Cardboard Gods

I am a citizen of the 1970s. I have resided in other decades, but I have always felt like a foreigner within them, or have mostly ignored them altogether, an expatriate with no interest in participating in the local customs.

Some of my favorite parts of my native land, which I can visit only in my mind, are the sections out by the decade’s yonder borderline. My personal memories of these early years of the 1970s are scant, narrow, low to the ground and close at hand, the hazy nearsighted glimpses of a toddler. Colored chalk on sidewalk. George of the Jungle and Ultra Man. A wooden giraffe and a soft yellow blanket. Mommy.

But as I got older I found myself being drawn to various ways to return to the early 1970s. I grew to love the movies of that time, recognizing the origins of my own imagination in the bleak, shabby, sprawling realism. I grew to love the music, too, so much so that I see it in its entirety as the highest peak rock ever reached with its strung-out odes to fading joy; its achingly beautiful Back-to-the-Land idylls; its ecstatic improvisational blues; its savage proto-punk freakouts; its nightmarish metallic dirges; and even, if you allow the decade to include some spill-over from 1969, its ass-shaking world-embracing funk. Read the rest of this entry ?

The 1973 cards featured here within this 1975 card are both familiar and excitingly foreign to me. I don’t own any cards from that year but they are closer both in time and in style to the cards I do have, especially the 1974 and 1976 cards, than any of the other older cards featured in this celebratory subgroup of Topps’ 1975 set. Also, this glimpse into the 1973 style features two supremely iconic players who continued to be a huge presence throughout my childhood, allowing me to make a personal connection with the cards that I wouldn’t be able to make when considering, for example, the card from this series featuring the 1963 versions of Sandy Koufax and Elston Howard.

The immediately accessible, classically simple design features a couple of unfamiliar flourishes that I love, including the way the names are presented at the bottom left of the card, the last name larger than the first, and, more significantly, the silhouette fielder at the bottom right, which may be my favorite feature in any Topps design. The 1976 cards also had fielder icons, but in being more detailed than the 1973 icons they actually lose a little something in comparison, lacking the gravity of the 1973 silhouettes.

The action photos in these 1973 offerings seem somehow different from the photos featured in later years, adding an additional note of strangeness to these cards. The Watergate hearings occurred the year these Reggie Jackson and Pete Rose cards came out, and there seems, coincidentally, to be an echo in the cards of the anomie that must have been seeping from sea to shining sea as the evidence of corruption from the top down began to mount. Instead of capturing the superstars in heroic poses, the Watergate-era edition shows Reggie Jackson and Pete Rose in moments that seem oddly inconsequential at best, and perhaps even tinged with failure. Read the rest of this entry ?

Through a special series celebrating the 25^th anniversary of the Topps company’s baseball card production, collectors of the 1975 set were able to view samples of all the sets that had come before. I only have a few of the cards from that series, including this one, which features the 1974 set, the only cards I had any previous familiarity with, having bought a few packs the year before my first baseball card deluge of 1975. All the other sets from the past were new to me, as history itself was new to me. This sense of history, of there being a whole colorful, knowable world of facts and heroes that had preceded me, was part of the reason I fell so hard for baseball. I’m sure other sets before and since have found various ways to include the past, but I doubt it has ever been done with such brightness and immediacy and gravity as in 1975, when the biggest stars of each of the last twenty-five years were shown at the height of their powers, as cardboard gods. Read the rest of this entry ?

  
“They just came back and beat us. That happens sometimes.” – Joe Maddon

I.
Hank Aaron was born in 1934, grew up in the Depression, lived through World War II, started his professional baseball career in the Negro Leagues, lived through the Korean War, lived through the Civil Rights movement, lived through the Vietnam War, broke the long-standing major league record for lifetime home runs while receiving racist death threats (and while also setting the record shown here, which has withstood all assaults, chemically-aided and otherwise), lived through the entirety of the Cold War, lived to see his major league record for lifetime home runs broken amidst an aura of cynicism and disbelief, and is currently living through the Iraq War and the possible collapse of the worldwide economy into the kind of economic crisis that hasn’t been seen since his earliest years. He has lived though the most tumultuous three-quarters of a century in human history, yet until last night he had never lived to see (or to sleep through, depending on how late he’s staying up these days and his level of interest in the American League) the thing that prompted Joe Maddon to say “That happens sometimes.” In the phenomenal lifetime of Hank Aaron, a playoff team had never rallied to win after falling behind by seven or more runs.

II.
I do not have cable television, but I subscribe to XM radio, so my connection to my favorite team in their playoff run has been an oddly old-fashioned one. I can either go out to a saloon (OK, a bar) and watch, which I have done a couple times, both to ill effect, or I can stay at home and listen to Red Sox radio announcer Joe Castiglione tell me what’s happening. For most of their playoff games I have enhanced my vision of the game by keeping score in my writing journal, trying not to think about the crushing line from the Vin Scully-esque announcer for the Springfield Isotopes, who ends a description of a play by saying “. . . if you’re scoring at home. And if you are, you’re loneliness saddens me.” So last night I wrote out all the names and within minutes of the opening pitch I was again darkening in rectangles for the Rays, my way of signifying that the batter in question had rounded the bases and scored. By the middle of the game I had flung my notebook across the room, leaving my scoring of the game unfinished. I still listened, but found myself nodding off a couple times on the couch. Joe Castiglione’s voice had turned sour. There was no crowd sound behind him.

“This is a fucking funeral,” I said to my wife.

“It is completely 100% over, done,” my old friend Matt, from Greenfield, MA, said at about the same time, in an email.

III.
The Depression began with the stock market crash in 1929, the same month we’re in now as the stock market again careens and plummets. October. A couple weeks before the crash in 1929, the Cubs forged a seemingly insurmountable 8–0 lead over the Philadelphia A’s by the seventh inning of game 4 of the World Series, virtual locks to knot the series at two games apiece.

But a lot can happen in an inning. It was a sunny day. The man in the above card, to Hank Aaron’s left, a man who would go on to become a member of the Hall of Fame, lost two fly balls in the sun in the bottom of the seventh, nurturing an A’s comeback so improbable and unusual in its magnitude that it would not need to be referenced for 79 years.

