scattered all over the house. This is how things get sorted now, through play. I find a card in the bathroom, another on the cat scratch pad. A favorite site for cards is my guitar. Jack likes dropping them in there. He can’t say guitar yet, but he makes a sound that approximates the sound of a guitar being strummed. “Dao,” he says when he wants to play with the guitar, the same way you’d pronounce the Chinese philosophy of embracing the randomness and transience of life. He said this the other day, and when we got to the guitar a backup catcher from a defunct team was inside. Oh, to live inside music, holiness itself. Oh to be an Expo forever, free of the sorted world.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Montreal Expos, Nelson Santovenia | 2 Comments »

Sabathia Crushed by Dump Truck

February 28, 2013

It’s not my habit or talent to break news, and what’s more I don’t even care about news. I’m an “olds” guy, more interested in say, Ralph Garr’s batting average in 1974 against righties and articles about Mark Fidrych’s consultations with a hypnotist in 1979 than I am with anything whatsoever to do with the upcoming baseball season, or, for that matter, with any current events at all. But I figured it’d be irresponsible of me to not pass along a report of the event pictured in the photo to the right. It is difficult to make out the identity of the player in question, but I happened to have been an eyewitness and can confirm that it is New York Yankees ace CC Sabathia who is being crushed by a dump truck full of sliced apples. So, you know, you might want to cut him from your fantasy squad or whatever.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, CC Sabathia, New York Yankees | 1 Comment »

George Brett

December 16, 2012

(This post originally appeared on The Classical.)

Evidence

Three: Rocky Roe

Beside the Donnie Moore card and the fragment of Mr. October is a 1994 George Brett card featuring an unusual photo (for the genre). The card’s perspective is from behind the plate, its subject, George Brett, following through on a swing that has resulted in the ball bounding toward second base. In the background, the scoreboard is clearly visible, providing plenty of clues to allow the moment to be identified.

In an uncertain world, it’s nice to come upon hard evidence, even if the evidence doesn’t matter. Maybe this is what’s behind my lifelong attraction to meaningless baseball occurrences. Despite the complete lack of societal or personal need for any illumination whatsoever about the photo shown in George Brett’s 1994 baseball card, I found myself researching details about the moment it occurred. The card lent itself well to this wasting of time. That’s probably part of the draw. To waste time. To squander. But sometimes it also feels good to know something, anything.

I found the game (an 8–7 Royals win), and the result of the play (groundout, Brett’s last at-bat of the day; on an earlier pitch in the at-bat, Brett had fouled a pitch off his foot, injuring it), and the identity of the pitcher (Jaime Navarro, now a coach with the Mariners) and catcher (Joe Kmak, now a high school math teacher). The umpire is Rocky Roe. Roe’s prominence in the card, no less than the last card of an inner circle Hall of Famer, is unusual if not unprecedented in terms of baseball card portraiture. Based on the composition of the shot, the card could easily be for Roe, not Brett. But what could possibly go on the back of a card for an umpire? And who would want such a card?

Roe got his start as a major league umpire in 1982, as a replacement for Lou DiMuro. DiMuro had ascended above the general anonymity of his profession a couple of times in his long career, once for being smashed into and injured by the gigantic Cliff Johnson, and once a few years earlier for his role in a famous World Series moment. He was the umpire behind the plate in Game 5 of the 1969 World Series. After ruling that a pitched ball had not hit Cleon Jones in the foot, he changed his ruling when presented with evidence: shoe polish on the ball. This keyed a Mets’ rally, and the Mets won the World Series, arguably the most improbable World Series win ever, evidence to many of miracles, of magic. Thirteen years later, after umpiring a game in Texas, DiMuro was hit and killed by a car. Rocky Roe got a call, filled a void.

Roe was the home plate umpire in Game 5 of the 1986 ALCS. As far as I can remember or recover through my compulsion to do pointless, time-consuming research, he did not make any controversial calls during the crucial moments of that game. One of his rulings during the fateful ninth inning, when it still seemed the Angels were going to surge into their first World Series, was that Boston batter Rich Gedman had been hit by a pitch thrown by Gary Lucas. It was not a disputed call.

Gary Lucas still feels guilty about the pitch. He was brought in specifically to face Gedman, lefty on lefty. After hitting the Boston catcher, Lucas gave way to Donnie Moore, who gave up a two-run home run to Dave Henderson. All these years later, Lucas still wonders about his role in Donnie Moore’s subsequent suicide. “If I do my job that night,” he told Los Angeles Times reporter Jerry Crowe in 2010, “perhaps he’s still with us.”

Guilt is one way to create a thread connecting one event to the next. Shouldering the world this way, as a burden, is an excruciating way to live, but the deep vein of guilt running through the collective human narrative suggests that we prefer suffering fictions to the alternative, a world without evidence, beyond our control.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, George Brett, Kansas City Royals | Tagged Cleon Jones, Gary Lucas, George Brett, Joe Kmak, Lou DiMuro, Rocky Roe | 7 Comments »

Reggie Jackson

December 10, 2012

(This post originally appeared on The Classical.)

Evidence

Two: Mr. October

The Donnie Moore card has been on my desk for several days, waiting to be made sense of. Beside it is a small fragment of another baseball card. I recently fished the fragment out of my son’s mouth. He’s fifteen months old, which means I’m fifteen months into a new life, one more splintered and doubtful than what preceded it, more overpowered by love. He has a basket of 2011 baseball cards that we play with in the evenings. Most of the creased, beaten cards are of currently active players, and I’ve been surprised at how many of them I’d never heard of, more evidence that I’m falling away from the times with the slow but irreversible momentum of an untethered spacewalker. But mixed in are some cards featuring older players achieving milestones. Ernie Banks, Willie Mays. When I fished the fragment out of my son’s mouth, it took perhaps a second to process the limited clues available and recognize it as being from one of these “legend” cards. I could tell from the California Angels batting helmet, the wire-rimmed spectacles, and the gaze trained on the far distance that my son had bitten off a piece of Mr. October.

Mr. October got his name for his apparent ability to play spectacularly well when the games mattered the most. The narrative truth of this rests on his iconic three-homer game in the clincher of the 1977 World Series. He had paved the way for this moment to be a mythic apotheosis by anchoring three World Series championships with the A’s, and he added luster to its magic by again performing spectacularly well in a 1978 World Series win. His exploits, and the outsized personality that went with them, seemed to illustrate the notion that some guys are able to rise to a higher level during big moments.

It’s true that Mr. October’s career World Series numbers are phenomenal: In 27 career World Series games, he had a .357 batting average, a .457 on-base percentage, and a .755 slugging percentage). But if his ability to play better in crucial moments was truly unshakeable, why wouldn’t he have also hit well during his appearances in the American League Championship Series? In 45 games with the pennant at stake, he posted these anemic numbers: .227/.298/.380. Overall, his total postseason numbers suggest a slight increase in performance over his career numbers (in 77 postseason games, he had a .278 batting average, a .358 on-base percentage, and a .527 slugging percentage, all a little higher than his regular season splits of .262/.356/.490). The slight superiority of those postseason numbers could easily be attributed to most of his postseason appearances coming during the prime of his career, when his overall regular season numbers were higher, too.

These findings, if you can call them that, are in line with the general conclusions of all inquiries into the notion of “clutch” performance: Basically, as a sample size increases and thus becomes a more fully supported representation of reality, any seeming evidence of clutch performance tends to recede, if not disappear altogether. It seems a decent bet that Mr. October would dismiss this suggestion that his clutch abilities are imaginary, that he believed and still believes that he was in possession of a certain magic unavailable to his peers.

When I think of Mr. October as an Angel, I see him in a moment seemingly designed to demonstrate that magic, if it exists, is so migratory and random in nature as to be entirely beyond the grasp of human hands. He is in the dugout beside Angels manager Gene Mauch in the ninth inning of Game 5 of the 1986 American League Championship Series, the Angels seemingly assured a pennant. In my memory, Mauch, who previously presided over the monumental collapse of the 1964 Phillies, is not smiling, but Mr. October beams broadly, winningly. He has removed his glasses, anticipating a pennant-winning victory scrum in which he apparently hopes not to have his glasses damaged. Some events transpire. Mr. October’s smile constricts. The game is once again in doubt. Mr. October puts his glasses back on.

(to be continued)

Posted in by Josh Wilker, California Angels | Tagged Gene Mauch, Reggie Jackson | Leave a Comment »

Donnie Moore

November 28, 2012

(This post originally appeared on The Classical.)

Evidence

One: Donnie Moore

Lately I keep finding myself in the midst of a routine motion gone strange. What am I doing? How did I get here? In these moments, I imagine I look like Donnie Moore as captured by his 1987 card. You’re doing something you’ve done all your life and suddenly it seems without purpose. You don’t even remember what you were doing or why.

Donnie Moore was an all-star pitcher with a long major league career, but he’s best known for surrendering a late lead in what would have been a pennant-clinching game in the 1986 American League Championship Series and for being so haunted by the failure that he ended his life. This latter point is a garish reduction of the complex reality of Donnie Moore’s life and death, and of the complex causes of suicide. Reductions tend to happen around sports. Playing sports, following sports as a fan, using sports as a way to tell understandable stories about ourselves: All of these things are ways of reducing and managing complexity.

