JULY 27, 1982
LOS ANGELES
Editor's Note: We at Baseball Diary are proud to announce this to be a landmark issue. We have at hand two firsts: BD expands circulation to 5, and herewith is presented the first submission to this periodical. We would like to remind readers that BD is accepting submissions of a personal, subjective nature relating to baseball. Prose and/or visuals are welcome.
TRUE CONFESSIONS
by Richard Rosen
Yes, I know. I'm 34 years old, a veteran, and a serious student of hatha yoga. It's silly. It's a waste of money. Good God, people are dying in Lebanon and Iraq, there's a world-wide economic recession, we all could be vaporized in a second by the flick of some switch and plastered all over infinity. I know, I know. I can't help it, really It's an urge, a primal urge stamped on my genes in the same way that my eyes had the urge to be brown and my hair black. Sure, it could be a sickness too, probably not hereditary, unless you think that maybe our parents are only agents of our birth, acting on behalf of some higher force in which humanity, in its widest possible sense, is itself hereditary. What I'm trying to say is, it's not my fault. Hey, all you PLO in Beirut, I'm sorry, all you people starving in Bangladesh, all you dolphins being murdered by the tuna fisherpersons, but, but, I collect baseball cards.
There, it's out. I said it and I'm not ashamed although I would prefer you not tell my yoga teacher. Actually, I've been on the wagon for six or seven years now, but for some reason I just couldn't resist the cards this year. It probably has something to do with getting older. When I was a kid, I collected these things with a vengeance, and like all junkies in the presence of their junk, the hunger will always be there. This is, actully, the point of this little essay, because I still have the first baseball cards I ever collected, and I thought it would be interesting to compare some baseball cards that are, now, 24 years apart. Some of these older cards, I might add, are worth considerably more today than they were in 1958; in fact, the stack of cards I have from that year are probably worth $100, although I would sooner part with my right arm than sell them. Well, maybe my left pinkie.
One very significant thing about the baseball cards of 1958 and 1982 is that they're both the same size. Think about that for a minute. Can you think of anything else that, since 1958, hasn't gotten smaller? It's the Candy Bar Syndrome: as the price of materials to make things goes up, manufacturers, in order not to raise prices and alienate customers, simply reduce the size of their products. The 25 cent candy bar has not disappeared but 25 cents worth of candy for a quarter has. (It's like the joke they were telling a few years in New York, you know, about the Reggie Bar: 10 cents worth of chocolate for a quarter.) Baseball cards, however, have remained stable, 2 ½ “ by 3 ½ “. I wish I could remember what I paid for a pack of cards in 1958; in 1982, you get 15 cards for about 20 cents, which is really not bad. There are 660 numbers in the Fleer 1982 series, which means the whole set costs a little less than $9.00 (that is, if you can somehow manage to get the entire set without also accumulating doubles, triples, quadruples, etc.) Of course, and this may come as a surprise to many of you who have not traded in baseball cards lately, you no longer get a stick of gum in the pack. Re ember the old days? You'd get a pack of five or ten cards in a wax-paper wrapper with a stick of pink chewing gum. Remember how they dusted the gum with some white powder to absorb moisture, and the powder got all over the cards? Not any more. Now you get a team decal and the pieces to a huge puzzle that when put together (I have most of the puzzle) shows a scene from the 1981 All-Star Game (the less said about 1981, the better). Why did they stop the gum? We can speculate that there was pressure from people who didn't like what the gum did to baseball card collector's teeth; perhaps the gum was sacrificed to keep the price of cards down; perhaps the card makers finally realized that kids usually throw the gum away anyway.
The face of the cards has remained basically unchanged. After all, what's there to change? They show a picture of the player, either a close-up portrait type, or an “action” shot, somebody swinging a bat, somebody else pitching a pitch. The 1958 series seems to favor portraits while the 1982 cards are action oriented. One thing, though, about “checklist” cards. You know what they are: cards that list the other cards by name and number; you check off the cards you get on this card so you always know who you have and who you don't. In the old days, these lists would come on the backs of cards with team portraits on the face. For example, the checklist for the 3rd Series of Topps 1958 Baseball Cards (#177 A. Smith to #264 J. Sanford) was on the back of card #246 with a picture of the 1957 Yankees on the face. One of those great team portraits, like they take of you in basic training, with all the guys lined up in rows with their uniforms on. The 1982 checklist cards, though, have lists on BOTH sides of the card, and the series seems to omit team portraits altogether. Another economy measure? A minor point, perhaps, but still. One does come to expect certain things in certain situations and there is a certain disappointment in their absence.
