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

The Only Rule Is It Has to Work

Baseball is the sport that most appeals to the dreamers among us, those who lack the talent to play the game at a high level but who have such a deeply felt love of the sport that we are willing to take just about any baseball related job that comes along.  Until recently, such dreamers were limited to jobs in the front office or to positions that could never even remotely impact what was happening down on the field.  But then along came Money Ball, and everything changed.  It hasn’t been easy, but baseball’s statistical nerds are finally in position to contribute to the game in ways that used to be impossible.

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller are two of those dreamers – and they managed to make their own dream come true by convincing the owner of a small-time professional baseball team to hand them the keys to his team for an entire season.  As Lindbergh and Miller describe them, the Sonoma Stompers, members of a four-team league known as the Pacific Association, are pretty much astride the bottom rung of the professional baseball ladder.  But that doesn’t matter.

What does matter is that the Stompers and the three teams they play over and over again are comprised of real, living and breathing baseball players – young men who grew up dominating the baseball fields of their youth, all the while believing that one day they would make it to the major leagues.  But although that hasn’t happened for any of them so far, and probably never will, they are not ready yet to call baseball a day.  And as long as they can afford to play the game for the $500 a month or so that the Stompers can offer, Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller want to help them make their dreams come true.

Lindbergh and Miller are baseball writer/editors (Lindbergh for FiveThirtyEight and Miller for Baseball Prospectus) with lots of theories about how best to play the game.  They use intricately designed spreadsheets to identify players that may have slipped through the cracks of major league baseball’s comprehensive player draft system.  They dream of using a five-man infield against players who almost never hit a fly ball, and they wonder what would happen if they ask their hitters not to swing the bat any time they jump in front on a two-ball, no strike count.  They wonder why managers insist upon saving their “closers” exclusively for ninth inning save situations instead of using them in critical situations that happen an inning or two earlier when a game is so often lost.

 Now it’s time to see what happens when theory becomes reality.  The Only Rule Is It Has to Work – and there’s only one way to find out.

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)

Spring Has Sprung in Texas

Minute Maid Stadium, Houston, TX (click on photo for larger version)

Spring in February...that's what I've enjoyed this weekend.  And I've been able to enjoy it in my favorite of all ways: by sitting at a major league ballpark and watching some of the best college baseball teams in the country go at each other.

I was at Minute Maid Stadium for 12 hours yesterday and watched three games (it takes about 45 minutes between games to get the field back into pristine shape for the next game).  And today it will be pretty much the same schedule with three more games and who knows how many hours.  If this first game is any indication, these guys are out of pitching and the games will be high-scoring ones (at the  moment, Arkansas is leading Texas Tech 10-6 in the 8th inning of the first game of the day).  

I have managed to get some reading in before heading out to the park - and I'm among a handful of people I've spotted reading books during inning changes and between games...so it's been the best of both worlds this weekend.

Now back to the game...

An Observation on Stephen King and a Rant About the St. Louis Cardinals Baseball Team

I can't seem to focus this morning while sitting around and wondering where the heck Tropical Storm Bill is and when the heavy rains are finally going to hit here (25 miles north of downtown Houston).  I did manage to squeeze in a quick run to the bank and then, on the way home, to the library to drop off three books that were due for return.  But then I wasted another significant portion of my remaining lifespan going around in circles on Facebook.  Doh!

Oh, well.  A couple of things did catch my eye there, one of which has depressed/irritated me and the other of which I hesitate to even mention.

So...hesitation aside, I saw a new picture of Stephen King this morning and I swear the man is starting to resemble some of the spooky characters out of his books and movies.  (No offense intended, as I have read most of King's books and particularly admire his novellas.  Too, I think he is the kind of man who would probably see the humor in my observation.)  Take a look:

Now for the depressing thing I saw on Facebook this morning:

I love baseball and have loved it since I was about 10 years old.  I grew up following the Game of the Week on CBS Television when Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese were calling the games.  Consequently, I became a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals and New York Yankees, the Cards because that was Dizzy's old team and the Yanks because they were on TV more than any other team.

Then when Houston got its own team in 1962 the Astros became my favorite team but I still had a soft spot in my heart for the Cardinals and Yankees.  So when the Astros moved to the American League a couple of years ago, I was able to start rooting wholeheartedly for two teams, the National League Cardinals and the AL Astros.  

And NOW?  Well, if the current investigation of the Cardinals for hacking into the Astros database proves true, I am done with the Cardinals...forever (see this New York Times article)

According to the Times article, one or more people in the Cardinal front office were hellbent on getting a little revenge on the Astros for hiring the Cardinal assistant GM and making him Houston's General Manager.  And not only were they trying to get confidential information that would help them grab players before Houston could get them (the two teams were division rivals for a long time), these crooks were also leaking information about trade talk that Houston was having with other teams...all in the hopes of stopping those trades from ever happening by embarrassing the Astros.