For some years now, I have dealt with a certain mounting sense of powerlessness in the face of the complexity of life by immersing myself in old baseball cards and in information about the players on these cards. At some point in this immersion, I learned of a fly ball that never came down. I was writing about Joe “Tarzan” Wallis, who hit the fly ball in question during a minor league game in Key West, Florida. Several future major leaguers were on hand, including Bruce Sutter, Garry Templeton, and Tito Landrum. The pitcher who surrendered the fly ball was Lon Kruger, then in his one season of professional baseball, now the coach of the University of Oklahoma men’s basketball team. Kruger’s opponent, the game’s eventual winning pitcher, was Donnie Moore.

The right fielder, second baseman, and center fielder all ran toward where they thought the fly ball would come down. Upon each man losing sight of the ball, all ducked, covering their heads. They tried to follow the play from their cringes, and then came out of their cringes. No one saw the ball land. No one could find the ball. Joe Wallis hesitantly rounded the bases. The umpire upheld the notion that Wallis had hit a home run.

The identity of this umpire, the presiding authority on the mysterious disappearance, has been lost. But I found a box score for the game on page 33 of an August 7, 1974, edition of the St. Petersburg Times. Wallis’ name is written as “Wallace” in the box score, and in the short recap of the game, Donnie Moore’s name is written as “Donny” Moore. The mystery fly is not mentioned.

On the cover of that newspaper, the news is about pressure mounting for the presiding authority of the nation to resign and about this figure’s continuing defiance. But in two days, the president would buckle to the mounting evidence of criminal activity arrayed against him. I feel like I remember that day Nixon quit, remember seeing a newspaper headline, but all my memories are suspect.

What are the effects of seeing things of seemingly unimpeachable solidity disappear? It must shake your confidence in the world on some subterranean, tectonic level. There’s no presiding authority, no evidence of a thread from one moment to the next.

(to be continued)

Posted in by Josh Wilker, California Angels, Donnie Moore | Tagged Bruce Sutter, Donnie Moore, Joe Wallis, Lon Kruger, Tito Landrum | 2 Comments »

Butch Edge

October 1, 2012

(This post originally appeared on The Classical.)

Butch Edge Sent Me

1980, Vermont

Nada. That was the word on the license plate of our VW Camper. It means nothing. It means Mexico. It means love. But it’s gone. The Camper, the license plate. Now we have a new blue Toyota Corolla with a license plate that doesn’t mean anything.

This morning,Mom drove the Toyota Corolla to her job, and Tom drove his old black Saab to his job. My brother is at basketball camp. Little League ended a few weeks ago, my last season. The tennis ball I’m holding doesn’t have any stories in it. Some days it helps me make whole other worlds. I throw it at the duct-tape strike zone on the garage. It hits a rut on the way back to me and caroms into the front yard, rolling to a stop in the grass. I could go get it, try again. Instead I start walking down Route 14 toward Race’s.

I buy a couple of packs and walk home. I open the packs in my room. Nada. No Red Sox, no Superheroes. Mixed in among the doubles and the checklists and the nobodies is one of the Future Stars card, for the Blue Jays. The Blue Jays are still brand new and still lose all the time.

“Butch Edge,” I say out loud.

2012, Chicago

I have a few small notebooks scattered around, each about the size of a pack of baseball cards. One on a table near some bills, one in a bureau near the bed, one in a drawer with my wallet and keys, one on a file cabinet next to a Future Stars card from 1980 featuring Butch Edge. I used to carry the notebooks around and jot down observations. I planned to channel all the notes at some point into Chekhovian masterworks. For a long time I lived for some vague life to come.I would be a Man of Letters, tirelessly churning the concrete details of everyday life into literature. This future hasn’t arrived. Now there’s the job, chores, a baby. The baby doesn’t sleep. At night my wife and I take turns trying to rock him into letting go of the waking world, but he keeps clinging to it fiercely, the misery of exhaustion amassing on his tiny shoulders but never completely overtaking his insatiable curiosity. Tonight after one of my failed attempts, I gather up all my little notebooks and rip out all the scribbled-on pages so as to salvage the notebooks for making grocery lists. The baby begins to cry. It’s late. I stand there in the kitchen with my hands full of disconnected observations. I feel a little tingly, disintegrating, like a Star Trek redshirt on a malfunctioning transporter pad.

1980, Vermont

Tom gets home from work first and meditates, and then he practices walking across the tightrope he strung across the inside of the garage. On my way out to the backyard, I catch a glimpse of him up there, teetering. I know he’s going to fall off because that’s what always happens, but I look away quick so the last thing I see is him still balanced a few feet above the ground, wavering, his arms straight out.

In the backyard, the sheep, Virginia, is munching grass on her side of the electric fence. Near one of the wooden fence posts, there are some of the long-stemmed wheat-looking weeds I like to pluck and chew on like a toothpick. I yank one up out of the ground. If you touch one of these stems to the electric fence you will get a jolt.

I take a deep breath, tense myself, and touch the stem to the fence.

Nada.

The fence must be shorted out again. Everything’s half-broken nowadays.

I break off a toothpick-sized stem and stick it in my mouth and pretend I’m U.L. Washington, the toothpick-gnawing shortstop for the Royals. All their guys are fast. That’s who they are. Fast and fierce and great. Who are the Blue Jays? Nada, light blue. brand new nada.

2012, Chicago

I stand at the kitchen counter, disintegrating. My baby’s crying. I look down at the little scribbled pages in my hands. What am I holding onto? As I flip them into the trash I catch glimpses. Fragments of dreams. Overheard conversations on the train. One page has some notes that I must have made while talking on the phone to Tom. The notes are about Tom’s tightrope walking. He learned to tightrope walk in 1980 as part of the skills he needed to play the lead role in the town’s production of Barnum, which climaxed with a walk across a tightrope suspended a few feet above the stage. He told me that while preparing for the role, the turning point was when he learned how he could incorporate a fall into the performance. I was going to make a big deal of this provision in my writing somehow, build a whole metaphor around it, but I never did.

He’s not with my mom anymore, and when they were together they weren’t married, but I call him my stepfather. He was there every day. I used to have night terrors as a kid. Books that cover the subject often say that these episodes featuring screaming on the part of the child are not remembered by the child, but I always remembered them. One of the ones I remember most was a later one, when they weren’t happening quite as often. Edging into the mid-’80s. The house was empty except for me and Tom. My brother must have been away at school by then, and my mom must have been on some trip. Usually, no one knew what to do with my screaming. No one could help. But Tom held my hand. It helped.

1980, Vermont

I hold out my cupped hand to Virginia across the top of the shorted-out electric fence, pretending I have a handful of grain. It’s a bad trick, but I want Virginia to come over. She does. She doesn’t complain when my palm turns out to be full of nada. She lets me scratch her forehead. She likes it. She can’t purr like a cat or lick you like a dog and her eyes are just dim black nada but she likes it and I love her.

My mom will be home soon. Lately the backseat of the Toyota Corolla is full of the bulbs of white flowers. That’s what it looks like for a second, like the car is slowly filling up with flowers, especially if I blur things by taking off my glasses. But put the glasses back on and they’re the tissues my mom cries into all the way home from her job.

2012, Chicago

My mom told me the other day over the phone that I’m a good father. But I don’t know what I’m doing. I guess she sees me being affectionate to the boy. I must have picked that up somewhere, from her, from my father, from my brother, from Tom, how it’s good to be cared for. But in general I feel like most decisions I make are mistakes. Also, my mind wanders. Earlier today, I was watching him at a playground and my mind wandered and the next thing I knew he was holding a bubonically ashen rodent carcass in his hands. I batted it away and carried him to my wife, who scoured his hands and arms with Purell. Even so, she stayed nervous the rest of the day. I was nervous too. How can you have a kid and not be ruined with anxiety every second? On the way out of the park we saw a lividly decaying bird corpse in the grass.

“That’s not a good sign, is it?” my wife said. “Things dying all over the place?”

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” I said, but my mind was reeling with visions of a mean, imminent future. The future used to be new blue nada, but now? Dead mice, dead birds, poverty, scarcity, epidemic disease. The world on a tightrope, wavering.

And tonight, my son can’t fall asleep. Midnight has come and gone, 1 a.m. has come and gone, 2 a.m. has come and gone. This happens all the time. I’ve started falling asleep on my feet, leaving this world for some other for seconds at a time before partially returning, bits and pieces left behind. Waking is now a new way of disintegrating, the present a provisional intersection of fictions.

Vermont, 1980

I stop scratching Virginia on the forehead and turn to go back to the house. A man is standing there on the lawn. He looks very tired. There’s the sound, somewhere nearby, of a baby crying.

“Butch Edge sent me,” he says to me. This man has glasses. He looks a little like my father, a little like my mother.

“Butch Edge?” I say.

“Butch Edge has glasses that look like your glasses,” he says. This is true.

