Someone hands you a gift, and it feels good in your hands, like it’s alive. That’s how this Joe Niekro card came to me. I didn’t find it in a pack when I was a kid but got it a couple of years ago when a friend came through town with a box of baseball cards that his brother was giving away. I already owned versions of the majority of the cards, but as I sorted them into my existing collection, I kept getting the occasional jolt of seeing a card that I’d never seen before, like something from a dream, like it was possible to travel back to a time before I started shutting down certain parts of myself in order to just go on. This Joe Niekro card was one of those cards, a blast of newness, of joy. The rainbow colors of the uniform, the smile on Niekro’s face, the stats on the back building to his most recent season, a 20-win campaign, a testament to this moment being the high point of Joe Niekro’s career, an all-star, one of the best in the game. But most of all: that ball, and the way he was holding it, the way his smile of easy joy had as its focus that delicate, ridiculous grip, the knuckleball. This was the year Joe Niekro mastered that pitch that had become synonymous with his last name, thanks to his older brother, but now something Joe Niekro owned as well, and for this moment, this card, he was the equal of his brother, and in fact the cartoon on the back of the card, its text reading “Joe hit a homer vs. brother Phil of Braves, May 24, 1976,” suggested in some way, within the world of this sliver of cardboard joy, he was better than his brother, as good as anyone, but in fact the card says that it’s not even about better than or worse than but about the tender, fragile gift of life, the thing you can only ever grip lightly and then let go, and the letting go is everything, because nobody controls a knuckleball, or life. Someone hands you a gift, and it feels good in your hands, like it’s alive.
Cardboard Gods 
You must be logged in to post a comment.