IV.
My wife has been very busy lately with graduate school, an internship, and a demanding job. There hasn’t been much time for . . . relations. Even on the rare occasion when she hasn’t been at or traveling to or from one of her many responsibilities she’s either been exhausted or stressed out or, most often, both. But last night, as the awful top of the seventh inning was drawing to a close and I was throwing dirt on the moribund Red Sox and wondering how the Celtics were going to do this year, my wife let me know that there was an unusual lull in her schedule.

“Do you want to sit here and listen to them lose or . . . , ” she said.

There are very few things that I would choose over the “or . . . ” option, but one of those things, most of the time, would be to follow the Red Sox in the playoffs. But a loophole in that system of prioritization occurred to me. I am, in general, a short pitch-count kind of guy.

“What the hell,” I thought. “The most I’ll miss is an inning.”

As I rose off the couch, Pedroia knocked in the first run of the game for the Red Sox. We have a small apartment, so I could still sort of hear the radio call while “or . . . ” was happening in the bedroom. I could not hear words, but I could hear Joe Castiglione’s voice rising again and again. Either the Red Sox were rallying or Joe Castiglione had abandoned the call of the game to pay tribute, for my benefit, to fellow broadcaster Phil Rizzuto’s work midway through “Paradise By the Dashboard Light.”

I got back to the actual words, and not merely the music, of the radio call by the ninth inning, the score knotted, and heard Masterson get out of a jam by inducing a double-play. I heard Youkilis reach on a two-out two-base error. I heard Bay get intentionally walked, just like the left-fielder who he replaced would have been. I heard Drew send one over the head of Gross, Joe Castiglione’s voice cracking orgasmically, as if he’d never seen such a thing in all his years.

  

Dear Cardboard Gods,

I am a baseball fan of a team whose season has come to an end. I am considering transferring my rooting interests for the duration of the 2008 playoffs to the Tampa Bay Rays. They seem to be a scrappy low-budget band of likable underdogs who only a bitter societal misfit with crackpot ideas and a psychotically narrow agenda could dislike. Are they not every bit as strong a testament to the human spirit as the team that is held up as the sporting world equivalent to the first moon landing that occurred during that earlier team’s miraculous push toward a championship, the 1969 Miracle Mets? If the Tampa Bay Rays can go from nowhere to a championship in a single season with a team of nobodies who collectively earn as much as one or two of the celebrity superstars from the domineering money-laden title-hogging franchise they are facing in the American League Championship Series, then couldn’t you begin to argue that anything is possible? We will walk on Mars! We will have world peace! We will all get laid by swimsuit models constantly! Why, I ask you, should I not root for that?

Sincerely,

About To Leap Onto The Tampa Bay Bandwagon

Dear About To Leap,

I am probably the wrong person to ask this question, since I would root against any team opposing the Boston Red Sox, the team I have rooted for my whole life, even if that opposing team included Gandhi, my mother, several 9/11 firefighters, and my cats. But since you asked, I will provide my thoughts on the matter.

First of all, the Tampa Bay Rays should not be considered the underdog in this series. They not only finished ahead of the Red Sox in the American League East, they beat them in the season series 10 games to 8. When the Red Sox had a chance to apply pressure to them with a series at Fenway Park late in the season, the Rays took two out of three. Furthermore, the Rays come into the series with key players who earlier sustained injuries, such as Carl Crawford and Evan Longoria, now healthy, while the Red Sox are limping, reigning World Series MVP Mike Lowell out for the series and ace Josh Beckett iffy.

Of course, no season occurs in a historical vacuum. The Red Sox have been a prominent playoff presence since 2003, and are the only team this decade to win two World Series. On the other hand, the team they are facing has been so bad for the entirety of their existence until now that it is almost like they have not even existed. My response to that line of thinking is that they haven’t existed until this season. This is the first season of the Tampa Bay Rays. And this is not just me saying it. Last November, the owners of the team disowned any connection to anything previous to this season by throwing the original name of the team, the one that had suffered a losing record every year of its life, into the dumpster. (After the name change, the next move by the team was to ship the member of my Golf Road collection pictured here, Brendan Harris, to Minnesota along with Delmon Young, a move that identifies Brendan Harris as one of the last true Devil Rays.) The Red Sox have been in the playoffs five out of the last six years, which is pretty good, but it’s not as good as the one hundred percent success rate of the Tampa Bay Rays.

So they are not the same team that endured all that suffering. Why are they not the team that endured all that suffering? Why did they change their name? Apparently, some market research was done that found that the name “Devil Rays” was less marketable than “Rays.” Even if this decision to change the name was not due to pressure from religious groups objecting to the word “Devil,” a scenario that seems highly likely to me in this age of rampant fundamentalist idiocy, the name change would still rub me the wrong way. If market research had been done on the name “Mets” before the 1969 season, it surely wouldn’t have “tested” very high either, but part of the reason that season has caught the imagination of so many sports fans is because it was the New York Mets that won it all that year, the exact same team that had been so bad for all of its existence, and not the New York Thunder or New York Rage or New York Conquering Black-Clad Charismatic Sharp-Fanged Predators.

But even if you swallow the premise that the Tampa Bay Rays are a continuation of the version of the team they tried to revise into invisibility, I ask you: just how much did they and their fans suffer? First of all, what fans? The team couldn’t even pack them in for most of this year, let alone in previous years, so it’s not exactly like they have a legion of deeply-scarred devotees who are on the weepy brink of finally seeing all their wildest dreams come true. Second of all, it’s not as if there are a lot of guys on this year’s team who have endured year after year after year of defeat in a Tampa Bay uniform. These guys, by and large, are newcomers, unburdened by history. Most of them are young and have been leaping from triumph to triumph throughout their lives. What suffering?

In fact, these guys, the Tampa Bay Rays, are more of a collection of “chosen ones” than the team they are facing for the American League pennant. Out of their regular nine-man lineup, the four-man pitching rotation they will use for the series, and the six bullpen pitchers most likely to get called on to record crucial outs (i.e., their nineteen key players for the series), they have ten former number one draft choices. The Red Sox, by comparison, have five former number one draft choices manning those corresponding spots, and two of the five, Drew and Lowrie, didn’t even start all four games of the recently concluded ALDS against the Angels, while a third, Varitek, was pinch-hit for in a big spot, showing his diminished role on the team, and a fourth, Beckett, has been reduced by injury questions from an exclamation point to a big question mark.