“Your glasses!” he says, looking just above my head and speaking louder, like Tom up on stage booming out lines from a script. “The arm of them will break off during a fight for a rebound in an eighth grade basketball game!”

“Eighth grade?” I say. That’s in the future.

“You will get other pairs of glasses,” the man says,his voice back down to a mutter like my muttering dad. Now he’s looking down at the grass like he dropped something.

“I always come back here,” he mutters, like he’s talking to himself. “I always come back to this place.”

“I’ve never seen you,” I say. He looks back up at me. The baby is still crying somewhere.

“What I can tell you about the future is that all your glasses will break, actually, one after the other, or else will just not work after a while because your eyes will keep getting worse. Your glasses will get thicker and thicker.” He looks past me. His eyes widen. “Oh. Virginia,” he says. The way he says it, softly but with his voice going squiggly, wavering, it’s like my mom.

That crying baby. I want to do something about it, but I don’t know anything about babies. I try to think about something that I know about.

“I have to go sort my cards,” I say.

I can hear the Toyota Corolla pulling into the drive. There’s a little mist of sadness over everything.

“Butch Edge,” the man says,fading into the nada, the crying.

Chicago, 2012

And the crying gets louder and I’m back at the kitchen counter in front of several small narrowed notebooks with blank pages.

“Butch Edge,” I say.

In 1979, his only major league year, Butch Edge notched three wins. The last was a complete game 3–2 victory over Hall of Famer Jim Palmer and the eventual American League champ Baltimore Orioles. For a moment, the future through thick glasses: not bad. Butch Edge.

I go into the bedroom and take the baby from my wife. I can’t get him to sleep but after a while, through nothing I’m doing or not doing, he stops crying. He loves life, hates to sleep. He reaches for my glasses and pulls them from my face and goes blurry. One of his favorite comedy routines: He takes my glasses, I call him a bully, he laughs. In my arms this being of pure laughing light, free of the future and the past, nada light blue brand new nada. I’ll never know what I’m doing. Blind I hold on.

Posted in Butch Edge, by Josh Wilker, Toronto Blue Jays | 6 Comments »

Joe Rudi

September 13, 2012

(This post originally appeared on The Classical.)

1962

My mom emailed me with the news that my dad’s favorite cat had gone deaf and blind. I was in my cubicle at work when I read the email. I took my cell phone down to the lower level of my office building, where sloping windows two stories high look out onto an expansive parking lot.

“He’s on his walk,” my mom said. “You should try back again later.”

I looked out beyond the parking lot to the raised highway in the distance endlessly ushering heavy traffic north and south.

“I’ll try. I can’t see him wanting to talk a whole lot,” I said.

“You’d be surprised. He went on and on at the vet. He’s changed.”

My mother and I chatted for a few more minutes.

“When you get a pet, you’re in for the long haul,” she said. “I’m 71 and I finally understand that, the long haul.” I forget how she phrased the next part exactly. Something about people, how you throw in with people, you make decisions in the moment binding you to another, not knowing or even really considering the future, the long haul.

***

One day in 1962, when Joe Rudi was sixteen, the greatest baseball players in the world came to his hometown of Modesto, California. Game 6 of the World Series was being delayed several days due to historically relentless rain. During the long delay, the New York Yankees and San Francisco Giants traveled south from San Francisco to work out in Modesto, where it was drier. Joe Rudi watched from beyond the outfield fence, where he was able to collect several home run balls launched by the major leaguers. By the end of the day, the sixteen-year-old had an armful of these World Series souvenirs.

***

In 1962 my mother had just moved to New York City, or perhaps was on the brink of moving to New York City. She was 21, and the world was wide open, unsolved. My dad was a stranger to her, one of millions in the city. He was older, had served in the Navy during World War II, had worked all through the 1950s. The two would meet at a lecture on psychology and art at Cooper Union. My future father went up to my future mother and asked her out for coffee. When I’ve imagined the scene, I’ve always superimposed my own insecurities and awkwardness onto my father, but he was probably pretty impressive in his own way. Not a bad-looking fellow. A gentle guy. An intellectual. He asked a question that was easy enough to say yes to. He didn’t ask her whether in fifty years, when he was 87, she would drive him to the vet because the cat he took in his lap every day to gently brush and brush had started walking into walls.

***

Joe Rudi’s memory of the day in 1962 when the World Series came to Modesto surfaced during a weather-related pause in the 1972 World Series. The A’s had won the first two games of the series, the second of these wins delivered in large part by Rudi, who supplied the winning margin with a home run and then preserved the lead with a leaping, fence-crashing ninth-inning grab. Looking for a story to fill space created by the rainout, reporters had gravitated to the most recent game’s hero, and Rudi had told them about 1962.

“One thing I remember most,” he said, “is that we all waited outside the park for autographs.” Joe Rudi was now himself a World Series hero, but in his recollection he became again the anonymous sixteen-year-old clutching an armful of major league home run balls to his chest.

“The players all walked straight to the bus,” he said.

***

One wall of my cubicle is a whiteboard filled with project schedules scrawled in black marker. When the schedules change I erase dates and replace them with other dates. Recently, during a lull, I used a blue marker to write “card of the day” down near the bottom of the board. Since then I try to remember every day to put a randomly selected baseball card on a shelf just below the “card of the day” title. Joe Rudi was the featured card the day I tried to call my father about his ailing cat. After returning from my first attempt, I did some work, occasionally glimpsing Joe Rudi off to my left, a pale, mustachioed ghost from my childhood, or in this specific case from the later fringes of childhood. The card was from 1981, when I was thirteen and losing interest in cards. I was considering the card when I sensed someone at the entry to my cube.

“Who you got today?” a coworker asked.

I swiveled around from my computer-facing position. A guy who sits a couple of cubes over from me in the accounts department was standing there. Every once in a while he ambles by and remarks on my card of the day. We’ve never had a conversation outside of these exchanges.

I reclined a little in my chair, motioned toward Joe Rudi. My coworker picked up the card.

“Hmm, he ended up with the Angels, huh?” the coworker said. He was looking at the front of the card. I knew what was about to happen. He was going to turn the card over to look at the stats, and in doing so he was going to be momentarily, infinitesimally jarred.

***

The game-winning catch in the 1972 World Series blessed Joe Rudi’s career. All his virtues, whether real or perhaps at times exaggerated, were encapsulated in it: he was clutch, a winner, a sublime fielder, someone who could do everything well and who would do whatever it took to beat you. Had he not made such a spectacular grab—had Denis Menke, who hit the drive, instead lofted an easy fly to Rudi—a fairly similar popular conception of Joe Rudi would probably have been generated anyway, but this collective portrait wouldn’t have had such an arresting and emblematic gathering point. Roger Angell best fixed the moment in time by comparing the leaping catch against the wall to the image of a pinned butterfly. There was something ineffable about Joe Rudi, something to be held gently, carefully.

***

In 1981 Fleer and Donruss disrupted the Topps monopoly on baseball cards. I didn’t get any Donruss cards but bought some Fleer. The photos on the new cards were often drab, dim, even slightly unfocused. But that wasn’t the problem with them. The problem was that the statistics on the back were upside down. Everyone who knew and loved baseball cards would first look at the front of the card, then would flip the card over in a certain way to look at the statistics on the back of the card. Doing this with a 1981 Fleer would result in the statistics being upside down. It’s a small thing, but it’s jarring. You hold a card with care, and this is what happens. The world you want to love will push you away.

***

My parents live far away from me. My infant son can’t ride in the car, not even a few blocks to Target. He instantly starts wailing to the point of gagging suffocation. For now, until he can ride in a car, there is a physical separation between the family I am raising and the family I grew up in. This separation is painful to me, the one part of my life that I would change if I could. I wish we all lived in the same village or something, but such is modern life. Everyone scatters.

***

I went back down to the lower level and stared out at the parking lot and the highway and dialed my phone again. My dad was there. He told me about the cat’s condition, described the sad daily scene of watching her inch across the room to get to her food, her litter.

All my baseball cards came to me when my father was separated from my mother. We lived in Vermont and he lived in New York City. He was a guy who visited. In the summer my brother and I visited him. He lived without a pet in a small studio apartment. During his visits to us he always spent time with our cats. He loved them. I wondered why he didn’t get a cat of his own. He seemed to be living like someone prepared to leave everything behind at a moment’s notice, like he was waiting for a call.

Eventually, that call came. He and my mom got back together in the mid-1990s, when the bleary cat that now teeters into walls was my mom’s rambunctious kitten.

The marriage between my mother and father has been unusual but not without love. Recently, my mom got quite sick. I spoke on the phone with my dad about it after she’d started to get better.

“She’s everything to me,” he said.

My mom was right about him changing. He used to be nice and silent about feelings, like me, but nowadays he says things like this every once in a while. It’s terrifying. When telling me about his cat, he somehow began talking about his own death, which, as he helpfully pointed out, was not too far off.

“I’m not unhappy about it,” he said. “I just hope for happiness for you and your family and your brother and his family. I just want you to be happy.”

