I fell out of love with baseball cards in 1981, when I turned 13. I mean that first, purest love. So I didn’t know that Skip Lockwood, shown here in his 1981 card, ever played for my favorite team until just last year, when this card came to me among a collection I scavenged from a friend of a friend who’d deemed that the cards from his childhood were not something he needed anymore. The majority of the cards had already come to me in my own childhood (and that I’m still holding onto), but some of them were new to me. This was thrilling, seeing cards like this, like an echo of falling in love.
The forlorn mouth-breathing hero shown in my hand at the top of this page was done by 1981, his last season in the majors captured on the back of this card. In 1980, he struggled through 24 games for the mediocre 1980 Red Sox, his one effective pitch, a fastball, faltering, losing its sting, his ERA for the season ballooning at times to over 6 runs a game before settling in at 5.32 for the year, the worst mark of his career. And it all happened in Skip Lockwood’s own home town, closing a circle on an itinerant, resilient major league career that had started at age 18, less than a year after he’d signed with the Kansas City A’s out of high school.
There’s no trace of that first major league season on this baseball card, because Lockwood started out as a position player, and Topps had no template for providing both hitting and pitching stats (just as well for Lockwood, as his one brief stint as a major league hitter produced some truly anemic results). After struggling as a professional hitter, he managed to make it back to the majors four years later as a pitcher. At first he was primarily a starting pitcher, but he had his most success as a reliever for the scuffling mid-1970s Mets that I used to watch once a year at Shea with my brother and father, beneath an ugly groaning ceiling of LaGuardia jets. It occurs to me now that he may have been the most frequent passenger in my favorite vehicle of all time, the Mets bullpen cart. I always liked him, always liked saying his name, always associated his name with a part of childhood that can’t be picked up and tossed away. Do you know what I mean? There are parts that are either so big that they collapse under their own weight, dissolving into themselves like old stars, or they’re so well-known, owned and dismantled and reassembled collectively, that they cease being part of anyone’s individual memory. But then there are small, seemingly unimportant pieces, thin as cardboard, with names you only know if you’re paying attention, like someone in love.
Cardboard Gods 
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