I realize, of course, that it would be preposterous to argue that the Red Sox, a giant-market juggernaut with virtually limitless financial resources, are at some kind of a fundamental disadvantage against the tiny-market, inexperienced Rays. But when I think about the Rays I think about standing around the sidelines before a pickup game as a kid. Two big kids are choosing up sides. They pick the best players first, the cool kids, the handsome kids, the kids without glasses or braces or odd personality quirks. Meanwhile, most of us have to stand there and wait to get picked, our worth in the eyes of our peers on graphic display for everyone. If you’ve ever had to stand there waiting and waiting to get picked, you have felt the sting of disappointing life. So why would you be so eager to jump onto the bandwagon of a team full of young elites who have never had to deal with that devil?

***

Note: The Griddle will be carrying the Baseball Toaster game thread for tonight’s first game of the American League Championship series between the Red Sox and the Rays.

   

I Walk the (Mendoza) Line
(continued from Mark Corey)

Chapter Four
I.
You can’t walk the (Mendoza) line without knowing about slumps. I know about slumps. Hot streaks, not so much. But lately I’ve been experiencing a certain familiar variety of cheap luck that’s probably the closest I’ll ever come to a hot streak. It’s nothing to go crazy about. I’ve been finding things on the ground.

As you may recall, I had a similar phase a couple months ago that led me to the discovery on Golf Road of a scattering of shredded 2008 baseball cards, including the above fragment of Dan Uggla. This time I haven’t found any baseball cards, just 40 cents on an elevated train platform, then another dime later in the day on the carpet near the bathroom at my job, then on my walk home after work a beaten-up small white business card on the sidewalk that read, in its entirety, DR. REAM IT IN AND OUT.

Read the rest of this entry ?

 

Yesterday at Fenway featured considerable fireworks from the two reigning rookies of the year, the A.L. award-winner Dustin Pedroia of the Red Sox going 3 for 5 with a home run while N.L. award-winner Ryan Braun pounded two home runs amid talk of his lucrative new contract. But neither of these players generated the excitement of the contender for this year’s award in the A.L., Jacoby Ellsbury. 

Whenever Ellsbury’s name is announced the cheers are very loud and a little shrill, as if the stands are suddenly full of lovestruck pubescent girls. To be a fan is to lose yourself in a dream of flight, a vicarious practice that is never easier than when the object of absorption is a rookie who can fly. The rookies that get the most love are the ones, such as Ellsbury, who are blank slates for us to impose our imagination upon. They are good young men, full of the joy of life, giving their all for the good of the team. They have had no nagging injuries, no crippling slumps, no contract disputes, no ugly personal revelations, no run-ins with the law, no clubhouse tirades. The back of their baseball cards belong to us, to our imagination, and we fill in the blank as if we’re filling in some absence in our hearts, the vision of season after season of untroubled glory like the score of an impossible song.

Everyone loves a rookie, but no one loves a rookie more than little kids, who see themselves in the young newcomers. I was just waking up to baseball in 1975, during perhaps the most celebrated season for rookies in major league history, when not just one but two members of the Red Sox burst into the everyday lineup and posted ridiculously good numbers while leading the Red Sox to the World Series. Jim Rice would have won the rookie of the year in most any other year, but his teammate Fred Lynn was even better, winning not only the Rookie of the Year award but also the league Most Valuable Player award. His numbers were indeed a bit better than Rice’s, but he also had a quality that made him the prototypical rookie—he seemed like an utter natural, as if he was born to play baseball. He could do everything—hit for high average and for power, run, throw, make breathtakingly spectacular catches in centerfield.

By the year the above card came out, 1977, the gravity-defeating qualities of Fred Lynn’s rookie season had been undercut by a decent but unspectacular, injury-riddled 1976 season. Lynn would show signs of brilliance again, especially in a 1979 season that rivaled his rookie campaign, but for the most part his 1976 season proved to be the blueprint of his good but not great career. In 1977 I was still hoping for Lynn to once again become the Golden Boy, but the presence of the need to hope, which can’t exist without its flip side, doubt, was the beginning of the end of the dream of a career of pure flight.

So my view on rookies in 1977 had matured beyond blind faith in limitless possibilities. Still, Fred Lynn and Jim Rice had taught me to be on the lookout for budding superstars, so I’m sure when I opened a new pack and found the card shown at the top of this page I tried immediately, hungrily, to identify the next vehicle for my vicarious dreams. And I’m also pretty sure that this attempt thunked dead in a nanosecond, as soon as my eyes were drawn to the upper lefthand corner of the card.

I’m sure after I stared at Juan Bernhardt for a few seconds I pried my glance away from him and tried to muster some enthusiasm for the other players. But even if the ominous specter of Juan Bernhardt hadn’t been looming over everything else in the card I don’t think I would have been able to shepherd a dream of the brilliant rookie through an inspection of the other pictures on the card. In the lower left, Jim Gantner looks doughy and bored, as if he’s just watched the team bus leave without him and doesn’t really care. Beside him is the alarming image of a fabrication of paint identified as Bump Wills, whose frozen visage is somehow overshadowed by the frighteningly unreal backdrop, which suggests a world stripped of every living thing, every note of every song, every breath. The name and the boyish good looks of the player above Bump Wills offers some promise, but his awful brown and yellow Padres cap taints the dream, dragging the name Mike Champion down into the realm of sarcasm.

Which brings things back to Juan Bernhardt, whose severe, deeply-lined face instantly tainted with irony the promise of the rookies card. Ethnicity aside, he looks old enough to be Mike Champion’s father. (For the record, the back of the card lists Juan Bernhardt as being born in 1953, which would make him 24 at the time of the picture, but it also lists his birthplace as being in the Dominican Republic, which has been known to produce players who are not always completely honest about their year of birth.) But more ominous than the sour, aged expression on Juan Bernhardt’s face is his black cap. I’m pretty sure I had never seen such a thing on a baseball card, and I’m pretty sure that it shook me up. I suppose, judging from the pinstripes still visible in Bernhardt’s uniform, that the Topps people only had an image of Bernhardt on the Yankees, and rather than going to the trouble of imposing a Mariners logo—which in 1977 was still a theoretical entity—they just smeared out the interlocking NY. But the result is so bleak and funereal that I think it may have harmed me in some barely perceptible but fundamental way. I was no longer a rookie.