***

I went back to my cube and ran out the clock on my day. I didn’t want to think about a blind cat or an 87-year-old father or distance or disappointment or the world pushing you away. I searched the net for traces of Joe Rudi. That’s when I found the story of him as a sixteen-year-old in 1962, running after and gathering home run balls struck by gods. I could see him in my mind, in that moment before he experienced the disappointment of the major leaguers brushing past him to get to their bus. He waited, happy, all still to come. He cradled the baseballs, each one blessed.

I don’t hold onto the gifts of my life with great enough care.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, California Angels, Joe Rudi | 7 Comments »

Guest post by Ted Anthony: Rennie Stennett

August 21, 2012

Today on Cardboard Gods guest writer Ted Anthony marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of a bad day for Rennie Stennett. Anthony, a journalist for The Associated Press, has been a national and foreign correspondent and has covered, among other things, China, Iraq, Afghanistan and how American culture is changing in the 21st century. He is the author of the cultural history Chasing the Rising Sun: The Journey of an American Song (Simon & Schuster, 2007). A Pittsburgh native, he was deeply traumatized as a boy when his parents dragged him off by the hair to Asia in 1979, the year the Pirates won the World Series. They have not done so since.

Rennie Stennett

by Ted Anthony

He looks off camera, to the side, as if distracted by something coming toward him. And something was.

Rennie Stennett was one of the best second basemen of the 1970s. That’s saying something, given that Rod Carew spent half of the 1970s at second base and names like Willie Randolph and Joe Morgan were also occupying the bag in those years.

Stennett could run, he could field, and oh — could he hit in the clutch. On Sept. 16, 1975, as his card trumpets on the back, he went 7 for 7 in a nine-inning game. What it doesn’t say is that his hits were part of one of the most lopsided games in baseball history: The Pirates beat the Cubs, 22-0. We in Pittsburgh don’t have games like that anymore. It would be a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Stennett was a thrilling part of the 1976 Pirates, a team that, in retrospect, I loved even more than the 1979 “Fam-a-lee.” This was “The Lumber Company,” a team full of Stargells and Hebners and Zisks and Candelarias and Mooses and Robinsons and a young rightfielder named Dave Parker whose days as a battery throwee were still in the future. We even had Mario Mendoza, he of the now-famous line. I can still hear Milo Hamilton saying our second baseman’s name in a deep voice: “And RENN-ie STENN-ett pulls into third with a standup triple.”

Yet Rennie Stennett is mostly forgotten, because of what happened 35 years ago today.

It was August of 1977, and we had embarked upon the first major cross-country trip of my childhood. The Pirates were well en route to a respectable five-games-out finish in the NL East behind their rival of the time, the Phillies, when my parents poured me into the back of my mother’s powder-blue Maverick. With my father driving, we set out from Pittsburgh to Jacksonville Fla., to see my uncle and many cousins.

We largely bypassed the interstates and pointed our car toward Plains, Georgia. You’ll recall, of course, Plains, Georgia — home to the freshly minted president, peanut farmer Jimmy Carter, and, perhaps more famously, home to the gas station belonging to his brother, the indefatigable Billy. (Wikipedia enshrines Billy this way: “Carter’s name was occasionally used as a gag answer for a Washington, D.C. trouble-maker on 1970s episodes of The Match Game.”)

Pre-iPod, pre-XM, AM radio was our constant companion. Local stations faded in and out as we passed through West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina. Various iterations of Stuckey’s appeared at the side of the road, then receded. We stopped only if my mother wanted some pecan clusters or if I needed a new pack of Colorforms or a bag of pork rinds. On the morning of Aug. 17, I remember hearing some Southern-accented announcer cut in on a song — was it Alan O’Day’s “Undercover Angel”? — to tell us that someone named Elvis Presley had died the previous day. “The King is dead,” I remember the announcer saying. My mother, generally progressive when it came to the arts, had this to say: “I didn’t much like his music.” I made a mental note to find some and prove her wrong.

And so we proceeded to Plains. We stopped at Billy’s gas station, and he wasn’t there, but we came away with a lot of peanut memorabilia and a few 7-ounce Pabst Blue Ribbons etched with “Billy” and the date in an electric pencil by some forgotten attendant. These would be great traders to build my beer can collection. We vacationed in Florida, saw cousins, went to beaches, sweated. And then, a few days later, we drove back.

On the way home, an announcer came on during some South Carolina sportscast and told us that Pittsburgh Pirates second baseman Rennie Stennett had broken his right leg while sliding into, of all things, second base. He was batting .336 at the time. He was gone for the season and, though we didn’t know it at the time, for good.

We kept hurtling north, back to Pittsburgh. The summer of 1977, fading, was hurtling equally fast toward fourth grade. Rennie Stennett’s ankle was broken, and he would not become the Hall of Fame second baseman I was certain he was destined to be. He would leave the Pirates quietly at the end of 1979, their year of triumph. His career, an asterisk to Pirates history, would peter out early in Reagan’s first term.

Somehow things weren’t what they should be anymore. Elvis was dead, and I knew that mattered, but I wasn’t quite certain why. I certainly couldn’t drink the PBR from Billy’s gas station, and I didn’t even want to yet. Disco was rotting my brain. And there was Rennie Stennett on his baseball card, gazing off camera a bit warily as if something was hurtling toward him. And something was.

Posted in Pittsburgh Pirates, Rennie Stennett | 7 Comments »

Rick Rhoden

August 16, 2012

(This post originally appeared on The Classical.)

The World’s Greatest Athlete

Who is the world’s greatest athlete? In honor of all the recent leaping and flailing and patriotic sobbing, I will venture toward an answer by considering a few cultural figures of varying levels of renown. All of them inhabit not this present world—which is to me a baffling, shadowy place of ever-eroding footholds—but the milieu with which I am much more familiar, the one I traversed in my childhood, specifically the star-spangled bicentennial summer of 1976, when this quiet Rick Rhoden card slipped unnoticed into my budding collection.

***

Nanu

Let’s play the word association game. Ready? Jan-Michael Vincent.

What comes to mind? I’m guessing it’s an image informed by the afflicted former actor’s more recent forays into the public eye, handcuffed appearances in court, bedraggled mug shots, and like that. Decay and ruination. Sort of the opposite of the gleaming ideal of athleticism.

At one time, however, Vincent was the ideal athlete, at least in fictional terms, playing the titular character in the 1973 movie The World’s Greatest Athlete. I never saw the movie but I read the novelization two or three years after the movie came out. Vincent was cast as a long-haired Tarzan type named Nanu who gets pulled out of the African jungle by an American college coach and brought back to campus, where it is confirmed that all the vine-swinging and tiger wrestling has sharpened the ape-raised jungle lad into an indomitable interscholastic athlete capable of shattering pole vault records and reviving the punt return attack.

I don’t remember what could have been the dramatic tension in the story. He won everything. Maybe he gradually got civilized or something, married the college president’s bookish daughter, etc. My copy of the book is long gone, most likely impossible to replace, and I’m not about to order the movie off Amazon and sit through it while looking at a youthful Jan-Michael Vincent and thinking about the crushing desolation of time and substance addiction. But I wish I still had the book, damn it. It was one of those books with a section in the middle with photos, stills from the movie. Born Free was another book from my childhood that had that still-shot section in the middle. I don’t remember that book or movie so well, except to associate it with lions and an almost terrifying level of sadness. Jesus Christ, I never want to know what it was in Born Free that touched my vast early childhood capacity for terrifying sadness.

Sorry, what? Oh yeah, great athleticism. Great athleticism would translate into being able to win any athletic contest, right? This would be impossible for anyone in the real world, but Nanu did it in a make-believe world and in doing so provided an ideal that real athletes could be measured against.

***

Bruce Jenner

The athletic ideal established by Jan-Michael Vincent seemed to materialize in reality in the 1976 summer Olympics in the form of Bruce Jenner. Like Nanu, Jenner was a white fellow with flowing hair who hurled things, leaped obstacles, and rushed toward finish lines. He won the gold medal in the decathlon, the event most frequently associated with the notion of the world’s greatest athlete, and parlayed that success into a monetized cultural ubiquity to rival that of Evel Knievel, i.e. (from a nondenominational pop-culture-addicted child’s viewpoint), God. Jenner could do it all better than anyone.

Or could he? I understood fairly early on that Jenner wasn’t really the greatest at everything, that he was actually generally mediocre when measured against the world’s top specialized athletes in each of the events comprising the decathlon. He was more accurately the world’s most versatile athlete, but only if the realm of athleticism could be stripped down to ten rudimentary track and field events and excluded all other forms of competition.

Jenner fared better, as the years went on, than the oft-arrested man behind Nanu. But like Vincent’s contemporaneous embodiment of virile youth, Jenner is widely considered (by superfluous sporting-minded internet typists such as myself) on the decay-laced cheap-shot prism of “how far they have fallen” rhetoric. We like to point out witheringly that Jenner is now a renowned figure in the world of reality entertainment, famous not for great athleticism but for being a plastic surgery victim and Kardashian empire subordinate. Which reminds me: A few days ago my wife told me that she saw an episode of Dr. Phil featuring several women who received plastic surgery from an unlicensed felonious charlatan who promised to make the women’s unsatisfactory buttocks plump up like those of Kim Kardashian. He instead endangered their lives with injections of, among other toxic substances, quick-setting cement.

