Mickey Stanley is pretty much exactly what you would get if you mixed together Mickey Mantle and Fred Stanley.
I can elaborate, but my back hurts so much. All the elaborating is over when you get knifing pains in your back if you so much as try to thumb the like button on any of your various stupid time-wasting virtual platforms.
I think it’s from when I was catching my sons jumping off the couch a few days ago. They climb up onto the back of the couch and take turns jumping toward me, and I catch them and spin them around. The joy of it! The terror! This is their world! What if they fall! But what am I going to do—tell them to cut the shit and sit down and start practicing their looks of disappointment so as to be prepared for when they hit the dog years of adulthood? And so I end up with hernias, back issues. The older, heavier one likes to improvise, and it was probably one of the times he spun around in midair, causing me to lunge to catch him, that crippled me forever.
Well, not forever, hopefully, but these kinds of things really drive home the point that life is an unstoppable deterioration. So why spend so much time pondering baseball players? Why don’t I get into collecting and trading ephemera on old rabbis? Like the one with Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Pershyscha, who maybe had among his followers in Poland in the early 1800s some Wilkers, who huddled there in a tenacious multi-generational pogrom-surviving Wilkerean cringe and were pretty big fans of rabbis all through the family tree until it branched out into a young bespectacled fellow, my father, cracking open the works of Karl Marx. To young Lou Wilker, religion, and sports for that matter: opiates! But I followed in neither his nor my older ancestors’ footsteps, neither overthrowing the system or studying rabbis, but somehow I acquired the knowledge that Rabbi Simcha Bunim carried two slips of paper, one in each pocket: bishvili nivra ha-olam (“for my sake the world was created”) was written on one, and “v’anokhi afar v’efer” (“I am but dust and ashes”) was written on the other.
You should see my sons spinning through the air in my arms. They are beaming with this feeling of bishvili nivra ha-olam. This is the feeling of childhood, the part of it we like to hang onto anyway. This is why a fellow such as Bob Costas carries around a Mickey Mantle card, I guess. But anybody who tries to hold onto Mickey Mantle alone might miss some of the picture. For his sake the world was created—how could this not apply in all ways to Mickey Mantle, chiseled sunlit immortal who could do everything on a baseball field as well as anyone else in history and was the blond, Caucasian, high-salaried, handsome star of the most powerful baseball team in history at its absolute peak? Yes, such a thing would indeed make a good talisman, a reminder that even to so much as to be alive in this world, such a rare and beautiful thing considering the black lifeless space stretching out in every direction for light years from this one tiny blue planet, is a blessing as breathtaking as even the most astonishing tape-measure home run. But you need I am but dust and ashes too—personified best by a weak-hitting utility infielder named “Chicken.” It’s a miracle we’re alive, yes, and it will all be over in a flash.
This all comes together in the person of Mickey Stanley. He was an outstanding centerfielder, like Mickey Mantle, but despite his four Gold Glove awards, and perhaps because of his more mediocre batting records, and perhaps even more because of the erasing tendencies of time, he has moved much closer to the anonymity of Fred Stanley than to the lasting renown of Mickey Mantle. His most famous moments on the field, in fact, had him not in sunny centerfield but at Fred Stanley’s jittery domain, shortstop, where Mickey Stanley was moved for the 1968 World Series to make room in the lineup for Al Kaline. He was a nervous wreck the whole time, hoping the ball wouldn’t be hit to him, that he wouldn’t make some huge mistake.
If my back gets better I’ll be a holy idiot again, waiting with arms outstretched to catch my beaming sons above me. I’ll be full of grateful love and worry.
Cardboard Gods 
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