 
Golf Road
Chapter Four (continued from Byung-Hyun Kim)

Today I’m not going to the actual Golf Road, because today is the day of the week that I have arranged to be my big writing day, my day where I better be brilliant because I’m sacrificing a day’s pay to get it. In effect I am paying money I could really use just to have this day.

Earlier I punched myself in the head as I screamed obscenities. I was trying to write. My head is OK now but my throat is still a little raw. After that I stuffed food down my throat and took a shallow, awful nap. This day away from Golf Road has turned into Golf Road. I am nowhere, waiting for something that will never come. I feel like ripping a notebook in half or shredding some baseball cards. But I already did something like that a long time ago and it didn’t make any difference. I was trying and failing to write, just like right now. I was twenty years old and had filled up a few notebooks by then. I knew I didn’t know how to do anything and was scared of everything and so my only way out was to write, but I couldn’t. I gathered up all my notebooks and threw them in a dumpster. I felt OK for a moment, lighter, but in the end nothing changed. I started the whole process all over by opening a new notebook and writing a shitty poem, then I spent the rest of the day eating chocolate chip cookies and putting golf balls at a table leg.

Most days I’m waiting in a place no one wants to know, least of all me. Golf Road. That moment, that long moment in the polluted dusk, waiting, the day chewed. How many days do you get? Stranded on Golf Road. A whole life leading to it. Things you could have done differently. But you didn’t. Anyway the past is gone. It doesn’t exist. You find some ripped pieces. You have lived such a life that you happen to recognize that these pieces go together. You don’t know much else but you know this. You gather them up and take them home. You tape the pieces together and add them to the pile. Next day you search for more pieces. You find a couple. The day after that you don’t find any. You keep looking every day for more but that chapter is over and you’re back where you started, nothing to gather, nothing to rescue, nothing to hold in your hands.

(to be continued)

                                                          Golf Road
                                                       Chapter Three
                                             (continued from Brad Ausmus)

There wasn’t a lot to do in my town. You waited for winter to end. When spring came you walked half a mile down Route 14 to the general store to buy a couple packs of baseball cards. A few days later you did it again. The years went by. I stopped buying baseball cards. Instead, I extended my walk just beyond the general store, to the road that branched off Route 14 and led up out of the valley. My brother had showed me what to do. You stand there and when a car comes along you stick out your thumb. Maybe they stop, probably not. Very few cars come along.

                                                       * * *

In 2003, I found myself getting excited when the Red Sox picked up Byung-Hyun Kim. He’d authored two horrific collapses in the 2001 World Series. Few if any players had ever failed as spectacularly or as publicly as he had. In the moments after that double-collapse, he’d seemed broken, a ghost of a man. But the following year he’d bounced back to save 36 games, with 92 strikeouts in 84 innings. And he was still only 24. Most of all, he still threw a hundred miles an hour. I tried to ignore the image of the ghost of a man and focused on imagining Byung-Hyun Kim to be exactly what my favorite team had always lacked. In this life you learn to gnaw on the spent, faintly narcotic cud of hope. Sometimes it numbs the pain of waiting.

                                                       * * *

Once, while I waited for a ride up out of my town, a pickup truck turned off of Route 14 and zoomed past my upraised thumb.

“Get a car!” the driver yelled. As the pickup disappeared the horn sounded. Like the General Lee, it had been rigged to play Dixie.

I’ve never really put that moment behind me.

                                                       * * *

Kim had switched to the starting rotation at the beginning of 2003 with Arizona, and for his first month with the Red Sox he remained a starter, but in July he moved into the closer’s role, which had been Boston’s biggest weakness that year. In fact, it had been Boston’s biggest weakness for most of their existence, ineptitude in that area a perfect Schiraldi-faced symbol of their long history of repeatedly getting close to winning it all only to blow it at the end. In half a season as the closer, Kim saved 16 games, but he started looking shaky near the end of the season. His shoulder was bothering him, but his inability to get the ball over the plate seemed to the fans, and to his manager (who started yanking him at the first sign of trouble), to be signs of cowardice, the pressure of the looming postseason causing him to wilt. In his one brief appearance in the playoffs, at a game in Oakland, his ineffectiveness contributed to a Red Sox loss. The next game, back in Boston, the fans showed their disappointment during pregame introductions. It wasn’t fair, but it seemed to the fans that a guy who could throw harder than all but a few human beings who ever lived didn’t have the stomach to throw strikes. So the boos rained down on the 24-year-old far from his home. What would you have done in that moment if you were him?

                                                       * * *

I wait on Golf Road, holding the damaged nest of baseball cards against to my chest. Minutes ago what was trash is now the newest addition to my most prized possession. Cars fly by. There’s always a small part of me braced for one of the drivers to yell something at me, to mock me for being carless. For once I don’t care. I found a bunch of ripped baseball cards. I feel rich. I feel lucky. If anybody said anything I’d just laugh. But the problem is that on Golf Road nobody says anything. The sound of traffic is like the roar of some foreign tongue you’ll never be able to learn. Even so, the message is clear: You don’t belong. You’ll never belong.

(to be continued)

 

“The commercial overproduction of souvenirs means that you’re inculcated with nostalgia before you’re even old enough to feel nostalgic.” 
                                         – Svetlana Boym

I.
In the seventeenth century, a 19-year-old Swiss medical student named Johannes Hofer constructed the word nostalgia out of Greek root words meaning “return home” and “sickness.” For the next two centuries, the term held a tenuous foothold in the medical lexicon, doctors sporadically diagnosing patients with this homesickness disease and treating them with, among other things, opium, leeches, and trips to the Alps. On Wikipedia, the page for nostalgia includes the assertion, backed up by sounding like the truth if not by a scholarly citation, that this malady was particularly prevalent among soldiers in foreign-based armies experiencing defeat. Nobody yearns like a loser.