I’m no better than anyone else in this demented world. I fully participate in the collective mudslide to oblivion. E.g., I’ve jacked it to images of Bruce Jenner’s step-daughter’s rear end more than once. More than twice. It’s not a contest, though.

***

Kyle Rote Jr.

I should be purer than I am, maybe. I should stop digressing. Stop onanizing. Stop writing about baseball cards, perhaps. Move on to doing good works, helping others, praying to a higher power.

I come to these thoughts of purity frequently, then discard them, or not even discard them, really, for that would require more purposefulness than I am capable of, but instead just kind of blah my way into something else, some other manner of cogitating that allows more meandering and guttering and nowhereness. That’s my life. Others decide to cast such a life aside, or try. Many are successful, I assume.

Kyle Rote Jr. seems to be one of these pious types. He has fared better in later years than the two other mid-1970s paragons of athleticism mentioned so far. He is a successful sports agent. He’s probably pretty wealthy. He’s a devout Christian. Maybe this allowed him to avoid some pitfalls.

I remember Rote from 1976 and thereabouts for being the perennial winner of Superstars. That made-for-TV competition pitted athletes from various sports against one another in several events to determine the greatest athlete of them all. It puzzled and fascinated me that Rote, a nondescript soccer player I’d never heard of, always won. The program itself fascinated me. It was much less formal than the Olympics, which undercut its legitimacy, and yet it featured guys who were the best in each of their sports, and these sports, unlike track and field, were the ones that I followed and loved. If you were going to pick a greatest athlete in the world, how could you not include the superstars of American team sports? That’s what I thought anyway. But then the winner was always Kyle Rote Jr. It was as if Marvel Comics put out a special issue featuring all its superheroes in a free-for-all brawl to decide who was the most powerful, and at the end the winner was some marginal lower-echelon guy not even capable of carrying his own series. Kyle Rote Jr. was like Hawkeye from the Avengers, if Hawkeye ever somehow figured out a way to defeat the Hulk, Thor, Spiderman, and the rest, then went on to be a devoutly Christian multimillionaire sports agent and abstainer from digression and gherkin-jerking.

***

Brian Oldfield

This is preposterous, of course. Hawkeye, weakest of limb of all superheroes save perhaps the Invisible Girl, possessing only one skill—an easily obtained skill shared by pale bespectacled loners in high school archery clubs everywhere—beating the Hulk? No, the winner of the ultimate contest, i.e., the world’s greatest athlete, would have to be someone with immense physical power and speed.

After all, a great athlete is a superhero. This was my thought in 1976, a thought which feels purer than what I am capable now, and thus closer to truth. Often in 1976 I imagined that I had superpowers, and in these imaginings I would more often than not use them to dominate various sports, running faster, throwing harder, jumping higher than anyone else. I could also, as needed, bash in faces and reduce skyscrapers to rubble.

In reality, I wasn’t particularly fast or strong, and I certainly never bashed in a face. Also, even in my imaginings, I understood that having superpowers wouldn’t necessarily translate to mastery of every sport. I could dominate the Olympics and then go into football and rush for touchdowns on every carry, dragging entire teams of would-be tacklers on my back, and then I could move to basketball and Darryl-Dawkins a few backboards, I guess, but then, when I pondered channeling my Hulk-strength into baseball, I usually let the whole fantasy kind of fade into some other scenario. I knew by then that baseball was tricky. You couldn’t just swing in on a vine like Nanu and start drilling sliders into the gap. It took skill.

I’ll get to that idea of skill in a bit, but for now let’s dwell a little longer on Hulk-strength, since in my mind the Hulk would win the imaginary Marvel Comics free-for-all punch-fest. I think there may be some thought out there Thor was stronger than the Hulk, because Thor is a god, but fuck Thor. Thor is full of shit. Hulk smash.

Not that you asked, but here’s my full top-five power rankings list:

1. The Hulk
2. The Thing
3. Luke Cage: Power Man
4. Spiderman
5. Oh, all right, Thor (Note: Sean Howe, author of the forthcoming book Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, advised me on seeing this list that Thor should at least be moved up to #3.)

Anyway, the Hulkiest athlete of my childhood was a man named Brian Oldfield. He was a shot-put specialist who went pro in the sport at a time when such a thing was rarely done by track and field athletes in their prime. Because of this, he did not compete in the 1976 Olympics, which occurred when he was at the peak of his powers. For a time, he enjoyed notoriety as something of an outlaw. He was a little like the Hulk in that sense, too, unaffiliated, bounding around the country from place to place. He didn’t fit. And his powers were mind-boggling, feats of strength and speed battling spiritedly for column space with anecdotes from his life as a good-natured, fearless, hard-partying lantern-jawed Dionysus.

A Superstars clip from 1976 includes a mini-feature on the colorful Oldfield. The clip then climaxes in a 100-yard dash in which Oldfield beats all the other Superstars assembled save for Steelers wide receiver (and former track star) Lynn Swann.

In another Superstars clip, Oldfield easily defeats the Hulk.

***

A nameless dog

Everything about the Superstars clips you can find on YouTube speaks to me, synching up with my meandering mind, my personality, my long gone world. The aimless pacing, the random collision of sports heroes, the modest relaxed scale of the event, which seems to have the scope and urgency of a company picnic.

There is something in the 100-yard dash clip I wanted to mention in particular: In the last few moments of the 100-yard dash, Brian Oldfield runs into a dog that has bounded onto the track.

What does this dog have to do with this discussion? In my opinion, every discussion should include the equivalent of this dog.

***

Scooby Doo

The popularity of the 1976 Olympics as well as the success of the Superstars competition inspired a Saturday morning cartoon called the Laff-A-Lympics. The captain of the team that won the most of the weekly competitions was Scooby Doo. Here are the all-time Laff-A-Lympics standings:

The Scooby Doobies – 14 wins
The Yogi Yahooeys – 7 wins
The Really Rottens – 2 wins
One three-way tie

Despite his wondering whether “re really rarromprished ranything,” the most-decorated Laff-A-Lympian was a fearless avenger for justice.

***

Gabe Kaplan

The 1970s craze for channeling everything into an Olympics-y competition also inspired The Battle of the Network Stars. There’s no need for me to add anything to Bill Simmons’ pitch-perfect take on this competition’s soaring masterwork moment, except to say that Simmons’ appreciation was written before the recent passing of Robert Heyges, so Gabe Kaplan’s famed win now features a bittersweet note. There’s Epstein at the finish line, alive once again, front and center, the only network star visible for a moment, before Wonder Woman and Richie and Laverne and the rest storm in, just one Sweathog alone, arms raised in triumph and welcome for his teacher.

Those days, god damn it, I miss them.

***

Rick Rhoden

Rick Rhoden slipped and fell on scissors as a kid and got sick, had to wear a leg brace, got the brace off at 12, started striking everyone out, and within a few years was drafted number 1 by the Dodgers. He won 151 major league games, more than all but 240 other pitchers in history. Of those pitchers only a dozen or so could claim to be as good a hitter as Rhoden, who won three Silver Slugger awards and was the only pitcher to ever serve as a designated hitter. Since his baseball career, he has become a successful professional golfer (lifetime winnings of over $250,000 and counting), something seemingly every great athlete in the world fantasizes about but can’t accomplish. There’s debate about golf being a sport, but whatever it is, it is fucking hard. (Ask any great athlete.) So in terms of mastering difficult, subtle athletic skills, Rhoden has few, if any, peers. Yes, Hulk smash. But imagine him trying to throw a curveball for a strike, then trying to hit a curveball, then trying to chip a tiny ball from the rough over a water hazard and onto a slippery green in the tense late stages of a pro event. Rrraaorggh! Hulk mad!

So Rick Rhoden had an uncommon mastery of subtle athletic skills. But if all Rick Rhoden ever did was master pitching, hitting, and the club-striking direction of a small white ball toward a series of tiny holes, I wouldn’t have considered him for this discussion. I don’t know what greatness is, but I know for me it resides somewhere in a long-gone Saturday afternoon after a morning of sugared-up Wheaties with Bruce Jenner and the Laff-A-Lympics and an issue of Marvel Teamup featuring Spiderman and the Thing, and a ceaselessly roaming little-kid imagination still capable of being amazed. I was never amazed by Rick Rhoden. But recently I discovered, by useless meandering, that in addition to his other athletic masteries Rick Rhoden also vied for the coveted title of 1975 bubble gum champ. He was not the greatest of all bubble blowers—only he who is called Bevacqua could make this claim—but Rhoden did make it all the way to the semifinals of the hallowed event. In this video, another beautiful piece of the shambling era I love and that made sense to me and that has left me, Rhoden appears at around the 1:40 mark, blowing a large oblong bubble as if the miraculous creation were nothing special, all in a day’s work for the world’s greatest athlete.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Los Angeles Dodgers, Rick Rhoden | 7 Comments »

Dave Roberts

August 8, 2012

(This post originally appeared on The Classical.)

