The premise of this book is an intriguing one: Get yourself an unopened package of thirty year old baseball cards, then follow up on all of the players whose cards are inside the pack and see how life has treated them since they retired from the game.
That is exactly what thirty-four year old man-child college professor/baseball geek/self-absorbed Rob Balukjian did. Like I said, the premise is intriguing, but as you can tell from the description in the prior sentence, I wasn't so crazy about the author who told the story. In 2014, Balukjian went to eBay to purchase some Topps "wax packs" from 1986, the year he first began buying baseball cards. In one pf those pristine packs, he found fourteen players - thirteen of whom were still alive - that ranged from journeymen (Randy Ready, Jaime Cocanower) to All-Stars (Garry Templeton, Dwight Gooden) to a Hall of Famer (Carlton Fisk). It also included the author's boyhood hero, Phillies pitcher Don Carmen, and for my own enjoyment, former Pirate Richie Hebner. Over seven weeks in the summer of 2015, Balukjian visited, or attempted to visit, all of them.
What did he find? Well, some were jerks (Vince Coleman) most of the former players were more than happy to meet with him and give him their time. Dwight Gooden never showed up as agreed, and Fisk couldn't be bothered, so put him in the semi-jerk category. Many told stories of multiple marriages that failed due to the baseball lifestyle, but just as many told of being happily married for decades. Several of them made note of telling the author of how they had quit drinking after they retired. It seemed, to me at least, that a disproportionate share of them had "father issues." Rick Sutcliffe, who comes across as a genuinely good guy, had a father who was a race car driver who left his family when Rick was a small boy. Today, Sutcliffe admits that he doesn't even know if his father is dead or alive, and he has worked hard and has become a good father because, as he put it "I know what a piece of shit is. I know what not to be." Fisk gave all praise to his mother, not his father. When Fisk's high school basketball team lost the New Hampshire state championship game by two points, all Fisk's father said to him was "You missed four free throws." This after Fisk had scored 40 points and had 36 rebounds.
Perhaps my favorite chapter was the one on Hebner. Balukjian says that when he visited each of his Wax Packers and showed them his cards, "no one elicited a stronger reaction than Richie Hebner.....and that reaction was always overwhelmingly positive." Now as a Pirates fan who liked Richie Hebner, that was really good to hear. In the summer of 2015, Hebner was working as the hitting coach for the Triple-A Buffalo Bisons, a Blue Jays farm club. This meant that Hebner, who joined the Pirates in 1968, was then working in his sixth decade of professional baseball. That astounded me. Hebner, 68 years old in that summer of 2015, had become the embodiment of a Baseball Lifer. In the epilog of the book, written in 2019, Balukjian does a where-are-they-now bit with his wax packers, and tells us that Hebner retired for good after the 2016 season. I was hoping that he somehow made it to a seventh decade in 2020. He no longer digs graves in the off season, but he still works part time in Norwood, MA at a friend's funeral home, driving the hearse.
I mentioned that I wasn't crazy about the author. A large part of this book seems to be an exercise in self-therapy as he attempts to exorcise his own personal demons - OCD issues, a bad break up years earlier with a woman he loved (and with whom he meets on this trip after not speaking with her in ten years), how own father issues. In the first chapter of the book, he writes about getting drunk in a bar one night early in his journey, forgetting where his hotel was, and pulling over and falling asleep in a field by the side of the road. Really? And this guy is a college teacher?
And maybe this is just me, but one thing really irritated me. Early in his chapter on Vince Coleman, he referenced that the speedy base stealer Coleman's nickname was "Vincent Van Go." He then spent the entire rest of the chapter, and also in the epilog, referring to him as nothing but "Van Go." THAT WASN'T ACTUALLY HIS NAME, BRAD!!! And while I'm nit-picking here, Balukjian spent way too much time telling us how much coffee he drinks and how much he dislikes San Diego.
All in all, and interesting book with a great premise. If you followed baseball in the 1980's, it makes for good reading. I just wish that someone else had written it.
Two and One-Half Stars from The Grandstander.
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