ESPN is lousy with Cardboard Gods stuff today. In addition to an excerpt from my book and a conversation between me and Rob Neyer, there’s a story by Buster Olney that reminded me of the summer of 1984, when Damaso Garcia somehow helped me briefly interrupt Buster’s previously impenetrable dynasty of Strat-O-Matic dominance. I’ll add only a couple things to his story of the day an ungodly string of luck on my part made him storm off in a rage. First, he is not embroidering the truth at all when he notes that the Strat-O-Matic teams he put together routinely crushed all the competition. He was way ahead of the rest of us in terms of valuing on-base percentage, for one thing, and cackled away at our slavish attraction to .300 hitters as he loaded up his roster with Gene Tenace bases-glutting types. He also wasn’t above gamesmanship. I remember one time when we were throwing bales at his family’s farm. He spent the entire exhausting day trying to sell me on some trade with him that, as soon as I finally relented and agreed to it, made me feel as if I’d been pick-pocketed. Second, as I’ve already suggested, I’ve always suspected that my big championship season versus Buster was purely a pronounced twist of good fortune, or, as Buster kept putting it throughout the marathon session of games that decided things between us, a “chunk of shit.” (This was his favorite dismissive term at the time, and he said it with a vehement sense of authority; as a farmboy who did all the grueling work involved in taking care of cows, he certainly knew a chunk of shit when he saw one.) I have these doubts about my team being inherently superior because one of the few players I remember from that championship season, besides my MVP, Eddie Murray, was Damaso Garcia, shown here in his 1983 Strat-O-Matic likeness. I batted Garcia leadoff, despite the fact that he wasn’t really that great at getting on base. Somehow it worked. I can’t explain why. I guess the gods just felt like smiling on me that day.
Cardboard Gods 
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