Diedre

I don’t remember Alaska. I was around two years old. My mother had met a man at a peace march the previous year. Something happened between them. Through life and its unending series of problems, you carry a belief that there’s some true path for you, waiting to be uncovered. Sometimes it feels as if you’ve found this path.

The man from the peace march, Tom, then went to work as a forest fire fighter in Alaska. My mom followed him, taking my brother and me along. My dad stayed in New Jersey. I’ve always known that when I was very young I went to Alaska, but I’d thought it was part of a vacation. My mom told me recently that it wasn’t. She said she wasn’t sure whether we’d ever be coming back.

That was in 1970. I don’t know exactly when. It might have been in April, when second-year pro Dave Roberts, still searching for his first major league win, got called into a game in relief. Mike Corkins started the game but was yanked midway through the second inning. Roberts got Willie Davis to ground into a double play, ending the threat. He breezed through the next inning, and the one after that, and the one after that, and so on. He must have felt good, numb and high and clear and natural, the way you do when it seems you’re walking the path meant only for you.

There’s mention of this game on the back of Dave Roberts’ 1977 card, below several years of statistics showing losses outnumbering wins. The card is on my desk, near a stack of unpaid bills. There are always baseball cards and bills on my desk.

***

In Alaska, we lived in some kind of communal situation among the crew of young drifting men who’d ended up in Alaska to fight forest fires. The place was hazy with pot smoke. There was one other child there besides my brother and me, a little girl my age. Her mother wasn’t around. Her father was one of the firefighters.

Dave Roberts had to leave that perfect moment from 1970 behind. He had to go on, losing more often than he won, surviving, moving from place to place. By 1976, he was with the sixth franchise of his pro career, the Tigers, part of a starting rotation on a hopeless team. He was by this time bracketed and obscured in the baseball encyclopedia by a Dave Roberts from the 1960s and another who as an overall number one draft pick had soared directly into the major leagues in 1972 (the same year, as it happens, that a fourth Dave Roberts was born in Japan—where the first Dave Roberts, no relation, was still playing pro ball—and this fourth Dave Roberts would eventually eclipse all previous players named Dave Roberts by stealing a base). In early May 1976, the Dave Roberts in question experienced arguably his most significant moment in the majors by contracting the flu, which caused him to miss his turn in the rotation, which allowed a Tigers rookie named Mark Fidrych to get his first major league start.

***

I had a dream last night that I’d left my eleven-month-old son in another room by himself. When I realized that I’d left him unattended I rushed back to the room he was in and found him yanking on a rickety bookcase three times his size. Later in the dream my wife asked me to go outside to check whether I could get into the apartment through a window in our basement, a test to see how easily an intruder could enter. Earlier, in the real world, before I’d started this anxiety-dream sleep, our central air conditioning unit had stopped working, the same one we’d spent thousands of dollars on last summer when my wife was very pregnant.

Last fall my wife quit her job to stay home with our baby, and our savings account is eroding. The money I make as a mistake-hunter—proofreading, copyediting—isn’t enough to cover our bills. Occasionally I make some additional money writing, but not much, especially when weighed against actual time spent writing. Spending time writing is, in financial terms, about as sound a decision as spending time throwing rocks into the sea. The long-endangered notion of writing as a way to make a living or even help make a living is now on the brink of extinction. I know this because my dad, who often sends me links to bleak news items, forwarded me a recent column by Scottish novelist Ewan Morrison, who sees a future without professional authors.

Writing has already begun its slide towards becoming something produced and consumed for free. . . . How long have we got? A generation. After that, writers, like musicians, filmmakers, critics, porn stars, journalists and photographers, will have to find other ways of making a living in a short-term world that will not pay them for their labour.

I recently spent a few weeks researching Mark Fidrych’s 1976 season. I was going to write a book about that beautiful summer and was very excited but then found out another biography of the Tigers 1970s supernova of joy was already well in the works, to be published fairly soon. While two concurrent books on, say, a famed American president or Miley Cyrus might have a chance of succeeding, two books on a baseball player who had one good summer thirty-six years ago would just scuttle both projects or at least the second one, mine, so I pulled the plug.

“What are we going to do?” my wife asked last night in the hot room. She meant about the air conditioning but also everything. I just sat there staring at the floor.

***

I’ve been working as a mistake-hunter for a long time. I started many years ago, getting occasional temporary gigs through friends. This was back in New York in the 1990s. When my girlfriend and I left New York in 2003, we didn’t have jobs lined up. I got the first bite on the work-hunting front. A publishing company in the Chicago suburbs needed a part-time proofreader. I was shown a cubicle and given some pages. I started hunting for mistakes. I have stuck with the company like a barnacle. Most every weekday since then has been some version of that first day. In the mornings before work, briefly, I go to my desk of bills and baseball cards and try to wander.

There appear to be palm trees in the background of the photo on Dave Roberts’ 1977 card. Maybe there’s a separating body of water just out of sight, and the palm trees are on an island. Maybe I could go to live on that island. I’d read. Baseball games of no consequence would occur nearby.

While researching Mark Fidrych I got sidetracked frequently. I love being sidetracked. It’s better than any fantasy of palm tree island solitude, even. I was looking at old newspapers from 1976 available in the Google news archives and in those newspapers you can scroll around, looking at old advertisements, the news of the day, TV listings. I kept finding traces of attempts to oppose gravity. There was a guy who wanted to cross Niagara Falls on a tightrope, and another guy who tried to fly across the ocean in a hot-air balloon and disappeared. Out beyond Earth’s atmosphere, Skylab was slowly disintegrating. Evel Knievel came out of a brief retirement, jumped some buses in the Kingdome, then apologized for not being spectacular enough, not flying high and far enough. ABC aired a Happy Days rerun of an episode earlier in the season when Fonzie, worried he was losing his cool, jumped fourteen garbage cans on his motorcycle before smashing into a food stand. There was something in the air that year, a deep cultural urge, a need to oppose the unavoidable awareness that everything was falling back down to earth.

***

My mom told me about Alaska while on a recent visit to see her grandson. She said I spent the afternoons playing in abandoned cars behind the compound, or whatever it was, with the little girl my age whose mother wasn’t around.

Dave Roberts never pitched better than on that spring day in 1970. After relieving Mike Corkins, he recorded 18 outs in a row. In the eighth, he walked Maury Wills and gave up a single to Willie Davis, but then erased the threat with an inning-ending double play and posted a 1-2-3 ninth.

My mom still remembered the name of the girl. Since she told me her name I’ve been carrying it around on my tongue. On the bus to work, staring out at the chain stores. While at work, looking for mistakes. On the bus home, the same. Applebee’s, Best Buy, Jiffy Lube. Diedre.

After a few weeks in Alaska, my mom decided it was too wild, too unstructured, too insecure. My father was still in New Jersey, going to his job, making a paycheck, refusing to stop believing things could work out, that the family could stay together. He turned out to be right, in a way. The family did stay together, for a while anyway, and weirdly. We returned to him, all of us, Tom, too, and all lived together for a couple of years in a house in Hopewell. I’d always thought those years in Hopewell were the peak of the wild living, the experimental open marriage on full display, but the wildest days had been in Alaska.

***

In Alaska, I crawl over and through the rusted husks of abandoned cars. Elsewhere, the last out of Dave Roberts’ near-perfect relief appearance is a pop-up to the second baseman. The ball seems to hang suspended in the air. Dave Roberts is about to win. The sun seems to hang suspended in the sky. The day is enormous. A motherless little girl clambers along beside me, the world corroding, dangerous, bright. Words are new. Diedre, I say. We are wandering.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Dave Roberts, Detroit Tigers | 1 Comment »

Rusty Torres

July 1, 2012

(This post originally appeared on The Classical.)

The Dugout

The happiest moment of my childhood? That’s easy. I’m in a little league dugout just after my one perfect at-bat. I’m still seeing the at-bat: the meaty fastball over the middle of the plate, the swing, the ball clearing the chain-link fence in left field. I’d floated around the bases, floated from home plate back to the dugout in a scrum of shouting teammates. Now I sit on the bench in the dugout, beaming out at the field, my limbs still buzzing from that perfect connection. I want the moment to last, and it does. The other team is bad, and we keep reaching base. We bat around.

“You’re up again, Josh,” someone says.

I rise, put on a batting helmet, and leave the dugout for another at-bat. The huge smile on my face feels permanent. It’s like a joke has been told that will never stop being funny. It’s like my happiness has overthrown time.

***

I have a Yahoo email account, and before I get to the inbox I go past a page that includes sports headlines. I always hope for sports to serve as an escape, a safe place away from the world. The top sports headlines lately have featured the Penn State coach found guilty of sexually abusing several boys over many years. His face accompanies the headline. I don’t want to see his face anymore.

You’ll hear people hoping that his punishment will include the unofficial component of fellow prisoners doing to him what he did to children. But no one can do to him what he did to those boys. They were safe, and then they weren’t and never would be again. Each one had the face of a child and this face was taken.

