Tim Raines
January 12, 2015
Immortality
3.
We’re all dreaming. Some dream with numbers, others with stories, others still with the belief in some kind of unassailable purity that never existed. I dream with whatever joys and wants and traumas pounded my psyche into its shape in my childhood. I dream with baseball cards.
That’s how baseball first came to me, or at least the part of baseball that served as the fantastical counterpart to the baseball I flung my imperfect self into on little league fields and the schoolyard and my rutted dirt driveway. Certain dreams that came to me through the cards were stronger than others, making me feel like I was touching the opposite of my transitory halting world. Some cards sang. Here was greatness advancing unashamed.
The photo on the front of this card feeds into a dream of greatness, capturing a coiled, bristling image of possibilities and power. Maybe the figure shown has just hit a ball that will be run down by an outfielder, as his eyes seem to be suggesting that the ball he’s just struck is arcing high into the sky. But his body has no surrender in it, not yet, and so it still seems as if the ball might hit a gap or even reach an outfield wall. Maybe it will even hit a seam or a bolt in the wall and ricochet acutely, opening the moment to its outer limits, every single base on the diamond, everything, in reach of this runner.
Cardboard Gods 
Another Dream Come True. Thanks Josh.
Tim Raines set the table for the 1980 Denver Bears, who were the most fearsome minor league team there’s been in a long time. They lost in the finals to the upstart Springfield Redbirds in the finals of the American Association that year, and I still don’t know how that happened. It wasn’t until many years later that I discovered the real prize for those players wasn’t in Denver, but up in Montreal instead.