(Note: Posts are going to continue to come at a trickle for a little while longer here at Cardboard Gods as I work some more on a book. I should be working on said book right now, actually, but I couldn’t help myself from wasting the morning with the following tangent…)
I don’t get the paper much anymore, so gone for the most part is my perusal of the transactions section of the sports page. That always came last, after I’d read the columns and the game recaps and the personal interest features and scanned all the box scores and studied the league leader list. On a good day, a sports page could take me through most of an otherwise blank afternoon: through a big heavy lunch, through the last sweet moments of carb-induced anesthesia before a post-lunch nap, through the nap itself (the newspaper face down on my chest like some sort of child-sized security blanket), through the first horrible leaden anxious moments of post-nap awareness, and through the inevitable product of poor diet and lassitude, an extended grunting sporadically unpleasant seat on the throne, my transitory afternoon kingdom dwindling to small AP reports on sports I didn’t even like that much. By the time the light started to fade, all I had left was the transactions. Sometimes, even given the gnawing ache of dusk on a day when nothing has happened, the transactions were enough. Little bullet points, sentence fragments, no adjectives whatsoever, just proper nouns and verbs, people in motion, teams transforming. One career could be ending, another could be beginning. Who was waived? Who was claimed? Who got the better of whom?
I started noticing the transaction section when I was a kid, but I don’t know if I saw the mind-bending multidirectional transfer of lives, including that of Tommy Boggs, on December 8, 1977 (info courtesy of baseball-reference.com):
[Tommy Boggs was] traded as part of a 4-team trade by the Texas Rangers with Adrian Devine and Eddie Miller to the Atlanta Braves. The Atlanta Braves sent Willie Montanez to the New York Mets. The Texas Rangers sent a player to be named later and Tom Grieve to the New York Mets. The Texas Rangers sent Bert Blyleven to the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Pittsburgh Pirates sent Nelson Norman and Al Oliver to the Texas Rangers. The New York Mets sent Jon Matlack to the Texas Rangers. The New York Mets sent John Milner to the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Texas Rangers sent Ken Henderson (March 15, 1978) to the New York Mets to complete the trade.
If I had noticed such a transaction, it would have fascinated and confused me. I have spent an inordinate amount of time throughout my life, if not my life altogether, trying to untangle the fascinating and confusing mysteries of youth, and I’ve never really discovered any definitive answers to anything, but maybe I’ve been looking in the wrong place all the time. Maybe I should have been trying to understand the transactions of the gods. Read the rest of this entry ?
Cardboard Gods 
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