***

Last night my wife and I went for a walk with our eleven-month-old son. He was nestled in a carrier on my wife’s chest. We’d gone on a walk the night before, after hours of the baby raging and wailing with teething pain, and on the walk he had eventually rested his head on my wife’s chest and gone to sleep. We were hoping for a repeat of that last night, but we walked and walked and walked and he kept staring out wide-eyed at the darkening world. He’s hungry for the world. Fireflies kept appearing in brief shin-high arcs in our path, as if part of some mysterious sanctification.

***

I have some Xeroxed pages from a newspaper on my desk. I got them a couple of years ago at my publisher’s request. They’re from the paper in the town I grew up in, and they back up a claim in my memoir that a coach in my town, Mick, was imprisoned for sexually abusing boys. Mick coached little league and seventh and eighth grade basketball. I didn’t play for him in little league (though at the time I wished I had since he was widely considered to be “the best”), but I played on his basketball teams. I was lucky, I realize now, to never go on a fishing trip with him. That’s where he did his thing. There were rumors about it when he was my coach, and I didn’t believe the rumors.

The article about his sentencing is difficult to read, full of disgusting, enraging details of a world oriented—as I had been—toward downplaying and ignoring the crime. Mick’s sentence was only one year in prison, and the judge who handed down the sentence said she was “impressed” with Mick and at the end of the sentencing wished him luck. The two brothers who came forward about the sexual abuse had been in recent weeks “suspected by classmates of being victims [and had] become the object of taunting and namecalling at school.” While on bail, and in violation of a specific provision of the bail that he not contact the victims, Mick sent a letter and a Christmas card, a fucking Christmas card, to the boys who reported him. There’s a description in the article of the impact of this contact.

The boys’ mother later testified that whatever the intentions, the effects were not good. She said when her son first received the letter, he took it to his room to read alone. Then he came into the living room, very upset, and slammed the letter down on the table. She quoted him as saying, “If he cares about me so damn much why doesn’t he leave me the hell alone?” (“Lewis Is Sentenced to Year in Jail,” White River Valley Herald, March 1987)

Mick was oblivious to this. He believed that contacting the boy was the right thing to do. His “impressive” courtroom demeanor seemed to imply some understanding on his part that he had done something wrong, or at least that his actions had brought him to the brink of being cast out of the community that he’d had a central role in, but the fact that he’d sent a letter to the two boys shows that he really had no idea what he did to the boys, and to all the other boys he victimized.

***

The card at the top of this page was intact, with a face, when I pulled it out of my shoebox of old cards at random few days ago. I always hope that by selecting from my shoebox blindly I’ll see the card drawn as if for the first time. I stuck with this hope for about a minute, lost focus, and then compulsively typed the player’s name into an internet search window.

Before typing in the name, I’d noticed the unusual setting of the photo on the card. Few photos on the baseball cards from my childhood are set in the dugout, which may be why this 1977 card is so well-handled despite the player’s marginality. I must have been drawn to the dugout. That was my first year in little league, the first year I got to sit in a dugout with a uniform on. I felt safer in the dugout than anywhere in the world. I loved that boy hive. Everyone sitting and standing and milling around and laughing, getting ready to bat or getting ready to go out into the field or looping fingers through the chicken wire and leaning close to chant no batter no batter no batter. The dugouts were where I most wanted to be even before I was old enough to play little league. My older brother played little league, so for two years I’d been at the edge of the dugout, looking in, waiting. Seven years old. Eight years old.

That was the age—eight years old—of the victim in the stories that clogged the first several pages of search results for Rusty Torres. An eight-year-old girl was playing on a pull-up bar. Torres himself supplied further details about the incident, as reported in the New York Daily News of May 12, 2012:

Torres said he and the girl “had a lot of physical contact” as he helped her down from the bar.

“Body to body, over and over,” he said. “I brought her to the back of my van and I don’t want to talk about what happened there but at one point I accidentally exposed my erect penis.”

The 63-year-old Torres said the girl never touched him, and he “stopped myself before anything bad happened to her.”

That last part, Torres believing that taking an 8-year-old girl into a van and showing her his erection constituted the behavior of someone stopping himself “before anything bad happened” is the most disturbing part of the article, especially when coupled with a later sentence: “Torres has spent the last decade working as a baseball coach on the Oyster Bay payroll, interacting with thousands of children.”

***

But I was telling you about the happiest moment of my childhood, that inning that wouldn’t end. I’m walking to the plate for another turn at bat, smiling like I’ll never stop. I hear someone calling my name.

“Josh! Josh!”

I look over. Mick is the coach of the other team. He is grinning out at me from inside the opposing dugout, his fingers looped through the chicken wire. He has those pro-style flip-up outfielder sunglasses. They’re in the up position, revealing his eyes. He’s the best coach in town. He’s never said my name before.

“Hey Josh,” he says, “no batter here, huh?”

It makes me feel good. I just hit a home run, so I know that he’s being gently sarcastic, that he’s saying there is a batter here. Mick is saying it. The best coach in town.

He had to get my attention in the middle of that game. He needed to imprint his face on my happiness.

***

Last night my wife and son and I walked up and down the firefly-graced streets until it was altogether dark out. My son still wouldn’t fall asleep.

“Should we just keep walking?” my wife asked.

“Sure,” I said. I thought she was asking whether I was tired of walking.

“I mean is it safe?” she said.

When is the answer to this question ever an unequivocal yes? We walked a few minutes more then came home and bolted and chained the door. I used the pointed tip of a nail file to alter a card from my childhood.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, California Angels, Rusty Torres | 2 Comments »

Bill Bene

June 20, 2012

(This post originally appeared on The Classical.)

Harold

I can’t find any information on the internet about Bill Bene’s sentencing, if it has even happened yet. The latest news, that Bene pled guilty and faces up to eight years in prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, appeared in late March of this year. I don’t know what’s happened to him since then.

If there are still going to be court proceedings in conjunction with Bill Bene’s sentencing, I want to believe that Harold will be brought in as a character witness. The defendant surely will have aged from his appearance in a 1989 Topps card, but Harold will be essentially unchanged after all these years, albeit maybe a little scuffed in places. Maybe his souvenir stand Los Angeles Dodgers batting helmet will be slightly askew.

***

“I fooled them for a while,” Bill Bene said.

This was in 1988, a month before the major league draft. Bene was admitting to a reporter from the Los Angeles Times that his high school career, spent exclusively as an outfielder, had been iffy. He’d known the best he could ever do was bluff and hope.

“I was never a very good hitter,” he said. “I guess I was meant to pitch.”

I guess.

Last week I discovered the 1989 Topps offering featuring Bill Bene in a friend’s box of unwanted cards. I’d never heard of him. A number 1 draft pick? This guy?

I’ve been discovering bits and pieces of Bill Bene ever since. Yesterday I watched a bird thump head-first into one of my windows.

“Jesus,” I said.

“Happens a lot,” my wife said. “We need to put up some stickers.”

It’s a big picture window. The birds are just flying along and wham.

“God, imagine what that’s like,” I said, pitying birds.

But then I thought about it some more. We can only ever guess. Every single step. And sooner or later we’ll smack into something. We’ll be stopped.

***

A couple of years ago, my wife and I drove to St. Paul, Minnesota, to attend a booksellers conference. My memoir was due out in a few months. The publisher sprang for gas money and a hotel room for us. The hope was that giving away bound galleys to conference attendees would drum up some buzz for the book. At the conference, hysteria for my book did not ensue. I wasn’t expecting it to, but even so the concrete affirmation that my book was just another book among hundreds of books, thousands of books, dampened my impulse to engage in fantasies of impossible deliverance. And who even reads anymore anyway? It wasn’t like I’d made a movie or, perhaps even better, a video game. It was great to have a book coming out, the realization of a lifelong dream. But it wouldn’t change anything. I would still be fastened to my life.

Afterward, my wife and I had a couple of drinks at the hotel bar, where a karaoke night was in session. There were maybe twenty people scattered around the bar, watching one another take a turn at the mike. On Words Without Borders, Jean Harris, reviewing Dubravka Ugresic’s Karaoke Culture, ponders the karaoke singer.

The hallmark of karaoke culture is a preference for faux versions of real things. So why does this world have a large population that opts for the theme park version every time? Because, according to Ugresic, “the very foundation of karaoke culture lies in the parading of the anonymous ego with the help of simulation games.” The denizen of karaoke culture is a cipher addicted to dreaming he’s somebody else: the one whose assertion of ego actually gets him somewhere.

***

Back when I was a kid I used to fantasize about being discovered. It started modestly, when my older brother was in little league. As I watched his games I imagined that a foul ball would bound my way, and I’d scoop it up and fire it back onto the field, wowing everyone with the strength and accuracy of my arm. (I hadn’t yet seen The Bad News Bears, where Kelly Leak’s superpowers as a baseball player are first announced in just this way.) As the years went on, this fantasy of being discovered got more preposterous, until eventually it involved a limousine pulling up at the edge of our driveway as I was throwing a tennis ball at the duct tape strike zone on the garage door. The backseat window would come down, revealing Carl Yastrzemski’s melancholy features creased into a smile.

