The Wax Pack: On the Road in Search of Baseball's Afterlife - Brad Balukjian

Brad Balukjian collected baseball cards during that brief period in the eighties and early nineties before the hobby was ruined by corporate greed and the runaway speculation fever amongst collectors that largely turned collecting baseball cards into something akin to a Ponzi scheme or a game of musical chairs in which the real loser was whoever ended up holding the most cards when the mania stopped. Balukjian, though, came up with a brilliant way to put one random 1986 Topps wax pack to work for him.

He turned the fifteen baseball cards, and the certain-to-be-brittle piece of bubblegum, that came inside that old wax pack into a baseball fan’s dream road trip. The author’s plan was to visit (and interview) all fifteen of the players so that he could write a book (this one) about what life is like for baseball players when their careers, however brief some of them may be, are over and they have to return to life in the real world. The fifteen cards Balukjian pulled from the pack included a couple of superstars (Dwight Gooden and Carlton Fisk), several other relatively big-name players, a few who had to work extra hard even to stay in the big leagues, and one deceased player. Hoping to snag interviews with all fourteen of the remaining possibilities, Balukjian plotted his course and set out in his old Honda to see what would happen.  

And what happened was, for the most part, beautiful.

Brad Balukjian 

Gooden and Fisk would turn out to be the biggest challenges for Balukjian, no surprise there. The surprises would come instead from the open friendliness of some of the other players and their families, a willingness to share their stories with an unknown young author that caught Balukjian so totally off-guard he sometimes felt like pinching himself to make sure that it was all really happening.  There were other challenges along the way, but Balukjian was remarkably successful in snagging interviews with some of his old boyhood heroes – and even got to play catch, get batting instruction, or lift weights with some of them as they showed him around their old hometowns. Most of the ex-players are doing pretty well these days. Some have turned into real family men, some are still coaching or managing in the minor or major leagues, and one or two of them still hold grudges from their playing days.

Bottom Line: The Wax Pack is a special treat for baseball fans who still remember the excitement of opening up a pack of Topps baseball cards to see what was inside. The experience was a little like Christmas morning in the summertime because you never knew what red-hot rookie or star might turn up in one of those little fifteen-card packages. And at those prices, you could do it all season long. Despite one or two sad stories, and a couple of near-miss encounters Balukjian recounts in The Wax Pack, this is the kind of feel-good book about ballplayers that fans will enjoy reading. They may even learn something about the inner workings of the game they didn’t know.

Advance Review Copy provided by University of Nebraska Press for review purposes