II.
I came out of the womb ass-first, a breech birth, and have continued living my life looking backward ever since. I wrote my first autobiography when I was seven. Its thesis was that life is boring. I reminisced about places where I’d once lived. The longest scene in the manuscript detailed one of my earliest memories, from my first home, a unit in a horseshoe of identical connected units in Willingboro, New Jersey. I must have been about two years old. I had gone outside to play and when I tried to come back inside I couldn’t figure out which of the identical doors was my own. They all looked exactly the same. Where is my home?

III.
The use of the term nostalgia to refer to a disease tapered off in the late 1800s. Industrialism and imperialism were in full steely bloom by then, which inspired in the powerful and their aspirants an embrace of a utopian future where looking backward would be laughable, if not punishable. Why look back when the future is so bright? Meanwhile, most everyone else got in motion, crossing oceans, crossing continents, massing in slums, disappearing into mines and factories and mills before dawn and coming out filthy after dusk, moving when company profit margins slipped too low, moving when hungry, moving when forced, moving by conscription, moving in a winding, wounding search for home. Maybe for too many to any longer call it an anomaly, a disease, the idea of home began to seem illusive, impossible, disappeared. Just a door no different from any other in a utopian infinity of doors.

IV.
I mark the beginning of my baseball card collection with a change of homes. I started collecting cards in late 1974, when we moved from Hopewell, New Jersey, to Randolph Center, Vermont. Since then I’ve been back to all the places where I lived growing up. To Willingboro, to Hopewell, to Randolph Center, to East Randolph. It’s always the same. I stand there looking at the house, the street, and maybe there’s an ache, but it’s not big enough to make me cry or write a poem, and nothing happens, and I get bored, and I go buy something.

V.
Nostalgia lost any lingering associations with homesickness in the twentieth century, as it became commodified on a mass scale. It had long been possible to buy things that had, for the buyer, associations with the past, but in the twentieth century the mass production of pop culture artifacts, and the aggressive marketing of those artifacts, helped the meaning of the word nostalgia complete its maturation from a disease of homesickness to a general longing for the past, an aching treatable not by leeches or opium but by oddly similar modern equivalents. For the last few decades the nostalgic have self-medicated by buying records and clothing and movie tickets and artifacts such as Fonzie lunchboxes if they have a little money or Fonzie’s leather jacket if they have a lot or Fonzie trading cards if they are the type to salve the ache of modern life, that long homeless losing streak, by holding and staring at and, most importantly, having flat rectangles of cardboard with photos on the front and text on the back. You can make a purchase. You can turn back the clock. You can have all you lost.

VI.
For a while now most of my days involve a search for home through the obsessive inspection of one after another of my childhood baseball cards. The latest of these cards to center my attention is the one pictured at the top of the page. It’s the only one in Topps’ 1977 “Turn Back the Clock” series that I own. There are others available on eBay. I know this because I checked eBay while, with another web page opened, I listened to the famous Grateful Dead show from the same year as the card, at Barton Hall in Ithaca, New York, the band in a groove as deep as any they’d ever found, the music so good it almost makes me weep, as if I’m returning to the golden center of a time that I can idealize as a perfect past even though I never experienced it. In these incredible times you can access practically anything you want. You can metastasize the nostalgia built on your experiences into a nostalgia that overflows the borders of your own memory. You can be nostalgic for places you’ve never seen, times you’ve never lived through, music you did not share in the creation of but which, now, due to the miracle of technology, you may well be able to have.

VII.
The other players with feats featured in the “Turn Back the Clock” series were either still playing or had been retired for a while at the time the cards came out. Nate Colbert, on the other hand, had just finished a two-city, sixteen at-bat, .178-hitting stinker of a final season in the major leagues. I wonder if seeing this card caused him to soak his famous muttonchops with the bittersweet tears of nostalgia, like a guy just given the boot by his true love looking at a picture of the two of them on their happiest day.

VIII.
The first thing that came to my mind when I wrote the above simile about a couple’s happiest day was the first long day I spent with a woman I met a few years ago, when I was working in a bookstore. She worked at the bookstore too. There wasn’t anything overtly special about that day. We poked around an aquarium store, spending a long time petting a black cat who was lounging around on top of one of the tanks. We went to a couple shoe stores looking for and not finding a pair of suede sneakers of a particular kind that I like to wear because they remind me of the 1970s. She bought sunglasses at an outdoor bazaar. We got something to eat at an Italian place, then sat and drank some coffee in a narrow, empty nook in the back of a small cafe. We walked to the subway station, and she kissed me goodbye as her train to Queens was rolling into the station.

IX.
A few years later we moved to Chicago. I wanted to go somewhere I’d never called home. After a couple weeks in our new apartment we went to an animal shelter just before it was due to close for the day. The woman volunteer who took us back to the cages told us she had one really special cat left. She opened the cage and the cat, black like the one from the aquarium store, got up and looked at us. Abby picked him up, and he reached over her shoulder for me, already purring. It was, for me, love at first sight. We took him back to our apartment, which on his arrival became our home. Sometimes, thinking of that moment when we first met, I pick him up and squeeze him and say to him, “Remember?”

  
If the history of star relief pitchers was the history of rock and roll, this card might be something like a snapshot taken of two young duck-tailed hep cats at Sun Records in 1954. Each moment in question has rich historical roots, antecedents such as Hoyt Wilhelm and Firpo Marberry and Dick “The Monster” Radatz feeding into one story as Robert Johnson and Bill Monroe and Big Joe Turner feed into the other. But with Sun Records, 1954, and Major League Leading Firemen, 1975, the histories are poised to become something all their own, to catch fire.

In this analogy, Al Hrabosky would be Carl Perkins, the pioneer of a savage new style that would bring him a brief, hot fame that would fade, leaving him years later largely forgotten by the general populace. And Goose would be Elvis, the one-name star who in some ways absorbed the style of his daring contemporary on his way to prolonged success and widespread immortality. Just as Carl Perkins was first and therefore most striking to snarl the threat not to step on his blue suede shoes, Al Hrabosky was first to close out games with motorcycle gang facial hair and the bristling malevolence of a starving caveman bent on breaking the neck of and feeding on a saber-toothed tiger.