Well, all I can say, St. Louis Cardinals, is that if this turns out to be true, you have forever lost a fan who has followed and loved you for the last 56 years.  The garbage man will be getting a whole pile of Cardinal fan gear to bury at the local landfill, that's for sure.  Yeah, you could say that I hold grudges and seldom give second chances to backstabbers.  Stan Musial is cursing you guys from his grave right now, guys.  Shame on the lot of you.

Rant over.

The Essential W.P. Kinsella

I will be forever grateful to W.P. Kinsella even if he never publishes another word because he is responsible for one of my favorite books of all time, Shoeless Joe.  That novel, of course, subsequently morphed into what is one of my favorite movies: Field of Dreams.  And now, thanks to the remarkable new collection of Kinsella's short stories (published in celebration of the author's approaching eightieth birthday), The Essential W.P. Kinsella, I have finally read the short story that started it all, "Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa." 

In addition to being a very fine novelist, W.P. Kinsella is a prolific short story writer with something like two hundred stories to his credit.  In the U.S., he is probably best known for his baseball stories, but in Canada he is perhaps better known for his First Nation stories set on the Hobbema Indian Reservation.  The reservation stories feature a continuing cast of diverse characters through which Kinsella takes satirical pokes at life on the reservation, the Canadian government, and the general attitude of the white population toward Canada's native population.  Those stories, funny as they usually are, often leave the reader pondering a serious point or two about life.

But Kinsella is also the author of what, for lack of a better term, I will call standalone stories, stories that have nothing to do with baseball or with Indians.  It is one of these standalones, in fact, that is my favorite of the entire collection, a story titled "The Last Surviving Member of the Japanese Victory Society."  It tells of a divorced man who falls in love with the Japanese woman who owns the plant and garden nursery he frequents.  It is the story of two people who are determined to be together despite a major obstacle to their relationship: the Japanese woman's mother, who is determined to have nothing to do with "the devil" who has come to take her daughter from her.  “The Last Surviving Member of the Japanese Victory Society” has such a feel of honesty and frankness about it that I almost immediately began to suspect that it is a very personal one to its author - a suspicion, in fact, confirmed by the touching dedication that follows the story's final words.  Simply put, this is a beautiful story.

W.P. Kinsella

The author himself had a hand in choosing stories for The Essential W.P. Kinsella, and fans of his baseball stories and First Nation stories will be pleased with the number of each type chosen for inclusion.  The baseball stories may magically touch on tragic figures such as Roberto Clemente and Thurman Munson, but the tales spend just as much time in the low minors with players who are unlikely ever even to sniff life in Triple A ball, much less the majors.  The Indian stories portray the unexpected humor of life on the reservation - humor that is often more of the "sometimes you have to laugh so you don't cry" variety, than not.  There are likely to be surprises for everyone in The Essential W.P. Kinsella.  But those who know Kinsella's work only from his baseball stories are going to get the biggest and best surprise of all. 

Happy Birthday, Mr. Kinsella...and thank you.

Class A

Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere is, not very surprisingly, a fairly depressing book. But what else would one expect from a memoir set in a little Iowa town in which most of the "characters" simply want out of town as soon as possible. Not only do the A-level ball players hope to leave quickly, but also the team's radio announcer can't wait to move on and up, and many of the team's most rabid fans seem to have little in their lives other than their “worship” of a few mediocre ballplayers who will be around town one or two seasons at most. The town is dying, the team is awful, and even the players don't really seem to like each other much.

Lucas Mann, the book's author pulls no punches in his portrayal of professional baseball at its lowest level. He presents baseball as the business it is, even to stressing that most of the players on Clinton's LumberKings team are seen by the organization as just place-fillers. No one in the organization thinks they have a prayer of ever making it to the major leagues, but hey, it takes a whole lot of warm bodies to play a regular season baseball schedule and there are lots of young men willing to play the game until someone finally forces them to stop. So, for every kid that actually makes it all the way to the top, there are hundreds who spend six or eight years doing the only thing they were ever really much good at doing. Sadly, we (most guys) would have done the same thing if given the chance.

Lucas Mann

Saddest of all, however, is Mann's frank portrayal of a group of super-rabid Clinton LumberKings fans. If Mann's story is accurate, these folks don't seem to have much of a life outside their little baseball stadium. That they invest so much emotional energy into guys who are only passing through (and who forget the fans the second they leave Clinton, Iowa) is hard to watch - but there is at least a little of the same behavior in all sports fans (the best lesson from the book).

"Class A" puts the focus a bit too much on the author and would have been more effective had Mann stayed in the background and told more about the players and their relationships to each other and their families. Although he offers a good bit of that kind of detail, it is almost overshadowed by Mann's hero worship – which is hard to figure considering that Mann is about the same age as these players and has as much baseball experience as many of them.

Bottom Line: not a bad book about minor league baseball but it could have been so much more.

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)