Anyway, it's the back of the card where the difference between 1958 and 1982 is really evident. We still get the vital statistics: height, weight, bats, throws, home, born, batting record. The 1958 card lists stats for 1957 and career, and for non-pitchers, the fielding record. This defensive stat isn't given on the 1982 card, but a much more complete offensive of pitching record is, and while fielding is interesting, I guess I prefer this year's cards for their number, which include steals, walks, and kays for hitters, and complete games and saves for throwers. But, dig this, the 1958 cards have something on the back that the newer cards lack, which gives them both charm and humor: a two or three line biography and a small cartoon about the player whose mug is on the flip side. There are some real classics in there which, you may be interested to know, I plan to make a study of and publish as “Baseball Card Biographies and the Darker Side of Human Nature”. Some of the bios are pretty straight-forward. Take my favorite player of the time, Mickey Mantle. He was coming off a year in which he hit .365 and was voted MVP for the second straight year. A bio like this writes itself. On the other hand, there's, um, Preston Ward: “Earlier in the season, the Indians relied on Pres for plenty of service. He is an all around player who can take over first base, fill in at third and deliver timely pinch hits. On June 15 he was traded to the Kansas City A's.” I'm not making this up, really I'm not. Pres' cartoon shows him swinging a bat and the caption reads: “Pres' picture swing reminds everybody of Ted Williams” (who hit .388 in 1957). How did Pres do? Remember the highlight of his year was being traded. Well, he hit .182, but one of his two hits WAS a double. Or take Whitey Herzog, who now manages the Cardinals. In 1958, he was on the Washington Senators. Yes, THE Washington Senators, you know, first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League. According to this cartoon, Whitey “clubbed .351 in the Sooner State League in 1950”. By 1957, unfortunately, he had slipped a bit to .167 in the American League, a fact which, as you might expect, does not merit a cartoon (to be fair, Whitey, whose real name is Dorrel Norman Elvert Herzog, hit .291 in 113 games for Baltimore in 1961. (By the way, did you know that he is the only player to hit into an all-Cuban triple play? In 1960 for KC, Dorrel lined to Senators' pitcher Camilo Pasqual, who then turned in a triple play assisted by Julio Becquer and Jose Valdivielso. I'm not making this up, either).
Yeah, baseball cards. I love them, but what the heck do you DO with them once the season's over? You can't throw them away or give them to some kid who won't appreciate them. You can't show them to your friends when they come over. They'll think you're nuts. You could sell them, but they won't be worth anything for 20 years, so you probably do what I do, put them in a shoe box, tie a string around it, and stash it in the deepest recesses of your closet. If you start now, and you're my age, by the time you're ready to retire, you'll have a tidy little sum in baseball cards, sort of like putting away savings bonds or Picasso's. But just one thing, ok? Don't tell my yoga teacher, you know, about all those baseball cards stuffed in my closet. I'm not ashamed, really, and she wouldn't say anything because she's too nice. It's just, well, I keep thinking how I'm supposed to be serious about this, and then I think about the cards, and then about the dolphins, and maybe the Cambodians, and inevitably, infinity. You understand, don't you?
INCREDIBLE BUT TRUE TALES OF BASEBALL
This is your editor again. I was tired and confused yesterday after work. My band had just called it quits the day before and it was a particularly nerve wracking day at the Government Bookstore. When my wife and I arrived home, we found a letter from her niece, a bill from Macy's and a package of baseball cards. The cards were doubles from a friend's collection. This gave us the opportunity to engage in a little game we enjoy. I will go through a deck of baseball cards reading the player's name and she will call out the team he plays for. It's both fun and educational. After she guesses, if she can, we place the card in a stack with other players of the same team. I never used to like baseball cards, but then I never used to like baseball, or any other sport for that matter, at lest from a spectator's position. While other kids bought baseball cards, I would buy movie cards or “humor” cards or especially those grotesque Mars-invades-the-earth-and-eats-its-inhabitants cards. I remember at my elementary school, Caleb Greenwood in Sacramento, a favorite recess past time was flipping baseball cards. Some guy with a stack of cards would stand next to a building. He would place a card between his index and middle finger and flip the card out into a crowd of waiting kids who would scramble for the treasure. For really great cards, he might announce them first. Sometimes, a really hard flipped card would land in the cootie hole, and only the bravest wold venture in to retrieve it. I never took part in this game, not liking cards in the first place and preferring some other fantasy games instead.
Anyway, we turned on Monday Night Baseball, the Baltimore Orioles vs the Chicago White Sox. I was hoping Earl Weaver would have returned from his one week suspension for slapping an umpire, but that wasn't until tomorrow. The game started and we started our game. We were about a half hour into it when the next card on the stack was Orioles catcher Rick Dempsey. I called out his name and a split second later the ABC announcers called his name over the TV – he was up next! Incredible but true! Well, we were a little amazed at this coincidence, but eventually overcame our excitement and continued our baseball cards fun as the Orioles began to beat Chicago. I went through the stack, going through Padres, Yankees, Mariners, Red Sox, etc. and then came to All-Star Carlton Fisk. Believe it or not, just as I announced his name (an easy one, for sure), who should come up to bat for the White Sox but catcher Carlton Fisk! Incredible but true! I had not known who was coming up; I had no knowledge of the batting orders, but somehow an Oriole and a White Sok were announced simultaneously with their at bats thousands of miles away! And the two catchers to boot. Not only that, but the random sampling of baseball cards on the floor in front of me revealed the two largest stacks belonged to – you guessed it! The Orioles and White Sox. Incredible but true. Well, it took us a little longer to regain our composure, but regain it we did. We continued the game as 7:35 approached, the time when the Giants/Dodgers game would start on the radio. WE went along and I looked at card after card and then Baltimore's Gary Roenicke came up. I glanced at the television, almost unable to believe I wasn't dreaming. There, on the screen, coming up to bat, was Baltimore outfielder Gary Roenicke. We were flabbergasted and totally convinced of some supernatural presence at work exerting control on the situation. Unable to continue the game (either one), we turned down the sound on the television and turned on the radio coverage of LA at San Francisco. INCREDIBLE BUT TRUE.
Baseball Diary Editor and Publisher: William Fuller