As a kid I was mesmerized and a little scared by the images on This Week in Baseball of Hrabosky stomping around behind the mound before pitches and shouting and gesticulating after pitches. But the key to his brief, hot fame–as with Carl Perkins–was that he was, at least briefly, really good. In fact, as good as Rich “Not Yet Goose” Gossage was in 1975, Al “The Mad Hungarian” Hrabosky was probably a little better. In 1976, when this card commemorating their success (albeit with a points system that was not explained and that few understood) came out, Hrabosky fell back to earth, but not as much as Gossage, who was moved from the bullpen to the starting rotation, where he floundered, posting a 9 and 17 record. At that point, if you had told a casual baseball fan that one of these men would someday make the Hall of Fame while the other would fade into relative anonymity (as evidenced by his unsponsored $10 page on baseball-reference.com), the casual baseball fan probably would have guessed that Hrabosky, not Goose, would be going to Graceland.

Pregame notes: When I was a kid I was always looking for a way to dissolve into made-up worlds. That I never tried “Play Ball,” which was part of the back of each 1978 Topps baseball card, doesn’t reflect well on the game. If an isolated, day-dreaming, baseball-loving, baseball-card-collecting kid didn’t play the game, who the hell would?

But in retrospect I applaud the inclusion of the game, as it suggested that the cards were not to be sealed under protective plastic—a trend that took hold on a widespread basis after my years of collecting—but to be touched and handled and played with.

So I’ll play. Thirty years later, I’ll play.

Below are the rules, courtesy of one of the 1978 cards previously profiled on Cardboard Gods. (Pregame Trivia Question: Can you name the player featured on the rule-giving card?)

I will be breaking the primary rule (“Played by two”) by playing solitaire. I will also ignore the coin toss rule. I know which of my imaginary teams is the home team and don’t need a coin toss to tell me.

I will describe the action in a running line-score below. The outcome of each at-bat is followed by the parenthetical listing of the player whose card provided the outcome. I think it’s important to keep in mind when perusing the results below that the players listed are not participants in the imagined game but the gods that determine the path of that game. The cards are all 1978 cards that have been profiled on Cardboard Gods; the earlier cards have been jostled from their chronological order and appear randomly (some time ago when I was leafing through my stack of written-about cards I dropped them and they scattered all over the floor), while the more recent ones were pulled from the pile in the order they appeared on this site.

Now, with all that out of the way, please rise for the singing of This Land Is Your Land.

Thank you. Play Ball!

Top of First, Hate Batting, Tied 0-0
1. Base on Balls (Wilbur Wood), runner on first.
2. Strikeout (Willie Stargell)
3. Single (Jim Rice), runners on first and second.
4. Ground Out (George Foster), double play.
0 run, 1 hit, 0 errors, 1 LOB. Hate 0, Love 0.

Bottom of First, Love Batting, Tied 0-0
1. Triple (Pete LaCock)
2. Double (Lenny Randle), run scores
3. Fly Out (Bo McLaughlin)
4. Single (Bill Buckner), run scores
5. Strikeout (Rich Dauer)
6. Ground Out (Dale Murray)
2 runs, 3 hits, 0 errors, 1 LOB. Hate 0, Love 2.

First inning notes: I want to talk about the team names, but first let me say how pleased I am that the trio of gods delivering the first runs of the game for Love are Pete LaCock, Lenny Randle, and Bill Buckner. Who better? Anyway, when I was a kid my made-up games often involved the development of entire leagues populated by teams filled with individual personalities. But occasionally I kept it simpler. I once spent hours playing handball in our living room with a balloon, and I never developed the imagined entities in opposition to one another beyond “left hand versus right hand.” I based the naming of the two teams battling it out in my enactment of “Play Ball” on that lackluster afternoon’s battle between hands and on the memorable monologues on the very same battle by the Robert Mitchum character in Night of the Hunter and Radio Raheem in Do the Right Thing. Here’s the latter character’s version of the speech:

Let me tell you the story of “Right Hand, Left Hand.” It’s a tale of good and evil. Hate: It was with this hand that Cain iced his brother. Love: These five fingers, they go straight to the soul of man. The right hand: the hand of love. The story of life is this: Static. One hand is always fighting the other hand; and the left hand is kicking much ass. I mean, it looks like the right hand, Love, is finished. But, hold on, stop the presses, the right hand is coming back. Yeah, he got the left hand on the ropes, now, that’s right. Ooh, it’s the devastating right and Hate is hurt, he’s down. Left-Hand Hate K.O.ed by Love.

Top of Second, Hate Batting, Behind 0-2
5. Single (Bobby Bonds), runner on first
6. Home run (Garry Templeton), two runs score
7. Fly Out (J.R. Richard)
8. Fly Out (Lyman Bostock)
9. Fly Out (Mario Guerrerro)
2 runs, 2 hits, 0 errors, 0 LOB. Hate 2, Love 2.

Bottom of Second, Love Batting, Tied 2-2
7. Fly Out (Bob Bailor)
8. Strikeout (Grant Jackson)
9. Double (Dave Johnson), runner on second
1. Base on Balls (Rollie Fingers), runners on first and second
2. Fly Out (Paul Lindblad)
0 runs, 1 hit, 0 errors, 2 LOB. Hate 2, Love 2.

Second inning notes: One of the problems you notice immediately with “Play Ball” is that there is no guidance on even the most simple shadings of the game of baseball. For example, if there is a runner on first and the next card displays “Ground Out,” is the “Ground Out” a double play? Similarly, if there is a runner on first and the next card is a “Single,” does the runner on first advance to second or to third? I briefly considered introducing some sort of random-choice device into the game to decide on these matters, but nowhere in the rules of “Play Ball” does it suggest that such alterations be made. Besides, if the playing of this game is in part a tribute to all the many hours I spent as a kid playing made-up games, I should just handle this issue the way I would have handled it then—by nudging every close call toward the team I wanted to win. In my favorite game, backyard roofball, this practice manifested itself on certain long ricochets of the tennis ball off the ridged roof. If the “player” pursuing the drive was a member of the team I wanted to win (generally a collection of gutty, limping has-beens and never-weres who were staging an improbable last-chance drive toward glory) I would run as hard as possible and even dive; if the “player” was on the opposition (generally a conglomerate of chiseled automatons with a collective history of monotonous and featureless league domination) I’d maybe hope the ball would tick off my fingers for a thrilling, game-changing triple. The funny thing is, I probably made as many if not more tough catches when I wasn’t trying than when I was, and anyway I never wanted to push things too far in favor of one imaginary team, knowing that in doing so I’d strip the whole time-consuming pursuit of the illusion of drama, and hence meaning. But for “Play Ball” I decided to keep it simple and make one rule to turn all gray areas black and white. At the risk of sounding trite, here it is: When in doubt, go with Love.

