This is one of my favorite baseball cards. It’s an action shot, but what is the action? In some other famous cards with action shots, the action captures an element of the game that’s at the heart of why the game came to mean so much to us, the drama, the excitement, the heroism. I think of the 1974 Cleon Jones card that is in my mind the first baseball card I ever saw, the one that started to lay the whole foundation of my conscious mind. For what is my mind but something built on baseball cards, on early childhood attachment interwoven with a want and need to attach to my older brother and to all things colorful and exciting? Everything before baseball cards was unconscious, and everything after it had within it at least some fragment of baseball cards. I’m living and have been living in the after for a long time. The after changes. I think about another iconic action card, Johnny Bench’s 1976 card, where he stands amid swirling dust like a gunslinger who’s just gunned down another challenger. That’s an after wherein the before seems so close at hand it crackles with life, an after that suggests itself as part of a continuum of drama and action and victory. The action shown in this Billy Almon card tells a different story. Billy Almon is clearly returning to the dugout after failing to reach base. If he were approaching home plate for an at-bat, he wouldn’t be holding the bat this way. He’s holding it in such a way as to enable a handoff to a bat boy. He has not only failed to reach base but has failed to even put the ball in play. He has struck out. This is why he’s still in possession of the bat. His expression is implacable. He is looking at me, or if you’re the one looking at this card, he’s looking at you. You could imagine he’s about to hand you the bat, that it could be your turn. But who would want to enter such a universe as the one that has reduced him to such brown and yellow and gray mediocrity? In truth I didn’t get this card as a kid but received it as part of a dumping of old cards on me last year from a friend of a friend who was getting rid of his collection. So I never had the experience of seeing it as a kid, when my favorite thing in all the world was playing little league baseball, and my favorite moment in little league baseball was being on deck, bat in hand, about to get an at-bat. Now I’m on the other side of most things. I’m not who Billy Almon is looking at. I’m Billy Almon, or standing in Billy Almon’s place, more or less. This is not such a bad thing. I’ve been blessed with a staggering amount of gifts in my life, and still out in front of me are the lives of my two sons, who are as young now as I was when baseball cards were forming my brain. From what I can tell, Billy Almon is accepting his fate with dignity and care. He stands upright. He hasn’t thrown his bat away in a tantrum but holds it carefully. He is going to hand it gently to the boy with his whole life in front of him.
Cardboard Gods 
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