“Quite an arm, son,” he would say. He’d produce a major league contract, holding it out the window toward me. “It’s just what we need.”

This is a deep American dream: to be discovered. To be seen, truly, and to be told with certainty, beyond any guesswork, that at our core we are aglow. That we have a great gift.

Absurd as it sounds, this is more or less what happened to Bill Bene. Bene was fumbling through the usual descent through baseball that all but the tiniest portion of the population experience, the game becoming harder and harder until it ejects us entirely out of active participation and into passive fandom. For me this occurred when I was fourteen and struggling in Babe Ruth league play. Bill Bene’s expiration date as a baseball player was set for when his passage as a guess-hitting high school outfielder concluded.

Instead, former major leaguer Randy Moffitt noticed Bill Bene had a strong arm and suggested he try pitching. According to a conflicting version of the story, this suggestion was made by Randy Moffitt’s father, Bill; what is indisputable is that Bene was blessed by the divine intervention of a close family member of Billie Jean Moffitt, Bill’s daughter and Randy’s sister, who gained renown beyond even that of my imagined fairy godmother, Yaz, under her married name, Billie Jean King. Billie Jean’s relation pointed the coach at Cal State-Los Angeles toward Bene, and it was at that institution, on a pitcher’s mound, that he would be discovered.

He first took the mound for his college team in 1986. From the beginning, he threw very hard and yet with so much wildness as to be nearly useless to the team. Scouts began to appear, more and more all the time, drawn to his promise, ignoring his flaws, much in the way one falls in love.

His complete college stats are displayed in full on the back of his 1989 “#1 Draft Pick” card. They are not good, as shown most succinctly by a career ERA of 5.62. And there aren’t even any positively suggestive “hidden” numbers below that broad-brush metric. He did not strike out more than a batter an inning, for example. Worse, he walked more batters than he struck out. Still, the scouts swarmed.

“We had 55 scouts at one game,” Bene’s college coach, John Herbold, said, adding for the sake of comedic hyperbole, “and we had so many radar guns going at the same time there was a power shortage.”

Somewhere along the line the fluttery hyperbole surrounding Bene began to coagulate into something more solid. By 1988, Los Angeles Dodgers general manager Fred Claire, who by the estimation of awards-givers at the end of that year would be deemed the keenest executive in all of major league baseball, was saying that Bill Bene had the “best arm of any prospect in the country.”

The Dodgers selected him with the fifth overall pick of the 1988 draft. In the minors, he continued to struggle. The temptation, with this “#1 Draft Pick” card in hand, is to imagine his story as a tragic fall, but where was he falling from? He wasn’t like David Clyde, who’d soared unbeatably through high school baseball, a national sensation, only to smack into an invisible barrier upon his immediate promotion to the major leagues. Bene’s nearly instantaneous ascension to the top of baseball had never been anything but an illusion.

***

I don’t participate in karaoke nights, but I sing sometimes. I once spent a year in a cabin in the woods. Because I had no electricity I had no entertainment beyond what I could cook up myself. I played my acoustic guitar and sang all the time. I wasn’t singing to heaven. I was lonely, going nuts. I hoped that someone might hear me singing and would be drawn to the sound. A woman, specifically. She’d appear from out of the birch trees, a smile creasing her melancholy features.

“Quite a voice,” this beautiful illusion would say. “It’s just what I need.”

If I discovered anything in my year in the woods it was that there’s only one discovery available. There’s no word for it, no voice to sing it.

***

A year or two into Bene’s professional career, he was so wild that he was demoted to remedial instruction outside of official action. In a simulated game, where the only other participant was a teammate standing in the batter’s box, a pitch got away from Bene, unsurprisingly, and broke the wrist of the teammate. The coaches further modified Bene’s remediation, replacing the human batter’s box attendant with a department store mannequin.

Bene drew a mustache on the mannequin. He named it Harold.

His pitching briefly seemed to improve, but this was an illusion. His minor league numbers tell the demoralizing story that sometimes people can’t change. We can dream of being discovered, of being told we have a great gift, and this dream might even come true, but eventually a second discovery will overtake the first. This latter discovery is the one we pray to avoid: our home in the world has been secured erroneously, and in that home we are a fraud, and upon the discovery of our fundamental insufficiency we are cast out.

***

This weekend I was reading an FBI document. It had an ad at the back, an attachment provided to illustrate the case being made that AOL be ordered to turn over all email records for a user with the email address dansternsplace@aol.com. This email address appears in the ad, the only contact info provided for the seller of the product being advertised, which is a hard drive containing 120,000 “Top Quality Karaoke Songs.” According to some information included earlier in the report, the price for this hard drive, $299, is far below the market value for the songs, which are all protected by a copyright that the seller of the product does not have a claim to. In addition to mapping the particulars of the felony of copyright piracy, the document sets out in painstaking detail the failure to pay taxes on any of the dubious earnings. Piracy, tax evasion: the subject of the report was in big trouble. The ad at the back serves as a disjointedly cheerful epilogue that somehow makes everything even bleaker. “Makes a great gift!” the ad copy exclaims.

From 1997, when his minor league career ended, until the appearance online of this 2010 FBI report, the internet does not contain any traces of Bill Bene save for some occasional, inevitable mockery embedded in his inclusion in periodic “biggest draft bust” retrospectives. After 1997, Bill Bene became for a time invisible, anonymous, at least in terms of overt internet traces. At some point he created what was in essence an online avatar, “Dan Stern,” and through that alias made hundreds of thousands of dollars by faking fakery.

I find myself imagining the courtroom. The prosecution will play the music of the victimized karaoke corporations, each song hollowed out by design, a vacuum in the center of it to pull in that hidden part of us that wants to be discovered. In the quiet following these empty songs the defense will turn to Harold. They will adjust his limbs accordingly and prop him in the witness stand. Gaze unwavering, mustache intact. His expression will be the same as it was in those early days, not long after the dreamed-of discovery had been made and before the other discoveries had fully overtaken and obliterated the first. No matter what question Harold is asked, his answer will be the same. He will sing. No one will hear. Life is flight until we strike this invisible song.

Posted in Bill Bene, by Josh Wilker, Los Angeles Dodgers | 1 Comment »

Luis Tiant

June 12, 2012

I spent some time recently writing an essay on Luis Tiant for a forthcoming compilation. It was impossible. I always feel like I fail whenever I try to write about something I really love. There is too much to say, so whatever ends up getting onto the page feels like a reduction, a diminishment, a mistake.

I have to balance my writing—well, balance is the wrong word. I have to jam my writing life into the rest of my life, going to and from work, working at a job where I am responsible for locating and correcting mistakes, looking after my baby, a wobbly lurching being who makes me want to maim myself when I make a mistake and allow him to fall down and bang his head. I try to allow the writing to be the one place where mistakes are okay. That is why I’m writing right now, beyond the end of my work on the Luis Tiant essay. By the way, I just misspelled Tiant and went back and corrected it, so I’m full of shit on my open invitation for mistakes and some kind of unreachable freedom. The way I keep misspelling Tiant is Taint, which is kind of funny. Taint is kind of like a mistake, meaning a flaw in something. Also it means the part between your asshole and your genitals, which I learned, perhaps erroneously, derives from the idea that it “t’aint one thing and t’aint the other.” My life is spent in the taint, not quite here and not quite there but definitely somewhere sort of malodorous and dank.

Now, what was I trying to say? Oh yeah, love and impossible words. Tiant: I will never say everything I want to about him, but I did want to point out that this button contains a taint, not just the badly centered name and team box near the bottom but, of course, the misspelling of the team name: “Red Soxs.” How the fuck did this occur? It makes me wonder who pumped out these buttons.

The photo is from just a little before the dawn of my fandom, as I only remember Luis Tiant when he had his fu manchu. He was the first to sport the fu Manchu, wasn’t he? He doesn’t get enough credit for this.

I remember going to Fenway Park as a kid. He ruled that place, in some ways even more than Yaz. I’ve written about Yaz, and about seeing the green of Fenway Park for the first time. I never have gotten it all down in words though. For example, I was in bliss even walking to the park. There would be souvenir stands selling shit like this, painters caps and pennants and buttons with the faces of players on them. Everything was shining in the lights. This was to me as a verdant heath was to Wordsworth or something. But I can’t tell you about it. I mean I can’t find the right words. I can only make one mistake after another.

That was one of my failed plans for the Tiant essay I just finished, that it would be organized around the Zen notion of shoshaku joshaku, first coined by Japanese master Dogen and brought to my attention years ago in the book Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki. The phrase means “one continuous mistake.” I wanted to describe Luis Tiant’s unorthodox and unforgettable pitching delivery in those terms, everything about it wrong but somehow beautiful and more than that somehow, hitches and pauses and twitches and all, continuous, and his career, too, with his exile and his injuries and his releases and his comebacks, one continuous motion, too, Tiant untainted by surrendering to the life of one continuous mistake, the mistakes not the point of this all but rather the will to continue. This was the point of these words, and all my words, and all my mistakes: continue.

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

Cardboard Gods

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