Top of Third, Hate Batting, Tied 2-2
1. Double (Davey Lopes), runner on second
2. Base on Balls (Johnny Oates), runners on first and second
3. Fly Out (Champ Summers)
4. Single (Sparky Lyle), runners on first, second, and third
5. Single (Darrell Evans), run scores
6. Fly Out (Tom Burgmeier)
7. Fly Out (Bob Stanley)
1 runs, 3 hits, 0 errors, 3 LOB. Hate 3, Love 2.

Bottom of Third, Love Batting, Behind 2-3
3. Strikeout (Sixto Lezcano)
4. Base on Balls (Skip Jutze)
5. Single (Greg Minton), runner on first
6. Fly Out (Mike Paxton)
7. Fly Out (Von Joshua)
0 runs, 1 hit, 0 errors, 1 LOB. Hate 3, Love 2.

Third inning notes: So Hate takes the lead, despite my rule making Hate into a plodding station-to-station team incapable of scoring from second on a single or from third on a flyout (or, as in the first inning, from avoiding the double play). Hate might win! But I’m already running out of previously profiled 1978 cards, and for some reason this actually makes me sort of hopeful. I’ve been writing about these cards for a year and a half, and the game isn’t even official. There’s plenty of Ball left to Play. Anything can happen. And maybe Love will get a hand from Gene Pentz, whose card provided the inspiration for this whole endeavor. Only a few more cards to go until I get to his card, the one card whose outcome I already know, Pentz ready to provide that node of offensive attack that is as vitally important as it is mundane. The walk! As we head to the fourth inning, let us pray for Pentz to plant the seeds of a rally for Love.

Top of Fourth, Hate Batting, Ahead 3-2
8. Ground Out (Joe Niekro)
9. Ground Out (Carl Yastrzemski)
1. Single (Stan Bahnsen), runner on first
2. Single (Ron Schueler), runners on first and second
3. Single (Brian Downing), run scores (note: even a Hate-handicapped station-to-station team will generally score from second on a two-out single), runners on first and third
4. Ground Out (Steve Garvey)
1 run, 3 hits, 2 LOB. Hate 4, Love 2

Bottom of Fourth, Love Batting, Behind 2-4
8. Base on Balls (Gene Pentz), runner on first
9. Foul Out (Barry Bonnell)
1. Base on Balls (Ivan DeJesus), runners on first and second
2. Ground Out (Jack Clark), runners on second and third
3. Home run (Jim Colborn), three runs score
4. Triple (Jerry Koosman), runner on third
5. Base on Balls (Brian Asselstine), runners on first and third
6. Fly Out (Chris Speier)
3 runs, 2 hits, 2 LOB. Love 5, Hate 4

Top of Fifth, Hate Batting, Behind 4-5
5. Foul Out (Steve Dunning)
6. Double (John Scott), runner on second
7. Fly Out (Lee Mazzilli), runner on second
8. Fly Out (Oscar Gamble)
0 runs, 1 hit, 1 LOB. Love 5, Hate 4

Bottom of Fifth, Love Batting, Ahead 5-4
7. Strikeout (Johnnie LeMaster)
8. Single (Bill Plummer), runner on first
9. Fly Out (Greg Gross), runner on first
1. Single (Freddie Patek), runners on first and second
2. Strikeout (Jerry Royster)
0 runs, 2 hits, 2 LOB. Love 5, Hate 4

Top of Sixth, Hate Batting, Behind 4-5
9. Ground Out (Tom Seaver)
1. Home run (Alan Ashby), one run scores
2. Foul Out (Lou Brock)
3. Ground out (George Brett)
1 run, 1 hit, 0 LOB. Love 5, Hate 5

Bottom of Sixth, Love Batting, Tied 5-5
3. Fly Out (Terry Bulling)
4. Single (Dave Skaggs), runner on first
5. Ground Out (Ed Figueroa), fielder’s choice, runner on second
6. Fly Out (Tommy Boggs)
0 runs, 1 hit, 1 LOB, Love 5, Hate 5

Top of Seventh, Hate Batting, Tied 5-5
4. Strikeout (Gary Beare)
5. Single (Ruppert Jones), runner on first
6. Fly Out (Lee Lacy), runner on first
7. Fly Out (Steve Staggs)
0 runs, 1 hit, 1 LOB, Love 5, Hate 5

Bottom of Seventh, Love Batting, Tied 5-5
7. Ground Out (Pete Redfern)
8. Fly Out (Bill Bonham)
9. Fly Out (Dave Cash)
0 runs, o hits, o LOB, Love 5, Hate 5

Top of Eighth, Hate Batting, Tied 5-5
8. Fly Out (Jim Dwyer)
9. Ground Out (Mario Soto)
1. Single (Jim Fregosi), runner on first
2. Base on Balls (Doug DeCinces), runners on first and second
3. Ground Out (Tom Veryzer)
0 runs, 1 hit, 2 LOB, Love 5, Hate 5

Bottom of Eight, Love Batting, Tied 5-5
1. Single (Enos Cabell), runner on first
2. Strikeout (Gil Flores), runner on first 
3. Single (Phil Niekro), runners on first and second.
4. Foul Out (Dick Ruthven), runners on first and second.
5. Fly Out (Jeff Burroughs)
0 runs, 2 hits, 2 LOB, Love 5, Hate 5

Top of Ninth, Hate Batting, Tied 5-5
4. Ground Out (Andy Messersmith)
5. Base on Balls (Rod Gilbreath), runner on first
6. Single (Jamie Easterly), runners on first and second
7. Single (Biff Pocoroba), runners on first, second, and third
8. Single (Tom Paciorek), two runs score, runners on first and third
9. Foul Out (Rick Camp)
1. Base on Balls (Dave Campbell), runners on first, second, and third
2. Fly Out (Darrel Chaney)
2 runs, 3 hits, 3 LOB. Hate 7, Love 5

Bottom of Ninth, Love Batting, behind 5-7
6. Fly Out (Pat Rockett)
7. Double (Vic Correll), runner on second
8. Base On Balls (Buzz Capra), runners on first and second
9. Fly Out (Joe Nolan), runners on first and second
1. Strikeout (Rob Belloir), runners on first and second
0 runs, 1 hit, 2 LOB. Love 5, Hate 7

 

Adrift

Chapter 4

(continued from Father & Son Big Leaguers)

I learned baseball from my brother. He started playing the year we moved to Vermont, away from our father. He wasn’t very good at first. After every one of his little league games in his first year I asked him the same question:

“Did you get a hit yet?”

The answer, no, was eventually rendered in the form of a malevolent I-Am-Going-To-Punch-You glare. By the end of the season I’d stopped asking. But by the time I joined him on the team, the Mets, two years later, he was one of the bigger and better kids in the league. Because I’d had him to practice with for two years, I was much more prepared to play than he’d been, and got a hit in my first game–a line single off the end of the bat, up the first base line. The following year, his last in little league, he was a superstar, one of the three or four best players in the league along with the neanderthalic Stu Townsend, the mustachioed Tony Russo, and the seeming can’t-miss future major leaguer Bob Chase. I’d always idolized my brother, but that year I actually got to watch him clobber high-arcing shots over the outfield fence, got to pour out of the dugout with all my teammates to meet him at homeplate cheering. Just like I’ve never really gotten over the strange power of these baseball cards, such as this Forsch brothers entry into the 1977 Big League Brothers series, I guess I’ve never really gotten over the summer when my big brother was a conquering hero.  

We played one more season together, two years later, in Babe Ruth League, but it wasn’t really the same. I was worse, relatively speaking, than I’d ever been in little league, and my brother, even though he was in his final year of Babe Ruth, had been reduced to being an emergency starter (behind the regular starters Stu Townsend and Bob Chase). He had one notable moment, nearly pitching a no-hitter, but the game was against a coed team of thin, easily distractible hippie children, and anyway he lost the no-hit bid in the last inning when one of the boys or girls stopped daydreaming long enough to loop a single into left in front of the mediocre leftfielder, me.

Somewhere around that time, maybe that year or the next, my brother and I were in a record store in a mall in Hyannis, Massachusetts. It was the day after Thanksgiving, which we’d spent at my maternal grandparents’ house in nearby East Dennis. After we’d looked around for a while, my brother started walking out of the store. He was walking fast, purposefully. I called his name but he didn’t acknowledge me. I kept saying his name, he kept walking. I was a few paces behind him but I started slowing down. It was like watching a train pull away, or like my voice had been removed. Like my brother didn’t know me. A man in a light-colored suit jacket passed me, walking briskly, and clapped my brother on the shoulder. The two of them went back into the store and disappeared behind a door in the back. I went back there. There was a small window in the door. I could see my brother sitting in a metal chair, staring down at a table. There was a rack of posters near the door on my side and I hid my face in there, pretending to look at the posters. I was crying. I wanted my brother to be the big kid in the same uniform as mine, jogging down the third base line toward home, smiling, toward the cheering team, toward me. But he was just some stranger in a jeans jacket, a copy of a cassette called “Get Happy” on the table in front of him as evidence.

(continued in Bob Stanley)

 
Adrift

Chapter 3

(continued from Ed Crosby)

My father never learned how to throw a baseball. His father was a tailor from a shtetl in central Europe, where baseball didn’t exist. The tailor married an innkeeper’s daughter sometime during the first decade of the 20th Century. I think it was an arranged marriage. Their first child died in infancy. My grandmother had been holding the baby when Cossacks stormed into the house demanding food, one of them threatening my grandmother with a bayonet. The baby became ill and died soon after. My grandmother always believed the boy died of fright. Two more children were born, my Uncle Joe and Aunt Helen, then at the start of World War I my grandfather fled to America to avoid conscription into the Austria-Hungarian army. Had he stayed, he would have been sent to the front lines as machinegun fodder along with all the other young men of limited means.

He lived alone in the strange new country for several years, working in Manhattan sweat shops. He couldn’t speak the language. At some point he sustained a serious head injury. He was hit in the head during a labor struggle, either assaulted by union goons who took exception to his desire to work or by company goons trying to squelch a strike. It was a long time ago and subsequently seldom mentioned with any detail by anyone in my father’s family. The one certainty is that by the time my grandmother and Joe and Helen arrived in America, my grandfather was not well. He worked sporadically if at all and was profoundly withdrawn from the rest of the family, a looming, largely silent presence in the middle of a series of cramped Lower East Side tenement apartments. The living spaces became more crowded with the arrival of two more children: my uncle Dave and the baby of the family, my father. My father remembers very few times in which his father spoke to him. When my father was 13 his father was found floating in the East River. My Uncle Dave thinks my grandfather was murdered; my father believes it was suicide.

I didn’t know any of this at the time I got the 1976 card shown above, part of a series that year featuring the various father-son duos whose younger halves were currently active in the Majors: the Smalleys, the Hegans, the Boones, the Bells. Each card featured a cheery note on the back from the son detailing the guidance and inspiration he’d received from his father.

“We’d work out together frequently,” writes Joe Coleman, Jr., of Joe Coleman, Sr., on the back of the above card. “He taught me how to grip a ball and advised me to throw it straight and not worry about curves until later.”

By that time my father lived far away. He came to visit sometimes, always arriving with two movie theater-style boxes of M&Ms, peanut for my brother and plain for me. When I think of those visits now I imagine him watching my brother and me play catch in the yard. If my brother and I talked at all we talked about baseball, conversations my father could not have understood. Even if we didn’t talk, the zinging of the baseball back and forth between us must have seemed to my father like the indecipherable language of a strange new country.

(continued in Big League Brothers)